Twitter Roadmap For Musicians

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

I had a couple of previous posts introducing you to Twitter and why you should use it.

Ariel Hyatt at Cyber PR has a Musicians Twitter Roadmap blogpost which should help give you some direction as to how artists can effectively start using Twitter.

For the record, you can start following myself at http://twitter.com/chrisyong.

—
Discover More About Music, Websites & Marketing
FREE Book Offer: Make Real Money On The Internet by Stephen Pierce

Book Review: Music Success In Nine Weeks by Ariel Hyatt

I found this ‘Music Success In Nine Weeks‘ to be quite an informative and valuable read.

The author Ariel Hyatt runs her own business Cyber PR that specialises in providing online PR services for independent artists so she knows a thing or two about promoting an artist online.

Each ‘week’ in this book really is an aspect that you should look into and incorporate as part of your overall online promotion and marketing strategy as an artist.

The first week is about getting you to think why you are an artist and about setting tangible goals for you to always aim for and hit.

The second week gets you to think about and craft your elevator pitch for your music. This was one of the most insightful sections of the book for me as most musicians always struggle to convincingly answer the question “So what does your music sound like?”

You need to be able to concisely describe what you do to someone who may never have heard you before, make it sound compelling and pique interest.

Week three is about optimising your website so it is actually useful and not just a pointless use of webspace ie. capturing the details of visitors

In week four, Ariel explains four web 2.0 resources that finds invaluable for cyber promotion.

Week five is about how to effectively use your mailing list that you should be building and encourages the use of a regular newsletter rather than random email every once in a while.

In Week six, we learn of some effective methods to help build your mailing list.

Week seven is about other creative ways you can get people onto mailing list through some offline methods.

Now week eight was a very informative section for myself too. Most of the time, we think the only things we can sell are cds and tickets to live shows to our fans. This section is about expanding the products you can potentially sell to boost your income as an artist, where you provide various products and services of higher increasing value to your fans.

Last but not least, week nine contains some valuable tips on traditional PR, how to create a good press kit and how to format a proper press release. Ariel also provides tips on how to be your own publicist.

There is a lot of useful content in this book targeted towards the musician who wishes to take control of their promotional activities specialising in online methods.

Yet another useful resource for the artist that wishes to take control of their own music career and not have to rely on a record label to pick them up and do everything for them!

—
Discover More About Music, Websites & Marketing
FREE Book Offer: Make Real Money On The Internet by Stephen Pierce

How to Make a Living as a Full-Time Indie Musician cont.

Carrying on from my last post, I found this great post on the Ariel Publicity blog where successful indie artist John Taglieri’s philosophy on being an indie musician was summarised.

Read more about ‘How to Make a Living as a Full-Time Indie Musician’ at Ariel Publicity (The Original Cyber PR Blog).

—
Discover More About Music, Websites & Marketing
FREE Book Offer: Make Real Money On The Internet by Stephen Pierce

How to Make a Living as a Full-Time Indie Musician

I’ve been listening a lot recently to this audio download titled “How to Make a Living as a Full-Time Indie Musician”.

Music marketing author Bob Baker interviewed indie successful artist John Taglieri and picked his brains on how John took control of his indie music career, what steps he took and how he has been able to give up the day job to focus on music full-time.

There are were many similarities discussed which parallel building a good business, things like

They discuss the pro’s and con’s of the indie music path versus the major music path. John describes a major label record deal as a bad car loan and he explains why.

They discuss plenty more insightful topics including using Myspace, publicity and building a fan base.

You can learn more about it on Bob Baker’s website.

—
Discover More About Music, Websites & Marketing
FREE Book Offer: Make Real Money On The Internet by Stephen Pierce

Music Marketing Your Band Using Google

You should always be building a mail list of people interested in your music.

In Using Google as a Marketing Tool, Bob Baker shares a couple of ideas how you can use Google’s services to help promote your band and they’re totally free!

—
Discover More About Music, Websites & Marketing
FREE Book Offer: Make Real Money On The Internet by Stephen Pierce

Have You Sorted Out Your Band Press Kit?

A really valuable tip I picked from the music marketing workshop I attended the other week was the need to have a press kit available 24/7.

You should have both an online and offline version available for press, promoters, booking agents, etc.

The press kit would include things like:

By having both an online and offline version, if you don’t happen to have any physical press kits on hand for whatever reason to give to someone, you can direct them to your website where they can get all the necessary information they require.

Your website is available 24/7 so put it to work!

Keep your bio concise
Also try and keep all your information current and concise, a bio that’s 10 pages won’t get read. Trim the fluff and just present the most compelling facts you can.

Image thumbnails
When you upload hi-res press pictures, make sure you create thumbnail images for people to preview.

