moderndaypeasants.com

Using The Internet Properly To Market Your Music

Are you really using the Internet properly to market your music? I mean sure, you’re probably submitting your music to all the music directories and Internet radio stations like everybody else is. You might even be paying somebody for these services. The real question is are you really taking the time to dig in and learn about marketing your own stuff?

Do you even have a website for your band? Hopefully you do because now days it’s an absolute must. More importantly, you should be taking the time to learn about driving traffic to your band’s website. You do want the world to hear your music, right?

There are technical aspects that you can apply to your site to get tons of free or organic traffic to your band’s website using techniques such as search engine optimization, article marketing, website memberships, newsletters, social networking, email marketing and much more. It’s hard to get new fans if they don’t even know your band exist.

If you aren’t doing these things yourself you are seriously doing your band a disservice. It doesn’t take a lot of effort once you know what you’re doing. It just means that you’ll have to work at it a couple hours during the day before your gigs.

The major websites who are charging you your hard earned money to attract new visitors to your band’s site already know this information. They know how to use this technology to drive traffic to your band’s site and that’s why they’re charging you for the service.

Consider reading more about marketing your music on this blog. It will definitely teach you the steps to get a large steady flow of new visitors to your band’s site and also how to market to your fans.

Nobody will do the job as well as you because nobody will care as much as you do. Begin using the Internet to your advantage and properly market your music to the world.

Best Wishes!

Adding A Privacy Policy To Your Website

The act of adding a privacy policy to your website will serve to solidify your site as a genuine online business. The privacy of your visitors should be as much sacred to you as it is to them. Nobody wants their email and private information sold on the open market.

When people come to your site and interact with your business they want to have clear written guidelines as far as what your intentions are with their email address and other private information. The Internet is a very large and scary place to some folks. Sometimes it is with good reason with all the scam artist that exist on the net. With that being said, the world gets more good use out of the Internet as opposed to bad.

Many people now days know of the scams that exist and are wise to it. All the more reason for you to make sure your site is in compliance with a good strong privacy policy. If you intend on using Google AdSense with your site you will need to make sure your policy complies with Google’s Privacy Policy Guidelines. Somewhere your policy must show the following statement, “Google, as a third party vendor, uses cookies to serve ads on your site. Google’s use of the DART cookie enables it to serve ads to your users based on their visit to your sites and other sites on the Internet. Users may opt out of the use of the DART cookie by visiting the Google ad and content network privacy policy.”

You should also clearly state what your site will or will not do with the visitor’s information. You don’t need to have a huge drawn out privacy policy. It can be short and to the point but it must exist. You can get your own policy for free at FreePrivacyPolicy.com. It’s easy enough. You just give them your site address and some information as far as what you want your policy to say. Then you copy and paste the html to your site builder, upload it to your privacy policy page that you already have set up and then just label it “privacy policy” in your meta tag and description page.

If you’re selling actual product on your site and you have a check out cart where money is actually being sent and received by visitors then you may also want to seriously consider adding some trust badges. There is a very knowledgeable and trust worthy company that many of the ecommerce sites use for this. You may want to enlist their support to help gain your visitor’s trust.. It will cost you a little money for their badges but they will pay for themselves easily. These badges will assist in letting your customers know that somebody else is monitoring their purchases on your site to make sure everything happens in a safe and secure manor. That assurance to your customers will effectively increase your conversion rates. Visit their site, read what they do and make your own decision.

Ok…so that’s all I have for you today. Hopefully you are now beginning to see why adding a privacy policy to your website is so critical.

Best Wishes!

Building Your Business One Opt In at a Time

Today I want to talk a little about building your online business by getting one opt in visitor at a time. I’m personally guilty of not following this advice as well or as quickly as I should have. That has all recently changed because I have seen the error of my ways. I think I just got lazy!

You see…many of the bigger online businesses out there just go out and buy a large portion of targeted email addresses or email lists in order to send out affiliate links and advertising to prospective buyers. It is very necessary to have a list of clients to send offers to. You must remember that people come to your website in search of something that can help them or something to buy and sometimes both are the same thing. Regardless, if they found what they wanted for free or purchased it from you, they are likely to come back again because hopefully you delivered the product easily, quickly and with good intent. Now they can feel more comfortable with you. You have built a trusting relationship with your customer. This is the exact reason I prefer to build my customer base one opt in at a time.

