Sid Vanderpool knows when a website is doomed. Vanderpool,
owner of Twin Falls, Idaho-based Music Magic Entertainment,
was recently hired to perform a makeover of someone’s
web site. “His site looked like junk,” says
Vanderpool. “For starters, he needed a decent logo,
and more importantly, nobody knew his site even existed.”
Whether your website has been running for years or you’re
building a new one, here are ways to increase your web visibility
and insure more hits, and, therefore, more bookings.
According to Vanderpool, who moderated a Web Design seminar
at the International DJ Expo this past August, a website
is an interactive version of your brochure. In order for
people to know your website exists, you must get your site
listed on search engines.
“It’s like having a store in the middle of Las
Vegas and you have no sign on the front of the store,”
says Vanderpool, emphasizing the importance of appearing
on search engines. “So no one ever visits you. That’s
the way a website is.”
Since clients use different search engines to find information,
it’s important to appear on several search engines.
You can do that by knowing the key words when using meta
tags – tags to describe various aspects about your
web page, which is how you program your site, so that when
a web spider comes across it, it knows it can find key words
and will log those keywords to your website. Gary Deane,
owner of Baltimore, Md.-based M.A.D. Promotions, advises
to “Use words such as ‘mobile DJ,’ ‘disc
jockey,’ ‘vinyl,’ ‘entertainment,’
and ’12-inch.’ It helps define your site more,
so it’ll show up higher in a web search.”
The good news is that you can do most of this for free.
However, if you fail to re-register with the search engines
at least once a month, your site’s placement will
suffer. “It takes a lot of work,” says Albert
Schrack, owner of Delaware-based A&W Entertainment.
“It takes dedicated personnel to constantly go back
on a monthly basis to get your names on these various search
engines. That’s how they keep themselves free, by
basically forcing people to go back to them. Other than
that, find reliable search engines because so many search
engines pop up.”
You need not go into every search engine imaginable. “There
are eight search engines out there right now that you want
to be hooked up with,” says Vanderpool. “You’ve
got Google, Yahoo!, DogPile, Northern Light, DMoz, Alta
Vista, Decentral and Alltheweb.”
Linkage
Theory
Reciprocal links are what you want to aim for. “Reciprocal
links is where you go to people who have like businesses
that are associated to you,” says Vanderpool. “For
mobile DJs, it would be like wedding businesses. You would
send them a nice e-mail saying, ‘I have this link
section in my website. I have your link already there. I
would be appreciative if you put my link up on your site.’”
If your e-mails are not being read or taken seriously, try
changing the tone of the e-mail or offer to do a review
of their services on your website. “You can do it
ahead of time and put it in the links area,” says
Vanderpool. “You can send them an e-mail saying, ‘Congratulations,
we’ve reviewed your services and you can find the
review right here. Feel free to link to it.’ If it’s
a good review, they’re going to link to that review.
People love praise. If it’s XYZ Caterers, they’ll
say, ‘Wow, they’ve got a nice review up here
of our food and about what we do. This is real cool. Let’s
put a link to it and they’ll call up their webmaster
and put a link to it.’ It’s a no-brainer way
of getting someone to link back to your site. That in turn
will link you up to their site. The more links that you
have going to your site, and coming from your site to other
businesses that are like yours, reciprocal links, the better
it is and the higher you can get moving on the search engines.”
Of course, you can choose a “pay for clicks”
service to do the work for you. Overture is an example of
this service, which covers 45-percent of the search engines.
“They pay search engines to put their links up there,”
says Vanderpool. “The search engines get paid 10-
or 20-percent of what Overture takes in on the clicks to
have Overture’s links put up wherever they’re
supposed to be. That means if you put $25 into your bank
account with Overture, then you paid 38 cents every time
someone clicks on your link. Google, on the other hand,
is $1.60 a click.”
Graphic Designers
Some DJs just cannot afford time from their work schedule
to spend fixing their website. Those who fall in this category
can hire a graphic designer. Russ Harris, owner of Naperville,
Ill.-based Show On The Road Productions, hired one who does
everything on his site. “I was ahead of the game with
that,” says Harris. “I’ve seen some charge
$500 and up to $2,000, depending on how extravagant you
want to make it.”
