Adam McFarland

As I said back when I launched it, Music-Alerts is a site I’m really proud of.  I think it’s a service that a lot of people could benefit from, and I think I did a pretty good job on the design and programming.  That said, let’s be honest:  the chances for it to actually make us any money is very slim.  The only chance it has is to become HUGE so we could make money on advertising or affiliate sales.  Currently, the links to the albums are affiliate links, so in theory if a crapload of people used the service we’d make some money when they clicked through and bought an album.  But we’re not experts in the music industry and we don’t want to commit ourselves to a site with little to no revenue potential.

So while I want the site to be useful and become popular, I really don’t want to spend much time on it.  We’ve been getting some traffic because of the high search engine rankings, and there’s a good chance if I left it there it would naturally grow slowly but surely.  However, I still wanted to spend a little time and effort to see if I could get the site to catch the viral bug: you never know who will see it and have interest in it.

Today (Sunday) I finished my emails and daily tasks in an hour or two, and I had the rest of my football-watching day ahead of me.  I decided to spend exactly 1 hour marketing Music-Alerts…primarily because I wanted time to relax and watch sports, but also because I thought it would be fun to limit myself to such a ridiculously small amount of time (this way, if the site does take off I’ll look like a genius for only spending an hour marketing it :)).  I also kind of wanted to prove a point that when your back is against the wall - either by choice or by circumstance - you can usually pull something impressive together.  While I really don’t expect much from my hour, I do expect an increase in traffic and feed creations.

Here’s what I did:

• Spent $100 on StumbleUpon PPC, which equates to 2,000 visitors to the site (5 cents/visitor).   I configured it to show to only people in the US that are between 18 and 30 and have listed “music” as one of their interests.
• Submitted the site to the QUIT (Quick Indexing Tool) on Blue Hat SEO.  The site advocates both white hat and black hat SEO techniques, so use your better judgment before following any advice on the site. However, it is a great read and I’m willing to take some risks with Music-Alerts so it was worth a try…I’ve been curious.
• Emailed about 10 influential technology blogs (like TechCrunch and LifeHacker) and a handful of popular music sites.  All it takes is one site like TechCrunch to cover the site and it’s ON.  Are the odds slim? Hell yea.  But it’s worth a shot, especially for the potential payoff.

I’ll follow-up sometime soon with the results!