By: Robert Wang So you just started this whole blogging business on the side, and now streams of visitors show up at your virtual doorstep every day, demanding flash media and video content. You're feeling ready to embrace a larger audience and maybe redesign your homepage, but aren't really sure what direction to go. We've got what you need. Barefoot Solutions has picked through dozens of articles to deliver the cream of the crop for your consumption. BY FAR the MOST IMPORTANT component of a high caliber blog. You can't become a rockstar without fans. Make friends with other bloggers and win over some of their traffic: •    Link to other blogs •    Comment on their posts •    Feature guest writers Most serious bloggers check Google Analytics religiously, so they’ll know, with startling immediacy, when you interact with them in the slightest way. The nice ones will pay you a visit or ideally even link you back. From there, your glowing prose and dazzling personality will hook new traffic and grant you the worshipful readership you’ve always dreamed of. Want the nitty gritty of link building? Vandelay Design offers 9 ways to make sure you’re linking where it counts. This is how it's done: VentureBeat.com - Think your page already has enough links? VentureBeat has 944,506 incoming links from other webpages. Well, 944,507 now. The staff's amazing networking ability has no doubt played a major role in launching this page into the top 100 Technorati Blogs. The simplest explanations are usually best. Keep it a quick and fresh. If you can’t say it in a few paragraphs, save it for another article or trim the fat. Keep in mind: bullets, top 10 lists, and short blocks of text are your friends. I'm confused. Examples? DaringFireball.net - Extreme minimalist design. This page only has 2 images...and one of them is a search button. The result is amazingly clean, professional, and easy on the eyes. The more time you take to manufacturing an appealing (read: glowing, abstract, and AHDH-friendly) interface, the more likely you are to be well received. TIP I: If you use a lot of colors it will tend to make your site look cluttered. Take a little time, pick a 2-3 color theme with good contrast, and stick to it. TIP II: The best looking websites will take an idea and apply it to every last detail and aspect of their design. Always think about how adding or subtracting from your blog will impact your theme. A study conducted by Dr. Gitte Lindgaard found that it takes users 0.05 seconds to decide if they enjoy looking at your site. Not sure where your page falls on the spectrum of attractiveness? Check out WebSiteOptimization.com for examples. Emulate me: OurWorld - Winner of the Best Blog Design Weblog Award 2008. This page tactfully combines beautiful high resolution banner images with an understated low color saturation theme, sleek fonts, and hot javascript action for an amazing webpage that just sucks you in, eyes first. According to Giancarlo Gallegos from BlogCatalog, we click because we believe we have something to gain from it—whether it is knowledge, pleasure, or LOLCATS, clicking requires a clear motive. Give people a reason to click through to your blog by creating a unique spin on overblogged topics. To quote Dawn Foster: “You can talk about a news story that other people are blogging about, but spend some time writing about your experiences and ideas that offer a different perspective than the rest of the crowd. Use research in new ways, interview interesting people, and talk about your experiences. By offering something new, people are much more likely to read your blog post and link to it, which is where the real SEO magic is found.” Brush off that storyteller’s cap. Y’all got some yarn spinnin’ to do. Now this is writing: RoughType - While the layout isn't much to look at, Nicholas Carr's blog is the perfect example of a content driven blog. The homepage has a mindblowing PageRank of 7.0 - this one man has accumulated the same net authority as the COMMUNITIES of Yelp and Metacafe. Be amazed. Google Analytics and Google Webmaster are amazing for visitor tracking, sculpting page rank, and otherwise refining your blog in ways you would have never thought possible. Once you’ve mastered the skills, you’ll be able to pinpoint the “who”, “what”, “where”, “when”, and probable “why” of every last click and page-view on your blog. Did we mention you can run customized analytics and test multiple versions of your blog simultaneously? No? It’s awesome. If you’re looking for a nice springboard into the world of analytics, Google has graciously provided a quick tutorial to get you started. Hop to it! Serious Skills: SethGodin's Blog - So what's so special about Seth Godin? His blog ranks #12 on google's search for "blog". While normally ranking on page 2 is sort of unimpressive, this page trumps roughly 2.3 BILLION other search results: including the official Whitehouse and Facebook blogs as well as BLOGS.COM. HE OUTRANKED A PAGE WITH BLOG in the URL. SEO. Learn to love it.

