And They All Rejoiced! – Creative Ramblings

During my research yesterday, I made a few interesting discoveries:

1) If you have an account with Ping.fm, you can now update your page on a Ning network of your choice. All you need is the link to the network, your email address and your password. I love the idea! Now, I hope they will let us do it with more than one network in the near future.

2) If you have an account with Twitter and are an independent artist, you will surely love this: Tweet for a Track. The idea behind this site is to virally help to spread the word about you and your music. This is how it works: link your twitter account to the site, upload a track that you would like to make available for people, and send your message. Every time someone will click on the link and tweet the message through the site, they will be entitled to download your song (for free, of course). You can also choose for your tweet to be sent automatically every three days.

When the person has downloaded the track, you have access to their e-mail address and twitter username. That’s a great connecting tool!

3) Now, what about being able to sell all your merchandise, books, and CDs in one convenient place, with cool options? FreeWebStore is the way to go! It is completely free and they claim that they do not charge anything for their services. All you need is a Paypal account to be able to receive money from customers’ orders. You can also use other payment services, such as Google Checkout. Choose your template, upload your files, and add all the necessary information, as you would with any product. You can also choose if you want to offer special promotions. If you upgrade, you can even issue coupons, let customers send you cheques, or display more than 15 items in your store.

Here is a list of cool perks:

- many free templates to choose from;

- the possibility to add YouTube videos and widgets from other sites in product descriptions;

- the “OFFER” section of your store page lists all the discounted articles;

- entire control of your stocks;

- customers can add items to their cart and continue shopping like they would with online stores like Amazon;

- customer reviews; etc.

The only major con is the long link, such as http://www.freewebstore.org/SoulpoetrysiteStore. Staff advise that you should get a domain name. However, apart from that, the site is user-friendly and the control panel, pretty much self-explanatory. I was able to launch my own store after a couple of hours. See for yourself  HERE .

4) I discovered a few new websites for music promotion. You may know them already, but I think that it is always nice to be reminded that they exist! So, here goes: Acid Planet, Garageband, Last.fm, Soundclick, and Bandcamp.

Now, you know what to do!

Cendrine Marrouat
http://www.soulpoetrysite.com