Happy cinco de mayo everyone…. KRONiS on an iPhone guitar

Ode to Clinton

Singer Kandice Melonakos

decided one morning to just do this.
Maybe if enough people talk about it Hillary Clinton herself will hear it!
Ode to Clinton.

Well if you are looking to increase your returning traffic and have a way to provide your readers on your mailing list (or if you NEED a mailing list - which you do if you don’t have one!) then here is the FREE solution.

Finally.

I’ve been waiting for a free mailing list application to come along that is compatible with blogging as well as your standard e-mail marketing initiatives. Introducing ZOOKODA from Izea Inc.

To do this right, I figured the best thing was to go through the process of signing up and explain some of the things I went through during this process.

For Example, the registration process is simple and straightforward - this screenshot shows what you are required to fill out during the initial registration.

After registering, you have the option to do what I’ve found to be the most annoying part of e-mail lists, which is figuring out the best way to have people subscribe to your mailing list. What’s nice about Zookoda’s interface is how easily the help areas are available and very informative about what you may need assistance with.

The really important thing to note here is that everything is stored on Zookoda’s servers, so you don’t have to worry about administration at all or possible downtime. At the same time if you decide that you don’t like the service provided by Zookoda, you can simply export your partial or entire lists for use on another system of your choice.

So to create a NEW mailing list it is very simple. Thank you Zookoda!

Here are the instructions they provide:

Creating a new mailing list

1. Click on Mailing Lists
2. Click New Mailing List.
3. Enter the mailing list name and description.
4. Click the Submit button. This will create a new mailing list with one field. The EMAIL ADDRESS field is a mandatory field that must be present in all lists.

The steps are nicely laid out on the page in order of what you need to do, depending on your business strategy, the next steps are to create the subscription forms, then create an actual email to send out to users.

Create a new email - This is what you will see:

Its great that you have the option to use feeds directly into the mailing list. This is one of the benefits of using ‘blog-related mailing list software’. For example, for the field above named “Feed Source” I simply put in http://www.digitalvegetarian.com/feed which is the main RSS feed for my blog.

From an SEO perspective, it is even better to have RSS feeds from your categories as your content grows. This means you could have targeted mailing lists for your categories and users can decide to only recieve updates for the categories they are interested in.

THEMES for your email.

This is probably the coolest part of this blog post.

They have a page (as shown below) where you decide which mailing list theme you want to use for your list.

After you choose from 4 pages of possible themes, you can preview first to see if you like the look:

HMMM so that looks great, but it may not be the most effective ‘look’ for dig-veg readers.

I tried another and this seemed a better fit:

Okay, great so that was really easy.

I simply did all of this while writing this post and I’m excited to use this for my other websites (such as GuitarTechnician.com)

So, the next step is to customize the email with the simple list of all the posts that will be involved. You can edit with simple checkboxes whatever posts you don’t want included in the digest.

If needed the options here are available to change feeds, edit the template, or re-order the posts any way you like or if there is something that you feel should go earlier in the post (some people only read the first part of an email).

Then click ‘Preview’. and you’ll see the message as it is intended.

Now I personally don’t believe anything until I see it work with my own eyes. So I decided to test sending this out to myself at several different domain email addresses (hotmail, yahoo, guitartechnician.com and wpromote.com).

After you get used to the interface you will find that there are areas where you can add or remove recipients to the mailing list. Everything is straightforward, just make sure you actually ‘name’ your mailing list, which I did not do initially and had to do before I could test anything.

This is what I saw before I sent my test messages out:

I also decided, what the hell and tried out creating the form…

If you wish you can edit the email message that will be sent out (I wish Facebook applications let you do that! no they only send out something you can look at but not change - stupid Facebook).

Okay, so now I want to send this out to my test accounts. I go to BROADCAST and I see a warning that reads

“Your Sender Details have not been approved and therefore broadcast permission has not been granted. To assist with spam protection, our support team needs to authenticate your Sender Details before you can schedule a broadcast.”

As seen here…

So the last step before you can broadcast out emails is to get verified.

HOW IT WORKS: this was a little confusing but I really like their interface. What happens is you ‘Create a new email’ which simply gets saved in their database in your account. Initially I wasn’t sure where exactly that went, however now I know that it is available in the ‘email’ dropdown field of the ‘New Broadcast’ page.

Here you choose the Email to send, and the Mailing list to send it to. ****AWESOME**** why?

What this means is that you can send the same messages to different lists very easily, or make minor adjustments as needed. Once you are Verified, you will see that the ‘Sender’ field is available with your name in it. - Just click on Account to see if you are ‘Zookoda Verified’ - as you can see here I wasn’t yet.

You can also send out ‘recurring’ emails if desired. Just remember that too much email will cause folks to quit your mailing list fast, at the same time we all need to be reminded sometimes!

Best of luck with Zookoda, I know I’ll be using this a lot now with my new sites and on this one too!

Aaron - Digital Vegetarian

Last night I was happy to be invited to Musexpo.net’s showcases at the House of Blues in West Hollywood on Sunset. There were a number of acts performing, you can see their music samples on the musexpo.net showcase pages.

Event Speakers include: Terry McBride (Nettwerk), Doc McGhee(Kiss, GNR, etc), Ted Cohen, and a lot more.

I’ll write more soon.

AK

I’m looking for some bands to submit material to an online radio station portal that I will be programming the music for. The company is called en2go.net and I’m excited about their new products and company initiatives.

