TechMuze Ep – 32 Content Marketing via Artist Promotion Blueprint

“Techmuze Ep – 32”

“Welcome to Techmuze, a netcast designed to educate and inspire your musical creativity through tech, both technology and technique. Please visit technews.ca for show, notes and more. Follow us all over the internet at Technews podcast and as always enjoy the show.”

Welcome back to episode 32 of the Technews podcast. In the Last few episodes we’ve been doing a sneak peak at the academy’s latest program which is called the Artist Promotion Blueprint. We’ve looked at I guess, part 1 through 3 so far of module 1 of the blueprint where we’re breaking down basically the  theory as to what’s going on, what this blueprint is designed to build, what that machine is capable of doing or what’s it suppose to do or hopefully what it will do and why we might be interested in such madness. Okay!

So, again if you are looking to accelerate the process head on to arstistpromotionblueprint.com and just go ahead and grab the first module. I’m giving it away for free at the moment. This is the begining of May 2013. So, if you’re listening to this at some point in the future, who knows what’s going on in your world. Send me back the winning lottery numbers if you don’t mind I’ll appreciate that. Artistpromotionblueprint.com, check it out!

Another thing that I’m really having a lot of fun with is if you follow me on Facebook you probably  notice that we are doing our first give away at the academy. If you go to academy.com/win, techmuzeacademy.com/win, “WIN” that will take you to the page where you can enter, enter as free. You just put in your name and your email and you now have a ballot in this draw. The prize this year, the first time we’ve ever done a give a way, I’m giving away a Golden Age Project PRE73 but you may know this pre-amp. Its a cloan of the NIV 1073 MICPRE, ofcourse significantly easier to pay for than the one that says NIV in the name plate. But nonetheless, sounds fantastic. I have two of them in my rack. I can see from the corner of my eye right now and I absolutely love them. So, I have purchase one brand Spanky The New and I’m giving it away. No strings attached all you got to do to enter is go techmuzeacademy.com/win and drop your name and email. The other thing is every single person who enters will also get a free copy of the “3 Simple Steps to Amazing Home Recordings” video training series that I’m giving away. It has help hundreds, hundreds literally hundreds of home studio enthusiast to improve the quality of their results so everyone gets that for free. And one lucky person will win the PRE73. Now there’s a little…I guess the way this contest works its kind of interesting is that when you enter you name and your email you get one entry. If you refer…if like tweet about it or you post it on Facebook, the system actually generates you a unique link. If you share it and somebody clicks on your link and also enters. If one person enters that you know that you’re responsible for sending them there you get 10 more entries automatically. So, sharing actually dramtically increases your chance of winning because you’ll have the most, the most entries in the pot so to speak. So, this program is going to run through the month of may and at the end of the month we will pick up a random winner. And I will notify you by email and get your shipping details and we’ll send you a brand Spanky The New Golden Age Project PRE73. So, once again techmuzeacademy.com/win to participate. And in todays episode we are going to carry on where we left off last time with the artistpromotionblueprint module 1 chapter 4.

Okay so we just basically covered the power and importance of leveraging systems, automation and potentially even outsourcing to get all kinds of great work done on your behalf without your effort. And that is truly the power of the Artist Promotion Blueprint. That is what we’re here to discuss is how to set this all up so that you can focus on what you love to do which is creating content which leads us to our next topic – Content Marketing. Now this is a sort of a catch phrase thats thrown around in the internet marketing niche and the idea is it’s a powerful one. The idea is..is that you promote yourself simply by creating your content. Its’s kind of cyclical thing. You’re creating content already. You’re trying to promote that content. And how do you promote that content? You promote that content by creating more content. It’s kind of an endless cycle. This image by the way kind a made me chuckle once when I found it. It’s very descriptive as to what we do in the content marketing cycle. However, the arrows are backward. You want to start at the start which is research and you want to move clockwise around the circle. First, you want to create content then you want to optimize it and again we’ll talk about in great detail about what all these means. Then you want to publish it, then you want to promote it then you want to measure the results that you’ve gotten from that piece of content and then you rinse and repeat. And this is sort of …this is how you fuel and drive the machine that we’re going to build. And it’s simply from creating content. The types of content that you create can be really anything and this is where I’d love to watch people implement these strategies because I get to see all sorts crazy creative outside the box ideas as to types of content that you can create that are going to entertain and engage your audience and hopefully cause them to warm up to you and to want to follow you a little closer. That’s really the goal with the content is to get people to want to follow us whether that be on the social channels which is a good thing or even better is to get people to join our email list and thats a big part of the goal of what this machine is design to  accomplish. And again we’ll talk in great detail about that as time goes on on. But a brief overview, is that when somebody you know stumbles upon your Youtube Channel or stumbles upon your Facebook fan page or whatever. That’s great! Gives them an opportunity to be expose to you and what you do. But when somebody joins your email list its far more powerful for a couple of reasons: 1) You own your email list. And so you’re not at the mercy of the constantly changing internet landscape. For example,if let say you grow your following on Facebook and you’ve got thousands of facebook fans on your fan page and you’re able to engage with them and to really make the best of it. And then perhaps Facebook made some change to their terms of service or what have you and all of a sudden there’s thousands of people that you’re no longer able to reach in the same way you were used to just a moments before.

