General SEO / IM strategy for bands/musicians

A friend of mine is a great web developer and I work with him to use my experience with internet marketing and seo to promote the websites he creates. Our most recent project pertains to a band (of musicians) that will be launching a brand new website sometime in the next week.

As part of this, we plan to coincide the launch of the website with a spike in facebook likes for their band's page. These likes will be artificially obtained, with the idea being that the launch of the new site and related new content will justify a sudden spike in facebook likes. That much we are sure about.

I wanted to ask the BHW community about their opinions for continuing an seo / im strategy for this project. I had the idea of publishing press releases (which I release through PRbuzz) describing the launch of the new website, and considered publishing new press releases each time the band played at a new venue / major event. This way original content could be legitimately written, and the high PR of PRbuzz's distribution channels would maintain a SE-friendly system of backlink generation for their website.

I also have other ideas in mind that I want to explore, such as a strategic Twitter/social media campaign, but those details are quasi-secretive at this time. What do you all think of the press release idea? Will it work to create quality backlinks? What alternative methods would be equally/more successful and why?

The ultimate goal is to increase the audience for this band, both internet- and geographic-specific audiences. That's why I thought press releases could be a viable solution. With a larger audience (including physically showing up at venues, and through "likes", "listens", etc. via the internet) potential employers at venues and concert halls will recognize the volume of this audience, allowing the band to increase their asking price for playing at a venue, and extending their geographic presence beyond what it is now (currently spans across 3-4 U.S. states)

I'm going to be promoting my own music relatively soon, but I haven't started yet. I will be employing pretty much everything you are talking about. Everything you mentioned sounds great, minus the whole press release thing. I mean, it's another backlink, yes, but I don't think press release sites carry as much weight as they used to. It just won't make a lot of difference overall. High PR blog posts and whatnot would carry a lot more weight for something as pop-culture-y as a band/music scene than press releases. And frankly, the Twitter/Facebook stuff is really the best thing to focus on for a band.

Also, use YouTube to your advantage as well and post some songs/videos and buy some views for them. That also would make good sense.

Go for giving away free tracks or something exclusive for retweeting a link to the site!

ljt3759 said:

Go for giving away free tracks or something exclusive for retweeting a link to the site!

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Already been offering all the music for free - this is simply part of an ideology shared by many young, internet-savvy music lovers and performers - we understand the industry has changed and profit does not come from selling individual songs or albums (easily).

As for the exclusive content offered for retweeting the site or related tweets, that's a fantastic idea! Thanked!

flist said:

I'm going to be promoting my own music relatively soon, but I haven't started yet. I will be employing pretty much everything you are talking about. Everything you mentioned sounds great, minus the whole press release thing. I mean, it's another backlink, yes, but I don't think press release sites carry as much weight as they used to. It just won't make a lot of difference overall. High PR blog posts and whatnot would carry a lot more weight for something as pop-culture-y as a band/music scene than press releases. And frankly, the Twitter/Facebook stuff is really the best thing to focus on for a band.

Also, use YouTube to your advantage as well and post some songs/videos and buy some views for them. That also would make good sense.

Click to expand...

Very true about blog posts being a viable option here. The thing is I'm already subscribed to PRbuzz's service for other reasons, so it makes sense to take advantage of that as it is a monthly fee. I will also use SB to post to high PR blogs about updates, recent shows, etc.etc. regarding the band, but finding AA/high PR/low OBL blogs is something I don't have much experience with (simply because I haven't invested in the best proxies yet, I think).

I didn't think about purchasing views for their videos - good idea. That will work in only some cases, though, as many of their live videos are recorded by fans (bad quality) - but my friend and I have collaborated to make some pretty sweet (toot toot my own horn) mash-up videos for them that could definitely use more views.

Regarding the blog posts, I'm concerned about creating unique blog posts (high quality spintax, perhaps) that will still manage to be approved by high PR/non-AA blogs. I wonder - is it wise to take the content we come up with for press releases (which are not penalized by SEs for being duplicate content because news information is often expected to be repeated and rehashed), and just apply spintax to create many unique versions capable of being posted to lots of high PR blogs? This step will require a lot more elbow-grease to find blogs that pertain to the "scene" this band is part of, in order to ensure the most approval.

Great ideas, though. Thanks guys. Feel free to comment further about what I just mentioned.