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How to Grow Your Fanbase and Promote Your Music

Let’s talk about music promotion. Believe it or not, it’s not just about selling your music and getting fans out to gigs. You also need to think long-term, and take action to grow your fanbase and get your music in front of a new, ever-expanding audience. Afer all, obscurity is the enemy!

By constantly thinking about fanbase growth as part of your music promotion efforts, you’re setting yourself to get bigger opportunities and scale up your success! Each new album release should be more successful than the last because you’ve gotten more exposure and more recognition.

So how do you actually grow your fanbase in a reliable and predictable way (without waiting around for “organic growth”)? Here are some ideas you can start using immediately to build an audience for your music.

Use these social media post ideas immediately to promote your music:

1. Live Music Promotion

With everything moving more and more towards digital, it’s easy to forget about the value of that person-to-person interaction. After all, these days you can create great quality music, release it, distribute it, promote it, and even play live (via online streams like Facebook Live) without ever leaving your room.

But, just because you can release something entirely online doesn’t mean you should! In fact, these personal interactions are still extremely important in the music industry. And live performances are still the best way to grow your fanbase IF you go into it with a strategy.

Now typically when we think about gigging the thought of big, headlining gigs comes to mind. But while headlining gigs and tours are great and can be excellent ways to make money, they’re not the best option for growing your fanbase.

Think about it like this… If you’re playing a gig on your own, most of the audience will be people who are already fans of your music. Very few people just go out and buy concert tickets for bands they’re not familiar with. Sure, you might get one or two people who got dragged along by their friends. But for the most part, it’s going to be the same faces in the crowd.

Now, if you do co-headlining and collaborative gigs, everything changes! When you gig with another band, you’re both bringing your respective audiences to the show. That means a good chunk of the audience may not be familiar with your music yet. Fresh potential fans!

The more musicians you gig with, the more potential fans you’ll be getting your music in front of. So try putting together lineups of 2, 3 or even 4 bands if you can.

The key for this strategy to work is to gig with bands who play in a similar or compatible genre to you. You want to find band who’s fans are likely to like your music.

Continuing on the same thread, you could also use gigs to grow a fanbase in new cities, states, or countries. Work with a local established band and propose a headline swap. You’ll open for them in their home town and they’ll open for you in your home town. Just make sure you pick a band with a similar musical style. Do this a few times and eventually you’ll be able to do your own headlining show. This is just one of the strategies you can use to promote and market your music.

2. Collaborate with Other Musicians to Grow Your Fanbase

Collaboration is an often overlooked way to grow your fanbase and promote your music. But as we just saw, it’s a great way to get your music in front of a new group of people and grow your fanbase exponentially. You can collaborate on pretty much anything. Just make sure you collaborate with musicians whose fans would appreciate your music.

Of course, the collaborative gig strategy we just looked at is a great option. But let’s talk about some things you can do online as well.

Obviously, you could also work together on a song or album. Try recording a cover song or two together and release them on your YouTube channels or Facebook pages. The key is to drive your fans to each other. If you create a song or video, link to each other’s website and social channels.

An even more easy-mode option is to just agree to give each other shout-outs on social media. Share each other’s newest track and tell your fans how much you dig it. (Obviously work with artists whose music you actually do dig.) The power of a recommendation is one of the best marketing tools out there.

So why does this work so well? As a musician, your fans trust your music recommendations. And if you were to recommend or work with another musician, your fans are much more likely to give them a chance than if they just happened upon a Spotify ad. To your fans, you are a trusted source. It works exactly the same when a band recommends your music. This is targeted exposure at it’s best and is one of the key strategies you can use to promote and market your music!

3. Reach out to Music Blogs

Music blogs are a great way to reach out to new audiences and get new fans. Bloggers are always looking for fresh, new content, and the cool thing is, there are a ton of smaller blogs that are totally within your reach as an indie artist.

Blogs also tend to have a pretty niche following. This means that if your music is run on a blog, it’s guaranteed to be seen by people who already like the genre!

Do some research, find blogs that cover your type of music, and send personal emails out to the bloggers. Are there any interesting stories about your new album, song, or tour? Having a unique story will definitely help you stand out from the thousands of other musicians releasing an album. Make it as easy as possible for them to cover your story and treat them like people. Remember, it’s all about establishing a relationship.

You can also harness a similar strategy with Spotify playlists to get more fans.

Conclusion: How to Grow Your Fanbase

Now that you have some fanbase growth strategies, check out this free article and this FREE EBOOK for more tips to promote your music and sell more music, merch, and tickets.

