Living in the Cloud with Google Account Mastery

As a DIY artists, some of the roles you’ll be playing might include booking agent, social media manager, master of the website, marketer, public relations, fulfillment, the list goes on.

So outside of just making good music, you’ll be doing a ton of things online that require management and maintenance. It’s hard to keep up with these things, but we are going to give you some tips that will make your life easier and save you time.

Thanks to our good friend Technology, we now have what some call ‘the cloud’, which is where we are going to be managing much of the day to day administrative stuff we need to do.

“Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product…” – wikipedia

So instead of having to store your data and files on your own computer which can get lost, stolen, or damaged, you can store them on a multi tenant cloud or ‘the internet’ through a 3rd party service. This allows for easy sharing of these files or data.

If you want to learn more about the technical details, google it

Enough of that, let’s get started with and see how we here at Hijacking Music are using a single Google account to manage everything.

Google Account Mastery

Google has managed to make it so easy to manage everything with one Google account, it’s almost stupid not to use them.

Just because Google says so doesn’t mean I say so, but they are some smart people doing some smart things, I just choose to take advantage of that.

Here are some of the ways we use our Google account here at Hijacking Music.

Gmail

If you send a message to the email address I give you when we meet, it says “thinkbig@hijackingmusic.com”, which is set to forward to our Gmail account where I can manage all emails.

I have access to this account from any computer anywhere in the world, as well as my phone which is with me almost always. If I need to access it, it’s not stuck at home on my computer on my desk, it’s available anywhere.

You can set up a Gmail account to ‘send as’ a different email than your @gmail.com address. For example, when I reply to you when you send me the email, you’ll receive it as ‘From: thinkbig@hijackingmusic.com”.

We actually have several email addresses that filter into a single Gmail account which makes managing them easier.

Google Calendar

You might have seen it already, but we host an Atlanta Music Calendar right here on this website. Several people, through their own personal Google accounts, have shared access to this calendar. They can make updates from that Google account, which will be reflected right there on that page instantly.

You could use this to manage your tour schedule, band practices, meet and greets, etc.

Don’t forget, this is also available from any computer or smart phone anywhere anytime because it’s ‘in the cloud’.

Google Documents

Google Docs is one of my favorite cloud applications. I’ve been using it for many years to manage all kinds of data.

As Hijacking Music we use it to share important documents and files. We have things like

• Booking spreadsheet
• Account login document
• Expense spreadsheet
• Out of state touring bands list
• Meeting notes document
• Marketing strategy outline document

You get the idea. Any kind of similar document you would save on your own hard drive, you can store, organize, and manage at Gdocs. To boot, you can also access it from anywhere in the … alright I’ll stop but you get the idea.

Youtube

Guess you have probably already heard of this site no? If you are not putting videos on the internet, you are missing out on a valuable marketing tool.

Using your same Google account, you can access and manage everything at Youtube seamlessly.

Some videos you could be putting up include

• Music Videos
• Show Preview Videos
• Live Performance Videos
• In Studio / In Rehearsal Videos
• Skits and Shorts
• Interviews

Don’t be scared to get on camera, the people want to see you and know what you are all about. Give it to them…you ARE entertainer right?

Analytics

Google Analytics allows you to install some script to your website, then receive MEGA AMOUNTS of data in regard to who’s visiting your site, where they come from, what they did when they got there, and more.

If you are not tracking and measuring your stats, how will you know if you are doing better or worse online? The data Google Analytics gives you in extremely valuable and should not be overlooked.

The same goes for any analytics or metrics you can receive from social media sites, email campaigns, or anything else you are doing online.

If you do not have analytics already install on your website, get cracking!

Google +

The newest addition to the social arena from Google is Google Plus.

I know what you are thinking…”great, ANOTHER social network to join”

Here’s the thing, Google dominates and is not going anywhere. While, at the time of writing this, they might not have the largest membership of the social networks, they’ve already pass 40 million users, which is no small change.

Using your same Google account, you can utilize Google + to your advantage. Here are some ideas

• Create Circles to manage fans in different states
• Live webcam shows to any of your circles
• Post pictures and videos straight from your phone
• Advertise upcoming events

Google + is not going away any time soon, and is going to continue to gain traction in the social media world. If you are not already at least looking in to it, now is the time.

“My Brain Hurts Can You Stop Now?”

We almost decided to go into websites, ecommerce, and mailing lists on this article, but we’ll save it for another day 🙂

I hope you were able to take something away from this article. I challenge you now to go  get yourself organized.

There are many other tools out there that do the sames things mentioned here, the beauty of the Google account is single user account access to ALL of these things and the instant access you get from any device with an internet connection.

Share some of the ways you are using your Google account with us on Twitter or Facebook, would love to hear from you!

Did you see lasts weeks article about The Business Side Of An Aspiring Artist?