Musician Resources and Band Promotion Ideas
I recently came across another site like this which also tackles the topic of band promotion and does a good job at it too! Check out http://musicpromote.wordpress
You’ll find tons more information on things like using Youtube to promote your band, more about search engine optimization as well as much more. I think both sites compliment each other nicely and it’s definitely worth looking at.
Have you set up your Facebook Flyers yet?I mentioned in the last post that I would be continuing on with this topic. Well, there are a few other things in Facebook that you can use to promote your band.
Groups — Every band that has members in Facebook should defintely have a group set up for their band. A Facebook group is basically just a page in Facebook that allows people to join up for. It also features a place to share pictures, discuss and post messages about your band. One of the greatest benefits to having a group and getting a lot of members in that group is that you will have a link to your group from every members profile. The more members you have the more links to your group will be out there. It’s kind of an exponential thing because as you gain more members, more follow because they are seeing the group’s link on their friend’s profiles.
Applications — This one is not so obvious but can also be a great tool, however, it does need a geeky member of the band to be able to pull off because you’ll need to know how to code the app. If you are willing to learn how to code it though, it’s not too hard — I taught myself in a weekend to do a simple app. You don’t really need anything too fancy either. For example, you can have apps that will play one of your songs, syndicate your band’s blog (does your band have a blog? It should!), whatever. You’ll need to get a little creative here but just remember that once you launch it there is the potential for it to go out to tons of people because people love to send their friends new apps that they think are cool.
Events - Events allow you to post an event and then send out invitations to all your friends. This is great if you are working on promoting a show because you can send out the invite and then it gets spread virally to your friend’s friends. Every show you have should be promoted with one of these.
Now if you’ll notice, there is a trend with all three of these things — it’s called viral marketing. You put something out there and send it to your friends, then they send it to their friends and so on and so on. You’ll have more fans fater that you can blink if you do it right!
Recently I came across a blog post that talks about using Facebook as a marketing tool for your band. I agree with some of what the blog post says, but there are also some things that they mention that didn’t work. The thing is, I believe that with a bit more creativity, Facebook works very well.
If you read the post, you’ll notice something about the band sending out 30,000 flyers and that these didn’t get much for results. My guess, and this is only a guess so I could be wrong, is that they choose the wrong type of flyer. These 30,000 flyers could have been seen by anyone on Facebook — especially people who are not interested.
Not sure what I am talking about? Facebook has a cool and very affordable application called Facebook Flyers. This allows you to put advertisements on the sidebar of people’s profiles — this can result in HUGE traffic for a relatively cheap price. Now, the main important thing to note is that there are two types of Facebook flyers (regular and Pro). Always pick Pro! Flyers Pro allows you to pick which profiles your ad will appear on. For example, you can target profiles of only certain ages and are interested in certain thing. So, if you are in a psychobilly emo hardcore goth band, you can only target people who are into that music. And if you are promoting a show in New York, you can only target the people in New York that are into that type of music. It is extremely powerful and can get you extremely targetted traffic to your site. Targetted traffic is key here.
Tune into my next post and I’ll get more into Facebook band promotion….
I was just surfing around the internet and found this excellent list of music promotion tips. It’s huge! Check it out at http://hypebot.typepad.com/hypebot/2007/10/100-free-affo-1.html
Check out the rest of the blog too if you are interested in the music business.
When you are using you band’s website to promote your music you should always be thinking of ways to get your visitors to keep coming back. Here’s the problem with this though — how do you know what attracts each visitor to come back to your site?
The problem is, it could be different reasons for different people. One person might like a specific video you have o your band playing out at a show, another might just like looking at your pictures, the list goes on. It’s pretty much impossible to suit everyone’s needs in this aspect.
This is where your website stats comes in. I’m not going to get into how to read and analyse your stats because there are so many stat packages out there, but I will say that you can use any of them to check out which pages are being looked at the most. From there all you have to do is cater to the ones with the most traffic. So, if your photo gallery pages are getting the majority of the traffic, add more pictures and update that section more!
Sure, you might not be making everyone happy but you are at least making the majority of your visitors happy.
Another excellent way to bring your visitors back is to encourage participation. Add a forum to your site to discuss your music. If you are using a blog for your band’s site, make sure they can comment on your posts.
When you take a little time and think about who is visiting your site and checking out your music, you will find that you can gain a lot of knowledge about your visitors and cater to make them happy. If they are happy….they will make you happy too!