YouTube Logo - Photograph by Rego Korosi

In order to talk about what the best practices for marketing your music on YouTube are, first we need to talk a little about what we are trying to accomplish using YouTube in the first place. An obvious answer would be simply exposure. By using YouTube, we are trying to gain exposure. The question I want to answer here before we get started is… Why? Why get exposure? What are you going to do with those people you are exposed to? It is always my opinion that you should be as prepared for the exposure that you might get as you possibly can be. Otherwise, potentially many people see your video and then do what?  So, here is a short list of the most desirable outcomes of exposure on YouTube, in my opinion.

• Visits to your website. This should be at least one of your goals with just about all of the things you do online. Your website is your central location. Sure, one can use facebook in ways that you website just doesn’t function. Still, I say make your website as functional as you can to meet your audience’s activities and send people there as much as possible. Follow this link to find out more about why I recommend using your website for homebase and the best ways to build a website as a musican.
• Subscribe to your YouTube channel. When your viewers subscribe to your channel, they will be automatically alerted to any new videos you post and more likely to connect with you again and in different places.
• Get your viewers to share your videos. One of the key ingredients to a video going viral is it being shared by your viewers to their social networks or via email or on their blogs. Here is the primary key to getting people to share your stuff, whether it be videos, photos, status updates, music, blog post or whatever. I didn’t think this up and I forget where I heard it, but this pretty much sums it up. “If you want me to share your content you have to create content that actually makes me look cool to my friends and followers by sharing it with them.” In other words, I am not going to share something that doesn’t make me look good to my friends. This isn’t shallow, why the hell would I? I don’t want to waste my friend’s time by sharing things that they don’t care about. But if I share a video that is so cool that my friends and followers start to think of me as a person to learn about cool things from, that makes me feel good.
• Social proof. I am not a big fan of the concept of pushing your number of views up just to be able to say that you have X-number of views on your videos. I am a big advocate of making every view count and trying to get your viewers to engage with you. However, there is a thing called Social Proof that I recognize as being an important psychological factor in developing trust. If someone sees that a video has 20,000 views they will automatically figure that someone cares about your music. This could make the difference between someone clicking the play button to see what all the fuss is about and someone just skipping over your video all together. So, I concede here that numbers are important.

So, let’s get started. Here are some of the best practices for using YouTube as a musician that I have discovered. This is not all of the best practices and you will likely see a follow up. However, this is enough to get anyone started and it is more than most musicians are doing. I would think that if you even do half of these things you will be way ahead of the game.

Design

YouTube allows you to custom design the look and feel of your YouTube channel. Here are some things to keep in mind in the creation of your channel and design process.

1. Channel Name ideally would match your band/artist name

I suppose this might sound obvious to some. However, I see this concept being violated often. Your channel name should match your band name / artist name whenever possible or as close to it as possible. This makes it easier for you to be found within YouTube search. Since YouTube is Google, this also makes your videos more discoverable in a Google search as well.

2. Make sure to check “Musician Channel” when setting up your channel

This puts you in the Musician category and makes it more likely that your video will be spit out in front of someone who is browsing other musician videos on YouTube.

3. Design your channel to match your website. Matching background and brand colors.

YouTube allows you to customize your channel. This means that your you channel should, to the extent possible, match your website. This way your audience will start to associate this design, color pattern, or image with you or your brand. That is important and it is generally under-utilized by musicians in all areas of their career. Many people don’t totally understand this, but our psychological understanding of our experiences is tied very closely to what we experience in our senses. Whenever possible you want to tie a message to a sent or a color or an image. This helps to stimulate people’s memory. In a world full of messages and advertisements, it is increasingly easy for people to simply forget about you or your band. Being consistent with the visual aspects of your brand makes remembering who you are so much easier. I can’t wait for scented websites

Optimize

This section is all about being found in searches. YouTube is the second largest search engine. If a fan of yours goes to YouTube and plugs in your band name you want your videos to turn up as a result. This is not all about YouTube searches, though. Google returns YouTube videos in their results all the time. So these tips will help you to be found on Google as well.

