Imagine releasing your song to an audience of several-hundred million, and minutes after you post it’s gone viral. New fans from across the globe are sharing your song, introducing your creation to more and more people. You could become a star without leaving the comfort of your home studio. Understanding product promotion in the digital age is a great way to increase your exposure to the world.

That’s the potential power of YouTube. According to YouTube, more than 800 million users visit the video-sharing site each month, and more than four billion videos are viewed daily. Even more amazing? Seven hundred YouTube videos are shared on Twitter each minute, a percentage of those being videos by musicians.

While your potential audience is massive, so is your competition. More than 60 hours of video are uploaded every day, which is equivalent to more than 176,000 full-length Hollywood movies each week. Independent musicians also have to account for competition from big labels paying to promote videos, and vying for your potential audiences’ attention.

YouTube success hinges on optimizing your video to maximize the chances that the right people will see and share your work. You didn’t create an amazing video of your newest song just so no one would see it, right? You need to get your music video seen, and we can show you how to do that!

Here are a few quick and easy tips to help you maximize your video’s exposure by optimizing your video for YouTube. This will work on music videos, your artist interviews, or any other type of video you will make.

Keywords Are The Key

YouTube optimization is a lot like search engine optimization – both rely heavily on relevant keywords to serve up the best content for searchers. Choosing relevant keywords is the most important step in optimizing your video for YouTube, and can mean the difference between 15 views and 15 hundred views.

There are four steps for optimizing your YouTube video with keywords.

1. Find Relevant Keywords.
   Review keywords on videos similar to yours, especially those with a high number of views, which will give you an idea what kind of keywords bring viewers to a certain video. Search for the keywords you might use to find your own YouTube video to determine if the search results are what you expected – you might have a different idea of keyword relevancy than your potential audience! Steer clear of adding irrelevant – yet popular – keywords to your videos. Irrelevant keywords might help your YouTube search results, but it’s not likely users will actually watch it. For a broader keyword picture, check out the YouTube keyword tool. It’s a free service that lets you see the most popular keywords based on language and country.
2. Getting Your Title Right.
   Start by optimizing your video title. Think of a newspaper or magazine. What type of headline are you drawn to reading? Choose titles that are descriptive, catchy and clear. You have 100 characters, including the spaces between words. Focus on the keywords you discovered in step one.
3. Choosing A Category For Your Music Video.
   Choose a category for your video. Search for videos similar to yours or browse the categories you believe would be the best fit for your own video. Think about using a less popular (but still as relevant) category so your video has a better chance of being seen.
4. Description And Tags.
   Add your description and tags. Your description should be as detailed as possible and include the ever-important keywords related to your video. You can include details like your location, genre, instruments or even the background of your song. You have approximately 800 words in your description, so use them wisely! Your tags, which have a 120-character limit, should also reflect your keywords.

All of these things will help your video be more relevant to any related search terms. This will help your target audience (And potential fans) find you a lot easier.

Settings To Set Your YouTube Video Apart

Keyword relevancy is only the first step to optimizing your YouTube video. YouTube also gives musicians a variety of further settings that can better help you optimize your video.

When you upload your video, you should always check the broadcasting and sharing options to make sure your optimized YouTube video will appear in searches. Privacy should be set to “public”; comments, comment voting, video responses and ratings should all be allowed so your audience can engage with you; and video embedding should be permitted. That way, when someone wants to share your video on their blog or article, they can embed your optimized video right from the YouTube website. People sharing your music video on their blog can only mean more exposure, so make sure your share settings are in order.

Adding Lyrics And Text To Your YouTube Video

YouTube videos are converted into Java, so the content isn’t crawled by search engines. To give your YouTube video an optimization boost, you should include captions or transcripts. These can be a written version of your song lyrics if you’ve uploaded a music video, or a written version of your interview.

To do this, transcribe your video or add captions if it doesn’t contain any dialogue. Save the transcript as a .txt file, then go to your video manager and click “captions” from the drop down menu beside your video. Finally, upload your .txt file to complete the process. Your video will now be accompanied by additional keywords and text, which will often help improve your optimization on YouTube.

Conclusion

By spending a little extra time optimizing your YouTube videos, you can share your songs with a much wider audience. Simply uploading your video and hoping it’ll find your target is a poor plan, so do what’s necessary to get your video found. You can find out more about video optimization for musicians in the Academy, so check it out if you haven’t already.

About The Author

Steven Payne is enthusiastic about all things to do with marketing promotions. While he isn’t busy with his day job, he shares his marketing knowledge with those in need. In this case, it just happens to be you cool musicians.

(The video can be seen here if you’re reading this post via a feed).

This is the first of many videos I will be doing. Make sure you subscribe to Youtube.com/iMusicAdvice to be kept up-to-date with any new guides. Feel free to ‘like’ the videos as well.

Here’s the transcript of the video:

How To Upload Your Music To Facebook Transcript

Hi guys, my name’s Shaun from IndependentMusicAdvice.com, and today we are going to be looking at how to upload your music to Facebook. Before we start, there are a couple of things we need to do. First of all, you need to make sure you have a Facebook page page. If you have not got one of these already, you can check out www.Google.com and search for ‘Create a Facebook fan page’. The first result will allow you to do just that.

Second, you need to make sure you have a SoundCloud account. If you have not got a SoundCloud account, you can go to SoundCloud.com, create an account for free, and upload your music from there.

Next you need to go to BandPage.com as you can see I’ve done here. We need to click on this big blue button in the middle, ‘Create My BandPage’, and a new window should pop up asking us if we want to connect our Facebook and our BandPage. We click ‘Allow’ because we want that to happen. It’ll take a second to load.

If you’re already logged into Facebook, this should happen straight way and automatically. If you’re not logged in, they may ask you to log in. Just click ‘allow’, log in and give your details. Next, you should be taken to this screen right here.

As you can see, our Facebook page and our BandPage are now connected. Next, we have to click ‘Add Track’. We choose ‘SoundCloud’ from the drop down menu because we want to take the tracks from SoundCloud.

As you can see here, BandPage has uploaded both of our tracks as I’ve got two tracks on SoundCloud. What we need to do is hover over track 1 (Or whatever track you want). On the right hand side here, it says ‘Add To BandPage’. We click that.

From here you can change the name of your track; I’m just keeping it Track 1.

If you have a link for people to buy your music, say for example on iTunes, you can add the link here. Let’s just say my link is www.Buy.com, but you can add whatever link you need.

If you want people to download your music (Be able to download it), you can click ‘download’, but I’m not going to do that. Next we click ‘save to BandPage’, as you can see it’s saving here.

Next, for example, I’m going to upload my second track. So let’s just do the same thing again: Add to BandPage, people to buy it(?), no, no link, save to BandPage. And that should be done.

Now we have two tracks on my BandPage. You can also change your appearance, for example if you want to upload an image you can do so here: Upload New. You can change the colours, say for example you want red or whatever colour. I’ll just keep it white.

You can also see what other tools BandPage has.

When you’re finished, click back to Content. Come on the left hand side, and as you can see, it says “This is not your real Facebook Fan Page, click here to see it”. So I’ve click and it’s opened up. And now you can see my Facebook Fan Page.

