Today is the second day of the conference I’m attending in Charleston, South Carolina on book publishing and authors sponsored by the Advantage Media Group. I’ve been tweeting about some of the interesting things I’m learning at this conference. Here is a digest of my tweets from yesterday. If you want to follow my tweets for today, you can follow me by visiting my Twitter profile!

• Down here in Charleston, SC for a book writing conference…at 73 degrees, it was a gorgeous day!
• Sitting in on a conference about book publishing in sunny Charleston, SC. Topic of the moment…1000 true fans, do you have them?
• Here’s the original link about the concept of 1,000 true fans- http://twurl.nl/t0dgxy
• Here’s the caveat for getting true fans…you have to be able to deal with them…or get someone who can. No hiding in the studio!
• Just learned the the worst way for an author to make money is to sell their books….in a bookstore. Who knew?
• Break time! A bit of trivia, this hotel is a restoration of the original Citadel Military College. Explains why it looks like a castle.
• Are you running a business or creating another job? Running a business means you need to hire good people so your business can run itself
• Statement from current speaker “All marketing and advertising revolves around your company’s Internet Strategy.” Completely agree!
• Anyone has an opinion on the statement “All marketing and advertising revolves around your company’s Internet Strategy.”?
• Speaker now talking about how they worked their way out of the economic slump during the Gulf War. His message- you can survive the economy
• …but it’s going to be awfully tough
• Okay…90 minute lunch…we do love our food here in the South
• Stopped by the gift shop on the way back to the conference..it’s selling candy bars for $1.50. Should be grateful, it would be $2.50 in LA
• Current speaker is talking about how social media (Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, etc) helps increase attendance to her events.
• You can follow her- @wkurtz
• Next speaker is Wayne Kelly who’s going to talk about media training for interviews, especially radio
• Whoa..this dude’s kind of funny
• When pitching for a radio interview, answer the question “So What?” Why would the radio audience be interested?
• BTW…that will also be the same question people will ask when they land on your website
• Interesting statistic- 96% of Americans listen to traditional radio
• What is your story? What’s the story behind your product? Even if your product isn’t unique doesn’t mean your story isn’t relevant
• Good uses for radio interviews…develop awareness, develop your brand, and list building
• List building is Step #2 in my 10 Steps to Bring More Traffic to Your Website- http://twurl.nl/61qzgo
• Wayne Kelly says, “If you want the attention of the media, you must have a website”. You heard it here first!
• You can follow Wayne on Twitter- @waynekelly
• Okay, last speaker of the day is up- Greg Stebben who’s going to talk about radio publicity…hmm, I smell a theme
• Hey, this guy is funny too. Good thing…I’m beginning to fade from information overload
• Here’s a tip, figure out how you can tie your product or work to current events and you can be timely in the media
• Media and radio publicity is a lot like social networking, come into the relationship with the impulse to give more than you get
• Conference done for the day…have to be back down here at 8 a.m.
• Now that the day’s sessions are over, I’m going to enjoy the evening…buh bye!
• Just got back to my room…boy oh boy, King Street’s jumping. Downtown Charleston’s sure is different from what I remember as a kid

If you’ve been following me on Twitter, you already know that I’m currently attending in Charleston, South Carolina at a conference on book publishing and authors sponsored by the Advantage Media Group. There’s some pretty good information here so I’m sort of live tweeting some of the interesting points of the conference. If you want to follow along, follow my tweets by visiting my Twitter profile!

Mark this as one of the website mistakes you don’t ever want to make on your art website. That mistake is autoplaying music or some other type of sound on your site. While this isn’t as rampant on the web as it used to be, the big exception seeming to be MySpace where I have to surf with my headphones off and the speakers turned down, it’s still annoying when you run into it.

Some people put music on their site to create some type of “atmosphere” for their visitors…like you’re stepping into a gallery or your local Pottery Barn. Or, instead of music, they’ll greet their customers with an audio message from themselves.