4. Title your videos properly

Don’t make this mistake, seriously, don’t. Titling your videos partial-song-name.mp4. For example, if your band name is Winged Helmet and your song is Bird’s Fly Over Port (I know this is not very inventive, its for the sake of the example), you should avoid having the title be birds-fly.avi or worse, some automatically generated title from your camera like 7x4rvgp3.avi. A better title would be Winged Helmet – Bird’s Fly Over Port. Here you have the name of the band then the name of the song. There are a couple of reasons to do it this way specifically. The first reason is that your viewers will know what the hell they are listening to. That is important if you care at all about your viewers experience. The other major reason to do it this way is for search engine optimization. SEO for musicians is tricky. For most brands out there they want to turn up in the search engine results when a certain topic is being searched for. For example, a gift basket tutorial site might want to turn up when some searches for the term homemade gift ideas. However, as a musician, you don’t necessarily want to be associated with a given topic so much as you do with your own songs. If someone is putting your song title into Google, you definitely want your website or something having to do with you to come up. When you title your videos this way your videos have a better chance of turning up in the search engines. Since you have set up your channel to point to your website, you will hopefully get traffic to your website when someone is searching for your song even if your site doesn’t show up in the results.

5. Description – use keywords after your URL

The first thing in the description of your videos should be a link to your website (we’ll talk about that later). Then describe your video. In your description, make sure to use keywords that would help your video to be found when some is searching for something relevant on YouTube.

6. Put keywords in the tags section

Load up the Tag section with keywords related to you and your group. Make sure to include your artist/band name and the name of your song. That leads me to another tip about tags that is significantly under-used…

7. Add unique tags only used by you so that your videos show up in the related videos section

Put the same unique tag in all of your videos. This will help the rest of your videos to show up in the “related videos” section along the right-hand side of the screen when somebody stumbles upon your video by chance. Your videos have a better chance of grabbing more views this way.

Get Traffic to Your Website

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it thousands more times. Your website is home base, not Facebook, not Twitter, not Reverbnation, not Bandcamp. At least one of your goals with YouTube is to get people to your website where hopefully you have a email list sign up waiting for them.

8. Put link in the front of the description of your video.

I was working with a group that had a total of 10 videos up on their YouTube channel posted over a two-year period. It is not neccessary to say that they were not using YouTube to its fullest potential. I think that is obvious. However, people love their music and they had a total of 25,000+ views on their videos all together. When I began working with them, I was asked to look through their analytics for their website, YouTube, Facebook and so on to try and compile the demographic information about their online audience. In looking through their analytics I could see no evidence of traffic to their website from YouTube. Needless to say, this is a missed opportunity. As I will be pointing out in the rest of this post, there are a lot of things that you can do to optimize your YouTube channel. However, I am sure that just this one simple change could make a big career difference for a lot of musicians. That is of course, if you have your website set up properly.

12. Use post bulletins to have your video show up on your subscriber’s home page.

This might seem obvious, but if it does, then I hope you are doing it. We want our friends and fans on all of our social networks to see our videos so they can like them and have the opportunity to share them with their friends and followers. Also this pushes the numbers up – Social Proof, remember

15. Post your videos in your blog

Partner up with YouTube and monetize your views

Youtube has the partner program which allows a video owner to display ads on their videos and share in the revenue generated from those ads. It doesn’t work out to be a ton of money if you don’t have a lot of views. However, it is something and something is sometimes better than nothing. I am a big supporter of generating revenue where possible as an independent artist. However, I will say that I can imagine a circumstance where an artist does not want ads shown over their videos. This is a personal decision. You can always try it out and take the ads down if you are finding it to be a negative experience for you.

I hope these tips help you to figure out what to do with YouTube. I am always on the look out for more tips about YouTube. If you know any great YouTube techniques or strategies that are not on the list, please post them in the comments below. Again, I would love for you to post a link to your videos on this site. Please check out this post and post your videos in the comment section.

