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.
