My Ultimate Guide to New Music Promotion & Marketing Methods

Golden methods to boost your mailing lists, whatever kind of music you make…

If you want to know one thing that separates successful DIY musicians from people who are condemned to just see music as a hobby for the rest of their life, then you don’t have to look very far…

The one thing that separates the men from the boys is this: a steady stream of people visiting your website who you turn into long term fans with a simple automated follow-up email system.

To read my guide on getting the most out of your fan mailing list click here.

The musicians who have figured this stuff out are relaxed and have a nice amount of income each month, that gives them the freedom to make the music they want to make.

Those that don’t have a sense of “creeping dread” that maybe they should give up their musical dream and focus on something more logical.

Shit BALLS!

But just knowing this fact does not make you a successful online musician.

If you do a simple Google search on “how to get more music fans” you will come up with hundreds of thousands of pages packed with ideas for the best way to get people listening to your stuff.

What we must keep in mind is that not all these methods are created equal, and though most of them have some basis in reality there is a good chance that you can focus on the gold rather than just trying to do everything.

Then you will have a much better chance of success.

One thing I have found while learning music marketing information is that even though a tactic is sound and makes sense, there are certain things that suit me better and that I just understand right away. I think if you see the whole picture in your mind it’s much easier to stay focused.

So try a bunch of stuff for a few weeks and see what works best for you.

I don’t know about you but when I learned guitar I did not give a crap about the theory, I just wanted to play like Jimi Hendrix, and that’s how I think about music marketing.

Tactics and step-by-step is what I like to deliver on this blog so below I’m going to show you some of the golden methods that I’m using right now to boost my mailing lists.

Not all this stuff is groundbreaking, but sometimes it’s good to get a reminder of the basics that work forever rather than new “rabbit tricks” that are going to get slapped in a few weeks.

Over the next few months I will continue this blog series and go into each tactic in a little more detail with a video – so stay tuned.

If you want to get informed each time I post a new guide then sign up to the mailing list below.

Once I have all these out in the open you will have a simple roadmap to more success with your music business.

Become a Blogging Guest Star

You might have heard me talk about this before – the basic system is that you find a bunch of blogs in your music niche and then work out what kind of articles are most popular for their audience.

Once you have done that you just need to write them a really quality article with a link back to your site and submit it to the blog author.

If the top blog in your niche does not take it, just work your way down the list until your post is live.

YouTube Videos

I recommend you post a video every day on YouTube with just an acoustic guitar and a cover of one of your favorite songs.

I have found that if you post a popular song then you can expect to get at least 1000 views on each video over time.

Which means that if you post 300 videos a year you would have 300,000 YouTube views!

If just 1% of those people click through to your website and join your list you have just added 3000 new fans.

How easy is that?!!!

Podcasting Your Way to Musical Success

This is easy to do, and if you submit your show to iTunes you can get access to the largest online music store in the world for free!

Think of it like your own personal radio show about your music niche.

All you need to start a podcast is a mic and an idea. I lay it all out in my post here.

Peer to Peer Bit Torrents

Most massive bands hate file sharing sites, and in the past have tried to sue their fans for downloading their music for free.

Great idea guys!

But as DIY music marketers we are going to think outside the box and use this massive source of fans to explode our email lists.

One method I have used in the past is to upload a special version of a song to the file sharing sites that fades down at some point and directs the listeners over to the band website.

You can also include a document with the download file that introduces your band to the potential new fan.

Another more advanced tactic is to use billboard.com and post your covers of popular songs to the file sharing sites. When people hit the torrent site to download the tracks, they may also be interested to see how you have interpreted the song.

Then when the fan downloads the song they just receive a html webpage that includes your opt in.

Share The Love

This tactic is simple when you get your head around it.

Basically you want to become the authority in your music scene. Whenever anything moves, you want to post about it to your Twitter and Facebook pages. Once fans start to see you as a source of all the latest information they will begin to follow and share your stuff.

At this point you want to throw in the odd blog post and video with your own music. This is when the magic happens because after a while this will turn into a kind of “viral on demand service for you”.

People go on for hours and hours about viral marketing, but the simple fact is that you just need to produce something cool and then have enough people listening to you so that it will start a viral trickle that has the chance of turning into a flood.

Not everything you do will go viral and that is why you need to be putting out great content all the time.

Don’t Forget About Old School Press

credit: mecredis

With all these online tools a lot of musicians are forgetting that there is a whole world of newspaper men who are desperate for some newsworthy stories.

So the process will be to write our own press release and then use automatic sites that put that press release in front of music journalists who may then decide to run the story.

One good write up can get you more traffic in one hour than hundreds of hours spamming MySpace for new fans.

You just need to make sure that you write your press release in the right format and lead with something very newsworthy.

Blog Carnivals

A blog carnival is just a set of music bloggers all talking about the same topic for a period of time that the reader can follow along with.

They are cool because it gives the public a chance to hear what a lot of people think of a certain topic, and are great for you because you get the chance to talk with a whole bunch of new fans.

