A Guide to Promoting Yourself As A Musician Online

Written by Peter Jacobs

Endless possibilities have been opened up by the internet for promoting your music. And although it might appear to be quite overwhelming, it does allow your creativity to run wild and leaves plenty of room for experimentation.

The key to promoting your music successfully in the current day music industry is to test out different things, learn from all of the promotions that you run, make necessary changes, and continue to fine-tune them to your individual music career.

So let’s take a closer look at some of the basic strategies that can be used for promoting your music currently.

1. Live Music Promotion
Although everything is moving increasingly towards digital, it is still easy to forget how valuable person-to-person interaction can be. These days, after all, you can create high-quality music, release it, then distribute and promote it, or even play live without needing to ever leave your room.

But simply because you are able to release something completely online doesn’t necessarily mean that you should! These personal interactions, in fact, are still very important within the music industry.

As an example, let’s look at the live show. Of course it is an opportunity to earn some money and have fun and perform your music. However, it provides you with some very unique marketing opportunities as well.

Gigs are an excellent place for promoting your new song or album. Let your fans know that you are going to be premiering an entire album or a new song before you release it. Select one local gig and transform it into an even. Perhaps fans who come to your show can purchase your album at your merchandising booth before anybody else does.

You also can use gigs for growing a fan base in new countries, states, or cities. Work with a locally established band and offer to do a headline swap with them. You open for them when they are playing in their home town and then they will do the same thing when you are playing in your home town. You just need to be sure to choose a band that has a similar music style to yours. If you do that a couple of time, you will eventually be able to have a headlining show of your own.

Click here if you would like our free guide on Promoting Your Music using our 3 Social Media Checklists

2. Contact Music Blogs
Promoting your music isn’t only about sharing with your fans. Another thing you want to do is to reach out to connect with new audiences and attempt to convert these people into fans. One great way of doing this is music blogs. Bloggers are constantly searching for new, fresh content, and what is cool about that, is there lots of smaller blogs that as an indie artist are within your reach. Blogs have a tendency to have a fairly niche following. That means if a blog runs your music, it is guaranteed that it will be seen by individuals who like the genre already!

Do some research, locate blogs covering your style of music, and then send bloggers personal emails. Do you have any interesting stories regarding your new tour, song, or album? If you have a unique story that will definitely help you with standing out from all of the thousands of other musicians who are also releasing their albums. Do whatever you can to make it as easy as possible for bloggers to cover your story and also treat them well. Establishing a relationship is what is key here. You can always cut out a lot of the time required by utilizing music blog submission.

3. Promote and Sell Your Music From Your Website
Your own website shouldn’t be something that is static. It should be changing and adapting continuously in order to reflect new events that are part of your music career. You want your fans to be visiting your website as frequently as possible. The more time they spend on your website, the more they will be exposed to your tickets, merch, and albums.

If you are just getting started, then most likely you won’t have many large updates other than a tour and album release occasionally. A great solution is to start a blog.

Setting up a blog on your website’s homepage is fairly easy to do. A majority of website tools such as WordPress and Bandzoogle have blog capabilities. Have blog posts planned out for regular times such as one or two times per week and then share whatever you think your fans will think it interesting. That could be a run-down on the various gear that you use, a funny story coming out of your most recent band practice, new lyrical ideas that you are currently working on, or inspiration for certain songs.

Getting landing pages set up on your website is another idea. You can use landing pages to make sales, provide more information to your fans, to raise awareness, or collect email addresses.

4. Use Social Media Properly
All of us use social media. These days, if you are not on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, it is like you don’t even exist. However, you might not be using social media for promoting your music to its fullest potential.

Social media isn’t a pure marketing platform. It is actually a catalyst for word-of-mouth marketing and conversations. Around 80% of all of your posts should be interesting, conversational and funny, with just around 20% being promotional.

That doesn’t men that conversational posts cannot be promotional! You simply need to learn the best ways of framing your content in ways that are interesting. For example, when you are recording your new album in the studio, sprinkle in some updates on social media. Write a story describing your studio experience, put a short teaser video of one of your songs up, of share a photo of your mix.

That doesn’t mean that conversational posts cannot be promotional! You simply need to learn the best ways of framing your content in ways that are interesting. For example, when you are recording your new album in the studio, sprinkle in some updates on social media. Write a story describing your studio experience, put a short teaser video of one of your songs up, of share a photo of your mix. If you are out on a tour, you can take photos from various venues and share photos and videos. Those things are not promotional in an obvious way, but they do let your fans know what is happening.

However, it is very important to remember that in terms of promoting your music, social media is not the only game in town. It can turn into a big time suck quite easily that takes you away from making music if you don’t properly manage your time.

5. Collaboration with Other Musicians
One music promotion aspect that is often overlooked is collaboration. It is an excellent ways of getting your music introduce to new people and exponentially growing your fan base. You can collaborate on almost anything. Just be sure to collaborate with musicians who have fans that will like your music. Work with bands that have similar fan base demographics or who play a similar genre to yours.

The headline trading strategy that we discussed earlier in this article is of course a great option. Let’s also discuss some of the things you can potentially do online.

You can obviously work together on an album or song. Try to record a cover song together and then release it on Facebook pages or YouTube channels. The key is driving your fans to one another. When you create a video or song, link to one another’s social channels and websites.

An easier option is simply agreeing to give one another a shout-out on social medial. You can each one another’s latest track and let your fans know how much you love it. (Of course that means you should be working with musicians whose music you really do love). One of the very best marketing tools that is available is the power of recommendations.

Check out NewArtistModel.com for more tips and ideas.

//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({
google_ad_client: “ca-pub-2828303470638946”,
enable_page_level_ads: true
});