Share the Dance - A Grassroots Marketing Campaign
Websites and blogs in the concert dance world don't get enough links.
This means that dance companies, dance studios, dance academies, dance departments at colleges and universities, dance associations, dance websites and dance blogs have relatively low search engine rankings.
To see your website's Google Page Rank, visit Google PageRank checker and enter your website address. The results will be a number from 1 to 10. 10 is the highest.
Search engine ranking is largely an indication of how popular your website site is. The more in-bound links to your site, the more popular your site will be.
When users search Google, for example, the top results for a specific key word combination will usually be those websites with the higher Google Page Rank. There are other deciding factors such as whether the page title and page web address include the key words being searched for.
Share The Dance - a Proposed Grassroots Campaign
I would like to make a very simple proposal. I would like to encourage people in the dance community to link to or share at least one dance website, dance blog, dance story, video, picture, performance or other dance-related content once a day.
If you have a website or blog, I'm recommending that you link to one dance-related story that you find interesting. Links from your website or blog are very helpful because they have a direct, positive impact in terms of the search-engine rankings of the sites you link to.
But there are many other worthwhile ways to share dance content so that others can learn about it. And in the process, you will generate more traffic for the dance stories and websites that you write about:
- Bookmark dance blogs and articles on popular social bookmarking sites.
- Post dance content to your Facebook page -- this content could come from your Facebook friends or from outside of Facebook.
- Add a comment and rate dance videos on YouTube and other video sites. Do the same thing for photo sharing applications.
- Tweet about dance content that you would like to share.
- Add a comment with a link to a non-dance blog story.
- Write a review about a dance performance or studio on one of the many arts and theater sites.
- Link to a New York Times article if you want to. But do a search for others within the dance world who have written about the same topic and link to them as well.
The Benefits of this Grassroots Campaign
My grassroots proposal is really simple, only take a couple minutes a day and could lead to much more traffic for all involved in the dance community.
If 1,000 people did this in, say, the New York City dance community, a lot of websites and blogs would have higher page rankings and would generate more traffic. More website visitors would lead to larger audiences, more students, new revenue streams and other benefits.
Posted by
Doug Fox on April 7, 2009 5:25 AM
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://greatdance.com/mtadmin/mt-tb.cgi/3097
3 Comments
I like the idea of building dance's presence online. However, PR has to bleed down from somewhere, and what you suggest would benefit websites with lower page rank and generally flatten PR among dance sites.
Perhaps cross-marketing would be beneficial by integrate fashion, theatre art, and classical music into online dance content and essentially link baiting from other subject areas.
Either way, dance appeals to a certain chunk of online traffic, and increasing that chunk is a daunting, if not impossible, task for any industry. The first step should be to optimize our content for that slice of the pie by getting on social networking sites and by creating quality dance content with new media. Cedar Lake's project52 on Vimeo comes to mind, along with all the dance companies who now write blogs.
Ryan
Great idea, Doug. The dance community would really benefit from this.
Ryan,
Thanks for your comment.
I definitely think that constantly seeking new approaches to creating and presenting dance content is important in terms of the Internet.
But for this content to reach larger audiences, including people with an interest in other art forms that you mention, dance-focused websites simply need more traffic across the board. And the simplest way to increase traffic is for more people to link to dance content. These links will make search engines "happy" and introduce more people to dance as a result.
Leave a Comment