If you followed our tips in part one I wouldn’t be surprised if people were clamouring to get your music, come to your shows and who knows maybe even financially reward you for your efforts?
One of the hardest things about growing a following in the current media landscape is the ADD culture within which we live, nowadays there’s a new buzz band for everyday of the week. So given that you’ve worked hard to make it to buzz band of the day you’ll want to remain there, at least until the end of the week.
So let’s give your rabid music fans something to stop them salivating…
Free, yep. Everything is better when it’s free isn’t it. This service allows you to create your very own little music hub, allowing your fans to freely download your music, or enter their email address for free track or even the in-vogue pay what you jolly well like model.
• Your very own website. Until such time as you have sufficient technical skills and/or the money to pay someone with sufficient technical skills this will do nicely. Handily you can get rid of the web address bandcamp.yourband.com and replace it with yourband.com which means your page will get ranked higher on search engines.
• PWYW isn’t just a passing trend. Yep, that’s right the infamous Pay What You Want. If it worked for Radiohead it’ll work for you, right? Well not quite, however BandCamp user’s have had success with a slight variation on it, I’ll call it PMYW. Pay More if You Want; set your minimum price and if your fans want to pay more, let them.
• Music as an incentive. You can create discount codes, free download codes or offer a free track in exchange for an email address. With these tools in mind you can use your music as an incentive to get people to sign up to your mailing list, or blog or follow you on Twitter. Just remember music fans are fickle creatures you’ll have to use further incentives to keep them.
The disadvantage of having a chimp hand deliver all your emails is that if you have more than 500 subscribers you have to pay them. However while your still relatively small time it should be more than adequate, although once you go past 350,000 subscribers it becomes free again. Go figure…
• Email is the Holy Grail. Social networks may come and go but the one platform that remains a constant in our lives is email. MailChimp gives you a handy little widget that allows you to create a basic sign up form, as mentioned above give your followers a reason to sign up don’t just bully them into it…
• A fool speaks because he has to say something. Never a truer word spoken. Once you have those prized email addresses in your grubby mits do NOT abuse them. Only email them if you have something to say that they will be interested in, people are far more likely to unsubscribe because you email too much than too little.
• Location, Location, Location. It may not be as important as when buying a house, but this is crucial if you don’t want to risk infuriating your loyal fans. MailChimp gives you the option to collect your subscriber’s Country and City, I strongly suggest you do this. There’s nothing worse than receiving constant updates for gigs in London when you live in L.A.
WordPress will let you create your very own fully functioning, fun filled, fan friendly… weblog (or blog for the cool kids). Sure there are hundreds of options out there for creating and managing a blog and you can call me old fashioned but I’m sticking with what I know.
• Personality counts. If you don’t have a personality… Blogging may not be the best option for you. Write about something you’re passionate about, this maybe music or it may be politics or it may be trainers. This should ensure that you write because you want to, don’t just post “updates” say something. You may alienate one group but you’ll be embraced by another.
• Control your comments. 99.9% of blog comments are from idiots or spam. You need to stay on top of this cause they can quickly mount up, and you’ll miss that one important genuine comment. These genuine comments are like gold dust, when you get one make sure you take the time to engage with the person posting the comment.
• Don’t forget to tag. Tagging isn’t just a pursuit of teenage delinquents with too much time on their hands. It’s also a handy way to let people know what your posts are about. They can also help increase the visibility of your blog; tagging your post with Lady Gaga means it will show up on a search for her name. All be it very low down, but you get the idea.
While it may sound like the name of a dancer in a down market strip joint, it’s actually an online store and merchandise service. The main bonus of this service is everything is made to order, so no more will you be forced to cart around boxes of unsold hoodies.
• Not everyone wants the T-Shirt. Get creative, you’re a musician right? The beauty of the Zazzle service is if your product doesn’t sell you don’t lose money… Not everyone will want your band’s logo emblazoned on a cooking apron, but someone somewhere might.
• Profits can wait. In order to make money on Zazzle you need to set a royalty rate, the higher your rate the more profit you’ll make. However this also means your product price will go up, my advice is set your royalty rate as low as possible at this point it’s all about exposure money is a nice bonus.
• An offer you can’t refuse. I believe this is what you call a no-brainer; Zazzle has a referral program where you get paid 15% referral fee for any sales made through your referral. This is especially great for artists as you can refer customers to your own store, all you have to do is add a * to the end of your Zazzle store link (zazzle.com/yourstore*). Simples.
Yes my brave student we are entering the wonderful world of Twitter, soon @, #, RT and OH will become like a second language to you. It’s basically a micro-blogging site where you have a maximum of 140 characters to betwixt and bedazzle your loyal followers.
• Get involved. Twitter has a rather spiffing community spirit. Unlike Facebook which is usually driving by real world connections, Twitter makes it’s connections through shared interests. Got a video you think is funny/interesting share it, found an article you think is useful share it… Twitter is about telling the world what you are doing right now.
• Hashtags help you grow. For those not in the know Hashtag’s are this # symbol. They’re a way to create grouping’s on common topics to make it easier to follow, for example #nowplaying or #quote. Contributing to these popular hashtag topics can expose you to new followers, just don’t put hashtag’s on every tweet… it’s kinda annoying.
• Promote your @username. Twitter usernames are easily identifiable by the use of the@ sign as a prefix. You can use this to your advantage by signing off your emails or blog posts with your twitter username. This is a more subtle way of saying HEY LOOK EVERYONE I’M ON TWITTER…
Any questions, suggestions, rants, raves or insults please feel free to leave them in the below comment box…
Until next time my budding superstars…
If you missed Part I of this post you can find it here…
Tags: app, music industry, Web 2.0
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