While music in your local mall or chain boutique might be useful, these tactics don’t really fly in the online world for a couple reasons:

1. A lot of people do their surfing at work. If they land on your page and their speakers start blasting your music or your audio greeting, that tells everyone in the office that they’re surfing the web and NOT working. Your visitor will end up leaving your page in search of one that’s quieter and less likely to get them fired.

2. A lot of people surf with their headphones on. While that solves the problem of your music invading the common space, it can get really painful for your visitor if your music is too loud or if their speakers are turned up. I often have my earbuds on when I’m on the web and there’s nothing more painful than have a million decibels shoot straight into your ear canal because someone thought it was clever to have their iTunes playlist running in the background of their websites at full blast. How much you want to bet that I or anyone else will want to hang around on your page after we’ve gone deaf?

3. Unlike stores, galleries, and craft shows, people don’t visit websites to “hang out” or take in the “atmosphere”. This is one reason why music works at your local Starbucks and doesn’t work on your website. In fact, try going to Starbucks.com and see if you hear the same music you hear in their stores playing on their website when you first arrive. Thought not.

People online are usually goal oriented. They want to visit a website, find what they’re looking for, then leave. Making someone scramble around looking for a way to turn off your music or turn down their speakers gets in the way of their goal and frustrates them. And frustrated people abandon things that frustrate them.

Now this is not to say that you shouldn’t have music or any kind of sound on your website. In my recent audio download, “10 Steps to Getting More Traffic on Your Website“, I talked a bit about how you can use audio to help increase traffic for your website. In certain situations and applications, music and audio can certainly be useful. The key is to do it right:

1. Give your visitors control over what they hear. Don’t force your visitors to listen to your music or your voice the moment they land on your website. Let them be able to turn the sound on or off and also let them be able to control the volume.

2. Have a good reason to have sound on your website. If your main motivation for having sound on your website is that it seems like a cool thing to do, you need to rethink that motivation. Most people aren’t going to buy something or sign up for your mailing list just because you have cool music playing in the background. In most cases, music or audio that has no real purpose ends up just being a distraction. Unless your business is music or music related, people aren’t going to visit your website to listen to music. That’s what radios and iPods are for.

3. This also applies to videos as well. One of my biggest pet peeves with some of these video sharing sites like YouTube and blip.tv is that they autostart their videos. If your video has sound, autostarting the video has the same effect as autostarting audio. Again, you need to give your visitors control over whether they want to watch your video or not.

So that’s one of my web pet peeves. What’s yours? Post a comment and tell us your rant!

P.S. Thanks to wren2000 for inspiring this post and for Maxell for the above ad image…that has to be one of the most famous ads ever.

If you’re just starting out trying to get your website optimized for search engines, it’s a good idea to know where you’re starting from and to check your progress from time to time. One tool that I’ve been using to gauge my progress on the SEO front for a while is called Website Grader by Hubspot.

Website Grader analyzes your website for search engine optimization, traffic, the number of links coming into your website, your Google PageRank, even how effectively you’re turning visitors into customers and gives you a grade up to 100. The neat thing about this site is that gives you a breakdown of what you can improve on your website to give yourself a better score, plus you can also compare your website to another website that’s similar to yours to see how you measure up.

When I first started using this tool, my grade was a 57. I’ve managed to get it up to 86. So looks like I still have a bit of work to do! You can see how you measure up visiting Website Grader.com. And be sure to share your grades here in the comments!

• New Blog Post- 10 Steps to Getting More Traffic on Your Website : Free Audio Download http://twurl.nl/wo8bqw #
• New Blog Post- Today’s Tweets for 2008-09-22:
  New Blog Post- Today’s Tweets for 2008-09-.. http://twurl.nl/0uzdxm #
• New Blog Post- Today’s Tweets for 2008-09-22 http://twurl.nl/mu466t #
• New Blog Post- Today’s Tweets for 2008-09-22 http://twurl.nl/p5ipb3 #

Powered by Twitter Tools.