Author: Ronnie

Have you missed me?

Everybody is online, some like facebook others use myspace then there’s twitter. you want to get your music out there. but where IS out there exactly? You need to be on all the major sites if you want traffic. I hear this all the time. last.fm reverbnation thesixtysix musicxray cdbaby youtube ustream the list goes on and on and on and on…… and it’s not enough to set up a profile. social media is fist and foremost SOCIAL. For it to work you need to engage. Be part of the conversation It’s hard, it takes more time then anybody has available to them. To be successful in social media? The only way I know of is to close yourself in a room and update your sites 24/7 problem is if you do that, how will you have anything interesting to say?

An update: Yesterday I posted this on twitter…

This link has nothing to do with the #IRANELECTION http://bit.ly/VirtualReality

#IRANELECTION is the top trending hash tag on twitter using it in my tweet exposed it to a much larger audience but an audience of an obviously different interest group. This action resulted in 20 hits within a minute then nothing for the rest of the day (interesting) resulting in ZERO downloads a 0% conversion rate! The take away?  posting off topic links is a waste of time. Watch trending topics for a match then post post post.

Feel free to post this link in your favorite blog, social media site, or forum and help me give this CD away to the world.

Spam your friends and tell them your friend Ronnie wants to give them a CD.

http://bit.ly/VirtualReality

Yesterday I embarked on a little experiment in active link promotion. I have a free CD Download on my site for my Virtual Reality CD which has been very stagnant I posted this link  http://bit.ly/VirtualReality in a couple tweets on twitter. Using tracking tools built into my site and bit.ly here is what I saw in the first day.

some numbers:

• I have 253 Twitter followers (Measly I know)
• 30 clicks on the link to my free download page (Bit.ly statistics)
  
• 7 downloads (of the 12 since Jan1 these 7 occurred on Jun 17th
  

so it’s safe to say these are due to this link)

So not a bad turn out for just a couple of strategically placed links.

Feel free to post this link in your favorite blog, social media site, or forum and help me give this CD away to the world.

Spam your friends and tell them your friend Ronnie wants to give them a CD.

http://bit.ly/VirtualReality

Talk about Fail!

My Tangled in Strings CD has been out over  a year and all this time the sample files I have been serving on my site were corrupt. something happened in the MP3 compression that had them distorted.  Thanks and a big shout out to Tonic room studios for checking in on me and pointing it out.

The main drawback to operating your own install of wordpress blog software is the upgrading.  I hate having to mess with my site when it is working. My wordpress hosted blogs get their upgrade from wordpress. I just wish they would unlock the whole embed thing.

Just finished listening to CD Baby Podcast it is my all time favorite podcast and I wish there was a new episode every day.

However David Gray made me ill,

I realize he represents the reality of music biz, And this is the way it is. He even seemed like a nice guy. Well, at least now I have a little insight as to why pop music is so….soulless.  So much of the process is taken from the artist and put in the hands of the bean counters, publicists and producers. In the American Idol model so much opportunity is given to those that are made and not to anyone who has anything to say through the art of music.  Today’s podcast only strengthens my belief that the corporate music machine just keeps pumping out more of the same homogenized vanilla crap.

I realize this is a total rant and that I probably sound like sour grapes from an old has-been. Or more likely an old never was, never will be. No I just long for the day when music rose to the top because it was the best, and not because it had a billion dollar machine cramming it down our throats.

Give me an independent artist that writes their own songs, and has a story of their own to tell any day over whats pumping out of the corporate music machine.

</RANT>

How did I miss this one? I post links online in social media all the time. Whether I am sharing something on Twitter or a link on my blog like this one. http://Bit.ly Which ironically I can not track because it’s already a bit.ly link. Which brings me to the point of this post. I like to know that what I post is usefull or at least interesting and when it comes to links wouldn’t it be nice to get feedback on what works? enter Bit.ly , I can shorten a long url and get report on when it get’s clicked. even if it’s already a short url like say RonnieRecords.com I link to it using Bit.ly http://bit.ly/ronnierecords and I can get feedback on when it gets clicked. Cool hu?

You hafta just love TED !