Put your opt in form somewhere on your website or blog and give your visitors the opportunity to decide if they want to hear from you again. If they do they will opt in and become your customer for life as long as you continue to treat them well and deliver on time as promised. You now also have the right to send them other information,opportunities or items they may have missed. Give them the opportunity to opt out also. If they’re not happy with what you’re sending them they will opt out. Your job is to make sure that doesn’t happen by consistently delivering quality products or information in a timely manor but just not too often. Nobody likes to be aggravated and nobody likes spam including me. It doesn’t matter if you’re selling information or physical goods. It all works the same way. I suppose buying a list of cold people who are uninformed about your product and you could serve a purpose but I much prefer my visitors know me and I know them.

No matter if you a well known email marketing company or build the mail responder yourself, it is vitally important to your site…. just make sure you do it. If your website is now up and running smooth the very first thing you should do is start building your business one opt in at a time.

Best Wishes!

How To Copyright Your Own Original Work

If you are a serious musician or writer you may at some point want to copyright your own original work. You never know when you are going to need legal recourse for your own protection. Lyrics, music and original unpublished writings are stolen all the time. I am writing this article to hopefully make it easier and less expensive for some of my good musician friends and writers who read this blog on occasion. You don’t need to pay somebody else to copyright your work. You can easily do it yourself. I have personally copyrighted 7 of my own songs with lyrics.

Start by visiting the Library of Congress Copyright Office website. Until recently, as a musician, I had to use a form PA which was the abbreviation for Performing Arts. The form had to be downloaded, filled out and mailed in with your original work including any lyrics, demo CD’s etc. This form is still available if requested. They have recently made it where you can use the electronic copyright. It will cost right about $35.00. Once you enter the site just click on electronic copyright office. Register with a username and password and follow the on screen instructions. The site will allow you to upload your original writing or lyrics and music via MP3. You should know that it will take roughly 4 to 6 months to get your certificate of registration back. You can preregister your work if it’s being prepared for commercial distribution but the fee is considerably higher. It runs about $115.00. The copyright office makes people completely aware that preregistration is not to be used as substitution for registration. You will still eventually have to register your work.

That’s about all I have for you today. If you have some really great stuff and you are considering selling it commercially it may be a good idea to go ahead and protect yourself. In my opinion any serious artist should always copyright his or her own original work.

Best Wishes!

Social Media for Brand Networking

Are you using social media for brand networking? If not then maybe it’s something you should seriously consider. I am guilty myself of not taking it seriously until recently. Social media platforms such as Twitter, Digg, MySpace, Facebook, Delicious and a few others can have a huge impact on the marketing of your business. All of the above sites have millions of dedicated users who may be interested in what your site has to offer. The key is learning how to properly use these tools to your advantage.

Let’s take Twitter for example. Twitter is what I would call a micro blogging platform that allows it’s users to send short instant messages known as tweets. The message can not be more than 140 characters at length. When I first learned how long the message could be I thought, well that seems kind of useless, why bother? I couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about. I guess it never dawned on me that in that 140 character message you could send a link to a website or a blog or possibly even an advertisers link that you can make money with. Twitter is an excellent social media source to help your business build it’s brand. Just keep in mind that you can’t sign in and instantly start selling to your followers. Like any other business you have to build solid relationships and trust before you begin to try and sell them anything. You can follow Modern Day Peasants on Twitter here.

Other social media outlets like Facebook, MySpace, Digg, Stumble Upon and Delicious should not be overlooked as well. You should know that these sites have outstanding Google PageRank. Just by signing up and entering your site you are building a high PageRank backlink. In addition, if some of your readers Digg your blog articles or maybe give them a thumbs up on Stumble it could feasibly send your website or blog traffic into a whole new stratosphere. Generally speaking a new website start-up is not going to have the PageRank Power to get to the first page of Google, Bing, Yahoo and Aol. The above social media sites do have that kind of power. Use them to your advantage!

I am still learning new ideas about the world of social media and I am no longer naive enough to think that they won’t help. Build your website or business by networking in as many ways that will help you to be noticed. If necessary build your followers one at a time. Be helpful, be friendly and be genuine and in the end the world will know who you are.

