Thursday, July 29, 2010

Benefits Of Online Marketing For The Arts

Owning your own arts or dance business can decidedly be a positive thing, but at the same time it can be very stressful. Making your way through what should and should not be done, and what works best for your business can sometimes be too much for one person to handle. One thing that is for sure is you must supply some form of advertising to gain business. This can be a very difficult task on your own and is something that you may want to consider hiring a dance advertising company for. They will put different marketing strategies and tactics into place. One of the possible strategies is online ads. Here are some of the benefits of using ads in your online marketing strategy.

You are going to find that people can remember your product better based off of the flashy ads that you have. These ads are going to be the ones that can cause people to talk. Hopefully they will be talking because of the wonderful way your ads were done, but it could also be because of the way that the ad was presented. Make sure you present your ads in a manner that people will organically follow with their eyes. Think of the letter "F" organize your ads with your most crucial info that you want to get out following the pattern of the letter "F".

You might also find that a local dance studio could be willing to help you out for free as long as they get some form of benefit as well.  You could be brought in as a guest instructor which will boost studio morale and students interest in the studio which will get them to start talking to their friends about the dance studio. This helps to get your name out and known in the local dance community also the students at the studio might begin to want outside opinions on things like choreography for their upcoming competition.

Hopefully these few steps will get you started in the pursuit of your own successful dance marketing campaign

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

7 free tips on internet marketing!

If you run a business you’re smart enough to learn any of the following internet marketing tips that will enable you to begin to market online effectively.
1. You Should Have An Open Source Website Content Management System
Basically, open source is free stuff. A content management system is simply a means by which non technical people can edit website content and even change your website design. If your website has a CMS, it will mean YOU can edit the content yourself, dialing out the web design company and so saving your business money. In years gone-by a good CMS cost THOUSANDS OF POUNDS. Now, you can get excellent content management systems for FREE.
There are a lot of Open Source CMS on the market today. Usually they are simple to set up (although you might need a bit of technical know-how) and easy to configure. A lot of them come with many kinds of templates that let you change the design of your site easily.
To add to that, you can easily add what are called extensions to your new cms that will add functionality to your site (like a forum, booking system or a poll).
To compete in Google today you need to be regularly adding good content to your site to attract visitors. A content managed website makes this easy and enjoyable and ultimately puts you back in control.
Hobo offers an open source cms configuration and set-up service called Arachnid (which you’ll need if your not willing to spend the weeks learning how to do it properly).
2. Google Local Business Center
Yes! You can get to the top of Google – guaranteed! And for FREE (albeit in the Glasgow area and based on the number of competitors already featured). You can also get free directions to your business. It only takes about 24 hours to get listed above that pesky competitor who’s been there for the last 7 years! Try it out at Google Local Business Center before they do!
3. Google Analytics
Track your visitors for free. Find out where they come from and where on your site they go. You can even find out which exact keyword combination visitors typed into Google that lead you to get an email from your website. For most this is the only website statistics program you will ever need. And yes! It tracks everything, including visitors from Yahoo and MSN and other websites. Sometimes you get what what you pay for, and on some occasions, you actually get a lot more. Try Google Analytics FREE for yourself.

4. Get a Blog!
You’re website needs a blog! Yes, you might not know what this is – but everyone’s doing it (at least everone who is generating lots of visitors to their site!). A blog is ideal for your news section in 2009 and lets anyone in your organization easily add content to your site if necessary through a simple online interface. As mentioned, we use it for our news section and basically it lets you add fresh news content easily without any wwebsite expertise and to boot it allows you to, via blog techy stuff, instantly promote whatever article you’ve written worldwide to blog search engines everywhere.
We use Wordpress. It’s free, too, and probably the best! It takes minutes to install on your site and can be configured in about 4 hours to look and operate like the rest of your site (like ours). Download a copy at Wordpress for your site.
What? You don’t have a website? Then you can set up a free blog on Wordpress.com or Blogger (not ideal – but using this method you actually don’t need anything apart from an email address).
5. Organize Your Own Domains
Domains can be confusing. My advice? Set up an account with 123Reg.co.uk and manage all your domains here. Just the domains, mind. Get the hosting elsewhere. Open an account for free and start adding domains (web addresses) you want to own (domains cost about £10 for 2 years depending on whether it is a .com or .co.uk etc. Then, organize hosting, but not through 123. Why not try out…..
6. Organize Your Own Hosting
Through a reliable host, you can organize your domain/s through a plethora of packages. There are a bazillion hosts out there, a lot of them good. At the time of writing however I believe Rochen do not support .asp, which might be a problem for some.
However if you are following any (or all) of the advice on this page (ie open source CMS or blog using PHP/MySQL) make sure your host suppots these platforms.
Basically if you organise your own hosting and domains it really puts you in control. If you’re in control you call the shots with your web development company. It’s not a hard thing to learn how to do, either.
7. You don’t have to pay to get into or (free traffic from) Google. All you need is a link from a site already in the index (ie already in the Google results pages). Get a link from a good site, though, and your site could be completely spidered in a week. Then you too could enjoy more free stuff from Google – traffic! Kiss goodbye to all those seo companies who say they will get you into Google for only £39.99! Sweet! Check out our very popular free guide to search engine optimisation.

Friday, July 16, 2010

Advanced Internet Marketing for Arts and Entertainment Professionals

Twenty Seven Reasons is a search engine marketing and search engine optimization company that specializes in internet marketing, website design, social media marketing, and IT business solutions for dance studios, theaters, dancers, singers, choreographers,  entertainers, mobile djs, and arts professionals.  

We have both been members of the Entertainment Industry for over 30 years combined.  In a niche market, it is important that you have people working for you that have first hand experience in entertainment to help guide you and market your 
company to its fullest potential. 

http://www.twentysevenreasons.com

 **All of our search engine optimization and search engine marketing strategies are completely custom for each individual client due to the personalized service needed for the entertainment industry. 

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