[cc-community] How to Promote Your Creative Commons Works?
Shlomi Fish
shlomif at iglu.org.il
Sat Sep 4 17:02:02 EDT 2010
On Thursday 02 September 2010 17:44:33 Paul Houle wrote:
> On 9/1/2010 7:52 PM, Shlomi Fish wrote:
> >>> 5. Doing Whitehat Search Engine Optimisation. I used to subscribe to
> >>> the SEOmoz blog but was overwhelmed with the amount of text posted
> >>> there and the concentration on SEO minutae. I like this blog -
> >>> http://www.jenniferslegg.com/ , but I feel it is usually stating the
> >>> obvious and does not go deep enough (and it seems to have been
> >>> neglected recently).
>
> I can't reveal my sources, but I can say that one of the great
> b...b...grey hat SEO masterminds of our time recently struck out in an
> attempt to build a music site about obscure bands that nobody has ever
> heard of.
>
> There are a number of technical, legal and moral mistakes he may
> have made, but I think ultimately trying to SEO for a band nobody has
> heard of is like pushing on a string. People are searching for "Hootie
> and the Blowfish" and they're not searching for, say, "Red Red
> Groovy". It would be easy to rank well for the names of obscure bands
> and their albums, but it doesn't get you traffic unless people know
> they exist and they're searching for them.
>
> SEO-wise, you might get some traffic for terms like "creative
> commons music" or something focused on genre or some quality of the
> music ("hip hop music" comes to mind, but I think that would be hard.)
> The promotional problem you're looking at, however, would be better
> addressed by "public relations" strategies and through social media --
> I'll warn you, however, that successful social media campaigns are 20x
> as much work as you probably think and that something "cool" enough to
> go viral has be be VERY cool... In the eyes of the audience, not in
> your eyes.
Well, as far as I'm concerned, I may have an easier time SEO-wise promoting my
topical essays, stories, and other such works. While they do not have the
coolness factor of music, at least they focus on delivering a certain message.
I should also note that there's no way I'll resort to black hat SEO. I'm far
too ethical to want to link spam lots of sites in the vein hope that it will
give me better page rank.
>
> It's easy for people to blame the troubles of the music industry on
> the stupidity of music executives, and it's not hard to find examples
> of it... But in truth, it's very, very difficult to promote new
> music. The basic issue is that people find it actively painful to
> listen to new music: most people like 5% of what they hear... In a
> relatively passive medium, like radio (or automated streaming), people
> often change the channel after hearing just a few riffs of something
> they don't like. In the case of an active medium, say people picking
> out tracks on the web, they just won't work up the motivation to do it.
>
I believe I liked more than 5% of the songs I listened to on Jamendo, but I
may be an exception.
> In the meantime, new music competes with an extensive back
> catalog. Many people from 15 to 65 listen exclusively to "Classic
> Rock", a genre of music from 1968-1989 or so that has a small canon of
> about 1000 songs. It's so overplayed that it makes me gag, but each
> and every song in that collection deserves to be there.
>
> Anyhow, the best formula I've seen is radio or streaming that
> mixes a handful of "oldies" that everybody has heard, (maybe 5-10%), a
> handful of some recent things that fit in (10-20%) and fills up the bulk
> with "oldies" that are good but not overplayed. Personally, I crave
> variety, but people need satisfaction and enjoy familiarity.
>
> An all-CC format has the problem that you don't have the back
> catalog to draw from.
>
> >>> 6. Part of my problem may be that I'm still blogging on LiveJournal.com
> >>> and other hosted services. I'd like to move my blog to a dedicated
> >>> server with my own engine, but since I'm unhappy with WordPress and
> >>> other blog engines, then another guy and I started writing our own blog
> >>> engine and we didn't make a lot of progress lately. Yak shaving -
> >>> http://szabgab.com/blog/2008/10/1224765950.html .
>
> I wouldn't knock Livejournal. It might not be the strongest
> blogging platform, but it has a "firehose" that feeds results to search
> engines and thus has fantastic indexation, at least in the short term
> -- Livejournal posts often end up in Google search results in ~minutes~.
>
True. But I feel that I don't have enough control over my LiveJournal blogs
(some of them I implemented as communities due to not knowing a better way to
do so).
> Overall, writing your own blog platform is a mistake. It's hard
> to beat Wordpress, particularly if you don't want your comments overrun
> by black hat spammers. A lot of people I know have gotten into Drupal
> -- I've seen it used as a CMS by organizations between 1 and 500
> employees... Like any packaged software you're going to find things to
> hate about it, but it's amazing how quickly you can get something "good
> enough" in Drupal.
Well, WordPress does not prevent spam by sheer magic - it has mechanisms for
preventing spam which one can duplicate given the need. Someone I know, who
used to use WordPress for his blog, commented a lot about its low code
quality, and said that for true nirvana you need to write your own blog engine
(which he did).
Regards,
Shlomi Fish
--
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Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/
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