Computers -> Online Promotion
Jack's guide to promoting yourself online.
I reckon as far as advertising online goes allot of people are just on the web
and don't necessarily use it effectively.
Being on the web is a must but ultimately useless if you don't use it. Anyone
can put up a profile on some website, anyone can put up a website even. What's
important is making sure people who find you find you and not some page or
lot of pages that never get updated and are riddled with errors of all
kinds.
That said, here's how I'd go about getting myself know.
Base Camp
Probably the single most important and possibly only costly thing would be
to set up base, that's not a facebook account people, companies (and hence
bands) should have websites. Setting up a website that allows you to mail a
list of subscribers, post content regularly and has a basic contact form
surely can't prove too costly.
In fact the web development has already been done, you've just got to know
where to find it and how to work with it.
http://www.drupal.com - It's probably worth working out if you're
technically orientated. Save a lekka wod of cash.
You will need to upload your Drupal, as with any other web page, to a
hosting server. For this you'll need a reliable hosting, we can supply domain
names and hosting at competitive rates, please contact the webmaster via the
contact form if you're interested.
To upload files you will need an FTP program.
That's a basic base setup, you'll now focus on putting content on and
getting traffic to your website. Obviously having allot of traffic and no
content is useless, not to mention impossible.
Traffic
Search Engines
You must submit your site to the various search engines, though they'll
likely find you anyway submitting it never hurts... only do this once, or
once a year or so otherwise it could hurt your ranking.
Luckily the people at http://www.selfpromotion.com sort all that
out for you so go submit your site there and don't worry about submitting
nothing to search engines.
Before you go about submitting anything though you'll want to make sure your
website has keywords and content for the engines to feed on.
Linking
One of the most effective methods of advertising is linking to your site
from other websites. You must put links to other sites on your site too,
Google pick up on these things and it will help you in your search ranking.
Link to and from good and relevant sites.
Mailing Lists
For advertising and keeping users up to date there is no better tool, use it
wisely. Try not to spam. Don't flood users with mail and make sure users can
opt-out, nine times out of ten they're too lazy too.
Paid Advertising
As with advertising anywhere else it only works if you've got a good product
and sell it well. Paid advertising, for the most part just bring traffic to your
website. It's probably worth making sure the website is working first.
Activity
I can't stress this enough, check your mail daily, keep your profiles up to
date, keep the news flowing, keep 'em coming.
Content is King!
The best thing you can do for your website is type. Content helps people
find your site, allot of content and dynamic content keeps them there.
*some cartoon character interrupts the seemingly inevitable ending...
File Sharing
Share your music on various file sharing applications, you should try and be online 24/7 at first and a broadband connection is a surely a must have? Name your files correctly and put your information in the ID3 tags. The link below will give you a list of some fire sharing applications, note that some use the same networks... you only need one per network. See the file sharing initiative on the initiatives page.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_sharing#List_of_file_sharing_clients_and_networks
That's all folks!
|
|
|
Find more information?
|