As you can see, it has my first track, and it has my second track. People can play there tracks right here. You can buy it if you have the link. And yer, that’s it.

So that’s how to upload your music to Facebook. If you enjoyed this video, please subscribe to the channel: Youtube.com/iMusicAdvice, and check out the website www.IndependentMusicAdvice.com. Thank you.

End Of Transcript.

Please let me know any thoughts or question about the video in the comments section below. This is my first video of this type, so go a bit easy on me. I’m sure as I do more video guides for you I’ll sound that bit more relaxed.

So what do you prefer: Guides via video, or guides via text?

For a while now, I’ve been using Twitter to drive new fans to IMA and a few other websites I own, both music and non music related. If you’re reading this now, there’s a good chance you’ve found a link somewhere on Twitter or Facebook, and have followed it to this page. If you have, congratulations, you’re about to learn the secret to dominating Twitter!!

If you want to skip the background info and start dominating Twitter now, click the below link for your 100% free copy of our Twitter Domination ebook. Once you have shared a Tweet or Facebook message, you will be given the link to download the ebook right away. This book works whether you’re in the music industry or not:

(Opens in a new window, powered by CloudFlood)

Please note that none of your information is stored by us or Cloud Flood (The service we use to deliver you this free ebook). Once you have shared the message, you will be taken to a page which says ‘Access Link’. ‘Right click’ on the link, and choose to save the ebook to your computer. Alternatively, click the ‘Access Link’ text, and the ebook will open automatically. Be sure to save the book to your computer before you close it down. If you need any help with this, please ask any questions in the comments section below.

So, What Is Twitter Domination?

Twitter Domination is a new ebook I’ve created that shows you how to make the most of your Twitter promotion. In this book, I detail exactly how I’ve built my Twitter accounts up to thousands of followers each. I also let you know how I drive thousands of these good quality Twitter followers to my websites each month.

What I mean by ‘good quality’, is they aren’t just random numbers on my Twitter account. They are people who have a proven interest in what I am Tweeting about, and will interact with my Tweets and go on to visit my website. In other words, they are the kind of visitors you want.

In this book you will get a load of actionable promotion and fan building tactics that actually work, as I have proven time and time again. What’s more, I’ve shown a few friends these tactics to make sure I wasn’t just getting lucky, and all of them now have over 1000 interactive followers on their page (One has over 8000). By following this guide, you too can have the same.

What You’ll Learn In Twitter Domination

Download Twitter Domination to learn:

• How to automate everything you need to do, so hours worth of manual work instead takes minutes.
• How to communicate with your followers effectively.
• How to set up your first twitter account.
• How to personalise your Twitter profile and make yourself easily recognisable.
• And much, much more!

Sound good? It should, as you’re about to get a whole load more people in front of your music or whatever it is you’re promoting! In order to download Twitter Domination, simply click the below button and share the message on Facebook or Twitter. You may need to log on to your account before you do so:

I hope you enjoy Twitter Domination. If so, please share this article around on your favourite social networking websites, or write a unique post about it on your website.

Please Note: Some of this ebook may look familiar to some of you, as part of it has been posted on IMA before. Despite that, I’ve also included some never seen before tips and tricks which is key to making this strategy work. It’s because of this, that I recommend you still check Twitter Domination out.

Today we’re going to look at an extremely important aspect of your music career: Music Marketing. We’ll looking at some of the best ways to promote your music, as well as some of the platforms that work best in getting your music out there.

This article isn’t a bunch of rehashed information full of strategies that don’t work anymore, everything listed below still works for the modern day independent musician. It’s because of this that I ask you to share this article around if you feel it has been helpful for you. You can either do this by sharing it via the social media buttons at the top of this article, or by linking to it from your website.

But before we go into the best ways to market your music, let’s have a look at why you need to do this.

Why You Need To Market Your Music

Marketing is the process of raising awareness of what it is you offer, in this case your songs and brand. You may make the best songs in the world, but if no one knows they exist, how successful do you think you’re going to be? Not very, is the answer.

Once your song has been recorded, or even before, you need to think about your marketing strategy. How are you going to promote your latest release? Without knowing this, you might as well not record any new songs.

Having a poor marketing plan will basically spell failure for your music career. Do you want to be just another reject of the music industry? If not, you need to start taking your music promotion seriously.

While I’m not saying everyone that markets their music will be a success, what I am saying is you need to take part in promotion in order to give people the chance to take to your music. And unless you’ve got money to pay music marketing companies to do this work for your, the promotion of your music will be down to you.

Below we will look at some of the best ways to get your music out there for free or cheap. All of these strategies are suitable for independent musicians, and work in the modern day music industry.

Online Music Marketing

Using the internet to market your music has become the norm, apparently it’s the ‘new age’ method to doing things. Me personally, I like to see it as another piece of the puzzle. Here are some of the best ways to market your music online.

Your Own Music Website – Your Main Advert And Marketing Hub

Before you start thinking about all the social media marketing and signing up to the popular social networking websites, it’s important to create your own website. This will be your home online, and the place anyone wanting to find out more about your music will go.

On here you can let people:

• Hear samples of your songs,
• See all your latest videos,
• Get to read about your latest going ons,
• Read more about your history,
• Buy your music,
• See where you’re next performing,
• Find out what social networking sites you’re on,
• And much more.

On top of this, you can use your website for two very important things:

• Get people to sign up to your mailing list. From here you can build a relationship with them and keep in contact.
• Create a sales funnel which will help your identify your most dedicated fans.

These are two very important things you should be doing in your music career. Building your list will mean that you have an army of fans that are clued up about what you’re all about. They can also be easily contacted when you have a release to promote, or just want to raise awareness about an aspect of what you’re doing.

Building your sales funnel will allow you to see the people who actually buy and promote your music, and allow you to give special attention to these people. Keep a good relationship with them, and they will continue to make you money and benefit your music for a while to come.

We look more at how to build your list, how to make your website, and how to create your sales funnel in the IMA Music Business Academy.

When promoting your music on other websites, you should always aim to drive traffic back to your official website and get people onto your mailing list. Here are some of the best websites for doing just that:

Facebook – For Build Meaningful Relationships With Your Fans

Facebook is one of the best places to get your music out there. Let me ask you this, how many of the people you know have Facebook? Not just musicians, I mean out of everyone you know in the world. Probably over 90% right? Or at least 80%?

Facebook is a big deal, and a good percentage of people have gone on to sign up an account. People put their real details on there, and only allow things that they are genuinely interested in on their page. So if they go on to click ‘like’ on your music page, there’s a good chance they’re interested in what you are doing.

It’s because of this, that Facebook fans are some of the most responsive around. While it may be harder to build them up, when you do have them, this is a great place to market your music to.

The key to marketing your music with Facebook is being interactive. Start discussions, share exclusive songs and offers with your Facebook followers, and generally befriend people on there. The more interaction you have going on, the more lifelong fans you’ll gain. The more lifelong fans you gain, the more people will spread the word about you. Not to mention you have the chance of going viral as people share your content around…

Twitter – For Gaining Potential Fans Fast

Twitter is another great tool for marketing your music online. It allows you to quickly and easily update your fans on what’s going on with you, as well interact with them in short burst.