I was asked by a friend who recently started a band named Legitimate by Friday what were some ways they could leverage technology to help promote their band, get their name out, and get some fans to show up to their gigs. I gave this some thought and figured I would post it here to see if someone else could get some use out of it. Once you have decided to go legitimate, there are several free and very low cost tools that you can use to start building your communication platform with your current and potential fans. MySpace - Step one is to set up a MySpace page. MySpace has become very music-friendly and is probably the most commonly used tools for new bands. They will let you actually sign up as a band and give you a solid suite of tools to promote yourself and your music. For an example of how to use these tools, see Sharif's MySpace. Avoid adding a background image that makes the content unreadable though, like he has done. Less is often more. One of the biggest complaints of MySpace users is that owners have so much control over design and some of them look terrible. Focus on posting videos, audio, gig listings, and interacting with fans through your comment board. Facebook - While Facebook is not as a musician-friendly as MySpace, its power with viral marketing is far superior. You will want to create a Public Profile, otherwise known as a 'Fan' page. You can get started on the Facebook's Pages tool. If you're brand new to Facebook, How to Create a Facebook Page will take you through the basics. The goal with this account is to acquire as many fans as you can, as well as posting photos, audio, and video. Keep this content updated regularly. Everytime you update, your fans will know about it and Google will also re-index and potentially improve your search rankings Email Marketing - It is very important to grown and maintain a database of email addresses. Any major gig or event should be blasted to your list. Email is largely one-way, so its more about disseminating information and less about trying to interact with your fans. It is important that people don't see this as spam, so some sort of newsletter management tool with an opt-out feature is critical. A popular low cost option is Constant Contact. On the cheap, you will have all the features you need to grow your email database and craft great looking emails to send out to your fans. Another option for email marketing is a startup based in San Diego - Champion Sound. This is a tool meant for musicians/bands, as well as venue managers and promoters. It offers email marketing, social networking tools, a guest list feature for and mobile access as well. This is a new site and I have not tested it, but Chuck Longanecker from Digital Telepathy has a reputation for building great and usable web applications and so I trust that it will be a very useful tool for up and coming bands. This tool is free for basic users and would be a great jumping off point. Be sure to always be collecting email addresses. At every gig you can have a simple signup list for interested parties to signup. Link a signup form from your Facebook and MySpace pages. Website - If you are brand new, I would advise holding off on building your website. To do right, this will cost a decent chunk of change to put together good graphic design, functionality, and seamless delivery of your music and video.  A first step would be to purchase a domain name through a registrar like GoDaddy, and put up a single page with basic band information, newsletter signup form, and links to your Facebook and MySpace pages. GoDaddy's Website Tonight application is a do-it-yourself tool that should be more than enough for a non-technical user to set up a basic page like I described. Once you're ready for a better looking website, you 're best bet is to hire a freelance web designer to put it together. You can find a good designer through eLance. This is a tool that connects customers with service providers and tries to keep you protected from getting burned by shady contractors. For a top of the line website with graphic design, integrated functionality, streaming audio and all the rest, you should avoid a freelancer and instead contact a full blown web development firm. Fill out the Barefoot Solutions Contact Form and we would be happy to put together a proposal for you With these simple and free/cheap steps, you will have built a very solid platform to get the word out and interact with your fans when you're not out playing. Feel free to post any questions or problems you might have as a comment to this entry and I'll do my best to point you in the right direction. -- Hunter

How can something be new AND improved. It doesn't make any sense. Either way, check out our new and improved Barefoot Solutions site! You're on it right now. This thing is pretty badass. It is a wordpress theme that uses HTML5. That means you can open it up on your computer, tablet, phone, whatever and it will resize itself to fit the screen. Go ahead try it out, I'll wait. Building this new site has allowed us to go back and look at our past clients and really make them the heroes of the site. Our portfolio does just this and we can't do what we do without the great companies and ideas that we've had the privilege to work with.