These are the types of things that do happen. In fact, there was a story a few years ago of a band…Oh shoot! I can’t remember their name but they had a huge following back when the sort of first version of myspace was very popular and they had all of their following on myspace. It was very powerful. They were able to really engage and promote their content. They were able to get people out to gigs all over the place because they had fans all over the place on myspace. And then Myspace decided that the name of their band ..it’s unfortunate I can’t remember what it was…was a single word and it was a word that also describe a new product that Myspace was launching. So, Myspace.com/ whatever that word was they need it. So, they wanted to  use that to promote their up coming product. So, they basically just said sorry dudes your myspace account is now our myspace account and we’re going to put up a web page there that advertises this new product. And then boom just like that they completely lost access to their audience. And that is just hugely dissappointing and tragic in fact. So, you want to avoid these type of things by focusing your energy on collecting your fans onto a property that you own and control completely. If the entire internet goes down okay well then you’re out of luck. But that’s extremely unlikely. But you again you just want to make sure that you own what’s going on and the way we do that is by developing a content headquarters, the HQ where  you’re going to basically throwing a party and with your content syndicating out from there to all these different locations on the web and encouraging people to come back to your HQ, which ofcourse is also known as your website to further engage with you to get more of what you offer and ofcourse everything on your website is going to be setup again in this machine that we’re constructing. We’re going to setup automated systems that are designed to encourage people to do a couple of things primarily to join your email list where you can then setup some more automated strategies to help in encouraging  engagement and to build a rapport with your fans. Okay!

So, that’s the idea…is we want our content to be everywhere. We want our content to be on Facebook, on Twitter, on Google+, on LinkedIn, on all of these locations but we don’t want to rely on any of those locations as our main source of traffic and engagement with our fans and our audience. We want that to be our property that we own so we’re going to design that to our machine and that going to be ofcourse your website. Okay!

So, what you want to do with your website with this content marketing idea in mind is to syndicate your brand experience. What I mean by that is to basically whatever it is that we…as we discussed in the first video or perhaps it was the second one. I don’t remember. But we discussed the idea of establishing your brand, you know your personna for lack of a better way of putting it. Your image which is a word that has been used for a long time and some people like it, some people don’t. But regardless of whether you have crafted an image or not you have one and in my opinion it’s better to have control of it and do it consciously and wide awake than to have it happened by accident. So, you take what..you know who you already are and you accentuate the parts you want to accentuate and you diminish the parts that you want to diminish and we call that your brand. And then we want to syndicate that brand experience out from your content headquarters, your website to all of these other locations online to create points of discovery that kind of act like spokes on a wagon wheel that all funnel the audience, the traffic into the middle – the hub which is your headquarters, your website. Okay!

So, when you’re syndicating your experience, your band or your artist experience, the types of things to consider are definitely multi-media. You want to be thinking multi-media. We produce music and we make records and that is one form of media. But online today you really want to try and satisfy all the different types of web surfers so to speak. All of the different types of music lovers who are out there scowering the net for fresh content. So, you definitely want to  definitely have audio out there obviously. That’s a no brainer. You want to be in Itunes and you want to have all these different channels where people can actually buy your music. But with our content marketing strategy basically what we want to try to do is create short small pieces of content that…that like I say syndicate our brand  and encourage people to be curious about our product
which is our music. Okay!

So, multi-media is definitely what you want to be thinking about and when I say that I’m talking video. You want definitely to have a Youtube presence. You want to be producing video either of gig performances, of sort of back stage behind the scenes types of stuffs, in the studio stuffs. You know, the making of type of videos, maybe just little humorous things. Maybe little quasi-philosophical random thoughts of the day. It really doesn’t matter what type of content you produce is going to be reflective of the brand that you have decided upon and designed in the earlier stage of the process. Okay!