More to come… you can sign up with your band at: I WILL REPOST THE LINK as the server is changing today!

haha. no worries back soon. - Aaron

I while back I wrote a post about ‘How to Monetize your website‘ - Now, when I wrote that my goal was to learn new and fresh ways to start making money off the Internet. It seems that one of the ways to monetize is by blogging about topics for others who are promoting things of interest and relevance to your blog community. As the ‘Digital Vegetarian’ is really about learning all things Internet and lots of other fun stuff, this is an easy site to work with on this front. I can talk about anything I want, of course my goal is to talk about what my readers are interested in.

As some of you know I won the ‘Shoeperstar‘ contest put on by IZEA Inc. and Shoemoney which allowed me to participate in SXSW Interactive with those folks and shoot an episode of the reality series, ‘RockStartup‘ that follows the IZEA crew and their efforts. They’ve recently created and launched a new interesting platform and community for bloggers and advertisers to get together for the purpose of helping match up great blogs and content that is relevant with new content that would fit well. The system in place at Social Spark allows for this to be much better managed by all parties.

The bloggers simply browse the current opportunities that are posted by the advertisers. If you decide to accept an opportunity, once approved you will have a ‘timeslot’ within which to create a post on your blog. This is all managed by the social spark system and is relatively straightforward once you get the hang of a few posts.

As shown below, you simply ‘browse’ the opportunities in the ‘Marketplace’ section of SocialSpark.

(Click to Enlarge Image)!

What’s nice about this system is that it was designed by the creators’ of Pay-Per-Post who have learned from their previous work what works and what doesn’t from the valuable feedback they have received from users all along.

Important to note, is that the code of ethics is highly respected and enforced.

• 100% Audit-able ‘In-Post Disclosure’
• 100% Transparency
• 100% Real Opinions
• 100% Search Engine Friendly.

This post was made about Social Spark as an exercise for our readers and to spread the word about this great new ‘manageable’ way for bloggers to find things to blog about and make money at the same time.

Till Next time,

Aaron - Digital Vegetarian

Here is the poster for this event. Being a part of en2go has introduced me to this artist who I will see performing for the first time tomorrow night. Check out Kandice’s myspace page for some free music samples and more information.

I’ll comment later how the show went.

LATER ON:

Kandice sang very naturally and held a solid performance in a small room where it was tough to get close to see the action. Normally when I see gigs like that, people just don’t care, but for this performance (Her SECOND one from what I was told, and her first where she told anyone about it) she was excellent.

I think she will do very well if she just keeps at this.

Aaron - Stamina Records

-KRONiS

Okay folks, finally a show on a friday night in Santa Monica.  I’ve been to 14 below once before, it would be a great place to shoot a video, small club, we’re ready to blow the  doors  off the place!

UNRAVELED - Live at 14 Below.

UNRAVELED

April, 18 2008 at 14 Below Santa Monica presents UNRAVELED/FLATLINE/KETASET!
1348 14th St, Santa Monica, California 90404
Cost : $5.00

BONE CRUSHING SHOW!!!!! DON’T MISS OUT!!!

See Unraveled’s mypace page for now to hear some more music. Our set time is approx 11PM

4/20 show at Bakersfield - The Dome, see flyer below:

The latest versions of WordPress have really made improvements in how you post blogs. I’m very happy about this as I’ve really gotten good at setting up this platform and it would have been a shame to abandon it.

I just added this blog to another directory called ‘Blog Catalog’: here is my trackback for their site to verify my blog with them: http://www.blogcatalog.com/directory/internet/seo

I’ve also just begun to work on ‘Guitar Technician’ which is going to be a massive resource for guitar techs and guitar enthusiasts, bassists, singers and others online. I partnered with a professional guitar tech named ‘Vegas’ who has worked for many famous musicians and guitarists (from GNR to Sheryl Crow, to KISS, to Smashing Pumpkins Billy Corgan) as well as on my rig, but teaching me all along the way.

Keep an eye/ear out for this site which I’ve just started creating offline. www.guitartechnican.com is the URL. pass it around soon.

• I’m also relaunching the new KRONiS band website to give the latest on my solo recordings.
• Unraveledmusic.com will be launched as soon as we work out some of the hosting details.

Till next time, your friendly neighborhood Rockstar SEO

KRONiS

Buzz Marketing Services

There is a new game in town for online advertisers. We are already familiar with services where your entire blog is managed, but if you are an advertiser how can you get your products mentioned on reputable blogs? Often you have to hire bloggers per post and this can get pricey, while it is difficult to determine what blogs are actually worth.

Well here is a possible solution to this question. A new service called Buzz Marketing is being offered from the online website ‘Snapbomb.com’.

These cats simply analyze blogs for relevance and come up with the ‘dollar value’ of a post on a blog about specific topics.

What advertisers can do is come in and decide on how targeted they would like their campaign to be, with levels from low-targeting to high-targeting (in which case a blogger would have to have already written about similar keywords for them in the past, causing a possible ‘repeat customer’ for solid bloggers with great sites). Also you can use your budget wisely and gauge the results with the statistics that are provided to you by Snapbomb.

Buzz Analytics

is and I quote their site, “free of charge and lets you know how much people are talking about your products and services as well as how you rank vs your competitors. ” - from snapbomb.com

Spam blogs are flagged and permanently banned from SnapBomb.

You may find this a great way to advertise your new products and services virally through ‘buzz marketing‘ on blogs!