1) MAILING LIST MISUSE

Sending emails to their mailing list only or mainly when they want to sell something or get people to a gig or other event.

Here’s the bottom line on this – and I can’t stress this enough – your email list is your most valuable asset. It’s long been observed that the size of your mailing list and the number of mailings to it majorly determines your income.

What too many don’t know is that in the current marketplace the nurturing of the list is now the key factor that realizes that income. And that doing 1) above badly misuses and dramatically weakens the potential value of that list.

In the last article I showed you how to do keyword research and how to find how many sites are competing with you for those keywords. This article will cover ways to check the SEO strength of your competition.

What this means is that for any particular keyword, the top 10 sites in the search engine result pages will have varying degrees of competitive strength and very often by analyzing them against the SEO parameters that I will cover, you can get a good idea of whether you could take their place in the top 10 or not.

It is always smart to have enough data to wisely pick your battles. That way you can avoid wasting a huge amount of time fighting the wrong ones (as many do) and trying to compete for keywords that simply have no chance of getting you traffic.

So, what are the main competitive strength factors and how can you find out which ones a competing site is strong or weak in?

In the last article I explained why finding your correct keywords was so important to your success when using the Internet for promotion.

If you’ve ever looked into getting some SEO done you may have been startled by how much it can cost.

But what if you could do a lot of it yourself for free? Well, you actually can.

In this article I’m going to show you how to do keyword research yourself using a very useful free tool that you can use online. Click on Page 2 below.

Many people don’t realize this but SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the key thing that underpins all successful Internet Marketing campaigns. In fact, one of the biggest factors that determine whether you succeed or fail with an online marketing campaign is the keywords you target (see my “The 2 Biggest SEO Mistakes that Musicians Make” blog article for information on how this often gets messed up).

Why is this? Well, the basis of any Internet Marketing campaign is to get more traffic to your web site so that you can then build your emailing list, which is itself a major key to converting your fanbase to happily buying customers of your music and merchandise, and having the correct keywords can give you a very major advantage in this.

Many people don’t realize that keywords should be used not only at your web site but in your blog posts, your on-line articles, videos, links from other sites and yes, even your tweets and Facebook posts, as well as anywhere you appear on-line.

On top of that, many musicians make the mistake of building their web site first and then end up having to rebuild it after they’ve done their keyword research because they didn’t realize how important the content layout and keyword placement is.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) involves discovering the key search terms (keywords) that people actually enter into search engines when looking for your kind of music. Many musicians figure out likely keywords but then completely miss the vital step of analyzing those keywords in terms of the competition.