The New Artist Model is an online music business school for independent musicians, performers, recording artists, producers, managers and songwriters. Our classes teach essential music business and marketing skills that will take you from creativity to commerce while maximizing your chances for success.

Check out the Music Business Accelerator (MBA) a new program that will help you plan your music projects, promote your music and create a sustainable career.

We also have a suite of marketing courses to choose from, including How to Build Your Audience with Cover Songs, Music Marketing 101 and the Promote and Market Your Music Super Pack.

August 6, 2019/2 Comments/by newartistmodel

Music Marketing

5 Ways to Keep Your Email Subscribers Engaged Without Spamming Them

Your email list is one of your most valuable assets when it comes to marketing your music. So it’s important to get email marketing right and keep your fans engaged.

If you go months without sending anything to your email subscribers, they’ll soon forget who you are. When you finally send them something, they’ll then unsubscribe since they may not remember ever signing up.

Because of this, in order to maintain a top-of-mind position among your email subscribers, it’s important to engage them often.

So, how do you keep your email subscribers engaged without spamming them?

Here are 5 ideas you can make use of.

1. Release Music or Videos More Frequently

It’s likely that your fans signed up for your email list to hear about new music releases. Why make them wait?

When making full-length albums, artists often only have time for maybeone release every year – and that’s if they’re not on tour.

Depending on a number of factors, like your genre and audience, more frequent releases of singles might be a better alternative to the more traditional EP and album method of releasing music.

If you want to release music more frequently, then the recording costs can get expensive – especially if you need to spend time in the studio. Because of this, it might be a good idea to invest in some recording software, and learn how to efficiently record your music.

If you aren’t an expert mixing and mastering engineer, you can outsource these tasks to a service that does online mixing and mastering after tracking your instruments and vocals at home.

If you release a song every week, every 2 weeks, or every month, your email list subscribers will get used to it and eagerly anticipate your emails.

Use these email templates to promote your music:

2. Tour Regularly

If you want to stick to the traditional release structure of EPs and albums, touring more frequently would be a great way to keep your email subscribers engaged.

While it’s harder to maintain a steady tour pattern than it is to release music on a regular basis, maintaining some level of consistency in your tour schedule can give your email list subscribers something to look forward to – assuming they’re in a city you can play a show in.

The downside to touring too often is that it can be tough on your band members. It can also lead to decreased demand for your shows, and will likely result in the need for you to spend more time practicing your instrument.

So if you choose to tour more often as a way to keep your email subscribers engaged, make sure you tour effectively.

3. Make Sure Your Emails Match Your Opt-in form

When creating your opt-in form, it’s common practice to convince people to subscribe by offering something in return – like a free download of a song.

This is great! But in addition to using this as your call to action, you want to make it clear that they’ll also receive updates on music releases, merchandise promotions, tour dates, and anything else you plan on sending them.

If you start sending them things that they didn’t sign up for, it’s more likely that they’ll view this material as spam, and will unsubscribe. Make what you plan on sending out very clear from the beginning.

By setting clear expectations early on, your subscribers will be more willing to engage with your promotional emails.

4. Send Your Email Subscribers Playlist Updates

Playlists are the new radio. And on music streaming services like Spotify, you have the power to create and promote your own playlist, and maintaining a solid playlist within your genre can be a great way to keep your email subscribers engaged.

Simply create a playlist on the streaming service of your choice, and update it at whatever frequency you find necessary to keep your fans engaged. This might be every week, every 2 weeks, or every month. It depends on your specific fanbase.

While Spotify is popular among musicians, keep in mind that not everyone uses Spotify. (Apple Music reportedly has more subscribers than Spotify in the United States) So it might be a good idea to create the playlist on a streaming platform that doesn’t require signup – like SoundCloud or YouTube – to give your subscribers an alternate option to stream it. If a subscriber, doesn’t use Spotify, and you continue to send them Spotify related emails, your emails will quickly become irrelevant to them and they’ll unsubscribe.

You can also re-create the playlist on multiple streaming services so your fans can choose where to listen.

Each time you update the playlist, send a link to it to your email subscribers. After all, they did subscribe to your email list because they want to hear about new music, right?

5. Allow Responses, but Don’t Encourage Them

Two-way communication is a powerful relationship building tool, so letting your email subscribers respond to your emails can build a strong connection between you and your fans – especially if you actually get back to them.

The reason you don’t want to encourage this, however, is because the bigger you get, the harder this will be to manage.