The reason I encourage you to use Facebook as well as Twitter, is because they serve different jobs. While it’s not easy to gain new fans via Facebook without an initial push, Twitter fans are easy to come across when you know how. That link leads to the first of a two part series I’ve writing on how to promote your music on Twitter, and will let you know everything you need to know to get your Twitter music marketing going.

As they’re easy to gain, the targeted followers you come across on Twitter can be driven to your website and Facebook page. On these platforms you can build up a better relationship with them, and turn them into true fans.

Youtube – For Marketing Yourself As A Brand

These days, fans want to do more then just hear your music. They want to see what you as a person are about, and buy into you as a complete package.

Creating videos is one of the best ways to help your fans achieve this. And Youtube, the most popular online video sharing service in the world, is the place to be if you want your videos to take off.

Showing your fans another side to you can help them really warm to you. You want to make it so they feel like they know you, and want to buy into what it is you’re about. Videos can go a long way in creating this bond between you and your fans, especially if you create exclusive videos talking to them personally.

Videos you make could include music videos, recordings of your live gigs, interviews, special recordings talking to your fans directly, you performing live in front of a camera, and cover songs. You could also take your video marketing in other directions, such as recording short stories and incorporating your music in there.

Forums – For Reaching The Enthusiasts

As well as the above three mentioned websites, there is another type of website that can still go a fair way in marketing your music: Forums. Forums are places you can go and discuss what’s happening in your music genre, or in music in general.

There are a whole host of music forums you could join, you’ll just need to find one or more that’s relevant to you. For example, if you’re from the UK and you make Grime music, you could search ‘Grime Forum’ in google. It will give you options of some relevant forums you could join, and discuss your music.

It’s not a good idea to go straight into promoting your music on these forums however. You should spend a few days seeing how people carry themselves, and join in once you feel you will be able to fit in as part of the community.

The good thing about forums is if you get one on your side, you will have a great platform for encouraging word of mouth promotion. Become part of the community, and link to your website in your signature. You can often also let people know you have a new release out once you have a decent amount of posts under your belt. Be sure to mention this in the correct section of the forum, and link to this post in your signature for all to see.

Guest Posting – For Leveraging Other People’s Audiences And SEO Benefits

Guest posting is a tactic largely used by marketers looking to take advantage of other people’s traffic. You write a post for someone else’s websites (Usually blogs of fellow musicians or fellow marketers), and they publish it in exchange for the free content. You benefit as you will get some of their traffic going back to your website. You will also get a link or two leading back to your website from theirs, which is great for your website’s SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).

For those that don’t know, SEO is the process of getting your website ranked in the search engines. If you can get ranked for certain terms, search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing will send your website free traffic every day. Independent Music Advice for example gets hundreds of people visiting this site on a daily basis, even when we don’t write any new articles on promote it. If you can do this for your music website, you will get potential fans coming to your site every day on autopilot. From there, it’s up to you to put them in your sales funnel and convert them into fans of yours.

We talk a lot more about guest posting and SEO in the IMA Music Business Academy.

Should You Market Your Music On Any Other Websites?

So, should you use any other sites to market your music on? Well, that’s totally up to you. From what I’ve seen, the above are the places where most of your potential fans will be online, so it makes sense to focus your marketing efforts there right?

I know some of you will be wondering about Google+, and whether or not you should use it. Well, not right now. Google+ is still largely used by businesses and people with something to promote, the average person is still currently using Facebook. It may be a good idea to set up a Google Plus account just so you’ve secured your name, but don’t focus your effort on there for the time being. I don’t know one person who has got a Google + account but not a Facebook one, do you?

Stick largely to the five above mentioned websites for getting your music out there. Don’t spread yourself too thin, otherwise your promoting on all of these platforms will be substandard.

Offline Music Marketing

When you talk about marketing your music these days, a lot of musicians simply feel you’re talking about marketing their music online. In reality however, you still need to do a fair share of offline marketing if you really want to get your music out there.

Branding yourself is all about getting your music in as many places as possible: The more places people see you, the more they start taking notice of your brand. If they recognise your brand, they are more likely to give your music a listen when they come across it.

Here are some offline methods of marketing your music. There are of course a lot more ways you can go about offline marketing then this, but here are my personal favourites.

Radio

When you mention radio, there are a lot of music industry figures that instantly think this isn’t possible. You need to be signed and have a big name to get radio play right? Well, not really…

While it may be difficult for a non signed artist to get played on mainstream radio, there are always other options. What about community radio stations? What about niche specific radio stations? What about online radio stations?

All of these places provide a place for you to showcase your music, and do so to a decent amount of listeners. While it won’t give you overnight success or make it so you’re known all around the world, it will get you new fans, and raise awareness of your music considerably.

The great thing about these radio stations is you may also have the chance to appear live for an interview. When networking with Djs, mention that this would be something you’re interested in. If they already do musician interviews, it will be much more likely you get accepted (Talent permitting of course). If not, then suggesting this may encourage them to do their first one with you. Make I out like it will bring their show to life, and draw in a whole new audience for them. After all, every DJ wants a bigger audience.

Live Gigs

Gigging, one of the best ways to make money from your music for musicians at any level. It doesn’t matter if you’re playing for free at a showcase event, you can still make money from performing gigs. You simply need to have your CD there to sell to people after your show, and not be to shy to approach people with this offer. Forget standing at the side and waiting for people to come over to you, go out there any make those sales! It really does work, I promise you.

As well as being a great way to make money from your music, gigs are a good way of getting in front of new potential fans, as well as communicating with existing ones. If the event isn’t yours, you are opened to a new audience of music lovers. Put on a stand out show for them and let them know where to find you online, and you have a bunch of new fans instantly. From there you can put them through your sales funnel, and convert them into mailing list subscribers or buyers of your music.

We look a lot more at making money from your gigs, how to get gigs, how to perform live shows effectively, and setting up your sales funnel in the IMA Music Business Academy.

Music Marketing Is Still Marketing, So Give Yourself A Unique Selling Point (USP)

When wondering how to promote your music, you should remember one thing: You’re not just promoting your music, you’re promoting yourself! You’re not just marketing your music, you’re marketing your brand and everything about you. Because of this, you need to create yourself a USP. In other words:

You need something to make you stand out!

You need to sell yourself as more then just a voice on a song. Your whole image, the way you act, the clothes you wear, it all counts to how brand-able you are. Even if you have good music, you can still easily get overlooked. But if you have good music and a story that people take to, you make yourself a lot more memorable.

Ed Sheeran is a good example of this. While he is a good and talented musician, there are three things that made him stand out over a host of other people doing his type of music:

1. Him having the likeability factor,
2. His willingness to jump across genres and work within different music types, and
3. His ginger hair.

While the last point might not sound like something major, him being ginger allowed him to stand out from the crowd, and make him more easily recognisable. It also added to his likeability factor, and helps him appear as ‘the guy next door’.

I’m not saying to go out and dye your hair ginger, although you can if you want (If you do please share your picture in the comments ). What I am saying however, is you need to think about what makes you different from everybody else. Why are people going to buy into you over the thousands of other acts out there similar to you?

