Big day for Soundcloud

Yesterday I followed the new strategy on Soundcloud. The results were quite good; My conversion rate from follows/invites to actual profile views went up. My song plays and comments went up as well. This is what I did.

I created two new custom actions in webDOM. One that writes a comment on someone's profile, and the other shares my newest track with any user from my list. I combined these two scripts into a main custom action I called "SuperFollow". I have updated the soundcloud plugin, so for those of you using it, you can enjoy these new features as well. The SuperFollow action only follows a person who has tracks placed on their profile page. If it notices there are tracks, it will also comment on one of the tracks using the message body I have set up in my message settings. If SuperFollow notices that there are no tracks (i.e: a music fan rather than a musician) it then chooses to share a track with that person, just selecting my latest track as the one to share. Since my message is spun using DynamicPhrases, webDOM won't drop the same comment twice, or it will, but very rarely.

I ended up running this on about 2,000 user ID's because I forgot to stop it at 1,000... but no problems, because though it could not follow, it still shared tracks and wrote comments. Here's what I got from yesterday's run so far:

354 profile views
333 plays
62 comments
11 favoritings
4 visits to my site

Now... I took a look at my google analytics for this and I noticed that those 4 visits from yesterday came from my profile page on soundcloud... In total, soundcloud has sent me 36 visits since April 3rd... and on one day it sent me 12. The other 32 visits from them came from the read message page. This allows me to make a couple observations:

1. Soundcloud allows links in messages
2. People respond more to a direct message, though some respond badly if they think it's spam
3. Most people who you do not ask to go to your site will not click your website link on the right side of your profile
4. Commenting and following and sharing tracks really helps the ratio between the number of profile views and the number of plays I'm getting

Also, take into account that this is only one day after my campaign, so there's going to be more people coming in all day as well as over the next few days. The biggest problem is my conversion rate. It seems that I really do have to ask people to come visit my site. So I'm going to wait a day or two, let yesterday's run finish it's job, and then my new policy is going to be dropping links on comments. The links are clickable in comments. It might be a bit shady as far as people seeing it as spam or something, so I'm weary to do it... but hey, one's got to do what one's got to do.

In other news, I was looking at google analytics and my results from last.fm. I'm going to run a last.fm campaign again today and see what I can do as far as that goes. I didn't run much automation on it, and it is up there right after soundcloud in top referrers.

That being said... Facebook remains my top referrer simply due to the viral aspect. The day before yesterday I posted up a new song on my site and shared it on facebook. I got about 180 plays / 112 full plays / 2 downloads. This is pretty good and at least there's people listening and downloading my music. On the 18th though, only about 2 people came from facebook (most of my facebook visitors came from april 3rd to april 12th.) In direct traffic, I had 12 direct visitors on the 18th so it's showing that people are coming back and listening to my music.

It seems I need to make the download aspect a little bit more noticeable or visible. Perhaps I'll make the download button into a gif that slowly pulsates from that dark red color to a yellowish or green color. I'll play with it to see if I can get my download ratio up. Tomorrow we'll see the full aftermath of this. Now it's on to Last.fm for the night.

More Soundcloud automation

I'm just now starting to get how to use SoundCloud properly thanks to another suggestion from a friend. In my previous blog entry about Soundcloud I mentioned my target "dubstep" and it's different sub-genres. Now what I have found is that the night I started doing PM's even though they were spun, I got results from people on other suggestions, but I missed one major point. I needed to do that message from a different account than my music account. Not that anything happened with SoundCloud or banning, just that the message was set up to mention my artist account without actually myself; the artist, being the person to be mentioning myself. Nonetheless. People overall responded well.

Yesterday I started actually letting the soundcloud plugin work on adding. I had previously set up the Add script in webDOM to "gather" to my list of soundcloud users while adding, so I now have a list of 30,000+ users, and because of the way commenting works on the site, all of those users are within the target market still. That being said, I let it run and it seems my follow count stopped at 979. This seems to be a limit imposed by SoundCloud.

