What is more important in today's music business? A.) Having a great sound? B.) Executing a great marketing strategy? If you chose "B", you may be on your way to stardom. In today's music business, having an effective web marketing strategy can make the difference between you being a local, national or international music star. A key element in your web marketing strategy should be the selection of your bands name. Why? Because your bands name will also become your bands keyword on the Internet. I'm sure you've heard of references to AOL Keywords, but AOL isn't the only place where people use keywords for search. Google, Yahoo, MSN, ASK and many other search engines use keywords to help millions of people find what they are looking for on-line. If someone is looking for information about your band on the Internet, they are most likely, going to type your bands name into a search engine. When the search engine returns the results, you'll want your website, or your myspace page to be in the top of the listings. My suggestion is to choose a crazy (or very creative) keyword. A crazy band name, when used as a keyword, will help your listings in search engines beyond your wildest imagination. For example, let's examine two keywords for two music acts - "Panic At the Disco", a rock band and "Algebra" a soul and r&b group. When I Googled Panic at the Disico, Google returned 10,300,000 results. On the first page of Googles search results, every listing led me to information about the rock band, Panic At the Disco. The very first Google listing, for Panic at the Disco, was for the bands video "It's Better If You Do". The second listing for Panic at the Disco was their bands website, panicatthedisco.com. The third result was Panic At the Disco at purevolume.com. The fourth result was Panic at the Discos' myspace page. Fith was Panic at the Disco lyrics. Get the picture? The first page in Googles' search results was all Panic at the Disco. Panic at the Disco is on an Indie Label. Now let's briefly look a Algebra, a R&B Group on a Major Label. I Googled Algebra, and you can guess my results. The term "Algebra" returned 86,000,000 results in Google. Algebra, the R&B Group wasn't listed anywhere in the first 10 pages of results. Most people doing searches will not dig past page two - in any search engine. The likelihood of the R&B Group Algebra, having any success on the Internet (from a marketing stand-point) is very slim. So the lesson to be learned here is: choose a crazy or creative keyword and band name. With a crazy keyword people can find you easily on the Internet and that can improve your on-line marketing efforts by over 100%