If you’re getting 1 or 2 emails a day from fans, it’s easy to keep them happy by responding. But once you start getting hundreds of emails each day, responding will become impossible.

Because of this, while you should allow for replies and do your best to communicate directly with your fans, it’s important to reduce the number of incoming emails if it’s likely to become a problem.

Here’s are some ways you can do that:

Include an FAQ page on your website for questions about merch orders and music downloads.
Try and have them interact with you on social media instead to increase engagement on your pages. This way, other fans can see the interaction and your posts will have more reach.
Try and write emails that don’t stimulate questions. If you send out a merch offer, for example, make it very simple.

Conclusion – Keep Your Email Subscribers Engaged

Keeping your email list engaged is key to being able to sell to them. However, if they only get sales-based emails from you, they won’t see much value in your emails and may view them as spam. Do your best to maintain value in your email exchanges with your subscribers, and you’ll be able to maintain high levels of engagement, which will ultimately lead to more sales of music, merchandise, and event tickets.

If you need more email tips, here’s what I recommend:

Guest post by Nicholas Rubright

August 19, 2018/by newartistmodel

Music Industry

How to Use Facebook Live to Promote Your Music

You’ve no doubt seen that little “Live” button on Facebook. Maybe you’ve even joined a Facebook Live video or seen other bands using Facebook Live. Right now, live video (on any platform) is one of the most powerful tools available to you and it presents an incredible and unprecedented opportunity to connect with your audience, create some great content they will love, and even make good income. In other words, live videos are a promote your music powerhouse that will let you grow your fanbase and connect with your fans on a whole new level.

So today, I’m going to walk you through how to use Facebook live as a tool to connect with your fans, grow your fanbase, promote your music, and make some income.

Why Use Facebook Live?

It can feel like new social media features are popping up every other day, so why should you dedicate time to Facebook Live?

As you probably know, Facebook uses an algorithm to determine what shows up in everyone’s newsfeeds. And those algorithms make it notoriously difficult to get posts on your artist or band page noticed. But right now, Facebook is giving live videos a lot of priority. In other words, Facebook live videos are more likely to show up in your fans’ and followers’ newsfeeds. And we could all use a little more exposure for our music 🙂

Facebook Live videos > Uploaded videos > Shared YouTube videos

As far as video content goes, Facebook Live videos get priority over videos uploaded onto the platform, and uploaded videos get priority over YouTube videos. And in most cases, video content in general will get more engagement than text or image posts. That means live videos are at the top of the engagement pyramid.

There are a ton of reports out there pointing to the higher engagement and audience retention rate of live videos as well. Typically, Facebook live videos have a higher average watch time than uploaded videos and they get three times the engagement.

And finally, any kind of live video lets you engage and connect with your audience and fanbase on a deeper level. While a lot of social media channels can still feel pretty impersonal, in a Facebook Live you’re talking directly to your fans and responding to them individually by name (more on that later), and that is an incredible opportunity.

Try these social media post ideas on Facebook:

How to Use Facebook Live: What You Need

There’s not many prerequisites for doing awesome Facebook Lives. A phone and a good internet connection is about all it takes. But there are a few things you may want to add on to your live set up to up the quality.

Especially for musicians, audio quality is really important. So it may be worth your while to invest in an external mic for your phone. This doesn’t have to be anything crazy high-end, but the little boost in audio quality will only make your performances better.
There’s nothing worse than your phone falling over in the middle of the best part of the song you’re playing… So a phone tripod or mount is another fairly inexpensive way to up the quality of your Facebook Live. You can get decent tripods or mounts for less than twenty bucks on Amazon, so there’s no real excuse for shaky video.
And finally you need a space that has decent lighting and a quiet, distraction-free environment. Any old well-lit room will probably serve your purpose, but you can also find inexpensive lights online if you feel like your space isn’t up to your standards.

Once you have that, all you need to do is go into Facebook and choose the “Live Video” option. From there you’ll be able to set your privacy settings and create a post description. This will show up in your fans newsfeeds so tell them what’s going on and why it’s gonna be awesome. Press the “Go Live” button and your fans will start coming in!

Live Video Ideas Your Fans Will Love

Live videos are a great form of content marketing. It’s a way to engage with your fans while also promoting your music in a way that just feels fun. There’s a lot you can do with a live platform, so let’s go through a few ideas.

With anything, your best bet is to try out a few things and gauge your fans’ reaction. What kind of lives do they get really excited about? Which lives get the highest attendance? Which get the most engagement?

