Recently I’ve been deeply involved preparing - before I launch the new music marketing forum - to relaunch this blog and all my clients blogs on a self hosted wordpress platform.
PLEASE NOTE: I haven’t decided yet where this blog – the wordpress one that is, the myspace is staying put - is going to once it strikes out on it’s own, but I will certainly announce it!
I have
http://www.musicmarketingblog.info for key word search
and
http://www.kurbpromotions.com for branding
ready on standby. But don’t worry this blog won’t be leaping ship without letting people know. I will still post here for awhile yet just to let people know I’ve moved.
As I said, wordpress is clearly beginning to pull ahead of the pack in terms of blogging platforms which is most evident in the amount of support and applications for customisable features available from independent developers online.
Top internet guys are always talking about new stuff thats becoming available for wordpress.
But there was an evil twist! Follow this closely.
There are blogging sites which include free blogging platforms, such as blogger, livejournal, typepad and squarespace being some of the more popular ones and then blogging platforms which are also known as a CMS or a “content management systems” within themselves, seperate from the website.
A content management system is an application that allows you to update your website or blog without needing a web designer or a web design application to do it all for you.
Some popular CMS are Drupal and um ahhh . . . well let me just say Wordpress is now becoming clearly a very popular CMS. So much so that a lot of people use Wordpress for their whole websites because it’s so easy to use and you don’t need a web designer to do really cool stuff because as I said, there so many independent developers creating new free designs that look really professional and heaps of really cool apps or “plug ins” as they call them so you can add heaps of crazy customised functionality to your blog.
But what about the evil twist? I’m getting to that!!!
You see wordpress.com is a free blogging platform based on the wordpress.org CMS but severely limited in it’s functions and basically these functions were the whole reason we signed up for wordpress – namely really snazzy professional looking designs, supersmart intuitive ad delivery platforms, and super search optimizing plug ins that soup up your search rankability.
oh and did I mention that wordpress creams the competition when it comes to Google? Wordpress has a way of doing its thing that Google seems to like a whole lot better than even Google’s own blog platform, blogger.com and on top of that, you can download and install all these plug ins that automatically optimize your search engine authority automatically!
The one thing that can be said for blogger.com is that because it IS owned by the world’s biggest advertising agency it only takes a couple of clicks to be making a buck here and there in ad money. Good luck getting enough people to see them to get paid however, and the advertising plug ins available for wordpress are sweet. Who wants boring old google ads when you could be selling some crazy shit!
Like weird hats! And lizard food! And Green tea!!!!
I’m just saying this because lets face it. If your demographic is angry, cynical young men for example, are they going to impressed that you have “work from home” ads served by google all over your site without a hint of irony?
But I mean look around you at this wordpress blog. It’s looks like a 90’s corporate disaster. There must be at least one person who’s seen this blog and been reminded of a scene out of Robocop and just left because it looks ratty and unprofessional.
But this was the only one of 12 wordpress.com themes themes that allowed me to have a sweet little spot on the upper right there which is always that pic of me in my corporate pose and of course all the links to where you can get stuff that involves you giving me money, so basically the upper right is just one big ad for me.
Also not a good look is that I don’t have my own domain - as I said still deciding between
http://musicmarketingblog.info and http://kurbpromotions.com
Go for the keywords or the branding? Hard choice. Do I want more people to find me, or do I want more people to remember who I am?
BUT you see if you take the wordpress.org CMS platform and install it on your own host server only THEN are you allowed to play with all the cool toys, the design themes, ads, apps and plug ins.
Personally I say branding matters once your big. Worry about reputation once you’re big enough to have one.
But that’s when everything turns dark. You see the CMS is designed to protect you, the user, from the nightmare that is technical aspects of internet implementation.
It’s another one of those things, just like podcasts, that sound so harmless until you actually try and set one up and you want to kill your computer.
This is something I’ve always wanted to develop – because for people who know this stuff, setting up a podcast or installing a wordpress platform on a server is no biggie.
But expact an average musician to just do this stuff is inhumane and likely to lead to night upon night of fruitless struggle. I’m also really looking forward to bringing a staff person on board who can service my whole operation in this way, so artists can just be like:
”Hey we made an mp3 out of a live recording of our gig last Friday can we get it as a podcast up on itunes?”
And it’s sorted. For my own blog family and my current client base who have been very patient waiting for the new system to come in, I am actually using my highly qualified friends from http://www.giantrobot.co.nz to take care of this first round of wordpress installations which is not going to be cheap but it sure beats being bogged down in the technically incomprehensible world of the back end. Also premium clients are going to have access to high end blog and website hosting and administration - I have my own server now so you wont be getting a slow response because you didn't know you were sharing a server with mr. popular or mr. porn 24 hours across the way who shares your bandwidth outage.
When the new forum is launched soon the first support person will be a dedicated automations person to assist in automated social campaigns – mainly covering myspace and youtube.
Because automation isn’t something that songwriters and strategists should concern themselves with, it just needs to be done.
The second person who I hope will be on board before the official launch in august is a full time graphic and web design support person, it will be my hope that that support person will be available in the forums four hours a day to respond to such requests as:
- we need a poster for our gig coming up
- we need a gallery for our website so we can archive our photos by date and event
- we need our myspace to look flash. We want a contact box with our band logo in it and a flashing banner saying we’ve got a new song up for download. It’s a song about a monkey so there has to be a monkey on the banner.
- we made an mp3 out of a live recording of our gig last Friday can we get it as a podcast up on itunes?
- we need a new wordpress blog. We’ve chosen a theme, can you install it for us
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