My own audio troupe, FinalRune Productions, has released a series of videos from behind the scenes of our live Halloween radio show.

The videos give you a bit of flavor of what the show was like – the gear and guys and gals that make a great live radio show, plus sound innovative uses of plungers:

See the whole video series:

• Behind the Scenes
• Cast and Crew Interviews
• Live Sound Effects Demo
• Musician Interview with Barb Truex

There are also some photos of the show on Flickr, and, of course, we featured this live show on the podcast and you can listen to our Halloween 2009 live radio drama in the archives.

The second installment in the internet marketing for audio drama series came to me rather unexpectedly as I routinely perused the Google Analytics stats for the last three months.

So back in March, Radio Drama Revival saw something like quadruple the average number of visitors to the site. With a bit of a quizzical “What gives?” I dug deeper into the stats, and saw that nearly all of the traffic spike was the result of StumbleUpon. Woohoo! I must’a got stumbed!

Now, at work, I deal with StumbleUpon and many other social networks all the time, but like the mechanic who runs an old jaloppie, I really haven’t made a concerted effort at promoting this site through the web 2.0 world, though I suspect the potential for growth here, even for an offbeat niche like audio drama, is huge (Roger Gregg’s use of YouTube comes to mind, but I think I’ll focus on YouTube another time).

So, in the hopes that all of you out there will expand beyond where I idle, here’s my tips on how to use social networking to promote your blog, podcast, and the art form in general.

Social Networks — What they are and how they work

Alright, I don’t want to start too basic here, but if you’ve never here of StumbleUpon, del.icio.us or Digg, here’s the deal — these sites enable you not only to pick out something that you find cool, but to share that with others. Whereas MySpace and Facebook are all about YOU, these networks are more about what you’re interested in and find useful.

del.icio.us, for example, is a shared bookmarking service — you sign up for the service, download a light-weight browser plugin, and bookmark sites you like for later reference, tagging them with useful things like “audio drama article writing radio theater” for example.

That bookmark is now public, though the chances of other people finding it are a tad slim, unless it’s an article that others have also bookmarked — and if enough people bookmark an article, it gets moved to the ‘popular’ section, where the top articles are bound to see heavy traffic.

StumbleUpon, in contrast, is sort of like channel-surfing for the web. Again, you download a plugin, and then you can start stumbling. Basically you bookmark a page and see if it’s ever been found before, if not, it goes into the network. The fun part is when you go into “Stumble” mode, where you go to a random webpage based on your preferences and the ratings of other users. So, for instance, if a lot of people who found RDR back on that fateful March day chose to give the site a thumbs up, it’s more likely that other users will stumble here later!

I won’t get into Digg too much, because it can be a brutal site, but it’s basically a news site where people choose the news and vote on whether it’s worth reading — e.g. do you “digg” it? The drawback with this site is that it takes an ENORMOUS amount of diggs before you’ll get anywhere where that many people will notice you, though the benefits are so powerful that talented search marketing people are fighting constantly with “legitimate” stories to get the next digged thing up on the front page. There are undoubtedly spin-off sites that would be helpful for the audio drama world, but those shall be another article…

Training Yourself in Social Habits

So now that you’ve got all these plugins installed, you need to figure out how to use them. After all, the first rule of this whole thing is that in order to derive any value out of them, you’ll need to first contribute to them.

So start stumbling, and gives thumbs ups to pages that you find really funny, cool, and interesting. The same for del.icio.us. Why not go and digg all your favorite podcasts — there is a podcast area to digg which is ripe for some audio drama additions!

You’ll quickly establish yourself as a keen member of the audio drama community, and when you tag YOUR work, you have the credibility of being a living actual person with tastes, not just a spammy account set up to try and inflate your ratings and site traffic.

And hey, not to toot my own horn, but there are convenient digg, stumble, and del.icio.us links at the bottom of this and every Radio Drama Revival posts

So Why Bother Do All This?

What’s fascinating about these social networks is that they hook into a really huge internet-savvy audience, most of whom I guarantee you have never heard of radio drama beyond “War of the Worlds.” And while the audio arts have pretty slack visibility on these networks now, what’s to prevent all of us from bringing our community to the forefront?

It’s hard to know how many people go from “Stumble” to “Subscriber,” but every new set of ears, even if it’s only for a second, get’s us more people who at least have heard something of what this sounds like.

So whether you love fan-fic, sci-fi, fantasy, Escape, OTR, NTR, spoofs, mysteries, audiobooks or hard-hitting drama, the audio world needs you.

Share your love, and get stumbling!

As much as my passion is all things audio, my paid gig is internet marketing with a local firm, Hall Web Services. What that means is that on a daily basis I’m grilling websites, writing optimized web code, writing the most interesting copy I can muster and figuring out interesting ways to market products and services online. So it shouldn’t be surprising that I have some observations about the state of the audio drama community’s internet marketing efforts.

For the most part, it’s abysmal.

While the basics of SEO are known and web publicized, on most of the audio drama websites I see the basic principles sorely lacking. This is forgivable, as there’s already enough to learn in terms of writing, casting, recording, and post-producing these things, but the weak marketing link isn’t helping anyone.

So as part of new series of marketing your audio production online, I’m going to talk about the basics of SEO and how it relates to your audio drama site, and how to make sure that you’re at least being found by the people looking for you.

We’ll start with easy and quick fixes that will give you the most “bang for your buck” in terms of increasing traffic to your show.

On the docket today: Name your pages something

This is called the “title” tag in basic HTML, and is quite possibly the most important thing you can change to help people find your site. Technically, it’s the words between the <title></title> tags of your website, but as many of you might be using blogging software or not coding by hand, what you actually change might be called something else.