YouTube image - Photo by Sean MacEntee

Wow! Thank you all so much for your video submissions. I had a great time watching all of your videos and learning from your experiences. If you didn’t submit your videos in the last post, it’s not too late! I still want to see your videos and get your feedback. Go ahead to this post and post your videos and your comments in the comment section.

Right now my goal is to learn more about what style videos have what kind of effect on the popularity of a video and how that could help you market your music and grow your audience. One thing I will say is that number of views isn’t everything. It is what happens with your viewers after they’ve seen your video that really matters. My philosophy is more firmly than ever that you should not necessarily be playing a numbers game. It is all about your connection with each person who watches your video, reads your post on Facebook or gets an email from you that really matters. I mean your connection with that individual. 

Alas, that’s a story for a different post and one that I will tell at some point. But, while I am a huge advocate of really developing that skill, it doesn’t make much of a difference knowing it if no one is watching your videos. So this post and the last one are all about how to figure out how to get more views. I will talk about encouraging engagement and making connections in another post.

So without further adieu…

No surprise here, but there is no “one size fits all” approach to getting more views on your music videos. Getting more views has more to do with your audience than it does the style of video you produce. Not only that, but it may appear that different style videos inspire different types of action. That kind of information is inconclusive for now, however, I plan to try to dig into that more in-depth at some point. I will keep you posted.

Let’s take a look at some of the conclusions that I was able to deduce from my little informal survey.

A quick note about these results. I am in no way suggesting that you go out and post only the style of videos that I found to be the most popular in my survey. While I am happy to have collected a little bit of information from my readers to help you all (and my clients) out with your music marketing on YouTube, I can’t call this the definitive word about YouTube. I would need to collect more data for that. That being said…

It would appear that a more produced video has a better chance of capturing people’s attention then a video of you or your group performing on stage or a static image video. When I put myself in the viewers shoes, this makes sense. A more produced video is produced to appeal to one’s visual senses.

This is the information that I got from the feedback on the previous post as well as the people I asked in person and the emails that came in.

I think an important question to ask about this conclusion is “why”. I mean, why would a more produced video attract more views. I am going to go out on a limb and say that that the reason isn’t the fact that the videos were more polished and produced. Let me explain. Keep reading…

I have a philosophy on this and in order to explain my philosophy I want to call attention to two recent ‘YouTube Sensations’. Karmin and Pompalamoose.

The two acts have very different music and their video styles are very different. Both generally posted videos of themselves performing, however, the videos were produced in very different styles.

Pompalamoose’ videos are highly edited and produced where the images bounced and popped with the music (really cool, by the way). Karmin’s videos are less produced videos of them just playing and singing.

Here is Pompalamoose’ most popular video. It’s a cover of “Single Ladies (put a ring on it)” – by Beyonce:

Here is Karmin’s most popular video. It’s a cover of “Look at Me Now” – by Chris Brown:

Here’s the thing… Karmin’s videos were quite a bit more popular. At the time I am writing this post Pompalamoose’ most popular video has 9,164,422 views. Not too shabby. I’m sure most people would be thrilled with these numbers.  Karmin’s most popular video has 61,365,097 views.  To be fair this video went totally nuts. The next most popular video, however, has views in the 14,000,000+ range, but there are several in that range.

Wait… If you look t the results of my little survey, you would think that Pompalamoose’ videos should be more popular. Their videos are more polished and didn’t I say that the more produced videos seemed to gain more traction? I did.

Here’s what I think…

Both the videos posted by Pompalamoose and by Karmin were entertaining. They give you that ‘want to see what is going to happen next’ feeling. Both groups are quirky and you can get the feel for this through their videos. Amy from Karmin jumps from belting a song to busting out full fledged gangster rap and you never know what instrument Nick is going to be playing from trombone, to keyboard, to a box. It is pretty amazing and you don’t expect it. The shifts and angles in Pompalamoose’ videos are also unexpected.

One distinction about Karmin’s and Pompalamoose’ videos. They were not videos of their performances in some venue. I am not saying that this is a bad thing to do, but I think it is important to note that these videos were made specifically for the video viewer. Not some other audience and then re-purposed for YouTube (I will explain why I do recommend repurposing videos from your shows for YouTube in a different post).

