Idolator’s Helpful Marketing Tips, Part 1: How Not To Announce Your Web Site

Let’s say you’re going to get your new digital-music site all over the news today by announcing that it’ll hawk exclusive tracks from multiplatinum artists when it launches. Wouldn’t it be a good idea to feed these news outlets a link for your site, or to make the site at least a bit Googleable so those people who want to snag a Killers Christmas track that somehow features both Elton John and Neil Tennant are able to? Sure, it may not go live until Dec. 1, but what’s wrong with a preview page? Or a place where interested parties can sign up for future updates? By the time your site’s launch rolls around, most people who browsed your press will probably have forgotten about the whole thing, and the music news sites you pitched will be reluctant to cover the same news twice. I mean, I’m probably better off not hearing the Flowers/John/Tennant collaboration, but if you’re trying to raise some money for a worthy cause, you may want to think of just how people will get to your Web site during the afterglow of your all-important initial press blitz. [Billboard]