Give Others the Tools to Promote Your Concerts

I love to help promote guitar concerts. Every time I find one I put it up on Classical Guitar News and post about it on twitter and facebook.

Here’s the thing: people need some place to go for information. They want to know more about you, your playing, and the concert; they want to know more than a 140 character tweet can give. So here’s some advice from an online perspective.

Update Your Website

Give blogs like the Classical Guitar Blog and Classical Guitar Canada someplace to link.

Update your website with a page for each concert. Include all the relevant details, including a link to where the concert is and information about how we can buy tickets. This makes it easy for people like me to send readers someplace specific where they can get all the info they need.

If your website is built on WordPress or other content management software, this is really easy to do. If it’s some flash-based monstrosity that only your designer/developer can edit…well, that’s a problem. Get a new site, or get a bigger budget to pay your developer for updates.

Revise Your Press Kit

In addition to having a page for the concert, your press kit should be easily accessible so bloggers and webmasters can copy snippets for their own sites. Please use document formats or, even better, plain text files for bios Don’t send PDFs to webmasters — it’s very hard to copy and format text from a PDF. Ideally your “official” bio is right on the website in text that can be highlighted and copied.

In addition, provide web-friendly, small images files. Your hair and eyes may not have the striking look as a they did in the 5 megabyte hi res image, but that’s okay. The web is obsessed with speed. The Classical Guitar Blog loads really slow (sorry about that), and I don’t want to make it slower with big image files.

Think of it this way: if you don’t provide smaller, web-friendly photos, webmasters will edit them for you. This means the quality is out of your hands, and for something that helps convey your image and brand, is that something you want?

Give Others Tools, Let Them Help You

Part of the goal of this blog is to help promote artists. Either through CD reviews or concert reviews or just a link sent out on social media. But I cannot do that portion of my job with out performer’s help.