How do these examples tie into the results from my survey?

I think the videos with static images or of performances lack focus in regards to your YouTube viewers. This puts an expectation on the viewer that they will be using YouTube as music player. That is not what video is for. It can be, but not by default.

When you produce and polish a video, you are creating content specifically to be viewed. While one can listen and not watch, they will be entertained if they do watch.

Here’s the even bigger point… something that is entertaining to watch will more likely be shared as people like to entertain their friends. When something is shared, it has the potential to go collect more viewers and turn people on to your music. Not saying that it will, just saying that is a necessary part of something going viral.

There doesn’t seem to be a way to not contradict myself in this post. So, I guess that means there is to be more digging into YouTube in my future. With that said, here is another point: While it may seem that a more entertaining video attracts more listeners, entertainment value is  clearly not the most important thing to the viewer. People definitely want to be entertained, there is no doubt about that. However, the most important thing is, hands down, audio quality. I mean, it is a song after all. This should make sense.

To be clear, I am not in anyway saying that you can upload your video and think to yourself… “well, at least the audio is good”. No. Great audio quality needs to be a given. Then you focus on the various other aspects (style, quirks, entertainment value, etc.) of the video. You will see this point in a future post about the best practices of YouTube marketing for your music career. The reason that I am bringing this up here, is to possibly provide some rationale as to why a video of a performance at a venue does not seem to necessarily attract a lot of attention. A lot of times the audio in these videos isn’t first class.

There are no absolutes here.

As with most things, none of the concepts uncovered in my survey or the conventional wisdom hold true all the time. There are always several factors at work. You could have a really intriguing and captivating thing that you do at your shows. This could be the thing that keeps your viewers viewing. Your static image video could be as much about the image(s) as it is about the song.

From the feedback I got back from the people I surveyed, it also matters quite a bit how you market the video as well.When this became more apparent, I could just hear someone in the universe asking the question: we have to market our videos? Aren’t the videos supposed to be the marketing? So now we have to market the marketing? Well… that’s right and yes the videos are the marketing, but your videos also serve as engagement with your audience. I will get into various techniques to market and promote your videos in a separate post.

For now, my advice is to post videos regularly and create a system where your are attracting attention from your current audience (in other words, keep them coming back). Something to keep in mind is that if your current audience is continually visiting your YouTube channel they become more likely to, at some point, share your video to their followers on their social networks or through email or some other social channel. This is good. So, focus most of your energy on getting your viewers to be return viewers.

In conclusion, I would say that the generally accepted wisdom to post different styles of videos to see what is working still holds true. But, by god, track the results. If you don’t track the results, how the hell do you expect to ever know what is really working. YouTube has very comprehensive analytics that will tell you all kinds of things. So, pay attention to what is happening. I will cover YouTube analytics (you guessed it) in a separate post.

I had fun hearing about peoples YouTube experiences. I would love to learn more about your experiences. Please feel free to leave a comment below to detail more about your experiences on YouTube. I will be digging deeply into various aspects of marketing your music on YouTube in the next several posts. If there is anything specific that you would like to learn about, please post it in the comments below. Thanks for reading.

YouTube Flames Image by - Eric Schnakenberg

I am on a mission to find out what is working in YouTube and possibly why. It is no secret that YouTube is one of the biggest exposure engines out there for music or anything else for that matter. It is my opinion that Music Marketing on YouTube needs a little direction. I see a lot of advise about Facebook but there just isn’t a ton of information out there for how to best use YouTube (unless I am wrong about that, if anyone knows where to find some really good YouTube information is, please leave a comment). As with every other marketing/exposure/promotion avenue that you can explore as a DIY musician, music is slightly different than other products. A music video is a different thing to watch than a ‘how to’ video made by a software company. So, as  a musician there are a whole separate set of best practices that are going to be different (somewhat) to the best practices for others using YouTube.