You don’t have to go out and act crazy to make your brand different, sometimes simply being the best at what you do is enough of a USP. If you can’t step your game up enough to be the best in your genre however, you need to find yourself an angle.

Music Marketing Strategies Conclusion

What you should do next is go off and put together a music marketing plan. This should map of how you plan on promoting your music, and what platforms you’re going to use.

There is no one best way to promote your music, a good few of these methods should be used together to achieve your goals. A combination of offline and online marketing methods will raise the awareness of your music, and make it so people know your music exists. From here you have the chance of converting these people into fans.

While there are a lot of other ways top promote your music then the ones mentioned above, these are the ones I feel work well for the independent musician. Things like magazine adverts and flyers work well when you’ve got a bigger budget, but don’t really benefit you enough when you don’t have huge amounts to invest in them.

If you want to learn more about marketing your music effectively, you may want to check out the IMA Music Business Academy. Here look at music marketing extensively, and give you step by step instructions on how to promote your music.

Welcome to part two of our two part series on how to promote your music with Twitter. If you haven’t already, we recommend you read the first part so you’re all clued up on the early stages of the process (How to set up an attractive Twitter page, how to find and get targeted music fans to follow you, and how to automate your Twitter promotion using Tweet Adder):

How To Promote Your Music With Twitter, The Ultimate Guide Part 1 (Opens in a new window)

In part two we look at the process of unfollowing non responsive people and why this is important, the art of messaging your Twitter followers without having you messages overlooked (Most Twitter messages are spam, don’t make yours appear as the same), and finally we look at a proven strategy to making money from Twitter and your music. So grab a coffee and get ready to learn, as you’re about to discover the secret to dominating Twitter!

Unfollowing Non Responsive People

I mentioned briefly in part one of How To Promote Your Music With Twitter that it is a good idea to unfollow some of your subscribers every few days. I didn’t however tell you why this is the case or how to effectively do so, so I’ll go into it now.

There are a few reasons why you’d want to unfollow some of your Twitter followers, one of those being because you want to appear to be an authority. Think about it, if you go onto someone’s Twitter profile and you see them following 1000 people but only 3 people follow them back, would you dive any deeper or immediately close the window? Most people would close the window and do something else, which means you’ve lost a potential fan. Image counts for a lot in the independent music business, so make sure you portray the right one everywhere you go.

When you’re starting out with your Twitter account however, it’s not really possible to have more followers then you have people following you. As you build your numbers up however, you can start deleting followers who either aren’t following you back (You should be deleting these people anyway) or aren’t interacting with your account in any way. As you do this your numbers will look more attractive to new people visiting your page.

This is all about social proof. A person is much more likely to follow you if they see a lot of other people doing the same.

I’d recommend deleting anyone you follow that’s not following you back within three days. I say three as not everyone gets to go on their Twitter account daily. Three days is enough for people to accept you, and anyone who doesn’t do so in that time is either not going to follow you back or doesn’t come on enough to be a good person to market to.

A word of warning however, if you repeatedly follow and unfollow the same people, you are likely to get your Twitter account banned. In reality though it is more or less impossible to remember every person you have added then unfollowed, so how are you supposed to know which people to stay away from? Well, the easiest way to do this is by using Tweet Adder. Tweet Adder keeps track of all the people you have followed and unfollowed before, and automatically removes them from your list so you won’t accidentally follow them again. This makes your job a lot easier and means you won’t get banned for abusing the Twitter system. We talked about other ways Tweet Adder can automate your Twitter promotion in part 1, so check that out.

If you haven’t got Tweet Adder however, it is possible to manually unfollow users that don’t follow you. This isn’t recommended as it can take hours as your Twitter profile builds up (That and the fact you can’t keep track of who you’re following / unfollowing unless you manually make a note of them and check it against each person you follow), but in case you’re interested I’ll tell you how to do it.

Just to note, Twitter makes this process long winded as they don’t want you to unfollow people just because they’re not following you. It’s not going to get you banned doing so, but is just an extra measure put in place to keep the Twitter community social.

In order to work this out who you’re following that’s not following you, you need to go to your ‘following’ list. You then click on each individual profile and see if there’s an option to message them. If you get this option it means that you’re both following each other. If there’s no option to message them, it means that there’s not following you. This doesn’t take long when you only follow like 20 people, but when you’ve got a lot more it can take a long time. Have more then a couple of hundred people you follow and it’ll take up a good chunk of your day (Hours). Have 1000 followers and you will have given up on Twitter promotion a long time ago.

As I mentioned in part one of our how to promote your music with Twitter guide, it’s best to automate your Twitter promotion. Doing is manually take up more time then it’s worth, and can’t be done on the mass scale which you need for it to be effective. Unfollowing users is a prime example why using Tweet Adder makes everything a lot easier.

How To Easily Unfollow Twitter Followers

Tweet Adder automates all of this for you. If you want to unfollow all users that aren’t following you after say three days, you tell it that, come back in three days and click ‘start’. Because it keep track of all the people you follow and when you follow them, it will automatically select the people who need to be unfollowed and unfollow them. When you’re next following people, it will also make sure it doesn’t follow these same people again.

Messaging Your Twitter Followers With Your Music

OK, so now your profile’s designed, you have tweets up on your wall and you’ve started adding people who are starting to follow you back. The next stage however is to further build a connection with these people and get them doing what you want (Which will also benefit them of course). You need to think about what the aim is for your Twitter account. Do you want to use it as a way to drive visitors back to your main website? Or do you want to just use it as a communication place for you and your fans? Either way it is important to send messages to people that follow you.

In all honesty, there is a lot of spam on Twitter these days. Around 99% of all the messages people send are seen as spam, and therefore often ignored. Having said that, if you send a genuine and helpful message then you’ll get people who will take notice. I’ve used Twitter messaging to get a load of people on the Independent Music Advice mailing list simply by saying that they can download it for free if they want a career boost. And what independent musician wouldn’t want that?

When you message people on Twitter, it is good to write a couple of messages that can be sent to anyone but also sounds personal. People should be able to retweet these messages if they please (It does happen, provide people with the goods and they will share the news) and also form a conversation about it. Make people feel like you’re reaching them on their wavelength and they will warm to you. And if they warm to you they’re more likely to listen to your music and become a fan.

You can send out messages to your followers manually, but often it’s hard to remember which people you have already messaged. It is also a very long process if you’ve followers in the hundreds or thousands. Once again I recommend using Tweet Adder to do this automatically. Once you have a message, put it into Tweet Adder and tell it to send messaged to all new subscribers. It will do this and you can work on something else.

How To Promote Your Music With Twitter – How To Make Money From Twitter

Twitter of course is a promotional tool. Having said that, you promote your music in order to get more fans and in turn make more money. So where does Twitter fit into all of this?

Well, Twitter is a great tool to raise awareness of your music. Using Tweet Adder you can quickly get a load of people to see your profile and in turn travel back to your website (If your Twitter profile interested them enough, just don’t forget to leave a link back to your site on your profile). This is a lot more significant then you think. Baring in mind that if people don’t know about you they won’t become a fan and won’t buy your music, don’t you think that getting a lot of people to listen to your music fast is something that you need to make happen if possible?