EPK (Electronic Press Kit)
It’s worth the little effort needed to create a 2 or 3 minute video where you can present what the band is all about.

Anything that can help make life easier for the person seeking information on you is a plus and a video can present a bit of personality that won’t come across on a written bio.

—
Discover More About Music, Websites & Marketing
FREE Book Offer: Make Real Money On The Internet by Stephen Pierce

Do You Have A Music Marketing Funnel?

A marketing funnel is a systematic process which people go through in order for you to establish who is seriously into what you or your band does.

The marketing funnel looks like this:
Suspect -> Prospect -> Customer -> Life Long Customer

The Suspect (Unknown interest)
With a marketing funnel, everyone is a suspect until they raise their hand and express an interest in what you do. You can’t be sure who is interested in what your band does until they give you a sign they are interested.

You can’t convince someone to like your music if they don’t, you just want to sort through and find the people who are interested.

The Prospect (Known interest)
As soon as someone indicates they are interested in what you do, they move on and become a prospect. This can be indicated by someone joining your mailing list or becoming friends on Myspace for example.

They have now qualified themselves as someone you should establish more contact with. The point now is to see if they are interested enough to move on and buy your music to become a fan or customer.

The Customer (Fan)
These are the guys and girls who have proven they like you enough to spend money on you. Treat them well and look after them as these are the people who most likely to spend more money with your band buying more music, merchandise, tickets to shows, etc.

The Life Long Customer (Raving fan)
These are the hardcore fans who will back you no matter what. They eat, live, breathe and believe in what you do to the very ends of the earth.

These are the people who are keen to help spread the message about your band, join your street team and want to help promote you. They will support and buy almost anything you do.

Why is a marketing funnel important?
It gives you a way for figuring out who is at what stage and how that can benefit you as an artist. As people move through the different stages, the numbers become less and less but their value to you becomes more and more.

A hundred raving fans will benefit you in so many more ways than a thousand interested prospects. What you need to do is nurture your relationships with people and figure out who is who.

—
Discover More About Music, Websites & Marketing
FREE Book Offer: Make Real Money On The Internet by Stephen Pierce

No video, no problem for artists on YouTube!

Check out this article from the NZ Herald newspaper where Ludacris’ manager used Youtube to create buzz for an upcoming CD release.

He even comments how Youtube is now a viable marketing tool!

—
Discover More About Music, Websites & Marketing
FREE Book Offer: Make Real Money On The Internet by Stephen Pierce

Band Promotion Tip - Always Build Up A Mailing List

The first and most important suggestion I can give to help you promote your band online is to collect names and email addresses of anyone remotely interested in your band, both from online and off line sources.

I’m not talking about collecting random email addresses either and spamming them!

Build up your mailing list
What you want to do is collect people who willingly wish to hear from you by way of them signing up or opting into your mailing list or band newsletter.

You can then stay in touch and communicate with them, letting them know what you’re up to and continuously promote your music to them.

If they don’t dig what you do, they can easily unsubscribe which is a good thing as you only want interested people on your mailing list.

Why build a list?
Simply because unless they are extremely motivated, they could see you live for the first time or bump into something online, think it was kind of cool but then completely forget about you.

Without a mailing list, you have no way of communicating directly to the very people that are interested in you.

Mailing List Software
PHPList is great, open source, newsletter software and best of all, it’s FREE.
Aweber is a powerful autoresponder service that works on a monthly subscription.

With PHPList, you install it on your web server and send out messages whenever you like.

Aweber differs in that you can write a predetermined sequence of messages which will begin to be sent out when someone signs into your mailing list. This is really handy if you wish each new mailing list member to receive messages that perhaps explain more about your band, your history, anything really.

Both allow you to send personalised messages so instead of them saying just ‘Hey’ or ‘Hey everyone’, you can say ‘Hey John’.

It makes it seem like you’ve personally sent your message to him which is much nicer than just broadcasting a group email.

—
Discover More About Music, Websites & Marketing
FREE Book Offer: Make Real Money On The Internet by Stephen Pierce

101 Resources For Band Promotion And Music Marketing

Here is a huge list of resources that can help you expand your reach on the internet and reach world domination!

You get links to help with the following:

  1. Where To Sell Your Music
  2. Where To Get a Band Review or Interview
  3. Where To Break News - Do a Press Release
  4. Join Forums & Post
  5. Where To Create a Blog + Comment & Ping
  6. Where To Get Links To Your Website
  7. Where To Post Your Gig Dates
  8. Get Your Music on Internet Radio
  9. Create a Profile to Promote Your Music
  10. Essential Resources
  11. Marketing Music - Resources

Check out 101 Resources for Music Marketing.

—
Discover More About Music, Websites & Marketing
FREE Book Offer: Make Real Money On The Internet by Stephen Pierce

Next Page →