I have a friend named Don Valerio Cohaila who kindly shared his recordings of Native American ceremony songs with me. He had recorded some of his songs a decade ago, and had his CDs sitting in storage in his basement. I asked him if I could work to distribute his recordings globally, and he agreed. I wanted to help him bring in some extra cash to assist with his travel expenses to sacred ceremonies.

I listed his music on a number of online music distribution services, and was able to create the following widget that can be placed on a website, an emailed newsletter, or a blog post.

Check out some of the songs by clicking on the widget below.

So now his digital CD and songs were available for download at ITunes, Amazon, Rhapsody, and other stores. On Amazon.com, type “Ayahuasca Songs” and check it out–his CD is listed as #2!

Well, this was certainly cool–this CD went from sitting in his basement to becoming globally distributed in one day! Not only that, but it ranked high on the sales page of online stores visited millions of times a day!

That’s really just the start of what I did, though. Next, I knew I had to help Valerio rank high in Google for his niche. This would help to guarantee sales, especially if he was listed on the first page of search results. Easy enough. I’ll research keywords, do some pitching and advertising, drive traffic to a website, and get easy sales, I thought. It wasn’t as simple as it sounds.

I decided I would work to compose a single blog post intelligently, centered around several keywords, to see how and whether my post would rank on Google. I created one article on my personal blog describing his music. My targeted keyword phrases were “Don Valerio Cohaila”, “Ayahuasca Songs”, “Ayahuasca Chants” and “Ayahuasca Icaros”. Check out the blog post here. You can see that this links to a picture of my friend, describes his music, has a direct link to samples of the music, and links up with a store where you can purchase the entire CD or digital downloads through Amazon. Think of this as a basic music website, created in a few minutes as a landing page for distribution of his material (he doesn’t yet own his own website). At this point, I became a music promoter and reviewer with instantaneous global distribution possibilities at my fingertips!

Okay, this is getting increasingly awesome, I thought. I knew I had something powerful here, but I wasn’t sure how to link all my ideas together into a complete, globally distributed promotional campaign.

I started researching, spending hours on the Internet looking for ideas, anything that would help push my ideas further.

My research led me to the following discovery….how to distribute one article across the globe with the click of a single button. Globally distributed products, focused marketing to top high-ranking Internet websites, and the generation of buzz and Google search ranking within MINUTES. This was revolutionary. Beautiful. This redefined what it meant to market, and how individuals could be empowered to distribute media.

Now, let’s look at Google after the Ayahuasca Songs CD has been live for a few weeks. I already showed you the Amazon Store ranking (#2). A search on “Ayahuasca Songs” in the ITunes Store returns his songs as the top relevant search results. Searching on “Don Valerio Cohaila” in both Amazon and ITunes returns only his CD and songs, as I would expect.

Here’s my results from Google for the keyword phrase “Don Valerio Cohaila”:

So, this shows that in the top 5 returned results for my targeted keywords on Google, my music distribution work yielded 4 of the top 5 returned results! Awesome!

Ok, on to my other targeted keywords.
As of December 26th, 2009, here are the results:

“Ayahuasca Songs” — Number 9, 13, 14, 15, 27 AND 28 out of 425,000 results (20% of the Top 30 links).
“Ayahuasca Chants” — Number 6, 9, 10, 13, 16, 17, 22 AND 29 out of 75,400 results (27% of the Top 30 links).
“Ayahuasca Icaros” — Number 8, 11, 18, 19, 23, 28, AND 29 out of 56,700 results.  (23% of the Top 30 links).
“Icaros” — Number 21 and 25 out of 181,000 results.
“Ayahuasca Prayers” — Number 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 12, 16, 18, 19, and 29 out of 99,200 results (40% of the Top 30 links!).

Pretty good for listing a CD and writing one blog post. I think this gives you a good idea of the potential marketing benefits this service can bring to your musical career.

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