You can find all of this in your Facebook analytics. To access them, just click on your “Insights” tab. There you’ll be able to see all kinds of stats that will help you make decisions about your live videos. Pay close attention to the “Average watch time.” Ultimately you want your fans to stick around on your lives as long as possible, so experiment and see what you can do to get this number up. You should also look at “Peak live viewers.” If you click through you’ll be able to see how many people were watching at what time. Pay close attention to any large drop offs and try to improve to keep people watching.

Okay, now onto the live ideas!

Small Performance

One of the most natural options for musicians is to simply do intimate performances with just you, your instrument, and your phone. This is a great option for singer-songwriters, but it can work for bands as well – take turns giving each member a chance to do a solo live.

The key to these small performances is to go back and forth between performing and chatting with your fans. This direct engagement is what will keep them hanging around and what elevates a live video from a YouTube video.

Band Jam or Practice

Next, you can turn your band’s jams or rehearsals into a Facebook live video. This gives fans a little look into what goes on behind the scenes in band life. Plus it doesn’t take much effort on your part – you’re already rehearsing, so why not just set up a phone and stream it? These are a little less personal than the one-on-one concerts we talked about earlier, but you can still take breaks and chat with your fans from time to time.

Stream Gigs

This is probably the least personable option. I’d recommend only streaming gigs from time to time – you want fans to actually come out to gigs, not just watch them on their phones, right? With these lives, its best to recruit a friend to be your live camera-man instead of just setting your phone up on a tripod. This can make the experience more engaging and interactive.

Announcements

If you have a really important announcement that you want your fans to know about, make the announcement in a live video to take advantage of the priority they get in Facebook’s algorithm! This way, you can be sure more fans actually see the post. As a bonus, give your live viewers early access or a special discount.

Q&A’s

The music is great, but it’s important to connect with your fans on a human level as well, so try putting down the instrument and just chatting with your fans. Let your audience submit questions beforehand and take some questions live as well. Some bands will get in a schedule where they do a Q&A ever month so fans know what to expect.

Vlogs

Another cool idea is to take your fans behind the scenes with live videos. Maybe bring them live into the studio, or backstage as you prepare for a gig. Talk them through what you’re doing, tell them a funny story that just happened, show them something cool behind the scenes, or give them a sneak peek at something you’re working on.

Facebook Live for Musicians: Best Practices

Okay, now that you have some ideas for live videos, let’s talk about some best practices. These are just some tips that will help you maximize your live videos and get better watch rate, engagement, and even make some money.

Show Up

If you really want your live videos to be successful, you need to give yourself a schedule and show up. Whether you go live once a week or every single day, make a schedule and stick with it.

Why? If you go live intermittently, you’re just hoping your fans are online when you hit that live button. But if fans know that you go live every Thursday night at 7PM, they might plan to be on Facebook just to catch your stream.

To start, use your analytics to see when your fans are online. What days of the week are your fans most active? What time of day? This is going to be different for every audience.

You could even give your live sessions themes. Like “Songwriting Sunday” where you hang out and play around with song ideas and write little ideas live. Or “Throwback Thursday” where you cover a bunch of older tunes that have inspired you.

Use a Tip Jar

There are musicians who are actually making a decent amount of money from Facebook Lives. All you need to do is set up some kind of “tip jar” (PayPal is an easy option) and link to it from the description of your live video and in the comments.

Next, set up a notification or have your computer right there so you can see the donations coming in and thank your fans personally by name. I know it doesn’t seem like much, but this little bit of personal gratitude can go a long way and show your fans that you really do appreciate their support. You see this all the time on Twitch, and it’s really easy to implement on Facebook as well.

If you want more ideas of how to use your Facebook live videos to drive music sales, make sure you check out this article next.

Build a Relationship

A good Facebook Live is not just about entertainment or putting on a good performance. You need to use lives as a chance to build a relationship with your fans.

Relate to your fans, get to know them, and answer their questions. Respond to them and use their name. Talk to them and with them, not at them. You want it to feel like you’re all hanging out on a Friday night together.

Over time, you’ll even get to know some of the regulars who show up all the time. Greet them by name and follow up on a conversation you had in a previous live. Remember, live videos are a rare opportunity to get an *actual* two-way conversation going with your fans, so take advantage of that and be real.

Promote Your Live Sessions

You’ll get the highest attendance if your fans know a live is coming, so post at least once announcing your upcoming live. You can even do a little cross promotion on other platforms like Instagram and Twitter so fans can follow you on Facebook and be ready when you go live. While Facebook does save live videos so fans can watch them after the fact, you’re going to get more audience retention live.