We’ll get to “how” to change this tag later, but now we’ll handle “why.” And since we like to “show, not tell,” here are some examples pulled out of a bucket by random that showcase a couple of points I want to talk about:

Darker Projects
Title tag: Darker Projects: Audio Theater in a Darker Shade – Science Fiction, Horror, and Suspense

Rating: Pretty Good.

Why? “Audio Theater” is mentioned by name, along with several genre names – sci-fi horror, suspense. Darker Projects, by no surprise, comes up #1 for “Horror Audio Drama” and in the top 5 for “Science Fiction Audio Theater.” A lack of “radio” here, however, kills rankings for “radio drama” related terms. And while it’s nice to give their troupe name and the “Darker Shade” tagline, it’s probably not be doing them any favors in search.

Union Signal
Title tag: Union Signal

Rating: Not so good.

Why? Anyone who’s looking for anything other than “Union Signal” is likely never to find this page. A better tag would be “Union Signal: Radio Drama, Audio Theater Plays by Doug Bost and Jeff Ward.” That would at least help those who already know the producer’s names, but not their production alias, find the site. After they got some basic rankings they could then look at adding interesting variations to the site’s content — “NPR spoof stories,” “audio sci-fi” etc.

This is a very common problem, as, without naming everyone’s names, I could quickly find a dozen other websites where the title of the page was the name of the production company.

This is OK — IF you have a gigantic fan base that is chasing you down dying to download your works (Stephen King, for example, can give a rat’s ass for SEO). But if your name is something you and some friends came up with on a weekend, and you’re struggling to get a half dozen downloads of your stories, then this is un-good.

National Audio Theater Festivals
Title tag: National Audio Theatre Festivals, Inc. – NATF

Rating: Not bad.

Why? Unlike the above example, NATF is a known organization, so having a title tag with the organization name is appropriate. And with a nice solid amount of links (785 as of this count), they come up in the top ten for plain ol’ “Audio Theater.” However, there’s still room to improve — for example, using synonyms and general terms that non-audio enthusiasts will use.

It’s an argument WAY too broad to go into here, but guts and stats tell me that “audio theater” is a fine, term, a wonderful term, even a GREAT term to use to describe this art, but not what people are searching for. “Audio drama” is actually a little more common, and, archaic as it may be, “radio drama” is still the preferred search term.

But then there’s still dozens, if not hundreds, or more of what they call “long tail terms.” That’s stuff like “sci fi audio drama” “audio drama blog” “radio drama westerns” “audio horror stories” and so forth. The Long Tail is a very important concept to understand if you’re producing audio drama, because this IS a long tail industry.

For YOUR audio drama site, you need to think about where you fit in with the bigger picture and what your intended audience is likely to be looking for. Overall I see LOTS of great “hit the street” marketing — heavily using forums like audio drama talk, link exchanges, blog exchanges, etc — but SEO should be the foundation that all of this is based on. If not, you’re promoting yourself only to fight against your ability to be found!

My recommendation for the NATF title tag? “National Audio Theater Festivals Production Training – NATF Radio Drama Workshop”

… And Let’s do one more for good measure.
Tony Palermo’s RuyaSonic
Title tag: Audio Theatre/Radio Drama/Sonic Storytelling

Rating: Pretty Good.

Why? Tony’s covered the bases, even if “sonic storytelling” isn’t the most popular term to search for in the world, the simplicity of the title tag gives this site lots of weight, and finds it in the top ten for “radio drama.” You don’t see “Tony Palermo” there, but I don’t think that matters — a lot more people are competing for “radio drama” than “Tony Palermo.”

What I LOVE about Tony’s site is all the great resources about producing and writing radio drama, and the simple “Writing for Audio Theatre” title does plenty of good. Again, there are opportunities for more synonyms, but overall it’s among the top tier in the sector.

It may not be perfect, but you may now understand why Radio Drama Revival’s title is “Radio Drama Revival! Audio Theater Blog, Podcast”

Alright, so how do I change it?

Well as I pointed out in the example above, there are good principles and bad principles for naming your pages. Here are the basic rules to follow:

1. Keep it concise – 7-9 words tops, 130 characters or so
2. Use good words – Avoid fluff and repeating words. Use synonyms
3. Every page needs a unique name – If you come up with a perfect title, don’t name every page on your site that. Each title should be uniquely suited to the content of that page.

And that should be enough to get you started!

If you’re using a WYSIWYG editor like Dreamweaver or FrontPage, there’s generally an option above the working window area for changing the page title. You may also look for a page/site properties dialogue somewhere. If all else fails, view the source code and look for the <title></title> tag. It (better) be between the <meta></meta> tags at the top of the page code.

If you’re using something like Libsyn, Blogger, or WordPress to manage your site, it’s even easier to update.

For WordPress — click “Options” and under the “General” tab, you’ll see “Weblog title.”? Bang, there you go.? By default, all of your pages will have unique names based on the titles of your posts, which is OK, but the bad-ass SEO Title Tag plug-in lets you more densely pack your page titles with good information.

In Blogger, in “Settings” you’ll see “Title” – ba-da-bing.? A similar deal for “Libsyn” — settings, “blog page/podcast title.”

Now that’s it!? You’ve tweaked the name of your blog, website, or podcast to something a little easier for search engines to understand.? You’re one step closer to bringing your show to a wider readership.

What’s next?? There’s still a LOT to know about before you’ve covered all your bases — stuff like organizing the site content, improving page code structure, getting good links to you from elsewhere — and in due time we’ll get to all of this.

And until we get there, you may be interested in tuning into my “other” podcast — a weekly show on web marketing topics called SEO Audio.

Enlightened? Confused? Angry? Let me know what you think below!