The Difference Between Content Creating And Sharing

Regardless if it's your website or your social media pages, the thing that keeps your fans coming back is new content. New refreshed content is also important in that it influences your search engine rankings, although there are a lot of other factors that play into that as well.

There are actually two kinds of content; content that you create and content that you share. Content that you create includes everything from your music, videos and posts about events, to posts about your latest news.

Content sharing covers all the content that you don't personally create, but think that your audience might find interesting. That includes links to 3rd party sites, trending news stories, music and videos from other artists.

Shared content has two purposes. First, it allows you to continue to post fresh material when the well of self-created material runs dry. Secondly, it provides a reason for your fans to engage and begin a conversation. The key is to use recent or trending material that people are interested in right now.

How do you find this material? We're bombarded with news everyday everywhere from Google or Yahoo News to friend's post on social media, and those are good places to start. Sites like What'sTrending are also good, but adding "trending" to the end of just about any news or social site (like Buzzfeed.com/trending) will give you a variety of topics that your fans may be interested in.

The idea here is that a combination of created and shared content is a way to keep things fresh, keep the search engines happy, and keep those fans engaged.

---

Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this blog at no cost to you (just click here).

A Visual Search Engine Comparison

As you probably know, Google dominates the search engine market but there are may users that also use Bing and Yahoo as well. Here's a great infographic that compares the big 3, but beware of a few of its conclusions. One of the predictions is that Bing may overtake Google in time, but I don't think there's much evidence of that happening myself.

I should say that I mainly use Google, but also others like Quora, Wolfram Alpha and Dogpile when I'm doing research. It's surprising how different the results can be, so don't be stuck using just one.


Source: Comparison of the Top Three Search Engines: Bing+Yahoo > Google? [INFOGRAPHIC]

-----------------------------------

Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

Most Popular Search Trends Of 2010

Certainly Bing is not nearly the most popular search engine available, but the trend in its searches are just as valuable and interesting as Google's.

Take a look at the most popular overall searches, followed by the people searched for on Bing in 2010.

Are we a society of celebrity watchers or what?

Most popular overall searches on Bing in 2010:

1. Kim Kardashian
2. Sandra Bullock
3. Tiger Woods
4. Lady Gaga
5. Barack Obama
6. Hairstyles
7. Kate Gosselin
8. Walmart
9. Justin Bieber
10. free

Most popular people searched for on Bing in 2010:

1. Kim Kardashian
2. Sandra Bullock
3. Tiger Woods
4. Lady Gaga
5. Barack Obama
6. Kate Gosselin
7. Justin Bieber
8. Jesse James
9. Lindsay Lohan
10. Jennifer Aniston
11. Michael Jackson

-----------------------------------

Follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

Blekko - The "Slashtag" Search Engine

A new search engine called "Blekko" has arrived and it has a chance to be something that not even Google can be. What makes Blekko different is it's use of a "slash" to create a specialty search for a topic. In other words, if I want to find out about Snew the band, I can zero in on just that by typing "snew/band" instead of "snew band."

Basically what the "slashtag" does is focus the search. In the case of "Snew band," a lot of irrelevant results pop up from "what's new" to results about bands that have nothing to do with Snew. If I plug in "snew/band," a whole new set of results pops up that are specifically related to Snew the band.

There are other ways to use the slashtag as well.

You can use "xx/people" to limit the search to pages associated with a person.
You can use "xx/blogs" to limit the search to pages associated with only a blog.
You can use "xx/date" to limit the search to pages associated with only a certain date.

Of course, you can do all of this with Google as well, but it's a lot more difficult.

Below is a screen shot of a search for "honey/bees" with Blekko on the left and the results from Google on the right. You can see how much more specific the Blekko search is.

Here's a great article that describes Blekko and it's other operations in detail. Give it a try. I think you'll like it. In a future post, we'll talk about music implications.

-----------------------------------

Follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.