So to get around the limit this is what I did...

1. Created a new list called "scratch"
2. Navigated to the page on soundcloud showing those who follow me
3. Auto-Gathered everyone from that list
4. In the list, I clicked on the very last list item so that webDOM starts after that item
5. Navigated to the page on soundcloud showing those who I'm following
6. Auto-Gathered the people from those who I'm following - because the list system only allows uniques it will not add those who are following me back because they're already there
7. I then ran the Unfollow custom action in the soundcloud plugin

So now I ran through all of the people toward the end of the list. At the moment I have a webDOM bot going through the latter 940 people who I was following and is now unfollowing them. This will give me more room to follow another 940 different people. At the end of the weekend (I didn't work on any campaigning this weekend) I was able to get 38 followers, 226 profile views, 128 song plays, 2 downloads, 31 visits to wiseeyesmusic.com and 22 comments.

Like all good marketers, I like to look at conversions and see the conversion ratios. This way I can figure out how much work it will take to reach my goals. I want to generate at least 100 visits to my site from each of the social networks I'm working with. So right now, the conversion flow works like this...

979 friend requests > 226 profile view > 31 site visits

So respectively if 979 were 100% then I would be converting:

1. 23% of requests to profile views
2. 13% of page views to site visits

So 13% of the people who view my soundcloud profile visit my web site, which means that in order to get 100 visits a day, I need to get 729 profile views. In order to get 729 profile views (23% of invites) then I need to send out 3,157 friend requests per day. Right now I can only invite 979 in one run, and I'm not sure how that's going to work since I need to give people at least a day or two before I unfollow them, because there are people who don't use soundcloud every day. I guess I need to use a new strategy then to reach my goal.

New stragegy - Commenting

I'm going to try doing this action with everyone. When I follow I'm going to also add a comment automatically on a track, if they have one. Then I'm going to also send them a message telling them that I followed them and asking to please follow me back. I do not know if this will work or not, but my hypothesis is that people will be more receptive to come visit my page if they see that I'm following them and that I also sent them a message. I could even, based on the condition that the person has songs uploaded, auto-favorite random songs and change the message to say something about how I like their music in the message. As soon as I'm done unfollowing, this is what I'm going to do.

As for the other strategy of creating a "fan" account and suggesting myself from that account, I'm going to try that as well.

Tomorrow we'll see how it's worked out.

Marketing: Results from Last.FM and viral marketing

Yesterday I talked about my Last.fm strategy. I did not mention the customizations I did on the Auto-Shout script. I added a couple lines to get the username of the user into a variable and then used that variable in my message. I then made use of DynamicPhrases (text spinning in webDOM) in order to really get the most of out my comment posts. Also so that no two comment posts would be the same. This is the full message as a dynamic phrase...

Hey ^global.name|global.tname^!|.| -^ ^I see you like|been listenin to^ ^Kode 9^?| i see.^ ^People who like him usually get along with my music well.|I think you would like my music too.|you might like my stuff as well!|I know you'd like my tracks too.^ ^If you'd be so kind please|^ ^drop over to|go to|hit up|check out^ my profile at http://last.fm/music/Wise+Eyes and have a listen. ^I have the newest album Om posted with a couple new songs.||I'll bet you love it :)|thanks :)|Leave a comment and tell me if I was right or not.^

If you want downloads of my ^tracks|music|songs^, I offer them free on my site at http://WiseEyesMusic.com so ^head over there|check it out|head on over|you can go^ and get all the downloads you ^want|need|desire^ (new tracks every couple days)|^. Thanks for ^taking the time time to read this|reading this|supporting independent music|supporting me^ ^:)|:D|=)|;)|:o)|=o)^

When webDOM parses this out, it can come up with some pretty different messages, but still carry the same meaning. Here are some examples of how it works out...

Example Output 1:

Hey Amiecn! been listenin to Kode 9? People who like him usually get along with my music well. If you'd be so kind please go to my profile at http://last.fm/music/Wise+Eyes and have a listen. I have the newest album Om posted with a couple new songs.