Duration

Facebook Live broadcasts are 90 minutes in length. While you don’t have to stay on for the full 90 minutes, you should try to make your live sessions at least 10 minutes. Facebook staggers notifications so you want to give it enough time to notify all your fans that you’re live.

Encourage Engagement

As with any kind of Facebook post, more engagement will always equal a greater reach, which in turn helps you get more fans on Facebook. So encourage your viewers to like, comment, and even share the live video throughout the broadcast. Try asking direct questions to get fans commenting. And something as simple as saying “Like if you agree,” can help boost the engagement.

How to Use Facebook Live

Facebook Live (or any form of live video) could be a great tool to incorporate into your social media plan. If you’ve never tried a live before, give it a shot this week and see how it goes! It will probably take some tweaking to find a live format that works for you, your schedule, and your fans, but with all the popularity of live video these days, it’s worth giving it a shot.

Let me know what you think – have you tried live videos on Facebook or any other platform? What kind of response did you get from your fans? Do you think it’s something that you’ll incorporate into your career?

For more great tips and tricks to promote your music, check out this free ebook.

We also have some great music promotion courses here, so take a look and see if they might be right for you.

August 5, 2018/4 Comments/by newartistmodel

Music Marketing

How to Sell More Music with Landing Pages

Today I want to talk to you about selling more music. (Or merch… Or tickets.) More specifically, I want to key you in on one of the most effective ways to get fans to take that next step and support you. Surprisingly enough, this tool is extremely under-utilized by musicians…

What is this powerful marketing tool? The landing page.

Granted, landing pages are only one part of your music promotion strategy. If you want to see how all your social media, email list, website, and store all work together to help you grow your fanbase and sell more music, download this free ebook and get 3 social media checklists.

What is a Landing Page?

We talked about using landing pages to grow your email list here, but there are plenty of other awesome ways to use landing pages.

In short, a landing page is a page on your website with a specific purpose – usually to prompt your fans to take some further action like buying your music, entering a contest, or signing up for your email list. If your fan chooses to follow through, it’s considered a “conversion” in marketing-speak.

These landing pages are simple, focused, and free of distractions. In fact, the best landing pages don’t even have a navigation or any links other than a big button.

Why? Well there’s a bit of psychology at play here. Think about your own browsing tendencies. If you’re on a page and you can see a social media feed with cool posts from Instagram and Facebook and a link to an interesting blog post, how likely are you to get distracted and click off to something else? (I know I would.)

Even if you have focus of steel, attention overload is a real thing. So, the more you can limit distraction, the more conversions you will get.

You can have as many landing pages as you’d like (and we’ll talk about all the different ways you can use them in just a minute). The key is to make sure each has a single, very specific purpose.

Once created, you can link to them from social media, a blog post, or an email.

How to Create a Landing Page to Sell Your Music?

You don’t need anything special to actually create your landing pages, though there are plenty of tools and services out there.

At the most basic level, you can simply create your own landing page with whatever website platform you use. (Think WordPress, Bandzoogle, Square, Wix, etc.)

Create a new page, give it a short, memorable URL like “www.myband.com/free-song,” and you’re good to go.

On that page, simply add an email optin form and some text telling fans exactly what they get for signing up. (Here are instructions to create embeddable forms with Mailchimp.)

Other services like LeadPages and Sumo are specifically designed to help you create amazing landing pages. BUT, I always suggest that you start creating landing pages and growing your email list NOW with the tools you have available rather than waiting until you can afford this or that software.

3 Types of Landing Pages

Different types of landing pages serve different purposes (and can look extremely different as well).

Always start by determining the purpose of your landing page.

Do you want to sell something (like selling your music)?
Are you trying to sell a low-priced item or a high-priced item?
Do you want fans to opt into something (like an email list or a contest)?

Once you figure that out, you can start putting your page together. So now, let’s go through a few of the most common types of landing pages, how you can create them, and how to use them.

1. Email Signup Landing Page

You probably guessed it, but this type of landing page is used to grow your email list. And it’s probably the one you’ll use most often (so read through this section a few times to let it sink in if you have to).

Most of these landing pages will ask for an email address, but you can capture other information as well. Like a first name (so you can personalize the emails you send). Or a zip code (so you can send them emails about gigs in their area).

Essentially, you’re goal is to get these fans on your email list so you can contact them.