The reality is however that using Twitter won’t make you a over night millionaire. In order for your Twitter promotions to be effective, you need to first have something of value to offer people. If you don’t add anything interesting to your profile but add a load of people, how many of those people do you think will then go on to your website and listen to your music? Very few, if any at all. The thing is, if you don’t offer people something of value (Free songs, witty banter, anything that will make them happy) then Twitter won’t help you make more money from your music.

If you offer something of value however, Twitter can get you a large amount of fans quick! You can then funnel these people back to your website and get them on your mailing list. As you may know, mailing lists are one of the best ways to make money from your music career as they can keep you in constant contact with your biggest fans. These are the fans that will buy tickets to your shows and even buy your music.

Some musicians have trouble with getting people on their mailing lists however, and that’s where Twitter can help. I’ve used Twitter to get hundreds of people on the Independent Music Advice mailing list, as well onto mailing lists of my other sites. My mailing list is one of the biggest assets I have, but it would be a lot more empty without the people that have joined it from Twitter.

You can also try a direct selling approach with Twitter (E.g. Tweeting about ‘buy my new single’) but I’ve found that to be far less effective then the alternative. People don’t generally like to be sold to, so offering people good value rather then selling to them directly will mean that you’ll make more money from your music career.

I touch further on how to use Twitter to make you money in our book How To Make Money From Free Music. The idea is to tweet about where people can download your music for free, then instantly follow a load of new target people. When people see your follow, there will be a number of people who check your profile and see your tweet. Some will then follow it back and go on to download your song free of charge. So how do you make money from this I hear you ask? Well, every time someone downloads your song you are paid money. That’s right, the fan gets your music for free but you’re still paid for this. For more information about how this works, check out our book here.

How To Promote Your Music With Twitter Conclusion

Twitter is a great way to promote your music. It can be used to easily get targeted visitors to check out your songs and potentially become a fan, and we all know that the more true fans you have the better your chances of getting free promotion and making money are. Having said that however, doing it all manually can be more time and effort then it is worth. If you’re serious about promoting your music with Twitter, I suggest you use Tweet Adder to get a lot of potential fans without working much at all.

Twitter Music Promotion

So now you know How To Promote Your Music With Twitter, good luck at getting it done!

Today I’m going to show you how to promote your music with Twitter. From my tests, Twitter seems to be the quickest and easiest social media platform to get fans to your music. While many independent musicians have struggled to use Facebook effectively, Twitter can be the easy but just as effective alternative that you’ve been waiting for.

Over this two part series on promoting your music with Twitter, we will be looking at where to find targeted Twitter followers, how to get these followers to do what you want (E.g. Check out your music / join your mailing list etc) and most importantly how to automate this whole process using Tweet Adder. We will also be looking at a whole load of other details in between, so make sure you read this article in full to become a Twitter expert!

Note: How To Promote Your Music With Twitter, The Ultimate Guide Part 2 can now be read here. This however should only be read once you have read this post start to finish.

All the methods I share in this article I personally use on my many Twitter accounts, so I can tell you they work. In order to promote your music on Twitter, you will of course need to have a Twitter account. If you haven’t already got one, you can sign up here for free. You will then be ready to promote your music with Twitter.

The Number One Mistake People Make When Promoting Music On Twitter

I’ve been using Twitter for a good while now, and have to say it’s one of the easiest means of social media promotion I use. It wasn’t always like this however, if you don’t have the right tools then promoting your music on Twitter can be a long and timely process.

As someone who does independent music, you should be spending the majority of your time doing the things that will gain you the most money and exposure. If you’re spending all day sitting at your computer adding Facebook and Twitter fans you’re not going to get very far at all. Yes these things do help get your name out there, but only as part of a wider promotional campaign. In fact, only around 5% of your time should go into this type of thing.

If you promote your music on Twitter manually, you have a long and hard task ahead of you. In order to create a strong and responsive account, you need to add a load of people, message them all, find out and delete the ones that aren’t responsive in any way, and add new people without double adding anyone. This is a very long process, and as you get more twitter followers this can take up many hours a day.

In order to cut this time down you have two options:

1. You can outsource your twitter promotion. This is a good idea if you can get someone who will do it for free and is reliable. If you don’t know anyone that’s willing to do that for you for free, this option can be very expensive and probably not worth it.
2. The other option is to use software to automate your Twitter promotion campaign, and this is the option I use. When I started out trying Twitter I done everything manually. I was adding followers blindly one by one, and although I was getting visitors back to my site it was taking up a lot of time and effectively burning me out. I then came across the idea of using software to automate your Twitter promotion, and after trying another less then effective automation tool (I won’t name any names), I came across Tweet Adder which I’ve been using ever since.

The things is, when you automate the process you don’t have to sit at your computer for hours adding and interacting with people. You can get Tweet Adder to add relevant people (I’ll explain the importance of relevant followers later), message people, tweet your messages, and unfollow people all on auto pilot. So while this is happening you can get on with writing your songs, networking with venue managers to get shows, sending your songs to Djs to play on radio, and all the other things that will make you the majority of money from your music.

While it’s not 100% necessary to use automation software to follow the rest of this article, I would strongly recommend using it as without it Twitter will take up too much of your time and won’t be worth the effort. Tweet Adder is the best twitter campaign manager I’ve come across, so give it a look. You can read out Tweet Adder Review here.

Making People Want To Follow Your Band Page

Just because you’ve got a Twitter account and one or two posts, that doesn’t mean that people will automatically want to follow you. Although Tweet Adder will make your promotion efforts a lot easier, you will still need to provide something worth while to your visitors. If you get a 1000 people coming your your Twitter page but you don’t have anything interesting to say, how many of those people do you think you’ll convert into fans? None is the answer, so the first thing you need to do after setting up a profile (And before you start adding people) is to make you page look lived in.

By this, I mean tweet some interesting things. You want at least 10 tweets on your page before you add a single person, so when they come to your page they’ll have a good idea if the information you provide is something that will interest them. Some things you might want to tweet about include any free songs you have, something interesting related to your music, or a competition. It can be anything really, but try to stay on topic with music and what you do. No one is going to want to read about what breakfast cereal you had, so think less ‘Facebook status’ and more ‘music business updates’.

In order to keep people following your page, you’ll want to tweet at least once a day. If you ever miss a day it doesn’t matter too much, just make sure you do one the day after. If you own Tweet Adder, you can pre-program tweets to go off in the future. I personally like to write seven tweets at once and set one to go off every day. I then come back a week later and write another seven tweets for the next seven days. This gives my followers something new and interesting to read every day without me having to always be on my Twitter account.

Customizing Your Twitter Profile

Another important thing to do is customizing your Twitter profile. You want your profile to instantly stand out and being recognisable to you. In order to do this, you can either design your own Twitter background and colour scheme, or you can get someone to design one for you.

If you’re going to do it yourself (Which isn’t as hard as it sounds), you first have to go to ‘settings’ in your account dashboard, then ‘design’. Here you will be able to select a pre designed twitter layout, or on the right hand side of the screen customise your profile more clicking ‘Check out Themeleon’. Themeleon is a pre-installed add on which gives you access to more pre designed Twitter themes, or in fact design your own. This is the option I recommend using.

