5 Tips for Promoting Your Music

How To Promote Yourself Online

1.  Set-up An Email List 

It surprises me how many artists still do not gather emails from their friends. I have talked to many artists who just lead people to their Facebook page for likes, without realizing that they don’t have complete control over who see’s their posts. Email lists are important because it allows you to reach fans directly, and update them on anything that you have going on whether it’s a tour, new album, or your if your just wanting to get feedback. Setting up an email list is easy, you can sign up for Mailchimp which is free for the first 2,000 subscribers. Mailchimp also has an analytics system so you can track the success of different email campaigns that you are running.

2.     Reach out to Bloggers

This is another area that many artists are taking advantage of. In a perfect world, artists would be able to release music and everybody would hear it upon release. Unfortunately things don’t work that way, and you have to promote your music in order for it to get heard. There are literally hundreds of bloggers that are looking for new music. Their readers count on them to expose them to new artists, so they like to find out about new music. Google is your best friend for this! One strategy that I have used to market artists in the past is I think of an artist that has a similar sound to what I’m trying to market and I Google that artist. I reach out to all of the sites that cover that artist, and use a personalized template to ask them to cover the artist. Not every blog is going to cover you and that’s ok. In the beginning, its about getting your music out there for people to hear.

3. Set-up a Facebook Fan Page

Pretty much everybody is on Facebook now, so theres a good chance that a lot of your fans are on there as well. Your Facebook page can be looked at as your own community of fans who have gathered to your page to worship your music. You want to be consistent with posting on the account, so you give people a reason to keep coming back. Also whenever one of your fans likes one of your posts, their friends see it as well. You want as much interaction as possible between you and your fans, so they share your posts with other people resulting in more people hearing about your music. Also other things to take note of, is that the more people react to your posts, the more your posts will reach fans of your page.

4. Manager Twitter Account

Just like Facebook, Twitter is very important in having a 2 way conversation with your fans and getting them to share your content. You never want to have an account that is just automated and shoots out promotional messages all day, you want to utilize the account to interact and encourage sharing. Twitter is also a great way to get feedback from your fans on your music, and run promotions like Tweet to Download among other things.

5. Build A Website

Yes I believe a website is very necessary. Even though you may have a Facebook and Twitter, there are many things that you can do with a website. The website can be where you sell merchandise, run specials for your fans, utilize it to acquire emails, etc. There are so many directions that you can go with your website, but it should be a hub for fans, and give them all the tools they need to share whatever content that you are posting there.

Some tools that I recommend to use for promoting online are Buffer, which helps you to see analytics about what your posting on Twitter and Facebook. It also allows you to schedule posts as well, which comes in handy if you already have a lot on your hands. Google Analytics is important for tracking traffic on your website, and seeing where the traffic is coming from.

In 2013, it’s more important than ever to stand out from the crowd.  Don’t expect to get heard, if you aren’t out there promoting your music.

Billy Bones is the marketing director at BBE Booking Agency, a booking agency specializing in booking entertainment acts worldwide.