I love music. I was in a short lived band once and still have: being in a touring band at the top of my do-before-I-die lists. I saw this info graphic that shows how little musicians earn online and then I read this article about how last week had the fewest number of albums sold in one week since Soundscan began compiling data in 1994, and it started me thinking about how I would do it if I were in a band that people cared about. So this is what I would do.

Disclaimer: Musicians don’t want to think of themselves as marketers or entrepreneurs but I believe that’s exactly what small musicians need to see themselves as to make money in this new digital world. I say, Get over it.

First, I would like to describe my strategy and then below I’ll put the tactics. The main trust of my strategy is sumed up well with this quote by Cory Doctorow, “It’s very hard to monetize fame, but impossible to monetize obscurity.” You’ll never sell anything if no one listens to you, so how do you get as many people as possible to listen to you? Share your music and get others to do the same. A fact of the internet is that If the product you make becomes digital, expect that the product you make will be copied. Let your music be copied and shared as much as possible.

The second side to this strategy is that once you can distribute something digitally, for free, it will spread as long as it’s good. If it spreads, you can use it as a vehicle to allow people to come back to you and register, to sign up, to give you permission to interact and to keep them in the loop. The spread of your digital music in an effort to create a well maintained following is the core of being a successful self-published musician.

The bands that create communities, connect people and spread ideas are the ones that will win. Seth Godin defines permission as an asset to be earned. “The ability (not the right, but the privilege) of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who want to get them,” is his definition of permission marketing and that is the biggest tool in the independant musicians tool belt. Most good bands have a message that their fans rally behind: anti-war, fun, unity – whatever. Your band needs to seek out those groups that agree with your message and want to be connected – and then the band works to become the connecting point.

Let me tell you what this strategy is not: You are not trying to get discovered by some self claimed gatekeeper who decides what the masses get to listen to. I would never try to join a label. What’s the point? All the tools necessary to self publish and distribute to the world are there already at your fingertips.

Onto the tactics:
1. Sell whats scarce. Music as a digital product is anything but scarce. And you don’t want it to be, you want everyone possible to listen to your music. Meanwhile, the one thing that you can’t digitize and distribute with full fidelity is a live show, limited edition t-shirts, special edition album covers and community. This is where you’ll make money.

2. To sell that stuff, you need to find your audience. I would make a band blog where I would write about what’s going on with the band as well as writing on the topics that the band is founded upon. Also there would be a music section for people to stream any song I had written. Next to each song I would put the Facebook Like button so people could Like individual songs which gets the song sent to their news feed in Facebook for all their friends to see. This would also allow me to message any of those people who Liked a song later on. Also next to each song would be a link to Tweet the song, email the song, embed the song on their own site or any other kind of sharing possible.

A downloadable high quality version of my music would be available if the person gave me their email address. Along with the download I would include album art, liner notes and stencils for printing out and spray painting the band name or image. I would also include a message to invite the downloader to share the music with their friends. Next to the download button would be a donate button to anyone who wanted to chip something in for getting the music.

I would also make a Facebook fan page, twitter account and YouTube channel for my band where the content from the band blog would be syndicated. All of these different avenues allows people to consume my music in their preferred place. If they want to listen to my music on Facebook but hate Twitter, or vice versa, I would make it possible.

I would make a YouTube channel and make music videos for every song I record. They don’t need to be high production cost videos just whatever speaks to the fans.

I would make a flicker group for fans to upload images from shows or themselves being a part of the music.

3. Once you find your audience, turn them into family. Kevin Kelly says you really only need 1,000 true fans to make a living. Making music for your fans instead of finding fans for your music. All sharing tactics above have the same goal in mind – get as many people as possible to listen and then capture their email to create your fan database. The fans in the database are your biggest asset. I would turn my music into a subscription service. They are the ones you send anticipated, personal and relevant messages to. They get first dibs on listening to new music. They get alternate tracks. They get asked for their feedback and see that their feedback gets put into practice. They get to talk to each other on the blog. They get exclusive fan club stickers and patches. They also can buy tickets to shows before eveyone else, buy the limited-run t-shirts before everyone else and get first dibs on buying special edition delux albums.

The internet is the best thing to ever happen to music. In an age when it’s cheaper and easier than ever to design something, to make something, to bring something to market, bands win.

The search query report in AdWords provides a great way to expand your keywords in a data-driven way. There are a lot of keyword tools out there to help you discover which keywords you should be bidding on so that your keyword list is perfect right out of the gate. I like the approach of trying out well thought out keywords first, and then using the data for making the decisions of how to refine your keyword list second.

This is what I mean…

Where Mobile, Social, Local and Personal all intersect. That’s where the web the heading.

One in five searches on Google is a local search. (That number goes way when the user is searching on a mobile phone).

17% off all time spent on the internet is on social networks. Up from 6% a year ago.

Visits to websites from phones up 34% year over year.

And all of this mobile, local and social content that makes up the web can be filtered, organized, and tailored to fit the needs of the individual making the web personal.

