Tag Archive for: how to get your music heard

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

how to not waste time promoting your music on social media
 

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.

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).

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Musicians Guide – Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is all about setting up your website so that its pages are easily found and highly ranked by search engines like Google. This Musicians Guide Search Engine Optimization SEO will show you how. While traditional marketing avenues like radio airplay and social media promotion are great for getting new people interested in your music, an SEO strategy around your music can help you gain new fans from a marketing channel that is generally underused within the music industry.

So, how do you get started with SEO? First, it’s important to understand what Google’s ranking factors are. Here’s a list of 200 of them.

While the list of ranking factors is certainly helpful, here are the things I’ve noticed help improve rankings and search engine traffic the most, in order or importance:

  • Backlinks (links pointing toward your website’s pages)
  • Large number of pages.
  • Website formatting and speed.
  • Using searchable keywords.
  • How much time visitors spend on a particular page.

Want to learn how to promote your music and get your music noticed? Click here to download this free ebook with easy music promotion ideas plus 3 social media checklists to get you started!

Musicians Guide Search Engine Optimization SEO

Here are some things you can do to help improve the above metrics for your website to increase traffic from search engines.

Format Your Website Properly

If you want your website’s pages to be found by Google, you need to make it easy for Google to read through them. To accomplish this, be sure to implement the following on your website:

Use Searchable Titles

Many musicians use general, single word titles for their pages like merch, about, tour, etc. If people are looking for your merchandise or tour dates, they’re likely to include your artist name in the search (for example – “Bring me the Horizon tour dates.”)

Because of this, a better approach to titling your pages would be to include your artist name in the page title. This makes it really easy for Google to know that the information on the page should be attributed to you as a musician.

Use HTML Header Tags

If you have a blog on your website (and you should), often times, your articles will contain headers and sub-headers. Many new blog authors make the mistake of bolding and increasing the text size for these.

Don’t do this. Use HTML header tags. This will make it much easier for Google to understand the content hierarchy of your page.

Make Your Website Mobile Friendly

More than 50% of searches are from mobile devices, and when it comes to mobile search, Google de-ranks sites that aren’t mobile-friendly.

It’s important to make sure your site works well and is easy to use on smartphones and tablets not just for search engine rankings, but because a majority of web traffic is from mobile devices anyway. People are more likely to purchase your merchandise and event tickets if it’s easy to do so.

Bandzoogle websites are optimized for SEO. They automatically add things like image alt tags, header tags, clean HTML and schema markup (to help you get Knowledge Graph results in Google). Bandzoogle websites are fast and mobile responsive.

Have Your Own Domain

When you work with a website provider like Bandzoogle, they usually default to hosting your domain as a subdomain to theirs (for example, yourbandname.bandzoogle.com).

You don’t want this. You want to have your own domain name. This way, when people link to your site, you get the benefits of that link when it comes to search engine rankings on your entire website rather than just the page being linked to.

If you choose to go with a website hosting provider like Bandzoogle, be sure to choose the option for a custom domain so you get all of the SEO benefits.

Have a Blog on Your Website

Starting a blog is a great way to increase the number of pages on your website, and the number of search queries your website will show up in. It’s also a great way to create valuable content that people will link to, which increases your website’s overall rankings.

As mentioned above, when you start a blog, you don’t want it to be set up as a sub-domain of someone else’s platform. Use a blogging platform, like WordPress since it makes it easier to get things going and publish content. But put the blog under your own domain!

It’s important that you choose blog topics that resonate with your audience. If people find your articles on Google, you want them to be likely to check out your music and convert into fans.

Here are some blog topic ideas to get you started:

  • Travel stories.
  • Music gear reviews.
  • Review music from other artists in your niche.
  • Making of your album.
  • Songwriting stories.
  • A passion outside of music.
  • Something you care deeply about.

Whatever topic you decide to go with, pick something that excites you. It’s much easier to write about your passion than something that’s just for SEO purposes.

When you write blog posts, make sure they’re easy and fun to read. Each sentence you write should convince the reader to move to the next.

Here are some things to keep in mind when publishing a new article:

  • Use lots of white space with small, 1-2 sentence paragraphs.
  • Make use of bulleted and numbered lists.
  • Write longer posts. These keep people on the page longer, and are more likely to rank well in Google.
  • Put your target keyword at the beginning of the article.

Your blog can be a great tool for building your email list. Integrate apps like Sumome into your blog to collect emails, set up a newsletter for your blog, and include a link to your latest release at the bottom of every email you send out.

Bandzoogle websites have a built-in blog feature, and other promotional tools like mailing lists.

Get Links

In my experience, I’ve found that the single most important ranking factor Google looks at is the number of links pointing to your site. Each link is like a vote for a page on your site.

Very few links will come naturally, so it’s up to you to go out and get them. There are tons of link building strategies available online, but here are three I’ve found work best for musicians.

  • Get Your Music Reviewed on Music Blogs
    If you’re able to get your music is reviewed by music bloggers, the review often contains a link to your music or website. If your music is reviewed on a valuable blog, this can vastly improve rankings across your websites pages, and even send a good amount of referral traffic.
  • Help A Reporter Out (HARO)
    HARO is a simple and effective way to get press coverage for your band, and links to your website. Just create an account, and they’ll send you multiple emails every day from reporters looking for help with a story. Just scroll through the options and respond to the ones you can add the most value to.
  • Guest Blogging
    Guest blogging is still one of the best ways to get backlinks. The reason is because you have complete control over where the links are and what anchor text (the words used in a hyperlink) is used, which Google also factors in when ranking different pages.

To get started with guest posting, you want to find blogs that write about topics similar to what you write about on your blog. You want links pointing to your blog provide real value to readers of your guest post.

Reach Out to Blogs

To find blogs in your niche to reach out to, just head over to Google and use one of the following search strings:

The first option is, “keyword” + “write for us”
Next, try out, “keyword” + “guest post”
And finally, “keyword” + “post was written by”

Once you find a website that you think is a good fit for your writing style, brainstorm 3 ideas and send them an email similar to this one:

My name is [Your Name], and I’m a member of [Band Name].

I’m reaching out because I’d like to contribute a guest post to your blog.

I’ve been brainstorming some ideas that I think your readers would like: (list your ideas)

To get an idea of my writing quality, here are some of my recent articles: (list your articles)

Please let me know if any of these interest you.

Best Regards,
[Signature]

Using the email above to pitch guest post ideas to blogs, I was able to get about a 1 in 5 response rate. And almost all of them converted into my guest posts being published. Guest posting a great way to build links to your website. It’s also a great way to generate awareness for your music in an engaging way.

This “Musicians Guide Search Engine Optimization SEO” is a guest post from Nick Rubright.

Nick is the founder and CEO of Dozmia, a music streaming service currently available on iOS.  He has a passion for helping musicians understand various marketing concepts, and creating the perfect playlist.  Sign up for Dozmia’s mailing list to get music marketing hacks straight to your inbox.

To learn more about setting up your musician website and creating a plan for success in music, check out the New Artist Model online music business school.

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