Most email signup landing pages will literally just have an image, a bit of text, an email signup form, and a submit button. The text on the page should tell your fans exactly what they’ll get for signing up.

It’s best to offer something free as an incentive for opting in. Almost like a trade.

As an example, you could offer a discount on merch for all fans who opt in to get notified when you’re touring through their area.

Some other things you can trade for an email address are:

Free music (it’s best to offer songs and tracks fans can’t get anywhere else)
PDF downloads (lyric sheets, gear sheets, tab downloads)
Video lessons
Early access
Exclusive streams and events

The key of course, is to make sure that what you’re offering resonates with your fans. Every fanbase is a little different. That means what your fans consider “valuable” may be completely different from another band’s fanbase. If you’re not sure, test some things out and see what works best.

2. Microsites to Sell Your Music

A microsite is exactly what it sounds like – a miniature website that lives on your domain. These pages are much longer than an email signup page and are usually used to sell something.

As a musician, you could create a microsite landing page for your new album. Create a URL like “www.myband.com/album-name” (obviously use your band name and the album name). Use it to tell the story of the creation of the album with text, videos, and photos. Link to a place where fans can buy or pre-order the album and also link some higher end bundles with signed merch and other exclusives.

You can link fans directly to this microsite from social media and email. All the cool information on your microsite can get fans more emotionally invested in your album and more willing to buy and can definitely help you sell your music.

3. Long Form Landing Pages

A long form landing page is usually a very long page with a lot of text explaining to your fans exactly what it is you are offering. Dispersed throughout the text should be call to actions.

This may not be the most common landing page, but it can serve a purpose – typically for things that require a bit more explanation to convince fans to convert.

As an example, a long form landing page would be a great option for a page that calls potential house concert hosts.

For many fans, hosting a house concert is completely new. That means they will be hesitant to volunteer up their personal space unless they know all the details.

To make the process easier for your fans, you could create a long form landing page that includes everything they need to know about hosting a house concert. Include details like how many guests they will need to RSVP, how big their space needs to be, if they need any kind of equipment, chairs, tables, or lights, a suggested concert schedule, and photos and testimonials from past house concerts. Include links to a form where fans can volunteer.

Landing Page or Home Page?

Can your website’s home page be a landing page? The answer is yes and no.

Yes, you can make your site’s home page into a landing page. BUT it’s probably best to keep it as a temporary thing. (Remember, landing pages typically have no navigation, so your fans won’t be able to get to any other pages on your site.)

If you’re trying to hype up your new album, you could temporarily make your album microsite into your home page. That way, anyone who visits your site will know you have an album and won’t get distracted by anything else.

If you don’t want to go all in with a landing page, you could opt for a temporary splash page instead. A splash page pops up over your homepage when a fan visits your site. It can include information and a short call to action.

Landing Page Best Practices

Okay, now that we’ve gone through what landing pages are and how you can use them, let’s run down a few more best practices for selling your music.

1. Keep the Background Simple

The content of your landing page should be the star, not your background. That means no large tiled background images (unless it’s very minimal), no bright colored backgrounds, and no video backgrounds. When in doubt, go for white (or some other neutral that goes with your site’s theme and your image.

2. Bring Focus to the Call to Action to Sell Your Music

On any landing page, the call to action should be the main focus. And an easy way to draw attention is with color. Try choosing a button color different from any other element on the page. Of course, you don’t want a completely jarring color, so pick something that fits with your theme without being obnoxious.

You also want to be sure the text you choose for your call to action is relatable for your fans. Something like “Click here,” isn’t too enticing. On the other hand, something like “Get a free song,” is obvious and valuable.

3. Build Anticipation and Urgency

The best landing pages create a sense of urgency. In most cases you want your fans to hit the page and make a decision fairly quickly. And that means you need to get to the point, be as brief as you can, and hit most of the important points up front.

You could even use countdown timers or a hard-close date right at the top to show fans that this won’t be around forever.

So if you set up a landing page to encourage fans to pre-order your upcoming album. Add a date right at the top to let fans know when pre-orders are closing down.

4. Make Sure Page Loads Quickly

This goes for any page on your site really, but it’s especially important for landing pages. Most people are just too busy to wait around for a webpage to load. They’ll move on and find something more important to do.

To increase your page’s load speed, avoid oversized images, stay away from javascript in the header of your page, and try to do as much with CSS and HTML as you can.