Find blog carnivals here…

Swap Your Fans

This is a great idea once you start to meet a few other bands who “get” this online marketing stuff.

What you want to do is approach them and suggest that you each send out a message to your list recommending the other band and linking to their free music page.

You can also do this with tweets, blog posts or even by putting a banner on each other’s sites.

You want to work with other bands that have a similar size list and people who you trust, because if the other band treat their list really badly then their fans won’t be motivated to download your stuff.

Get Your Fans, Friends and Bloggers to Sell Your Stuff For You

Listen…

If you can do this one in the right way you are never going to need another fan generation tactic because this will give you more fans than you can handle.

Basically you want to set up your album download page with Clickbank so that you can then let music bloggers, fans, friends and family sell you music for you in exchange for a cut of the profits.

If you are selling digital stuff this will not hurt your income because you don’t have a warehouse full of CDs so all the extra sales will be a bonus!

The best thing you can do is find music blogs that already get loads of hits and then just offer them a cut of your record sales.

Offer A Prize

Clever marketers have always used the power of the competition to spread the word and build a buzz about their products, and you can use the same thing to build your fan lists.

First things first… the prize.

You want to think of something cool that is going to get your specific fans excited.

For example, if you do music like Lady Gaga you might offer a piece of meat that she wore on her meat dress or some other piece of memorabilia you find on eBay.

I usually don’t spend more that $500 on prizes but if you think creatively you can get people going crazy for something and running through walls to try and win.

The first step is to get them to sign up for the contest, then to share the contest with their friends.

To really make this viral you need to give them a reason to be the best promoter.

One idea is to have an album-naming competition on YouTube and the winner is the person who leaves a comment with the name idea that gets the most “likes”.

Search Engine Optimization

This is another very effective way to get fans to your website. You optimize your web pages so they show up in a high position in Google for search terms that your fans might be typing in, like “new rap music”, “hardcore punk” or “Indian Surf Rock”. Anything that will bring target fans to your site.

There are three parts of search engine optimization that you need to be aware of…

1. The number of times that a search term is searched per month in Google.
2. The amount of competing pages the search phrase has in Google.
3. The value of the search phrase to you and how closely it matches to something that your perfect fan will be typing in.

To be honest with you I tend to forget about the hardcore details of search engine optimization at the moment and just focus on blogging about news in the music scene.

If you produce quality content, Google will start to rank you.

Paid Advertising

Many people hate the idea of paying to get fans, but it’s a good option for creative people with some spare cash who want to spend 99% of their time making music and the rest just posting out a couple of ads.

Ads that will get you fans:

1. Google ads that show up on the right hand side of their search engine. (Yahoo and Bing also have the same kind of option.)
2. Google content network ads that show up on relevant websites to your music. You may have seen this on sites that say “Ads by Google”.
3. Facebook ads.
4. Myspace ads.
5. Stumble upon ads.
6. PPV Ads – “Pay Per View” is where you pay each time somebody sees your page and you target your fans by other websites they visit. So if you play metal music you could get your website to show up each time your potential fans visit Metallica’s site.
7. PPD – this stands for “pay per download” and you can offer your free track or music video when a fan downloads another app online. This is usually used by software developers so start thinking about an app you could create for your band.
8. Solo ads – where you pay to show up in an email newsletter.
9. Banner ads – you basically pay to place a banner on a website that your fans visit. You can either find a bunch of websites and approach them direct, or use a banner ads network like Google.
10. YouTube sponsored ads – you can also pay for your ad to be shown when your fans are watching other music videos that match. Or even pay for your ads to show up when your fan types in “punk music” etc…
11. Be a sponsor – this is sort of like a TV commercial where you would pay to have a slot. You need to find people who talk to a lot of music niches, like bloggers and Youtubers, and approach them to sponsor their show in exchange for a mention of your latest album.

Re-targeting

This is a new traffic tactic and works for musicians like this…

You place a code on your site so that every person who visits is “cookied”, which means that you place a small piece of code on their computers.

If they decide not to sign up for your mailing list and leave your site…

… the “cookie” comes into action, showing your ads on other popular websites that they visit.

This is a great branding tool because they will think that you must be a really massive band to show up on so many sites, and after a while they will be intrigued to learn more about you.

I know that dropping a “cookie” on someone’s PC sounds a little bit shady, but this is common practice on a lot of major websites and is not considered unethical by most people.

But feel free to ignore any of these fan-getting tactics as you see fit.

Did you get all that?

I thought not, because trying to do everything on this page will be super confusing and might just melt your brain to mush!

So over the next few months I’m going to be going into each of these in more detail with snazzy videos and everything!

This post is to get you started and I’m sure the over-achievers will test out some of these ideas right away.

I’m here to answer any questions you have. Let me know which fan-getting methods you are most excited about and I will work through those first.

Good luck,

Chris Rockett
Your Music Marketing Guinea Pig

Tags: music marketing, Music Promotion, New Music Promotion & Marketing