The 3.1 ‘Reinhardt’ WordPress release is finally out! i’m writing this on the old version and about to upgrade as soon as I post the link and click upgrade!

Go Get It!

Okay I just updated it and am now re-editing this post:

Here is a screen shot showing how you now can ‘select from a dropdown’ of your own content to link to when you click on the paperclip ‘or ‘create link’ icon in the visual mode of the ‘Edit Post’ screen on WordPress 3.1.

Isn’t that nifty?

So I have been testing out ways to promote music online. In the future I intend to be fully immersed in the launch of a project that I get to be a part of. For now, let’s focus on learning by trial and error and let me show you some of the things I have found effective in online music marketing. Being an SEO expert (SEO Evangelist @ Wpromote Inc.) I have the insight into what most musicians wouldn’t likely be as experienced in.

So Headliner.fm Has an interesting setup. But its BROKEN for one reason.

They don’t allow you to edit the messages you send out. and for THAT I stopped using it the way that they intended it.

EXAMPLE:

On Myspace: I have about 6200+ connections (mostly fake accounts so true reach is likely about 400-600)

on Twitter Its the same: 5150+ followers, (850 likely true reach)

and on facebook its about 1250 from my personal and 300 from my fan page, which I’m sure overlaps immensely.

So when you ‘sign up‘. other bands will give you ‘Band Bucks”

The trick here is to not lose all of your followers by spamming them with the artist’s sent out spammy looking messages.

First of all, if the artists and promoters who were using this system were savvy with social media, they would make the messages appear organic and real.

e.g. instead of : “CHECK OUT the new single from ‘blah ARTIST promo CRaPP that looks SPAMMY’ or blah”

use something like: ..listening to Out of reach cool track by kronis

where you don’t even use the linking or branding tactics that scare off your facebook friends and twitter followers.

SO how do you do it?

Easy. I just disconnected facebook, myspace and twitter to make sure nothing would be sent out as anythingI’ve done in the past seemed very, ‘Spammy’ and obviously sponsored to me.

I lost a lot of real folllowers because of that. @KRONiS lost some true reach. AT that time I decided to create @SEORockstar to separate my music meanderings from my friends in search who were beginning to unfollow me when ‘sponsored’ headliner.fm tweets or facebook messages went out. No one cared about myspace messages. it probably helped on that site which is still launching SUPER ad heavy. yet again making it useless, at least so far. (sorry @tonyadam I want to help..but what can I do..its TOO slow and the interface is hard to learn/use should be just html/php or wordpress->that would be a great backend for myspace).

So next I switched over to use my staminarecords twitter account. (one i grabbed for my company, but never use). It has about 9 followers..so now I only accept twitter promotions. As the Twitter account I use only has 10 followers, maybe 8 now! I only get 8 points for each promotion I tweet out.

So by doing 10 promotions, i earn aobut 80 points, sending messages ONLY to that one twitter account. NOT to my facebook, or myspace or real twitter connections.

What’s the trick?

for every 10 times i sent out tweets to those following @staminarecords, I get like 7,000 bonus band bucks, which I can then use for REAL promotions that I write and others have to tweet out.

SO why am I outing them? Exposing this ‘exploit’ which they will probably change soon….I’m not mean. I’m a good person, and I want to help musicians…its a dog eat dog world and they are broke and won’t know this shit and probably can’t afford to hire and online marketing team to help out…so they gotta do it on their own.

Well I reached out to headliner to ask them :

“Hey can you please make it such that I’m able to edit the messages with the bands before I send them out”

answer: NO.

reason: he explained that they simply wanted to avoid yet another layer of communication.

my thoughts? this is dumb. I can’t control something that I send out? nope. not happening. So I decided to do this instead.

What should Headliner.fm do?

This: they should make it so you can hit: Negotiate… then you decide

A) how many band bucks (if you want to do fewer)

B) what the message will be with the option to send over your own version.

If they say no, then you can modify. they can permanently reject those who argue too much, however at least they know you will be doing it right and will likely engage in a longterm way.

Right? anyone have any thoughts on this? Try it here:http://headliner.fm/

So i’m getting 7000 band bucks every time i send out a bunch of tweets to nobody because I don’t wanna be Spammy. I also paid for one month of the premium service, but I’m not in a realease right now so its pointless. i’m just testing and getting a few ‘feedback comments’ on some of my new material.

-KRONiS-

STONE TEMPLE PILOTS

So a friend and I went and saw Stone Temple Pilots Live last October 29th at Nokia Live Theater in Downtown Los Angeles. It was nice to see STP thanks to tix from @KROQ. They said we had a VIP after party, but it was really just a private bar next to the show where only contest winners could go and buy drinks…its was okay, there was a dj, but it seemed kinda campy – but we had a good time till I bailed back to Manhattan beach to rock out 12 + Highland for yet another Halloween pre-party.

The first band was Black Rebel Motorcycle Club… chick drummer, organic sounding… kinda awesome kinda okayish…I’ll have to listen to it a lot first to like it me thinks….

Black Rebel Motorcycle Club:

STP Live:

Here’s some Video:

Still Remains:

Closer view:

Wicked Garden:

So we all have been watching and learning and growing with Google’s Webmaster Tools and figuring out all of this great SEO work, listening to Google’s complaints and making it happen.

Now you can’t submit a sitemap to Google without logging in first (maybe this is a good thing that prevents spamming it?)

But with Bing you can and it is encouraged. Google doesn’t force you to install Chrome just to use webmaster tools. I installed Chrome because its faster lately anyways.

Now, BING has Microsoft spending TONS getting in front of everyone.