Before you hire a graphic designer, you should ask questions
to determine if they’re the right for the job. “I
would ask a designer if they understand HTML code,”
says Carl Williams, web/audio architect of Orlando, Fla.-based
DJ Connoisseur Enterprises. “A lot of web designers
out there today are using editors and they just drag and
drop and they don’t really understand the code. Ask
them if they understand how to market a website and if they
have graphic design ability. You need someone who knows
how to make it visually appealing. Other questions can be:
Will the designer look at the competitor’s websites
to gain ideas and will the designer understand what kind
of benefits to put into my website? What are the benefits
you are going to convey to my client? What do you think
is good about my service I can put onto the website that’s
going to drive traffic and keep potential clients interested
and get them talking about my product or service?”
Potential clients become clients by being wowed at a DJ’s
website. One effective way to do that is to include several
photos from your events. “They don’t have to
be large,” says Williams. “But it’s very
important to do. If you do school parties, you need to show
a bunch of kids having fun the party. If you specialize
in weddings, you need to show some brides having fun at
one of your parties. Your colors should be white, ivory,
light green, light blue, very pleasant and appealing colors
to brides. I would highly suggest to make sure your pictures
aren’t too big so they can download quickly.”
Susan Eisenbrey is a web designer for A&W Entertainment.
“Keep the colors muted,” she says. “If
you’re going to use text, try to vary it, maybe with
two different colors to break it up. You can use horizontal
rules to break up the section. I wouldn’t do a purple
background and have bright orange text and little smiley
faces all over the place. It turns people off.”
Susan Doyle, co-owner of Concord, Calif.-based Denon &
Doyle, is about to launch a newly re-designed website, specifically
geared towards brides. “We’ve made it more bride
and female friendly than it was in the past,” says
Doyle. “I personally find that most DJ websites seem
to talk to other DJs and not the brides. They talk about
all the equipment they have. Being in the sales end of the
DJ business for 15 years, I know brides want to know what
songs you’re going to play and how you are going to
introduce her when she dances with her husband. We put more
pictures that brides could picture themselves in. We’ve
got a picture of a bride leaning over talking to a flower
girl at her wedding.”
Sean Eckstadt, owner of Tuckerton, N.J.-based Sound Master
DJs, concurs. “Don’t clutter it with too much
information that’s useless,” she says. “Put
information in that’s going to be valuable to the
customer, that will make them want to have to call you and
talk over the information. If you put too much stuff on
it and make it too busy, people just look over it. You have
to make sure you have the important stuff up front and visible.”
Customers also appreciate a way to be interactive, either
through a chat room or message board. “It’s
one way that you can really drive traffic to your website
and to get people to give their feedback on your product,”
says Williams. “It’s a way of getting people
to keep coming back to your website. That’s why I
put this message board on there to make it real easy, to
sell my services to potential customers for them to see
comments from past customers. It’s nice to talk great
about yourself, but it’s even better to have people
talk great about you.”
Inducements
Doing the little things can generate revenue as well. Throw
some web-only premiums into your packages. “There’s
all sorts of things that DJs can give away without costing
too much,” says Vanderpool. “Give web discounts
of 20-percent off the regular price. Most DJs build in a
price pad so they can move up or down. A web coupon is another
way of doing this. You can put a coupon up there that says,
‘Come see us at the next bridal show. Bring this coupon
and get 10-percent off the booking of your wedding.’
You can work with other vendors and put together a coupon
book and say to potential clients, ‘You saw us on
the web, we’ll give you a coupon book and give you
10-percent off this tuxedo shop or this flower shop.’
That can get clients to call you and say, ‘Yeah we’re
at your website now. I’d like to know a little bit
more about you.’ And that’s music to every DJ’s
ears.”
If
you have any questions for Business Line, please write to:
DJ
Times
25 Willowdale Ave.
Port Washington, N.Y., 11050
fax 516-944-8372
e-mail djtimes@testa.com.
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