You can design your own Twitter theme either by simple choosing the colours of your profile, or by adding one of your pictures as the background of your Twitter profile (If you have any Photoshop skills now is the ideal time to use them). Get your theme how you want it looking and click save.

Finding And Following Potential Fans Of Your Music On Twitter

Now that you have your Twitter account looking lived in with your page designed and your first few posts, you’re ready to start finding people to follow you. Unless you’re already established and you have a way of telling your fans to follow you, then you most likely won’t get any natural followers. This isn’t a problem though, as there is another way of getting twitter followers: By following them first!

People aren’t going to know you exist unless you get in their face, and you do this by following them to begin with. When you follow them, you want them to take interest in you by going back to your page to see who their new follower is. If you have something of interest to them on your page, they are likely to follow the information back to your website and check you out. This is why you need to have interesting things on your profile before you start adding people, if you simply add people with an empty profile they’re not going to end up back on your website or follow you back.

So how do we find a bunch of people that will potentially be interested in our type of music? Easy, we ‘borrow’ them from other established musicians in your genre.

Think about it, these established acts who make the same kind of music as you are going to have followers that are into that type of music. If you make the same kind of music to a high level, there’s a chance they’ll look into and follow you too. For example, if you make hip hop music then following all of 50 Cent’s followers could be a good idea. Or if you make rock music then it could be a good idea to follow Radiohead’s followers. You may want to follow big underground musician’s followers first however, as these followers have shown a proven interest in underground music (Which is what you currently make if you’re not mainstream yet) and are more likely to listen to you.

In order to make things a lot quicker and easier, I suggest you use Tweet Adder to make the process of following other independent musician’s followers a lot quicker and easier. While you can do this manually, the amount of time you put into it won’t be worth the rewards. What you need to do is set Tweet Adder to follow 200 of the fans of ‘Artist X’ (The musician in your niche with a lot of Twitter followers). I say 200 as when you have a new profile and 0 followers, it will look weird if you’ve 0 followers and are following 1000 people. Once you’ve set this you can leave Tweer Adder to run in the background while you do something else. A few days later (2-3 is ideal) you should go back and unfollow all the people that haven’t followed you back. These people will bring nothing to your marketing campaign, so there’s no point having them on your profile. Once again this can be done automatically using Tweet Adder, but you can do it manually if you’ve a lot of time on your hands.

For now, rinse and repeat this. As soon as you’ve unfollowed users, then go on to adding the next bunch. As you get more followers yourself you can start adding more people. So instead of adding 200 followers a time, you may want to add 300 or more. It really does depend on how quickly you want to scale this campaign and when you need to have it done by.

Once you’ve finished ‘borrowing’ all the fans from one particular Twitter account, you should go on to another related musician and follow all their music followers too. Once again, rinse and repeat.

Promote Your Music With Twitter, End Of Part One

That’s it for part one, please believe me when I say we’re just warming up!

Update: How To Promote Your Music With Twitter is now avalible and can be read here.

Twitter Music Promotion Part 2

Be sure to look out for part two where we’ll look a lot more at how to effectively promote and sell your music with Twitter. This post will be available next week, so be sure to subscribe to our site to be informed when this post is ready.

I’ll see you next time with more tips on how to promote your music with Twitter.

Tweet Adder Coupon Code

Before I go any further, I just want to share with you a coupon code that’ll help if you decide to get Tweet Adder yourself. I’ve included two, both of which will give you 20% off the regular price:

Tweet Adder Coupon Code: SHAUN20

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In this article I will be looking at what Tweet Adder can do, and why it it the best twitter automation software around. I will also be giving my personal opinion on what Tweet Adder can bring to your marketing campaign, and looking at how to use this tool effectively.

Before I go into all the features of Tweet Adder however, I want to look at why Twitter automation is important. If you want to skip onto the exact features of Tweet Adder, click here to be taken to the Tweet Adder Review.

Twitter Automation, And Why It Is Important

Twitter automation software such as Tweet Adder is important for anyone looking to effectively promote their business on Twitter. Twitter is a great means for getting your company message across with minimal cost, but for most it’s impracticable and takes up more time then it should. If you’re already well known in your industry, it may be possible for you to get a lot of followers naturally. If not however, you’ll more likely find that very few people (If any at all) will end up following you and listing to what you have to say. And what good is having a Twitter profile if no one’s following you?!

This is where Tweet Adder comes in. Tweet Adder makes it easier to get high quality followers quickly, and promotes to them in a way where you’ll have them interacting with your page and company website.

Twitter automation tools (Tweet Adder being the best one) will allow you to reach a mass of new customers, all targeted and interested in the niche you’re in. So not only will you get a load of new Twitter followers (Which provides social proof), but you’ll get people that will actually be interested in your business and often ready to buy.

How To Automate Twitter Effectively

Now there’s no point having a nice big car if you don’t know how to drive it. Tweet Adder is equivalent to the biggest and badest car you can imagine, but unless you know how to automate Twitter effectively you won’t be using it to its full potential. This is why we’re offering you an exclusive ebook: How To Effectively Automate Twitter if you end up buying Tweet Adder through my link. This ebook is worth $37 alone, and the information you’ll gain from it could earn you much more then that in the long run.

In order to get this ebook, simply clear the cookies in your browser (You can see how to do this is the ‘Tweet Adder Bonus‘ section below) then buy Tweet Adder via one of the Tweet Adder links on this page. Once you’ve bought it, email us on tweetbonus@independentmusicadvice.com telling us your order number. Once we can confirm your purchase, we will send you your Tweet Adder bonus right away.

So not only will you be getting a Tweet Adder discount, but you’ll also be getting the best Tweet Adder guide on the market for free!

A Honest Tweet Adder Review

So now we now why Twitter automation is important, let’s look at Tweet Adder specifically. Why Tweet Adder? Well, because Tweet Adder is quite simply the best Twitter automation tool on the market! And I don’t say that lightly, I’ve used good few Twitter automation tools in my time. However, none of them have as many features or make things quite as easy as Tweet Adder.

Some of Tweet Adder’s features include:

• Set And Forget.
  Tweet Adder allows you to choose what you want to do (Follow a load of people, unfollow people who aren’t following you after two days, message all your new followers etc) and carry out that task with a click on the button. Your task then runs in the background and you’re free to do whatever else you want. You can literally go off and make dinner, then when you come back everything you wanted done will be finished.
• Targeted Mass Following.
  You can target only people that have similar interests to your business, and target them on a mass scale. No more randomly following people and trying to make a hard sale, you get to target people who are proven to like the same sort of things you offer and do so fast.
• Easy Unfollowing.
  As you may know, Twitter frowns on mass unfollowing and then following the same people again. If you’re using Twitter manually, it’s often hard to remember who you’ve added before. With Tweet Adder however, the Ids of all the people you’ve followed are stored. This means that Tweet Adder will automatically stop you from following the same people over again and getting you in trouble.
• Automatic Messaging.
  Messaging your followers with valuable information is all part of building up good customer relations. Messaging everyone manually however can be a long and painful process. Thankfully, Tweet Adder has a feature which lets you message everyone automatically. Just make sure what you message them has something of value.
• No Yearly Fees.
  Unlike most other Twitter automation tools, Tweet Adder is a one of purchase. In comparison, you save a lot of money on Tweet Adder as you’re not paying for it every year you own it. This is one of the things that turned me off other Twitter tools, especially as they don’t do the job nearly as well.
• And much more.