The Good News

People love watching video and it is easy and fun to share. The reasons why video is so great are worth paying attention to. Maybe it’s about entertainment or could it be that watching a video is a kind of permission to shut your brain off and rest. This is not a post about ‘why’. But I hope to dig into the psychology of video and work on another post as a follow up to this one.

While I have some ideas of best practices with YouTube, I really want to know more. I figure who better to find out from than my readers. So this is a short post asking you to post your experiences, successes, failures and confusions regarding YouTube.

I want to know what has worked for people and what hasn’t worked on YouTube. The conventional wisdom says to try some different styles of videos and see what gets the most or highest quality responses. I like this approach in general being a marketing guy and living in a ‘test and track’ mindset. However, I am curious what you all think about what is working.

What I Want From You

Please leave a comment and a link to some of your videos to demonstrate the style of video that you have used. Let us know if your video has been successful in your mind or unsuccessful. Go ahead and give reasons for either way if you think you know the reasons.

Just to clarify, different styles of videos include: video of a performance, a more produced music video (a la MTV or VH1), an interview, a solo performance in your bedroom or a vlog (video blog) for some examples. Obviously, there are many other styles of video as well. Whatever it is, even if you have to make up a name for it (especially if you have to make up a name for it),  let us know.

I will be sending this request out to my email list and posting it on Facebook and Twitter as well looking for as many answers as I can get. So, please share this post with as many people as you can. Tweet it, Post it on Facebook, Digg it, Email it or just tell someone you know to go post their YouTube videos here. Once I have it put together, I will post the results of this mission here for you all to read.

Thank you so much. I am excited to see some of the answers and watch some great videos!

I have had a lot of musicians contact me lately looking for promotion and-or representation that are simply not ready for it. I do my free consultation and then nicely tell them that I can’t allow them to hire me. I love talking to all of you about your businesses. I love being able to help in some way and I hope that these people find what I am telling them useful and helpful. But, here’s the deal… You might feel lost and frustrated with your current status. You might be working a full time job in addition to your music career. I get it. You might want some help. I totally understand wanting someone else to take over some responsibility. I want someone else to do some of my work too. The problem is… do you know what exactly you want that person to do? I am going to lay out three guidelines for people to refer to when considering hiring someone to take over a part (or all) of their business. Please note that I just wrote the word “guidelines”. This was intended to imply that what I say may not apply to you. I don’t know your circumstance until I connect with you directly so please don’t read this as personal advice from me to you. I urge anyone who has hired help to leave a comment for those who haven’t to benefit from your successes and challenges, as your experiences are valuable.

3 Guidelines to Think About Before Hiring a Publicist

Thing One:

Do you have something to sell? Or are you making money playing live? If you have no way of making money, then how in the world do you expect to make any money by hiring someone else. This seems like you want someone to hold your hand through the entire process of song-writing or fine tuning your music, getting you into the recording studio or helping you build one of your own, navigate duplication, distribution, artwork, book your first gig for you, set up social media platforms and so on… all based on trust that you are just simply going to be awesome. There are many factors that I need to consider before I begin to work with someone. One of the biggest is “is this person (or group) going to do their part?” I can’t do everything for an artist. If you are not willing to put in some time to learn some of this stuff, there is no evidence that you will do what is necessary down the road, leaving the person that you hired with no action to take except to wait for you. This is totally unproductive and useless. I like to be successful. I don’t want to have someone throw money at me, then do a bunch of work only to watch the artist not do anything to help themselves out. If you haven’t gotten yourself ready to blast off, you don’t need me. You need to get motivated. Teach yourself the next step. If you need to call or email someone you don’t know to ask a question, do that. I will usually answer someone’s question if it is presented in a polite and friendly way. In fact, I have musicians trying to hire me and I end up giving them all kinds of advice and then tell them that they don’t need to hire me.

