Say it with me, INTERNET MARKETING. The internet is a big tool in helping launch the career of a lot of independent musicians all over the world. As an up and coming musician, it would definitely be in your best interest to market your album on the internet. Honestly in order to succeed on any level in the music business of today, you MUST have an internet presence. If you want to have a presence on the internet, you will definitely need to get your own website. That is a must! In addition to having your own website, you should have your own MySpace page, FaceBook page, Twitter page, and any other page on any other social networking site. You’ll also want to go a step further and sign yourself up on any indie and unsigned artist websites. The more you do that, the more you are able to promote yourself on the internet. Building your online presence is extremely important in these times!
Once you secure a domain name and you got your website set up, you’ll want to promote your website as much as you can. Make it your business to have an email list because you’ll need that in order to send people news, album release dates, concert info, and other important information in regards to your music. It would also be a good idea to set up an iTunes account and put your music on iTunes. Many people use iTunes regularly and once your music is available on iTunes, it will allow your fans to download your music and allow you to make a profit.Another way to promote yourself is to place ads and get web banners put on other sites. In addition to that, something else you’ll want to look into is Google optimization aka Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This will help bring more traffic to your website. Speaking of Google optimization, you should submit your website to many search engines. The most popular search engines you can submit your website to are…
o Alexa
o AltaVista
o AllTheWeb
o AOL
o Ask
o DMOZ
o ExactSeek
o Excite
o Gigablast
o Google
o Hotbot
o Kanoodle
o Live
o Lycos
o LookSmart
o MSN
o NationalDirectory
o Netscape
o WebCrawler
o What-U-Seek
o YahooIf you want to bring in more traffic to your website, something you’ll want to look into and get more familiar with is META TAGS. Meta Tags are HTML codes that are placed in the header of a webpage, after the title tag. That is a very simple and brief definition of Meta Tags. If this is something you’d like to learn more about in order to bring more traffic to your website, there are many websites with tutorials that explain Meta Tags in more depth and show you how to apply it to your website.
A few other ways to market yourself online and effectively attract more visitors to your website would include…
- Write a keyword title page
- Put keywords in your headers
- Use keywords in hyperlinks
- Make your navigation system search engine friendly
- Create a sitemap
There are many ways to increase traffic, but those are a few ways to do it. There are many websites online that can teach you how to market your website. The amount of free information and tutorials online that can help you attract more fans is unbelievable.Once you have a strong and loyal fanbase that is coming to your website and social networking sites on a consistent basis, it would be a good idea to be consistent in coming up with ways to keep your fanbase coming while expanding your fanbase at the same time. Doing things like keeping your website and social networking sites updated regularly, providing song descriptions, offering free downloads every now and again, writing blogs, posting music videos, uploading new photos, and most importantly, making great music will definitely help to keep traffic flowing through your site. When you are internet marketing, try not to spam people and if you can help it, don’t spam at all. A lot of up and coming musicians are constantly spamming random people and while that might have worked in the past, that’s not a very effective strategy nowadays.
If you want to get more fans, you’ll want to do things like starting your own blog and building a relationship with music bloggers. You would build a relationship with other bloggers by commenting on their blogs on a fairly consistent basis in order to build your presence on their blog site. Make sure to make comments that are only relevant to the topic of the blog and always put your website URL at the bottom. This will eventually bring traffic to your website. Another thing you will want to do is send your music to blogs too. The traffic from those blogs will be able to hear your music if you do that, which will bring more traffic to your website (if they think your music is good, of course). These strategies are also effective with podcasts. When it comes to music, podcasts are just as important as blogs, so if you want to make your internet presence greater, you will definitely want to get connected with podcasts too. Setting up an account on YouTube and uploading videos is another great way to promote your music online. YouTube is one of the most popular websites in the world today, with millions of people looking at videos online everyday. You can create music videos on a low budget and upload them on YouTube for free! By doing this, you will be giving your audience a visual of who you are and what you can do. This will definitely bring traffic to your video(s) and with enough people watching your videos; it will help make your online presence bigger.
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