Music Marketing – How To Rectify The Two Many Common Mistakes Everyone Makes
Posted by Music Archive | Posted in Online Music | Posted on 24-05-2009
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Music marketing is by and large c hall enging for most musician s, that is something all of us need to realise. Marketing yourself, being confident to allow people to listen to your tracks and most importantly, handling criticism takes a bit of time to get used to. In the majority of cases though, marketing plans do fail. you could have a amazing sounding track, but if it is not marketed properly then it will just be white noise.
However all is not lost.
The main reasons why music marketing fails is that
1) there is always some money involved, and
2) all of us market our music.
They all sound a bit strange. That I understand, but my plan is for you to get over these hurdles and to get your music out there without any hassle. I will take each of the above points in turn, but recall they’re interlinked:
1) Money marketing. This is bad. The economics of this is so: you have to sell slot of tracks to get back the amount you spent on marketing, then you need to sell several more to make any profit. The problems is, why are all of us spend ing so much money on music marketing, or, why are all of us spend ing any money on marketing at all?! The Web has greatly decrease d the cost of marketing by 100 %. Yep, marketing should be free, then any tracks that you do sell is pure profit. There are so a lot of music marketing strategies, some of which are simple suggestions that are not being utilised.
Here are some fantastic free marketing strategies are not being used, at all. How about leaflet distribution, flyers, making a mailing list then advertising your new tracks on that (they already like your tracks because they have signed upto your mailing list). Applying to competitions will always bring in some much needed traffic as competitions generate 1) leads and interest from the host web site, 2) your tracks will get viral marketed only if it has become in the top 3. Viral marketing is just another way of spreading interest, all the people who voted for your tracks will recommend the amazing track that they heard, and you name spreads. 3) You could always advertise the fact that you got in 1st, second or third in X competition (always state how a lot of other competitors were there as well- coming third out of four entries is little to promote really).
Doubtlessly the highest quality advertising strategy is…give away your MP3s for FREE! A simple technique that promotes your tracks. people then trust you, they love quality items, they assume then, “hmm, if this is free, and it’s wonderful, what would his selling tracks be like?” Free stuff sells pay wonderful s, fact. Give away alot of free stuff…MP3s being the main one, and then be patient.
Once you have finished your free marketing, start again. Just keep on promoting yourself by free processes. It gets your name banded around, people will see your Webpage link and click on it rising your traffic. It could not too successful in the 1st few months or could be even a year, but stick with it, gaining visitor confidence will highest quality ly prevail.
2) The above is great, but why would everybody buy any track from you in the 1st place? To most surfers you are faceless, they do not see you on the music videos, so why should they buy anything from you?
Harsh words I know, I’m sorry, but it’s true. That’s the real reason why there are thousands of wonderful groups and musicians out there in Web land marketing away, spend ing cash and showing little for it. They marketed 1st, wanting cash, and their visitors are literally saying “I do not think so”. You then become the banner ad- looks really wonderful, but never gets the click.
What you need to do is create content within your web site. simple as that. without content you are just another web site that the visitor has no real reason to come back to. Content furthermore stimulates the opportunitys of you being pick ed up by the search engines. Please note:Google, and the other big search engines have stated that their thousands of calculations per web site includes content search. This is a fundamental statement, even if you are a music web site giving away your MP3s.
If you have ever looked for MP3s within the search engines, there are about six million web sites dedicated to the term MP3. Now, your one web site has to be found by a visitor, the opportunitys are truly low. However, if your web site has content focused keywords, such as ” wonderful guitar riffs”, “how to gig” etc, then you will be pick ed up much readily than a simple MP3 search. Within the numerous pages that you have created you put, “download free guitar MP3s” or something that suits your music, and you then advertise your MP3s through the “back door”. Content will furthermore bring back the visitors, they love a web site that they’re interested in, they sign up to your news-letter, and then you email them with new updates, your new MP3s etc. Then you start to create your own little buzz, you create people willing to listen to your tracks.
A sideline to content is always relevant, up-to-date content. offer ing tapes with your tracks on is music marketing suicide. I have seen these actually being offer ed on some web site s. offer ing a tape states that 1. You’re not up-to-date hence your sounds won’t be, 2. You’re offer ing poor quality, hence your tracks won’t shine, and 3. You have to pay out for the tape (postage and packaging etc). people on the Web want things now, not tomorrow, offer ing MP3s, even short WAV files is giving the visitor what they want- immediate access to your tracks.
Relevant content is just as important as current content. If you have a rock web site stick to rock related Web pages. If I was into hip-hop I would not go onto your rock web site and look at hip-hop related articles. I know that this seems obvious, but scarily this has been done. It furthermore has another effect. The search engines see topic specific web sites as just that, topic specific. If you stray away from your chosen topic it won’t look wonderful for you with the engines. They will see that your relevance has decrease d and so to will your page ranking.
Content is not that simple to accomplish. It comes with time, you need to tweak, track whether that has done any wonderful to your traffic or click throughs. You could furthermore just be writing alot of drivel. Content needs to be “Search Engine Focused”, you need to honestly guide people to buy from you, you need to have a one to one style ( like you are talking to a friend), and definitely not be boring. Nearly forgot, you need to assess who your fans is. Are they young, middle aged, technophobic? You writing style should cater for your fans. By way of example, a younger fans will like more colour, more tech information, a friendly banter, and up-to-date chart acts. Generally if you write as you would talk to a friend then you will be on safe lines.