While going through different reprots in Google Analytics, analyzing what is and isnt working can be difficult if you have thousands of keywords, referring sites and pages in your reports cluttering everything up. You want to be able to efficiently look through them to find something useful. To do this use the Advanced Filter under that report table.

Here a few uses I have found work great…

1. Top Landing Pages sorted by bounce rate

Content > Top Landing Pages

When you pull this report and sort by bounce rate you get a bunch of pages that only have one entrance that keep you from seeing the landing pages that matter. Create a filter with Entrances Greater than 100 or whatever number suits your site. Now the good and the bad are revealed and you can pick which pages need the most immediate help. Go to this post on analyzing top landing pages for the next step to finding insights.

2. Non-Paid Keywords sorted by conversion rate

Traffic Sources > Keywords. Show: non-paid. Ecommerce Tab

When looking at Non-paid keywords, create a filter for keywords with a conversion rate of better than 10%. There is something about these keywords that align perfectly with your site. You might consider including these words in your PPC campaigns or look at including them in meta tags, include them more often in the content of applicable pages or create altogether new pages that focus on these keywrods, all of which will help SEO.

3. Referring Sites sorted by per visit value

Traffic Sources > Referring Sites. Ecommerce Tab

Similar to sorting keywords, when you’re looking at referring sites you want to analyze only the ones that have any significance instead of all those random ones that have only one visit, so filter visits by a number that’s higher than the average and voilà, you can now see just those referring sites that convert the best. (To be able to see the full referring URL in the user defined report go here.)

This is one of the first things I look at when I analyze any website. Under Content in the left column click on Top Landing Pages. These are the most frequently landed on pages that your visitors see when they first come to your website. These are your “head” pages, which means that small improvements to these pages can quickly yield high ROI. In the furthest right column in the report is the bounce rate for each of these pages. % Bounce Rate means the % of visitors that came to your site and then left instantly, or in other words, that landing page was not compelling enough for them to read more than that one page. Bounce rate is a great metric to measure the quality of the traffic you are acquiring. It helps you hone in on where and how your website is failing your visitors.

So now you can see what is failing, in one more step you can get an idea of why it is failing: Click on one of those poor performing pages (I put little cash signs next to my contenders) with a high bounce rate to analyze it on it’s own. Then click on the drop down that says Content Detail on it and select Entrance Keywords. Do the keywords people use to get to this page align with the content of the page? Looking at their keywords you can get a sense of what their intent was and why it doesn’t match up with what the page is delivering. Now you have something to work with and fix. Now make the changes to that page so that it better matches what your visitors want. Bounce rate will go down, and positive outcomes will increase.

When setting out to manage and optimize bids in paid search, looking at all the campaigns, adgroups and keywords at once can be overwhelming. I like using the impression share report as a starting point for focusing optimization strategies and managing bids.

In AdWords make the following report: 1. Report Type: Click Campaign Performance. 2. Settings: Set Weekly visits, set the date range for a few months and select all campaigns. 3. Advanced Settigns: Add the following Columns: Impression Share, Lost IS (Rank), Lost IS (Budget), Conversions, Conv. Rate, Cost/Conv.
That’s it – once the report is made export it into Excel. In Excel sort by Campaign so that you can see the increase or decrease in impression share week to week for each campaign. Now we can cover the what, why and how.

What:
Start off by looking for campaigns with low impression share and then look across at the Cost/Conv column. If Cost/Conv is within your accepted range for these low impression share campaigns, then you are leaving money on the table by not maximizing your impression share. Likewise, if impression share is high for certain campaigns and their Cost/Conv is high, you might consider decreasing impression share.

Why:
With these initial insights look at the Lost IS (rank) column and Lost IS (budget) column. These two columns will tell you why you have low impression share. If Lost IS (budget) is high, this means your ads are not showing as often as they could because your campaign budget is being tapped. If your Lost IS (rank) is high, this means your keyword bids are so low to the point that your ads aren’t appearing.

How:
The campaigns with low Cost/Conv and high Conv. Rate are you hero campaigns. These should have as much impression share as possible. Give them unlimited budget (why limit it? As long as the ROI is worth it you should push these campaigns as far as they’ll go) and give their keywords higher bids. Google has a bid simulator built in for giving you an idea of how much traffic will result in your bid, but don’t worry too much about it, set a bid that seems right and then test how it performs. You can adjust it once you see the results.
The campaigns that are in-between need a little more time and effort. This is where you’ll dive into individual adgroups and keywords to discover which ones are causing the bad Cost/Conv and low Conversion Rate. Decrease bids on the losers and increase bids on the winners. Click through your ads to see if the keywords you are bidding on match the landing pages you are giving your visitor. Try different keyword match types.

This PPC bid optimization strategy allows you to prioritize your efforts so that you increase the biggest winners and get rid of the biggest losers first. Once done, go back the next week and see your results. I like to make my changes all in one day and then leave it alone for a week instead of making little changes day to day which makes it harder to recognize causation.

