This guide is for musicians and producers looking to increase their web presence, and hoping to make money with their music.
(If you want to skip the DIY approach I offer a
promotion package, but I recommend using it and using this guide.)
What follows is a series of steps, tips and tricks you can use in order to increase your fame and status online.
Let's begin.
I use a method I like to call the Domino effect.
A series of sites is set up, each linked to the others to varying degrees. For example,
youtube-reverbnation-soundcloud-amazon-other social sites-facebook-home website-affiliate marketing-merchandise
This is how it works.
You create accounts on each site, and work on building a reputation on each site. This is stacking your dominoes. You keep working at it till one site reaches a point where you get a lot of attention. This is the point when the first domino falls.
All of your sites are connected to varying degrees, so when the first domino falls, traffic will bleed over into your other sites. The domino chain starts.
If things go well you get a chain reaction with each site feeding the others till the traffic pool is exhausted, at which point you have hopefully spread your name and music to a much wider audience and made some money, perhaps a lot of money.
If not you just keep working, resetting the dominoes, till a big enough reaction takes place to complete the chain.
This method is both time consuming, and can be very frustrating. It is not an easy way to success, but it is a way that lends it's self to long lasting success, rather than flash in the pan success.
Here's what I mean.
In marketing you need several things to succeed. Hype, value, social proof and trust. Different markets need greater amounts of different attributes. With music, hype and social proof are the most important and trust has almost no role at all. Value in music is totally subjective, so you can only make the best music you can and work to find an audience that will value your work.
So we have to focus on the two things that are the hardest to manipulate, social proof and hype. In our case we want to cultivate social proof more than hype. Which is to say we want to get people's attention, then get them to do our job by telling their friends about us.
The fast way to success is to find a way to generate a lot of hype, which generally means blowing a wad of cash on a marketing firm, a la Rebecca Black. Luck also plays a big part. It also wont last. Black is already quickly fading away (when I wrote this she was getting ready to release a new song, and was getting next to no attention except as a curio).
My way is slower, but it works more in the social proof arena, then waits for people to create the hype naturally. No way to guarantee success, but it's far more likely to last longer and leave you with a nicer image when it does.
So now that we know that social proof is better than hype, let me define what social proof is a bit more.
People are always far more likely to check something out if a friend suggests they do, that is one form of social proof.
Another is that people seldom will take a chance on something if no one else has. This is the part that makes it a slow method. You have to prove yourself to people the hard way at first. Then, with time, people will start telling their friends about you and word of mouth kicks in.
Ultimately the goal with this method is to find your first super fan(s).
That first person that hears what you do and thinks you are the best fucker ever to make music.
There is no way to really put anything down mathematically, but let's do a hypothetical example.
Let's say you get your first superfan. That person will do things like make a fan page for you, try to get you on Wikipedia, tell everyone they can about you, wear your shirt(s) all the time, etc. Living, breathing, walking and most importantly talking social proof of how bad ass you are.
Let's say that because of their enthusiasm you get a handful of more typical fans, a bunch of casual fans and a lot of people that have at least heard of you. This is Hype in action.
By working on building real social proof we have allowed someone else to start our hype for us, we don't have to tell anyone how great we are, our super fan will do it for us.
The best part of getting that first superfan is that is dramatically increases the odds of getting more superfans. Each working to spread you within their own sphere of influence just because they like you. That is the kind of hype money can't buy, mainly because it rarely comes with the backlash associated with the IN YOUR FACE money based hype most people use to get famous these days.
Now you may say to yourself, "I'm doing all this stuff anyway, sure, knowing the psychology helps me some, but I haven't really learned much new here." Well, the question isn't whether or not you are using these sites, you're a fool if you aren't, the question is... are you doing it with any kind of plan? It's hard to make money with just your music, that's why I have other things going on. It's hard just getting attention online if you don't know what you're doing, and don't have a plan.
The first thing you need to do is build up your domino chain. Starting with a home site. I use cheap hosting and a free forum script, Simple Machines Forums. Wordpress and other web 2.0 blog and multi-platform content management systems like drupel also work well.
I'm not going to go into how to set up a site here. I have a complete wordpress set up guide in both my kindle book, and in the members area here. And yes, if you want more specific training you do need to sign up for the membership or buy the book, I would prefer you signed up for the membership because then I can help you directly with questions and concerns.
The artists subscription is for 10$ every 3 months where I will be teaching a lot more about promotion. I already have over 25 posts in the artists promotion section you can read through. Roughly 5 years of experience boiled down to what I know works. To get the membership sign up with the site and subscribe with paypal in the profile area under actions.
If you want some proof, just do a search for "mulab dubstep production" on google. It's not a big market, but I have the top 5 spots on that Google search and I did it in less than a week. If you put in mulab dubstep I have 2 spots on the front page of search results. The best way to find good search words is only one thing you can learn here.
You can even use this forum to promote yourself, as long as you aren't a pain in the ass about it. You can also send me a PM about getting your own board on this forum. If I like your work, and you are willing to put work into promoting yourself on this forum, I will set you up with a board.
