Everyone knows about MySpace, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook as great ways to promote your music to the masses online, but dig a little deeper and there are some truly great tools available for those looking to get their music out there – and ahead of the competition.
Before getting started you need to think about your band website. It doesn’t need to be anything too amazing – use self publishing tools such as WordPress.com to set up a basic website where you can host and link to all of your individual social media profiles with ease. Once you have a website you can use a number of search engine optimisation tactics to generate some ‘buzz’ and links to your website.
Below we take a look at some of the best kept secrets out there now:
eBooks
eBooks are rapidly gaining popularity and are now outselling traditional print books. You may think, how does this affect my music promotion? Well, eBooks are read on devices such as iPads, Amazon Kindles and the Barnes and Noble Nook; they all come with internet connection, which means a reader can click from something you’ve written and listen to your music. You don’t have to create a bestselling thriller. Think about what your band is about and where you are based; perhaps you could create a short ‘gig guide’ to your local area and promote on the Kindle store and iTunes. It’s just one other way to reach out; all you need is an idea, a laptop and a home broadband connection.
Music Apps
Research by Neilsen in 2010 found that 30% of consumers listen to music via their mobile phone, and 20% of those surveyed have downloaded music apps to their mobile. Creating an app could be a great way to get noticed, but they can be expensive, so do your research thoroughly.
one of the fastest growing social networks, Pinterest is a really easy to use platform. You can ‘pin’ your band photos and photographs that you like and share them with your followers. For best success think about a theme. For example, if you are a punk band Google+ – Google’s social network may not be as popular as Facebook or Twitter, but with a search engine behemoth behind it is only likely to grow in the future. Early adopters tend to be well rewarded online. Setting up a page is easy and you can share your music and videos with ease: remember that Google owns YouTube and is the world’s biggest search engine, so setting up an account and feeding in content regularly is a good idea.
Keyword research
Search engines still dominate how a lot of people find out about new trends and new music. If you want to get ahead of the competition you may want to think about doing some additional search engine optimisation. Use the Google Keyword External Tool to research what users are searching for around your music style and/or locality. For example if you regularly gig in one particular city, you might find that there is a lot of search traffic around terms like ‘Indie gigs London’ or ‘drum and bass shows Bristol’. If so you may want to try and add these keywords to your website so that when people search for these phrases you are more likely to appear higher up the search rankings.
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