I think this screen shot from insights for search tells the story all by itself. The age of hiring a “consultant” are coming to an end. Why would you hire someone with all this so-called experience when your own business, with it’s specific problems and issues, has all the data it needs to figure out what to do? What you really need is a skilled analyst to figure out what all that data is saying.

In a post by Stephen Few,

The problems that we face today, both big ones in society like the current health care debate and smaller ones like strategic business decisions, do not exist because we lack information, but because we don’t understand it. They can be solved only by developing skills and tools to make sense of information that is often complex. In other words, the major obstacle to solving modern problems isn’t the lack of information, solved by acquiring it, but the lack of understanding, solved by analytics.

Sometimes while looking at all your web analytics data it’s difficult to figure out where to focus. This dashboard allows you to take a very maco look at where your site is at, define where you want to be in terms of revenue and then set some high up goals.

This dashboard uses the following metrics: visits, conversions, conversion rate, average order value and total revenue. With some simple formulas you can see what effect a percent increase in conversion rate or average order value will have on revenue in a visual way.

So if you set your revenue goal first you can mess with the other metrics and then focus on which other metrics you want to divide and conquer. So let’s say you decide that if you could get 1,000 more visits while maintaining the same conversion rate you can reach your revenue goal. Then you can make your tactical plan to get those 1,000 more visits like working at SEO, expand your PPC keyword coverage or push your affiliates. If you see that a $3 increase in average order value will get you there, then maybe you’ll start merchandising your site differently or include more up sells – you get the idea.

Download: Web Analytics Planning Dashboard In Excel

Long Tail keywords individually might not make the biggest difference to your overall PPC account. But in aggregate these long tail keywords can sometimes mean huge amounts of traffic and lots of money. Setting up you PPC account with your most popular, or “head”, keywords set to broad match is not an effective strategy to capture all of your long tail traffic and have a positive PPC campaign. Here’s why:

1. You will hurt you click through rate due to less targeted ad copy. look at these two examples for the query “Gibson Acoustic Guitar”.

Where one is only bidding on the broad match of Gibson Guitar, the other is bidding on the longer phrase Gibson Acoustic Guitar. Not only is the former ad more targeted and therfore more likely to get my click, its quality score will be better due to keywords in the ad text which will save money and give it a higher ad position.

2. Conversion rate will improve. Take a look at the landing pages for both of the previous ads.

One is showing me exactly what I was looking for, Acoustic Guitars, and the other shows me both electric and acoustic which means it is not inline with my intent so I will most likely bounce.
3. Better bid management. Let’s say that you have your adwords accounts set up so that each one of these long tail products are organized by category and theme. This way if there is a seasonality element or if something goes on sale you can easily increase your bids for just that product segment and keep all the rest of your campaigns running at the same cost. This means you can be more nimble and cost effective with your inventory.

So that’s the why long tail keyword management is better than just using broad match head terms, here’s the how:

1. First start by running a Search Query Report in AdWords and find all the keywords that are trigging your ads that you arn’t currently bidding on that make sense. Orgainze these keywords into themes that you can build campaigns around. In this example’s case, one campain set up for general acoustic guitars, another around Gibson guitars and another around Gibson acoustic guitars.

2. Expand on that list with this long tail key word tool to figure out all the permutations of those keywords.

3. Also use modular ad text. Meaning don’t make the second line flow over into the third line on the adtext, make them seperate sentences. This will help you mix and match adtext on the fly so that if acoustic guitars go on sale you can easily swap out one of the lines and replace it with something like, “Now 20% Off, Buy Now!”

Monitoring these keywords takes more time and more effort to set up, but in the long run means a much more effective PPC marketing effort.

• Enhance memory with fun product centered quizzes and facts
• Add to credibility with customer testimonials or industry wards.
• Reveal hidden attributes by asking the customer how they use the product and then share that with the community.
• Hold your customer’s attention with stories of your product in action written by those who use it day to day.
• Influence preferences by making the product more interactive and vivid.

2. Conversation centered on what the interests of your customers.

• To do this, brainstorm 3 main interests that your customers are into that doesn’t have to do with your product. Maybe its gardening, traveling and raising kids. Put yourself in the head of your customers and find interesting content done by gardening blogs, talk about it and link to it. Invite your fans to submit their summer vacation plans. Write tips on best ways to keep kids safe at playgrounds. Remember, you’re not trying to write about these things and then secretly inject your brand name in the background somewhere or mention how your product is great when you’re gardening, traveling and raising kids. You’re just starting a conversation with your like-minded fans on subjects you are mutually interested in.

• One on one dialogs with customers about their questions and needs, open up their questions for the community to answer and discuss.
• Make customers famous by featuring their posts about your product and highlight their images submitted to you.
• Shout-outs and props given to fans who do something cool or note-worthy.

Any more ideas on conversation starters for brands? Leave em’ in the comments.