So, you know if you’re a funny guy and that’s really part of your brand then you’re going to be wanting to produce to let people see that by producing video content, audio content and maybe even text content in a you know providing humor and entertainment for both as an example. So, video is something you definitely want to think about. Audio not just your music but the other thing that’s extremely powerful is podcasting. If you’re able to you know maybe have interviews…if you’ve got interviews with people, people have interviewed you take the audio and put that into a podcast feed so that people can discover it in Itunes. If you’ve got thoughts on things, maybe you’re a radio against type of band where you have a real socio-political message and you want to have 10-minute once a month, or twice a month or once a week podcast that allows you to express your thoughts on that socio-political state of the union as it were. I’m just tossing random examples at you ofcourse that have to tweak and tune these ideas to suit you and who you truly are in the brand that you’re trying to expose to people. But you want to definitely be thinking multi-media. That is the point so video, audio in the form of podcast and things of that nature and then text in the form of blog posts. Some people prefer to read and that’s just something that boggles my mind because I’m not one of those people. But its something that definitely is a fact and you want to be sure that you’re covering all of the bases possible. And ofcourse the thing you want to do without a doubt all of the time is to strive for the absolute highest quality that you’re able to achieve.

So, sometimes it means simplifying. I found out that to be extremely effective if you got a lot of things happening on the screen. There’s a lot of things there that need to be all of high quality which can be difficult, which can take a certain skill set that you may or may not have. So, what I found is an easy thing to do is to simplify. A lot of the videos, in fact the video you’re watching right now is very simple. It’s a keynote slide presentation to give you something visual to look at and it’s my voice. Very, very simple as long as my microphone sounds good and as long as my slides are you know high definition or whatever then that’s all I need in order to produce a high quality product. If I started..if I turn my camera on and allowed you to see me sitting here that would be fine as well. In fact that’s something that could have positive impact because you’re able to engage with me a little more deeply if you can see me. But it would mean that I would have one more thing that now needs to be high quality. So, the lighting in the room would have to be good. I have to be sure I was clean shaven. I have you know etc etc. etc. I have more to consider in order to make my content high quality. So, sometimes simplication is a great way to achieve a higher quality product.

Also, you know improving your skill sets or maybe outsourcing certain things to other people who have the skills to make the quality high. For example, having an intro for your video, a little 5 second thing, that’s brandable -that reminds people of what they’re watching. You can go to places like fiverr.com and you can outsource at…find outsourced designers on odesk and elance and so soon and so forth to get people to develop and create these little things for you for very, very little  money. And again we’re going to talk in great detail about where you can find all of this type of thing in the next module. But the bottomline is you’re producing the highest quality product that you can. With text that’s pretty easy. Make sure you know, sound like your above 5th grade english and assuming english is your language and  you should be fine you know. Images are great when it comes to text content, having images…high quality images and so forth. Video and audio you know make sure your microphone is great. Audio is very, very important even in a video. In fact, a lot of times it’s more important than the quality of the video itself but that’s just something you always want to have at the forefront of your mind.

The other thing, the last thing here to consider is sounds kind a funny when I say it but is you want to be remarkable. And what I mean by that is basically you want to create content that would cause people to remark. And that could be leaving you a comment, saying something underneath your video or underneath your blog post or whatever.  That’s them remarking on your content. Hitting that like button on Facebook and sharing it or retwitting – that’s the type of content that I refer to as remarkable content. And this basically comes from understanding your audience, understanding your brand presentation and  being able to present to your audience exactly what you know they would be able to relate to most easily. That’s in essence how you make remarkable content. And the big thing to think about to keep in mind is that how complelling your content is will have a direct result on how…like I say in this little phrase here how good the party is that your throwing at your website at your content headquarters. So, you want to make your content as compelling and  remarkable as possible. And again there’s no real black and white rules as to how that’s done because it’s different for every market. And when I say market I simply mean type of audience, that’s really all I referring to there. So, you want to do market research and find out what you know your target audience is interested in and you want to create content that is complelling and will make them want to remark upon it. And that’s basically the essence of content marketing.

In the next chapter here, I want to talk about the real fun stuff and that is the psychology – the psychological techniques and tactics that we’re going to build into our machine, what they mean, how they can help you and how we’re going to implement them in this content marketing, music marketing, artist promotion blueprint machine that we’re going to build and I’ll see you there.

That was part 4 of the Artist Promotion Blueprint module 1, all about content marketing. I hope that makes sense to you. If you got thoughts on it I’d love to here them. Come on over to Techmuzeacademy.com and leave a comment under this episode. This is episode 32, you’ll see at the top of the page if you’re checking this out in real time and if you are living in the future you’ll have to do a quick search for it, Episode – 32, Techmuze Podcast.

Once again,  techmuzeacademy.com/win to enter the free, no-strings attached drawing for a Golden Age Project PRE73. Don’t forget, the more you share your link the more you increase your chances of winning. This contest is going to run through out the month of May. At the end of the month we will randomly pick a winner and I will contact you via email for your shipping details. Until next time have fun, make music, stay lively and we’ll see you on the next episode!