See All The Tweet Adder 3 Features Now By Clicking On One Of The Tweet Adder Links On This Page

If you have any type of business or talent to promote, you should promote on twitter. It can bring you so many more fans and customers, but it can be a hard graft. Once you have a good amount of subscribers, you will find it can take hours a day to manually manage your Twitter account, and even then you’ll find there’s still a lot to be done. Tweet Adder makes all this easier by doing all the hard work for you in the background. This frees up time for you to work on other parts of your business or personally interact with your Twitter followers.

Buy Tweet Adder 3 Now Via The Tweet Adder Link At The Top Of This Page

Tweet Adder Bonus

We’ve got something very special for you. Not only do you get twenty percent off the price of Tweet Adder if you buy it through our link (Use the tweet adder coupon: SHAUN20), but we also have a Tweet Adder bonus that will allow you to use this twitter automation software to its full potential. Enter our book:

How To Effectively Automate Twitter

This ebook has a retail value of $37, and will tell you the steps you need to find targets followers and get them back to your business doing what you want. If you want a copy of this book, simply follow these simple four steps:

1. Clear your browser of any cookies. How you do this will depend on your browser: Firefox:
   In your Firefox browser, click ‘Tools’, then ‘Clear Recent History’. Make sure you’ve selected ‘Cookies’ and nothing else, then press ‘Clear Now’.

   Internet Explorer:
   In your Internet Explorer browser, click ‘Tools’ then ‘Internet Options’. Make sure you’re on the ‘General’ tab, then click ‘Delete’ in the ‘Browsing History’ section.

2. Click on this link and buy Tweet Adder, the best automation tool available.
3. When ordered, email tweetbonus@independentmusicadvice.com with your order number. This is for us to confirm you did order through us.
4. We will send you your Tweet Adder bonus and you can start dominating Twitter straight away.

Twitter can be a powerful promotional tool, but only if it is used effectively. Many people try and promote with Twitter manually, but in reality this isn’t practical and takes up a lot more time then it’s worth. Unless you have the money to hire someone to sit on Twitter all days and promote your business, I’d advise you to buy Tweet Adder, the best Twitter automation tool on the market.

Tweet Adder Review Conclusion

Tweet Adder is the best Twitter software on the market. If you want to effectively promote your business online but don’t have the money to outsource this process, Tweet Adder is the answer you’ve been looking for.

That’s it for now, I hope you enjoyed our Tweet Adder review and it has helped you with your decision.

Free Tweet Adder Download

If you’re still not sure about buying Tweet Adder on sale, then click the TA link at the first couple of paragraphs in this article and you’ll be able to download a trial of of Tweet Adder free. You can’t however get our Tweet Adder bonus until you buy it, so if you want the bonus described in this Tweet Adder review then check out the steps in the ‘Tweet Adder Bonus‘ section.

In this article, I will show you why Facebook fans are so important to your business and how to get Facebook fans fast. I will also look at why so many musicians struggle to get many Facebook fans, and how you can get up to 3000 new Facebook fans in 30 days (Please note, that book is no longer available. If you want to learn how to become a master of Facebook, then check out the relevant lesson in the Academy). But first, here’s a bit of background.

With the death of MySpace, Facebook has become one of the best outlets for the independent musician. While previously you couldn’t sell your music on Facebook, new applications have meant that you can not only do this, but you can also stream your music and personalise your page too.

Despite this, many musicians still aren’t sure how to gain new fans via Facebook. It’s not surprising to be honest, MySpace had taught us to be lazy. They showed us that all we had to do to get ‘fans’ was upload our music, add a load of random people as ‘Friends’, then send them pre-automated messages about listening to our music. Although it seemed it’d be effective at the time, looking back I’m not sure how so many people got scammed into thinking this was a good method of promotion (Myself included).

Now don’t get me wrong, MySpace did serve a purpose. Some people did get a good deal out of their exposure from MySpace, and it did allow everyone to showcase their music regardless of their ability (Whether that was a good thing or not is a matter of opinion). In terms of musicians learning how to properly promote themselves however, it probably did a lot more damage then it did good.

How To Get Facebook Fans, Why Get Facebook Fans?

Want to know how to get Facebook fans? Lots of people want new Facebook fans, but why do people need them? And how can they benefit your independent music career? Well, I’ll tell you this from my own personal experience: People that become your fans on Facebook are usually people that are genuinely interested in what you have to offer.

People’s Facebook pages are practically an extension of their lives, so most people are very particular about what they add to their page. If you invite them to your group but they have no interest in what’s on your page, most likely they’ll just ignore the request. If however they do accept it, there’s a good chance they’ll look into your page and probably click links going to your website. In general, they’ll interact a lot more then traffic from other social media sites (E.g. Stumbleupon).

This is ideally what you want from any groups you set up, a responsive fan base that will be open to buying your music and promoting your sound for you. This is why Facebook fans pages can be a great place to build up your fan base. The more Facebook fans you have, the more sales you can potentially make.

How To Get Facebook Fans, 3000 Facebook Fans Enough?

So how do you get more Facebook fans? Well, you may think this is me being lazy here, but instead of writing a 10,000 word post on how to market your music on Facebook (And get fans), instead I’m going to point you in the direction of my favourite Facebook ebook: How To Attract 3,000 Facebook Fans In 30 Days. Now believe me when I tell you this will probably be the best book on Facebook promotion you’ll ever read. It’s written by Nick O’Neill, a man with over 100,000 Facebook fans (So he knows what he’s talking about). In this book he’ll run you through how to gain a whole load of new Facebook fans, and what you should be doing to keep them. I’ve used some of his techniques for two of my Facebook fan pages, both times with good effects.

In the interest of disclosure, the link provided to this book is an affiliate link. That however shouldn’t affect your decision to by the book, as there is a lot of quality information in there that will help you grow your Facebook fan page in no time.

Now don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a “I’ll read this ebook and 3000 fans will automatically pop on to my Facebook fan page” type of affair here. No, there’s actual work to be done in order to achieve these fans. This isn’t a book which will tell you to add 3000 random people in spammy ways, it’ll actually help you build up quality responsive fans, ones that will be interested in what you have to offer and possibly buy your music. As long as you’re willing to follow the book from start to finish and implement most of the strategies Nick shares with you, there’s no doubt you’ll end up with a whole load of new Facebook fans by the end of the month. And the great thing is this: Most of the strategies in the book can be used over and over again. So when you hit the 3,000 mark, there’s nothing to stop you from going on and gaining more!

If you’re serious about gaining new and responsive Facebook fans, How To Attract 3,000 Facebook Fans In 30 Days could be the book for you. That’s it for now, look out for future Facebook advice we’ve got coming soon. Now you know where to find out how to get Facebook fans, make sure you go and get them.