So WTF is up with this weak as$@#  sitemap stuff? like, make me a friggin’ form please?  Oh No, we have to cut and paste and type in and then I’m not even sure if I spelled it right…’cuz it just says thank you.

http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?sitemap=www.YourWebAddress.com/sitemap.xml

Bing spends $$$$ on advertising...can't even tell if your sitemap uploads properly.

How about “THANKS for submitting ‘blah.xml’ with the full URL? Come on Microsoft. Stop living up to your name. Small and squishy.

You have to look at the URL to double check that you spelled the submission correctly!

C’mon microsoft! Make stuff for the pros not just the masses.. if you want some credibility without forcing us to use your shit.

SILVERLIGHT?

So I cave and click install for Macintosh. NOPE. Didn’t work on Chrome either. I’m sure I can submit to them but who cares right now, I have other more important things to do pertaining to my Website results in Google.

Geez. Really? so to login to Bing I need…yeah right. Who’s the Bing Evangelist? Please get one.

So I turn on @KROQ this morning on my way to @Wpromote and I hear that some magazine called ‘Total Guitar’ (notice how they got no ‘link love’) has come up with a top 10 list of the best ‘guitar riffs of 2000-2010′. I read Guitar World if I’m reading something, but I am open to new things -> Simply haven’t heard of this one and many guitar tablatures/lessons/etc are available online, and even on some of MY sites.

‘Best guitar riffs?’ How about ‘Relevance’.   Like I just saw this thing on TV about ‘Rush’. I’m not a super fan of them, but as some of the artists responded, ‘Rush was still relevant’ to the scene because they showed that you could do something way out in Left Field, and if you bust your butt at it, people will connect with you organically.

So… here’s that list! of the Top 10 so-called Best Riffs!

(First of all 2010 isn’t over yet! although release schedules are set by now so let’s see what they came up with…)

10. Avenged Sevenfold

9. The Killers

8. Halo

7. Seven Nation Army (weird that is 7th?)

6. Queens of The Stone Age

5. Muse

4. Dream Theater

3. Avenged Sevenfold

2. Velvet Revolver ( I almost sang this tonight! – SLITHER)

1. Muse

[I deleted the full size screen shot of this because it was WAY too long and looked spammy]

Okay so I was just blown away to hear them say DREAM THEATER on the radio. THAT NEVER ever ‘effin’ happens.

What else? I NEVER HEARD THAT SONG TILL TODAY… geez. So please don’t dare call my guitar nerd self a Dream Theater nerd when I never heard the ‘Fifth Best Riff of 2010′ and play all their guitars.

<BEGIN NERD>

This just in:Dream Theater’s_Vocalist, James_Labrie_Announces_Solo_Headlining_Tour

James you should probably get the twitter account rolling to help you connect with your fans.

(email me for the password – > visit http://twitter.com/jameslabrie for info)

Look though, what I did for you. Fuck you have almost 300 followers already! Note my link to guitartechnician.com

I only posted one tweet as I don’t pretend to be other people online. Look how it grew this. the KLOUT score is already:

(NOPE NOT READY YET! [UPDATE ITS READY NOW SCROLL A BIT MORE see Klout score of 8 for his account with ONE tweet only ever made] – but this is relevant for awesome things like loyalty marketing)

for those wondering or if anyone cares, I have spoken James at a club and we have some common people unrelated this. If you know him tell him to read this and either hire my firm or start tweeting to help his management rock the new release internationally. Any online marketing campaign should find this…. SHOULD…

</END NERD>

Some interesting Jurassic News: I was in Kauai this past week at Search and Social W00t! where I was listening to Dream theater while driving around with @googleandblog and @efishkin (shown here below the jeep video one of what I like to call the ‘evanosaurus’)

Now I thought this was weird, but I guess I forgot about new albums in 2010 or something…

Now I play 3 John Petrucci guitars from ernie ball. But I also play my Gibson as my main guitar now.

When I was in Unraveled, my main guitar was the 7- String JP-7 Ernie Ball MusicMan Guitar as seen below:

Here is my Gold JP-6 Ernie Ball:

And a wonderful shot of Lyndsey the Guitar Technician homepage photo.

So here is the Dream Theater song that was ranked #5th best riff of 2000-2010 that I just heard ABOUT from KROQ:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fr0u2kYYOLQ

Tonight after the L.A. 140c Character Conf, put on by Jeff Pulver I hit up ‘Dimple’s and lost my ‘dimples virginity’ here’s the proof: no shame.

Oct 5th, 2010 – Dimples, Burbank, CA

So this is pretty awesome. You need to have Google CHROME installed (…….installed yet?) okay now click on http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com/

What’s interesting is how it uses several different popups (yes POPUPS… i thought i was getting spammed to all hell for a minute there..but it was okay. wonder what spammers will do with this!). (Note there are SIX popup windows created by the ‘film’). In the middle is one where you can draw and type freely while things ‘grow’ from your text. its really cool how it works and its going to go viral for sure.

It asks you for ‘the address of where you grew up’ and then it pulls street view images of you old house and displays them in separate windows from the content of the video that was filmed to ‘immerse’ your location with the video images.

Here it is showing the area where I grew up (Toronto’s Beaches) based on an address I put in at the start.
Its a first stab at this, but an interesting demonstration of what can now be done with HTML 5 using the new browsers that support this.

When all is done, You get these options where you can ‘Send Your Postcard Downtown’ (maybe it will end up on their next cd cover? or up on a visual at a show somewhere… gives that ‘ego hook’ making you want to go see their stuff to see your stuff).

Here’s my postcard. Let me know if you see it at any shows!

It reads: “Freaky Postcard Using HTML [I put '5' but the number didn't work] Nice Job Arcade Fire” plus my ‘ASK’ symbol…

’till next time!