Best Wishes!

Train Yourself To Say “I can”

by: Dan Waggoner

Think of the possibilities if you could train yourself to say “I can” instead of “I can’t”. I know it’s tough, because I still find myself saying I can’t do something on occasion but I’m getting much better at being aware of it. We’ve been trained as a society to think that we “can’t” do it on our own.

I can’t pay my bills, I can’t take care of my kids, I can’t fix my car, I can’t buy my own home, I can’t write a book, I can’t be a musician, I can’t be a movie star, I can’t build my own business, I can’t become the President, I can’t quit smoking, I can’t say hello to a stranger, I can’t go to work, I can’t understand math, I can’t learn a new language, I can’t be a teacher and I can’t be a doctor. I can’t help myself, how can I help others?

You get my point? Even though our society plays it’s role in training us to think this way, we must play our role in understanding that we live in a country where we can do anything we want if we want it bad enough. Then we must act on it. We have to be committed to it. Immigrants to this country fully understand this concept. That’s part of the reason why they come here. They don’t have to train their-selves to say “I can” because they already know they can.

The human mind is much more powerful than we give it credit. I know I’ve said it before on this blog but I’m going to say it again so bare with me. It’s been proven that it takes 30 days to form a habit. We just have to make sure that the habits that we form are good ones! Please forgive me if it seems like I’m preaching but writing these thoughts down serves two purposes. It helps me to remember and follow the beliefs that are important to me and hopefully it also helps some of you to do the same.

Start training yourself to say “I can” and you’ll soon learn that the rewards are great.

Best Wishes!

Internet Promotion For Musicians

I recently stumbled onto a new outlet for musicians to promote their music through the Internet that I wanted to share. It’s called musicSubmit. The thing that fascinates me so much about these guys is what they actually do! Basically you register with them online and submit your music to their site. They will then proceed to submit your music and materials to a combination of Internet based resources for you such as radio stations, online music magazines, blogs, directories, podcasts and Indie Record Labels.

Even more cool is that they also provide you with full reporting. After you have submitted your material they will notify you by email when your submissions begin. You can then log into your account and go to the reporting section and see a complete list with running totals of the sites to which your music and materials have been submitted. The reporting page will include website link, date sent, site name and type of site. This allows you to keep track of the sites that have reviewed your music.

The company was set up by a musician who was spending too much of his time marketing his music on the Internet and too little time actually playing out and making new music. What an excellent idea! You get to create more and better music which is what you love anyway and they do all the Internet marketing for you. musicSubmit has basically taken your hours and hours of Internet research work and submitting out of the picture. They do the Internet promotion for musicians and musicians get to do what they love doing! Cheers to musicSubmit!

Best Wishes

Virtual Assistant Good Or Bad?

Evidently very good if you have chosen the right company. Bad if you choose the wrong one! A virtual assistant can save your business valuable time and money. You save time by eliminating some of the everyday tasks that keep you from doing what you’re really good at and you save money because you don’t have to pay on a full time basis. Things like FICA, state unemployment taxes, social security, health insurance, profit sharing, holiday pay and more can all be eliminated from your cost. You just pay for their services when you need it. I don’t have one yet, however, I am just now getting to the point to where I can barely keep up so I have been really on top of this subject lately. The company that I plan on using is Team Double-Click. They come highly recommended by the likes of Fox News, Entrepreneur Magazine, NBC News, CNN Money, Staff Digest, Woman’s Day Magazine and more. This company currently has 65,317 virtual assistants available and started their business back in 2000.  They’re always looking for more good assistants too. So if you have some skills, you could make some extra money at home working for them. I must warn you that their screening process for employing you is very thorough so be on your toes. They only want the best people to represent their clients and that is one of the traits that I really like about them. The company has told me that if any of my readers wanted to be a virtual assistant they would need to visit the contractor services area here.

Other tasks a virtual assistant can do for you are, telecommuting, lead follow ups, social marketing, transferring files, typing, etc.

As I stated earlier, determining whether a virtual assistant is good or bad for you will depend first on your needs and second on which company you choose. If you’re like me and you’re almost to the point of overload doing it all by yourself then maybe it’s time to start thinking about it.

Best Wishes!

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