Our Song Wasn’t Heard

A year ago I helped a friend put together a music video on a nonexistent budget. The production was completed for around $500. About half of that money was spent on studio recording and on the dance choreographer, who was also the lead actress. The rest was spent on props, food and advertising. We hit the studio at Cornerstone University and acquired the help of a student to record the music.

We faced many challenges creating the content but had a lot of fun working on this passion project. The project took 5 months with 7 different days of shooting. It required a lot of locations, extras and wardrobe changes. This was the largest scale project I have written, directed and executed. You can click here to view the music video. You can also watch the behind the scenes video here.

Our marketing fell short, unfortunately. We focused mostly on getting through production and did not adequately prepare and execute a marketing campaign. Since all the content was 100% original and there was no copyrighted material used, we could monetize the video. However, this resulted in little return with only over fourteen hundred hits. We also took advantage of annotations to promote the release of the song on Amazon, Google Play and Spotify.

How to Frame a White Hat

For quite some time I’ve known about SEO; I grew up around web design terminology. My father has been a self employed web designer, operating under the name CBS Creative, for about a decade now.  In fact, he went to Davenport to learn how to do his work. However, I never really had a true understanding of the terms he used. Taking a class and really exploring these concepts is pretty exciting for me.

Today, I wanted to briefly share some of my research on SEO. My class at Davenport brought up the two different types of SEO: White hat and black hat. I decided to read more about these concepts. There is a black hat technique where you generate thousands of links to your website to artificially inflate your ranking. Being a curious and mischievous person, I started to wonder, “Could I do this to someone else’s website with the sole purpose of having them get caught? Shut them down and effectively eliminate my competition?” Thus I decided to research just that and found an online article. I discovered it’s a black hat technique called Google Bowling.

The article I ended up reading also shared many other easy techniques you could use to ruin someone’s online reputation. Some of the methods of Google bowling are as simple as clicking on their ad repeatedly! If you’re running a website, I’d recommend not getting on my bad side. Of course I say that in jest, or do I?