Since the death of MySpace (It is official, right?) everyone’s been looking for a MySpace replacement. Not only that, but everyone who knows a bit about web design and is into music is trying to create the next big thing. I regularly get emails from people trying to get us to cover their new music website, but most don’t offer enough to make it worth mentioning. A couple of days ago however, I was contacted by a representative from NME, a popular music magazine in the UK. They told me NME had started up a new “online space for budding musicians to showcase their talent” and that I should check it out. While it sounded like any other email I’d get sent about these sites, I decided to check it out due to it having such a large name behind it. Check out the short video below to see what it’s all about and I’ll see you on the other side:

This new site from NME (Well, it’s incorporated into their original site) is called NME Breakthrough. The whole point behind it is for up and coming musicians to showcase their material and get new fans. Although I only signed up yesterday and have been using it for a day and a bit, I’ve already seen enough to know what this site’s all about. Is NME Breakthrough the MySpace replacement everyone’s been waiting for? Unless they give the site a overhaul, make it more user friendly and add more unique features, I doubt it. Is NME Breakthrough worth using? Most defiantly! Let me explain…

Although the site is awkward to navigate (While I thought I was signing up for an artist page I was actually signing up to the NME site. I then had to sign up for an artist page separately afterwards, and when I signed in again later I found it hard to find my artist page to edit it) having a page on the site really does allow for mass exposure. How? Well, every now and then NME features artists on their high traffic home page. And I don’t just mean the NME Breakthrough home page, I mean the NME home page! If you’re one of their featured artists on any given week, expect a flood of profile views and (If you’re good enough) potential fans.

While NME Breakthough is pretty much a standard “showcase your music and get thousands of fans” site, the fact it has the NME name behind it allows room for growth. The main reason I’d recommend signing up to this site is due to the possibility of getting featured on their main site. If it wasn’t for that feature I’d find it hard to recommend this site as it doesn’t offer anything new. The site layouts they give to signed up musicians are quite boring, and it’s all the same stuff you’ll find on other such sites (Stream your music, upload your pictures, show your tour dates etc). While you should still sign up and hope to be a featured artist, I wouldn’t pour buckets of time into this site. Instead, I’d recommend Band Page for Facebook for people looking for a MySpace replacement. You can check our Bandpage Guide and sell your music on Facebook by clicking that link.

If you liked this article, please share it. Thanks.

Today we thought we’d look at some of the best methods of promotion available on a budget. We know many independent musicians don’t have a huge budget, so any type of promotion would ideally need to be cheap or free. They’d also need to be easy to implement and easily integrated with other types of promotion. With that in mind, we’ve come up with some of the best ways to promote your music on a budget. But the best part? All of these types of promotion have been proven to work!

While the following list has many useful ideas, you don’t have to use all of them when it comes to your promotional campaign. You may instead want to focus your efforts on doing a few of them well if you have a limited amount of time or resources. So read on and see what types of promotion are best for you…

Getting Your Music To DJs

Getting your song to radio and event DJs is a must. If a load of DJs are playing your song all over the radio and at events, they’re basically doing a lot of the promotion work for you! It can almost be compared to outsourcing, except you don’t have to pay them.
DJs can be very influential people, and even a couple of plays from a top DJ can mean a big increase in your sales.
Some radio station DJs select their songs from a playlist, so if you manage to get on a big station’s playlist you’ve the chance to earn a lot of money from royalties as well as sells (Which come as a result from people hearing your music on the radio).
Similarly, if a lot of club DJs are playing your song and it gets people moving in the club, there’s a good chance you’ll make sales off the back of that too.

For these reasons, getting your music to DJs this is one of the most important types of promotion you can do. I recommend you all give it a try.

Flyering

Flyering is the process of giving out flyers with your information on them. As you may know, flyers can be an effective but cheap way of getting your message out there. You can give these flyers out on the streets, at events, leave them in record shops to be pick up… The list is endless!
While many of the flyers you give out will end up on the floor, the sheer amount of flyers you give out can mean that even a small percentage of flyers doing there job can mean profit.
Say for example your presses up 5000 flyers for £80. This flyer is promoting a product that sales at £5. That means you’ll need 16 people you give flyers to to read and act on those flyers to cover the cost of pressing them up. That’s not even 0.5%! If then you get 1% of the people you give flyers to to act upon them (1% of 5,000 is 50) that means you’d end up making £250 (50 people spending £5 each).

So, where to get your printing done? Print Carrier is one of our favourite places to get flyers made as they do a quick turn around and are very cheap (Under £80 for 5000 A6 flyers printed on 300g matt coated paper). They also print worldwide. With them you have to supply your own design though, so if you don’t know anyone who can design for you (Or haven’t got the budget to hire a designer) another option is using Vistaprint. On their website you can easily design your own flyer from their given templates then send them to yourself.

Social Networking

Social networking sites are essential for promoting your music. It seems everyone’s on websites such as Facebook and Twitter, so not having your music on there means that you’re missing out on reaching a lot of potential fans. Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites all work differently. That said, they all give you a chance to increase the exposure of your music and get people to know you exists. And if your music’s good enough, they may turn into real buying fans. Social networking should be part of your every day promotional effort, just be sure not to start mixing business with pleasure. It’s easy to get caught up spending too much time on these sites (And therefore not getting to do other equally important things) so make sure you set yourself a certain set amount of time to spend on them.

Online Videos

Youtube has meant that anyone can become a video superstar without the need for a big budget. As long as you have a means to record yourself (Sometime even an Argos camera will do depending on what you want to achieve) you can get your video out there. Even if you don’t have a video camera, you can still make good music videos for Youtube using software called Animoto. This software turns your pictures and audio into professional looking promotional videos, so that’s always an option. The beautiful thing about YouTube is it’s not a place for polished big budget videos (Although there is some of those on there too). Instead it’s a place where anyone with a good idea can showcase their videos and potentially have them go viral.
Once you’ve uploaded your promotional video to Youtube, you can also embed it on other websites (E.G Your personal website, Facebook, MySpace etc). Having your video in more places means there’s the potential for more people to see it, which can only be a good thing for you.

Offline Videos

If you’ve got a bigger budget, you may want to promote yourself using more traditional video methods. Getting your video on TV can reach a wide audience of people, especially if played on the right channel at the right time. Producing these videos is more expensive then making your YouTube promotional videos (They generally need to be of a better quality in order to be accepted onto your targeted channel) but can also be very effective. They’re also good for providing credibility for an artist.

Show Touring

Doing shows is another good way of promoting yourself. During shows you get to interact and meet your fans, and the more people feel involved in your movement the more likely they will buy into you. You’ll also get to sell your music at shows, so not only will you be gaining awareness for your music, you’ll also be selling units.

Radio Touring

Radio touring is when you appear on different radio stations over a set period of time promoting your product. Depending on the format of the shows you do, they may interview you, they may have you down for a talk, they may allow you to perform your music live over the radio, or they may just play your songs while you’re there. With this method of promotion you get exposure to the radio host’s fans and get to turn them into your fans (This will happen if your performance is good enough).

There are of course a lot more types of promotion you could be doing, but these are some of the best types you can do on a budget. I’d suggest adding some of these to your current promotional campaign if you have one going already, otherwise start using them when you get one going.

So what type of promotion have you had success with? Have you used any of the above mentioned methods? Let us know in the comments section below.