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!

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.

Either join our mailing list here (Recommended as you get a free ebook as well), subscribe to our RSS feed by clicking the icon below, or enter your email address to be email each new post.

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

Other How To Make A Mixtape Parts

1. How To Make A Mixtape, The Ultimate Guide Part One, and
2. How To Make A Mixtape, The Ultimate Guide Part Two.

If you’ve already read those How To Make A Mixtape guides, we can move forward…

Pricing Your Mixtape

When it comes to pricing your mixtape, it’s often good to think about what the purpose of the mixtape is. Do you want to use the mixtape as a way or promoting yourself as much as possible, or are your goals more profit related?

If mass exposure if your main aim, you may want to give out your mixtape for free, or in a no cost exchange (E.G In exchange for an email address, or for a certain amount of promotion to be done by the fan). This type of pricing strategy can help get your music quite widely spread with the right promotion, but also runs the risk of being seen as a lower quality product (As it was free to obtain).

If making profit is your main aim, you will of course want to sell your mixtape. When pricing it you could go one of two routes:

1. You can price it on par with other mixtapes within the genre. This’ll subconsciously give the impression it’s worthy of buying as it’s similarly priced as all the other CDs. You will of course need to back this up with a good product if you want people to choose your CD over the many others on display however.
2. You could under cut the market. The aim here is to make it cheaper then the other CDs available, so people with less cash flow that want a CD will be more inclined to buy your CD over others. Once again, you run the risk of being seen as cheap (In a bad way) and therefore not of a good quality, but with the right marketing you can over come this.

A good strategy I’ve found is to do a mixture of both. You can release a short promo CD for free, then release a bigger paid one soon after. The smaller CD will hopefully get your name out there, then if people like what they hear they will go on to buy your full CD.

When it comes to pricing your mixtape, you also have to think about where you’re selling them. Mixtapes often sell at similar prices to albums in high street stores, but a bit cheaper in underground record shops. If you’re selling them on the streets you can expect to sell them for a fraction of the price, sometimes as low as what you’d get from a sale or return or distribution deal.

Releasing Your Mixtape

The next thing we’re going to look at is releasing your mixtape. There’s no point learning how to make a mixtape if you don’t ever release it, your mixtape will do no good in your bedroom collecting dust! Firstly let me say there is no one correct way of releasing your mixtape. The strategy of releasing a successful mixtape will vary depending on what you want to achieve for this mixtape and what music genre you make music in. There are some general tip that can be used for any type of mixtape however, so today we will look at those.

The first thing you need to think about is what format you want to release your mixtape in. Are you going to press it up and put it out as a physical product? Or are you going to keep it as a digital download only? Physical products have the benefit of making you look more like a serious musician, and give the chance for people who don’t like buying online a chance to get your product. A digital download however can save you money in the sense you don’t have to pay to press up your music to CD. It’s also cheap and easy to have your digital downloads distributed to big sites worldwide using sites like Songcast, so is worth doing even if you do press up a physical copy (Songcast is free to sign up to and will get your music on iTunes, Amazon and other online music stores).

If you’re giving away your mixtape for free I’ll advice you only release a digital download copy. While there may sometimes be reasons to press up copies of a free mixtape (If you want to give some to important industry figures to make a good impression, or you want some freebies for a show etc) you should generally make your fans go to your website and sign up to your mailing list in exchange for any freebies.
So now you know what format you’re going to release your mixtape in, now is the time to get your music to the general public. If you opted to release your mixtape as a physical product, your best bet would be to go through a distribution company. For a cut of the money you make, a distribution company can get your mixtape into shops you wouldn’t otherwise be able to get them into. This includes both physical and online music shops, and good ones can even get your music distributed worldwide. A typical distributor will take at least £ / $1 for each CD they sell for you, and while this many vary, the price is often worth the service they provide. Another benefit of using a distributor is that they can often collect your money from record shops as soon as the record shop have agreed to stock your CD. That means you won’t have to wait till your CDs are sold to customers to be paid.

While not all music distribution companies operate the same, many distributors that deal directly with independent musicians work like this:

• Once you have your product, you bring a set amount of pressed up CDs to your distributor.
• You agree a price that you want for each CD.
• The distributor then shows your music to shops and tries to get them to take them in. If the shop chooses to sell your product, the distributor receives money for the product.
• The distributor sells to as many shops as they can in a set period of time. Once the time limit is up they pay you for any CDs they sold, and give you back the ones that didn’t sell.
• If all CDs are sold they may ask you for more copies if there’s demand from the shops.

The other way to get your music into shops is via ‘sale or return’ deals. This is where you give your mixtapes to record shops, they sell however many of your CDs they can in a set period, then pay your for any CDs they sold in that time. Any CDs they didn’t sell they give back to you. Check out our previous topic What Is A Sale Or Return Deal (SOR) And How To Get One for more info on how to get SOR and distributor deals.

How To Promote Your Mixtape

So no you know how to make a mixtape and you’ve got it in shops, there next stage is to promote it. It’s no good having your mixtape in the shops if no one knows it there. Without the knowledge of it’s existence, no one’s going to buy it. It may sound obvious, but I’ve seen too many musicians put months into making a mixtape, get it into shops, cross their fingers and hope it sells. This is not an effective business strategy, and not one I’d recommend to anyone.

There are many ways to promote your mixtape, but often thinking out the box can do wonders your your marketing efforts (We already talked about making your mixtape stand out in part two of this guide). On top of that you should look into doing all the tried and tested marketing methods:

• Live or pre recorded TV or radio shows,
• Performing at live events,
• Getting your music to radio and venue Djs to play,
• Video promotion if you have the budget,
• Magazine adverts,
• Online promotion (Social media, on your own website, call in favours on other websites etc), and
• Flyers (These can be handed out at venues or left places for people to pick up) and other paper based promotion.

I’d suggest you pick a few of these to do rather then attempt all of them. Unless you’ve got a big team and / or budget behind you, it’d probably be best to focus on doing a few of these methods very well.

You should focus most of your promotional efforts pre-launch to raise awareness of your product and build up a want for it, as well as when it’s actually released to make people go out and purchase it. This is the period you’ll get most of your sales, so make as big a noise as you can during this time. The more people talking about it before and during its launch, the more sales you will make.

Having said that, promotion for your mixtape should never stop. Even when initial sales slow down you should at least have adverts for your mixtape on your website, and be promoting it on any radio and TV shows you do. Remember, not every one will have caught your initial launch, so giving new fans a chance to discover your mixtape can mean more sales.

How To Make A Mixtape Conclusion

That’s it for our “How To Make a Mixtape” series, you should no longer be wondering how to make a mixtape, but instead be out there making one instead! I hope you’ve found it useful, please leave any comments or feedback below in the comments section. If you’re currently in the process of making a mixtape, please let us know how it’s going. Similarly if you’ve already released a mixtape and have any advice for our readers let us know. Please share this guide with friends, if any of them want to know how to make a mixtape then forward them this link.

If you haven’t read them already, you can catch our previous posts with more tips on how to make a mixtape below:

How To Make A Mixtape, The Ultimate Guide Part 1,

How To Make A Mixtape, The Ultimate Guide Part 2.

I hope we’ve answered all your how to make a mixtape related questions, good luck with making yours.

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.