Thing Two:

Do you have your music marketing systems in place? Let’s say you don’t have a website. You have been using facebook as your central hub to connect with your fans and CD Baby to sell your music (of course now you can put a CD Baby store on facebook so that doesn’t need to be two different places). Let’s say you have uploaded a few videos to YouTube but you haven’t really played with YouTube all that much and the videos are just sitting there for the most part. Now you go and pay for someone to do some PR for you and your music. All of a sudden you have a burst of exposure, people are searching for you on google. Do they find you? I don’t know maybe your facebook page comes up, maybe your videos come up. If your videos come up, then what? Do they point people to your facebook page? Does your facebook page have email sign up form on it? It is possible to do that, did you do that? This doesn’t generally work all that well. It is choppy and is a huge risk. Facebook is going to change a lot. I can almost gaurantee that. If this is you, you don’t need PR. You need a system set up (by the way this is what I do. I don’t do PR. When people contact me asking me for PR, I always check to see if they have any of this in place yet if they do, I send them to Cyber PR - affiliate link). Then you need to think about PR and you might be able to grow some without PR still and that might be a better way to go for you and your music. In my experience, musicians have this idea that someone else holds the key to their success. It is my opinion that this is far from the reality of today’s music industry.  Here is a picture of a system for you… You have a website, your website is optimized to be found on Google. you have a facebook page, you have an active (or even semi-active) YouTube account and you are active on twitter. You facebook page directs people to your website, There are links in your video descriptions on YouTube pointing to your website (the link needs to be the first thing in the description or else no one will see it), you have a newsletter sign up widget on your site and on facebook, your website has a storefront to sell your music and your merch and you have a store set up on facebook too just in case that is what your fans would like to do. Now you go get some PR. Where ever people look, you are ready for them. You have ways of collecting their information so that you can help them find their way back at a later date or guide them to a show, you have given them a way to purchase your music and most of all you are ready to connect with them in whatever way they are most comfortable.

Thing Three:

Are you ready to listen to somebody? All too often, I have people get in touch with me to tell me what they need. Usually it is something like they want promotion or they want me to get them reviewed on a famous music blog. When I start to look into it, they don’t have a website, facebook page, twitter account or have any content up on youtube. Or they have some of these things but aren’t really maintaining them. I tell them they need to do that first and they just plain disagree. If you already know what you need, here’s a tip… don’t hire someone who thinks their job is to give advise or strategize. Hire an assistant. A virtual assistant is not a bad thing to have. You can find virtual assistants on Elance, oDesk or at Virtual Staff Finder. At elance and odesk you can hire someone to just build you a website or just write a press release for you. Virtual staff finder is more about finding someone to do regular part time or full time work. If you are ready to manage a team, this is worth looking into. I would like to do an entire post about virtual assistants for musicians in the future. But if you know what you need, don’t go and get someone else’s advice.

What if you are ready for Promotion?

If you are set up with a marketing system for your music like I said before, I recommend checking out Cyber PR (affiliate link). I have spoken with Ariel Hyatt myself and she and her staff are extremely helpful. She handles digital PR campaigns. She doesn’t mess with traditional press and media. If you are in a position (as I described above) to take full advantage of a PR campaign, there are some additional things to know about PR. Ariel Hyatt wrote a great article outlining some of these things - 9 Critical Things You Should Know About Publicity Before You Make Your First Move. Definitely read that first.

Share Your Experiences

If you have hired a publicist in the past or go and hire one in the future, please leave a comment below to highlight some things you’ve learned with that experience. This will help a lot of musicians out there more than I can by ranting about why people shouldn’t be contacting me looking for Promotion. I thank you in advance for your comments.

Let’s jump in… First of all, you are not ready to work with me or anyone. You need to grow some roots first. You can’t pay someone to do something for you if you have no way of making money from that. There is no upside in it for you. Second, if you don’t have a website or any social media profiles and you don’t play out it is no wonder that you don’t have an audience yet. You have been barking up the wrong tree with the big name blogs. You don’t need that. You’re desire for feedback is great. That is what you need.

In order to get that feedback you need two things: Exposure and engagement and that is what you should be focusing your efforts on right now.