Conclusion – How to Sell More Music with Landing Pages

Landing pages can be an extremely effective tool to promote your music, and hopefully this article has inspired you to give them a try. Remember, you don’t need to dive in the deep end and create tons of different landing pages right away. Try making just one to start – maybe an email collecting landing page to grow your list. From there, you can expand out your landing page strategy one at a time.

If you want more promote-your-music guidance, download this free ebook. You’ll learn how social media, your website, and your email list work together to turn fans into buyers who support your music. AND you’ll get 3 free social media checklists with tons of ideas for social posts. Click to download your free copy:

October 24, 2017/8 Comments/by newartistmodel

Music Marketing

Promoting Your Music on Social Media – How to NOT Waste Time

Let’s talk about promoting your music on social media.

More specifically making the task of promoting your music on social media not suck. I mean, who has time to spend hours coming up with social media posts to promote your music on Facebook and Twitter?

The secret is NOT doing more to promote your music. It’s about working SMARTER – making the most out of everything you create.

Of course, there’s a lot more to promoting your music than social media. But for today, I’m going to walk you through a quick approach to making your social media efforts more efficient and more productive (so you can save time and get your music heard).

Keep in mind that implementing a music marketing strategy on social media like the one I’m going to give you today takes TIME. There is going to be very little instant gratification here, so get yourself in that mindset.

True success on social media is like a relationship (a relationship with each of the hundreds or thousands of fans you have on the platform). And like any relationship, it will take some time to develop.

That being said, I do have a jumpstart guide for you that includes 3 social media checklists that will give you the music promotion tips that the most successful indie musicians use online:

Think long term with these tips, be consistent, and after a few months, you’ll start seeing more activity.

Use Content You Already Have to Promote Your Music on Social Media

If you think you need to create a whole new set of content for promoting your music on social media, you’re wasting a lot of time and effort (time that could be spent playing gigs, practicing, recording, writing…).

Instead, think about how you can repurpose and adapt all the great stuff you already have. This is called content marketing.

As musicians, we create A LOT of stuff. You know – riffs, songs, lyrics, covers, jams, live performances, albums, tones, beats, effects, and the list goes on and on.

BUT, a lot of musicians I see out there promoting their music online don’t actually use half of the stuff they create. And that’s a missed opportunity.

I know, there is a bit of a balance to find here. Especially if you’re working you way up to a big album launch you don’t want to give everything away before the actual release date. But giving away little pieces here and there can actually get fans more excited for the release as you build up the anticipation.

Today, take a few minutes to look at all the creative work you do every day.

How much of it are you actually sharing with your fans on social media?
How can you start weaving the content you’re creating into your music promotion strategy?

If you want our free guide on How to Promote Your Music with 3 Social Media Checklists (CLICK HERE).

Music Marketing is All About Frequency and Consistency

Okay, one quick aside before we get into how to actually create your social posts…

A lot of musicians have this mindset that their work can’t be released until it’s 100% perfect and finished. And that it needs to be released in its entirety or not at all. The result is often long periods of radio silence on social media followed by frantic promotion of the new thing.

At the most basic level, success on social media is all about balancing frequency and consistency. The more you post (as long as it’s quality, interesting posts), the more of a response you will get over time. Fans will start to expect and anticipate your posts.

Which means that radio silence is actually hurting you when you get around to promoting your album or next big thing. (Especially on Facebook where the algorithm favors posts that get more engagement.) Less fans will see your promotions, less fans will respond to your promotions, and you’ll start feeling that social media is a waste of time.

So try to focus on getting some kind of posting rhythm down. After some time you’ll be in a much better place to promote your music (and have your fans actually notice your posts and respond).

Before you move on, look at your social accounts and figure out how often you’re posting.

What does your schedule look like?
Are there any gaps?
How can you be more consistent?

Splinter Your Content

Now we’ll move a little deeper and start talking about how you can actually take something like a new song, a new video, or a live performance, and turn it into multiple social media posts – posts that will get your music heard by more people.

I like to call this “splintering” your content. Think of it like taking a big thing – like a song – and breaking it down into smaller pieces that you can post on social media. Each of those smaller pieces will lead fans back to the full song.

So for a single song, here are some “splinter” post ideas:

Take a quote from the lyrics. Post as is or create an image with the quote. You can probably get a lot of quote posts from a single song
Open up and share the meaning behind the lyrics. You could create a post, a blog post, a short video, a live stream, or all of the above.
Create a short video (or do a live stream) walking fans through the tones (or beats, or pedal board setup…) you used in the song so they can recreate the sound
Share photos of the lyric sheet or lead sheet
Do a playthrough or tutorial of a certain riff or beat
Create a “making of” video series for the song
Post a lyric line you’re working on and ask your fans to finish it with their own words
If any of your fans cover the song you could share that too

See what we did there? That was just one song and we got a ton of social posts. Individually, these posts don’t give away the full picture of the song. Many of these ideas can be used in the days leading up to the song release to create hype.

