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I’ve said before how much I love Ariel Hyatt and what she does, both as a PR person and as a musician’s resource.

Check out her site and products here – Ariel Cyber PR

She’s just posted a fantastic article (as she does on a weekly basis) about how to maximise your traffic on YouTube. It’s actually written by Cassie Petrey of Crowdsurf.net, a company that specialises in Social Media campaigns for artists.

Read it here and digest. It covers all the essential basics of how to set up a channel and build awareness for your band through the wonders of YouTube.

We’ve been making all the people we work with use Youtube for a long while, particularly making tour diary videos and rehearsal back stage videos. The fans love it and you should be doing it.

A few other tips about making videos and looking for traffic on YouTube (and the other video sites too!):

• don’t forget that looking to drive traffic is an essential part of your job as a self marketing musician and that ultimately you want to get people to your site or MySpace page and to join your email list but the video should also always be an end destination in itself and should therefore be as good quality as you can make it. That doesn’t mean it has to be polished and brilliantly edited – it just needs to be good quality content and entertaining or inspiring or revealing;
• Google and the other search engines can’t see videos (not yet at least!), so you need to make sure that your title and description are telling them what it is;
• if you have a 10 minute video, break it down into parts 1 and 2 of 5 minutes each. People have very short attention spans and this will help to keep them watching and hopefully make them move on to part 2;
• in your description, ask people to comment. This helps the search engines rate your video as well as doing so for YouTube;
• Top Tip, and a bit sneaky! – Target related videos: search on YouTube for the videos with the most views in a day and check from the comments and their dates that they are still getting views now. When you’ve established that they’re being watched a lot right now, try to match your title, tags and description to those that are in that high rotation. Obviously, your video must make sense with those tags. Then, YouTube will place your video in the ‘Related Videos’ column to the right and you will get a load of traffic from people watching those high rotation videos.
• A great way to do the above trick is to find a massive new single that is getting huge views and film something a.s.a.p that makes sense in relation to it. So, just a few minutes of your band doing a rushed cover version in rehearsal or something like that. Then the keywords will match up.
• Don’t just use YouTube – it should be your focus because it is for everyone else, but also getting a lot of traffic are Google, DailyMotion and Viddler. If you really get into that, you’ll be needing to use Tubemogul to upload to multiple sites at once.

So, that’s a few extra little insights into Ariel’s chosen topic for the week. Go and check her post out – Read it here

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I think these might become a bit of a feature on the blog – little quick posts that point out a neat little tool that can help you in your mission to market your music.

We covered ArtistData the other day, which amongst other things gives you greater control over listing tour dates. Well I’m not sure if the application covered in this post will read the feed from ArtistData or not – I’m not that techy, but I assume it will. Let me know if I’m wrong!

So, what is it?

It’s a MySpace application from the lovely people at iLike. Great site that you should and probably do know about – it’s not in my top 5 of places that you should be using, but it’s not far behind. The Universal Artist Dashboard is good if you are an artist, and although it’s not as comprehensive as ArtistData looks like it will be for posting to all your profiles at once, it’s a pretty serious tool. It remains an awesome route to fans for larger artists.

But that’s not what this post is about!

They have just released an App for MySpace that replaces your MySpace calendar for listing your dates. As you’ll know the MySpace calendar isn’t very attractive and doesn’t allow any of the features that this brings to your profile. As well as being update-able from your iLike UAD, if you have one, so that MySpace updates with facebook etc, the App also has the ability to host buy links for tickets. There’s more – a whole load of info is dragged into the event page automatically – which friends are attending, venue map and details of pre-gig bars nearby. All  sounds pretty good and gives that little bit more engagement with your fans.

Add to that that it is customizable to fit in with the look of your page and it seems like a worthwhile MySpace page upgrade. Check it out here – Concerts powered by iLike

Note to self – make sure we put this in the next edition of Make It On MySpace!

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