First let’s talk about engagement:

Engagement can happen in many places. At shows, online, music conferences (don’t go this route yet). I suggest you stick with the internet for now. Engagement happens, by in large, in two places on line. Your own website and Facebook. This is a little bit misleading because engagement should happen everywhere, but for now I just want to paint this picture for you. So, first step is to get your website set up. There are a couple of ways to do this. Bandzoogle is a great resource for musicians to set up a website. There are a lot of cool features and they are in the middle of an overhaul so things will be getting even better soon. Bandzoogle does offer a free plan, but I don’t recommend it because you don’t get to use your own domain name. So, if you go with Bandzoogle, get the cheapest paid plan for now. You can always upgrade if when you grow out of it. If you don’t like the templates that bandzoogle offers, I suggest using a wordpress site. I love wordpress. In order to set up a wordpress site you will need a hosting account. I use Host Gator, but many people like Blue Host a lot (and with Blue Host, you get a free domain name when you sign up). If you go with Host Gator you will need to buy a domain name. I use GoDaddy for that. Oh, and start blogging. If you have no idea what to blog about, then go buy this book. Now for Facebook, you will need to set up a fan page this is not complicated. Just google anything you don’t immediately understand. Once you have that set up, you will need to make a landing page. For this I suggest you use Bandpage by Rootmusic. There are tutorials on their site that are easy to follow. Nice! Now that that is moving let’s move on to exposure. First let me point out that I have explained how to set up engagement first before exposure. There is a reason for that. If you go get exposure and have no way to host the growing audience, you’ll lose that audience. Moving on…

Exposure:

There are two major exposure engines that are relatively easy to get going with immediately. These are: YouTube and Twitter. I think YouTube is obvious. People don’t just like to watch videos, they also like to share them. That is a win-win for you. So, you’ve got to start using YouTube. For more about using YouTube, check out these articles. Then go make videos and upload them. Twitter, if you haven’t used it at all, can be a little mystifying at first. The first thought in one’s mind when they consider using twitter is “what the hell are all of these people doing on here anyway?” Here is my advice: Make a list of 10, or so, well-known artists that are similar to you (note: these are artists who sound like you, not just artists that you like) start following them on twitter. See who is following them and follow those people too. Try to follow about 10 – 50 new people per day. You will see that people will start to follow you back. The people following you should be people who are interested in your music if you made your list accurately. Now start posting some tweets. Don’t just post things like “Hey check out my music” that’s annoying. You’ve got to post more interesting things first. See what the people you are following are posting to get some ideas. If you can’t think of anything, post quotes and links to interesting articles that the people who are following you might be interested in. Once you have a pattern going with posting non-promotional posts, then you should post something like “looking for some feedback, check out my video at wwww.____ and tell me what you think.” You may still get nobody that responds. Don’t worry about that. Just keep it up. There is a great tool that will help you manage your social media. That is Hootsuite. You have to get into using this. It will make your life a lot easier.

Extras:

Alright… that’s the meat of the idea. However, I don’t want to leave you with a gaping hole in your set up. There are certain tools that will be necessary for the next step in the set up process. This is the “just get started guide”, but I don’t think anyone should do anything without at least a minimal effort to start an email list. Even if you don’t actually email them. Now if you go with Bandzoogle for your website than this is already taken care of. I’m not going to tell you, in this post, how exactly to set this up in Bandzoogle. You will have to use their tutorials for now. If you are using a wordpress site, you will need an autoresponder service. This costs some money. The cost is generally based on the number of subscribers. I go over a list of the popular autoresponders in my post Marketing Your Music Online – Step Four, however, just to simplify it I will tell you my favorites as of this writing. I am still using Aweber and have no complaints, but I can see why people would use Mail Chimp. It is cheaper. Again this isn’t a tutorial about setting up autoresponders and name capture forms. There are great tutorials on these sites to check out.

That is plenty for right now. If this post is speaking to you, leave a comment after you have put some of these pieces in place. I would love to see your progress. Also if you have any questions or if you think I have left out any crucial pieces of the initial set up, please leave a comment below. I hope this has been helpful.

Tom Siegel

P.S. – If you haven’t signed up for my newsletter at http://indieleap.com/newsletter Then go ahead and do that. When you do, you will receive my ebook that outlines a music marketing plan with these steps (and others) laid out in more detail.