Exercise: Splinter the Content You’re Working on Right Now

Try to do this exercise for something you’re working on right now. Make a list and brainstorm everything and anything you could splinter off from that main piece of content. You don’t need to use all the ideas you come up with, but write down everything that comes to mind and proceed from there.

If you need more ideas, there’s more tips on how to promote your music here

Use Automation to Promote Your Music on Social Media

Okay, so now we have all these social media post ideas. You probably don’t want to post them all at the same time. (Remember – consistency is key). So that means you need to space things out over time.

And that’s where automation comes in.

Automation tools help you pre-schedule posts on many different social media platforms so you don’t need to be constantly remembering to post on social media. That way, you can get your promotion over with and allow yourself to focus completely on music.

Check out these tools:

Hootsuite – this will allow you to schedule posts for multiple different social platforms. The free version allows you to post to 3 different social channels
Facebook (there’s a scheduler built right in. Instead of choosing “post,” choose “schedule” and pick a date and time you’d like it to hit your page)
Tweetdeck – this is a great free platform for posting, scheduling, and monitoring Twitter
Buffer – the free version allows you to schedule and manage 1 account from each social platform (so you could have a Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc). You can schedule up to 10 posts at a time per social account
SocialOomph – the free version only allows you to schedule and monitor Twitter, but the paid version covers multiple different platforms

Be Relevant and Authentic

A little word of caution. Automation can be overdone. The very purpose of social media is to be able to connect with your fans authentically and in real time. If you’re pre-scheduling all your content out weeks or months in advance, you’re totally missing that real-time connection with your fans.

So, here’s what I suggest… Create your posts by splintering up your content, schedule them out for maybe a week or two, and then make time each day to post something relevant that you’re working on right now and respond to comments and messages.

If you take the time to implement these steps over the next few weeks or months you’ll start seeing major changes. And not just in how much attention your music attracts online. But also in how much time you’re spending promoting your music on social media.

If you want more concrete examples of social post ideas, don’t forget to download your free social media guide and checklist! Here’s the link again:

If you want our free guide on How to Promote Your Music with 3 Social Media Checklists (CLICK HERE).

May 2, 2017/5 Comments/by newartistmodel

Tag Archive for: grow your fanbase

Use these social media post ideas immediately to promote your music:

1. Live Music Promotion

2. Collaborate with Other Musicians to Grow Your Fanbase

3. Reach out to Music Blogs

Conclusion: How to Grow Your Fanbase

1. Release Music or Videos More Frequently

Use these email templates to promote your music:

2. Tour Regularly

3. Make Sure Your Emails Match Your Opt-in form

4. Send Your Email Subscribers Playlist Updates

Conclusion – Keep Your Email Subscribers Engaged

Why Use Facebook Live?

Try these social media post ideas on Facebook:

How to Use Facebook Live: What You Need

Live Video Ideas Your Fans Will Love

Small Performance

Band Jam or Practice

Stream Gigs

Announcements

Q&A’s

Vlogs

Facebook Live for Musicians: Best Practices

Show Up

Use a Tip Jar

Build a Relationship

Promote Your Live Sessions

Duration

Encourage Engagement

How to Use Facebook Live

What is a Landing Page?

How to Create a Landing Page to Sell Your Music?

3 Types of Landing Pages

1. Email Signup Landing Page

2. Microsites to Sell Your Music

3. Long Form Landing Pages

Landing Page or Home Page?

Landing Page Best Practices

1. Keep the Background Simple

2. Bring Focus to the Call to Action to Sell Your Music

3. Build Anticipation and Urgency

4. Make Sure Page Loads Quickly

Conclusion – How to Sell More Music with Landing Pages

Let’s talk about promoting your music on social media.

That being said, I do have a jumpstart guide for you that includes 3 social media checklists that will give you the music promotion tips that the most successful indie musicians use online:

Use Content You Already Have to Promote Your Music on Social Media

Music Marketing is All About Frequency and Consistency

Splinter Your Content

Exercise: Splinter the Content You’re Working on Right Now

Use Automation to Promote Your Music on Social Media

Be Relevant and Authentic

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