Hyping Bands on the Internet : EMail & Articles
More Options to Build a Following via the World Wide Web
Oct 29, 2009
In Hyping Your Band on the Internet 1, social networking and blogging were discussed. The information presented below seeks to drill down into additional Internet resources that musicians can employ to continue a viral marketing campaign with the goal of attracting fans and spreading the word about the music.
This is particularly important as the band starts to play live shows.
E-Mail Campaigns for Musicians
As was mentioned in the discussion of blogging in the previous article, a band should provide opportunities for fans to sign up for and receive e-newsletters about the band. Placing a link on a MySpace page is the best way, but having a sign-up sheet available at the band’s live shows will also encourage fans to enroll.
An e-mail newsletter should be regularly distributed – perhaps once a month or once every couple of months. Too many e-mails in a fan’s inbox can start to look like SPAM, which is something that should be avoided. There are hundreds of resources available to help structure a newsletter and that will provide the technical aspects of how to load and maintain one, so some research on the subject is in order.
A good newsletter will focus only on the band, and will provide notifications of upcoming shows and news about what the band is doing. A newsletter needs to be laid out in a user-friendly and aesthetically pleasing fashion (with no spelling or grammatical errors), and there are free templates available to help create one that does. A template format should be created and that same template should be used for each mailing that goes out, in order to establish a brand identity.
Musicians Can Take Advantage of Article Marketing
Article marketing is a concept that is widely used on the Internet, but one that musicians may be totally unaware of. The concept is that an article is written about the industry, or a segment of the industry, and placed on an article syndication site in an effort to direct Internet traffic to another site – in this case, the band’s site.
Let’s say a band has a smoking-hot guitar player. An article could be written that talks about the style of that player – just the style, not the player him or herself. The article will be loaded with keywords that attract readers, and somewhere in that article, a link is placed to direct traffic to the band’s MySpace page.
Article marketing requires a little more effort and skill than simply posting to a blog. It will require a good writer who writes in an engaging voice that will pull readers in. It further requires proper placement of keywords and knowledge of search engine optimization that will get attention. To find keywords that have impact, a writer can use Google AdWords Keyword Tool for ideas. (The “Local Search Volume” column is the one that provides the best ideas.)
Finally, the band will need to locate article syndication sites that will publish the articles. The first step is to determine the keywords that will ensure maximum exposure, then to set a Google alert to have e-mails delivered (it can be daily).
Those alerts will come with links to Internet-published sites that contain those keywords. From those alerts, the band’s representative can find sites that carry articles such as the one the band wishes to publish. From there it is a matter of following the instructions of the site to have an article published. Publishing regular articles with fresh content is a great way to direct traffic back to the band’s site.
More Internet Marketing Tools for Musicians
A band will be restricted only by its lack of marketing imagination as far as promoting itself on the Web. The next few articles in this series will cover helpful resources that exist solely for this purpose, and will provide information on how to get a song into rotation on streaming Internet radio.
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