music promotion and spam: A reformed Black Hat

Http://www.nickycakes.com

Nicky Cakes aka partner ZU9whatever is an internet marketer and blogs on internet marketing under the bi-line "confessions of a reformed* black hat"

I know most of you just want to write your songs and earn a living. I wanna earn a living too promoting the songs you write, what those songs and what you represent, and creating value out of that that results in income. but one of the most inefficient parts of the work I do is explaining my work and the sorts of skills I have that make me in such demand right now to the people who pay me - people who just wanna make songs and make a buck from it.

My work involves learning about how internet marketing is carried out and looking at where that intersects with marketing music online in an appropriate way. Which is pretty unique because I'm doing pretty well with it.

I say "appropriate" because to me whether something is right or wrong or black hat or white hat spam or not is not the issue in marketing and promotion. I feel that if internet marketing messages and techniques are not useful to those who recieve them, because they are untargeted, unoriginal, and disruptive, then they are spam and damaging to your brand whether you used software, bots, scripts or automated techniques or not.

To me it's not spam that's wrong or the methodology of communication but all communication that isn't thought out with the interests of those recieving the message in mind.

Thats why the richest internet marketers are not software developers or code gurus. Unique ideas and innovation still drive music marketing and promotion as it always has.

THIS FROM Nicky Cakes:

Nickycakes gets asked this question quite often. “What is a Reformed Blackhat?” Most people assume that it has something to do with spam or making cloaked pages to fool the search engines. Wrong, WRONG. First, take a look at what “blackhat” really means.

For years, the terms “Black Hat” and “White Hat” have been used to describe hackers, people who break into computer systems, etc. A Black Hat hacker is someone who breaks into systems with malicious intent. Personal gain, causing a general ruckus, or making a name for themselves are a few of the motivating factors. White Hat hackers, on the other hand, is someone who breaks into systems to help. These people are generally the ones who notify the vendors of problems in their systems, help write patches, etc.

Anyway, along came SEO. Like hacking, there were 2 sides of the SEO coin. There were webmasters who got their search engine rankings naturally by writing “good content” or developing relationships with other webmasters for backlinks, etc. Then there were people on the cutting edge who came up with creative ways to rank higher in search engines with less work. Sometimes these practices are thought of as “spammy” but generally none are illegal unless computer systems are being broken into, or can-spam laws are being violated.

So the terms “White Hat SEO” and “Black Hat SEO” were born. Neither have much real meaning, but both are thrown around quite liberally. It’s kind of silly, really. The self proclaimed “White Hat SEO” will try to build inbound links to his website by manually visiting related blogs and making comments on them with his website’s url in the comment. Someone more clever than him will write a program to automatically post comments on all related blogs with the push of one button, and the “White Hat” screams “BLACKHAT!”.

That’s really what Blackhat SEO boils down to. It’s just a term thrown around a lot by idiots who are continually 1-up’d by people more clever than they are. It’s pretty much meaningless.

Ok so that’s the end of that tangent. What does Nickycakes mean by “Reformed Blackhat?” Well, many years ago the Cakes could have been labeled as the type of blackhat first mentioned in this post. Since then many things have changed and now he’s devoting that energy to something more productive: making money on teh intraweb. Hence Reformed Blackhat.

Keep it real.





Kurb is a media promotions company providing a regular blog on digital music promotion, marketing digital content and artists creating revenue from new media online. .. ..

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