If you want downloads of my songs, I offer them free on my site at http://WiseEyesMusic.com so check it out and get all the downloads you want (new tracks every couple days). Thanks for reading this :)

Example Output 2:

Hey amiecn! been listenin to Kode 9? you might like my stuff as well! check out my profile at http://last.fm/music/Wise+Eyes and have a listen.

If you want downloads of my songs, I offer them free on my site at http://WiseEyesMusic.com so you can go and get all the downloads you want. Thanks for supporting me :)

So I just went about Auto-Shouting this using a 90 second wait counter (at least 90 seconds between each comment sent). I was able to pull 7 people from last.fm directly since yesterday. I checked my last.fm account and I got 1 play yesterday. A comment, and some people tagged my account and added my music to their last.fm library. This is modest so far, so I'll see if it's just the fact that not everyone's on last.fm every day. I'll give last.fm a rest for a couple days and see if any of the effort from yesterday has some continuing payoffs.

As far as the viral part of the site goes... I'm delighted to see that facebook is sending me a nice constant stream of people. I looked at my stats on the site this morning and I've already had 30 full plays and 5 downloads (which means 5 shares of my tracks, most likely somewhere on facebook) Only about 8 people per day on average, but return visitors and new people alike. Here's my google analytics output on that...



Overall as well, here's a view of my GA dashboard. Visitors are going up, so that's awesome. Direct traffic being the biggest contributor, followed by facebook.


Onward and upward! Today I'm going to try out Mixcloud plugin and see where it takes me

Marketing Day 4: Checking SoundCloud Starting Last.FM

I got anxious last night and decided to start SoundCloud on messaging after about 750 friend adds (follows on soundcloud). I let the messenger run all night. Only problem is that webDOM says it's performed 350 actions while I only see two pages of messages in my outbox. I'm assuming that this is because SoundCloud ghosts messages (which is popular nowadays.) I used DynamicPhrases in my messages so I'm guessing that some of my messages are not getting through possibly because they are being sent too fast. I sat and watched webDOM sending for a bit and sure enough, SoundCloud comes back with a message after every send saying: "Message was sent".

While the messaging part is a little disconcerting, I found that at least I got some plays on my SoundCloud profile, a comment, and a couple of profile visits. Since I did my search in google, and overall doing a search for dubstep, it seems that a large portion of the people I chose are possibly just not on soundcloud much or have abandoned their profiles. This can be helped by trying to find more recent users. All in all... it seems my target was correct, and my auto-play song on the site matched that target, but so far I've not seen the type of results I'm looking for. I'll have to wait until tomorrow to see the aftermath of the soundcloud venture. So far with adding all day yesterday I've gotten no referral hits from SoundCloud. This means, either my music is bunk, my target market is off, or that people on SoundCloud just don't like following external links on profiles. I'm hoping it's the later.

In other news, I continue to get hits from SoundClick commenting even though I stopped auto-commenting on soundclick two days ago. Seems that people on SoundClick are used to copying and pasting links, cause my direct hits who are new visitors keeps going up. I've also now hit the search engines with two people searching for "wise eyes music" yesterday. I'm assuming these are also soundcloud members as one of them searched for my actual domain.

All this is good stuff and positive hits for my site. But I need something that's going to bring more people, and I need to make it clear how to download the song. I was thinking that maybe a system could check if the song was 20% finished and then during that time, show the download dialog and possibly change the title of the page. When page titles change in most modern browsers, you can see the tab flashing or you can at least see the change. I'm going to go for the same way facebook chat does their flashing titles when someone gives you a chat. I'm hoping to increase the natural viral effect of the site and the tracks. Also, I'm releasing another track every other day (I have about 150 unreleased original tracks,) so that I can keep users coming back to the site who know that there's always going to be new content on there.

What's my new site for today? Last.FM. I've got a profile up on there already with some music uploaded. It's been around for a couple years, and I've already got about 165 natural listeners on that site. They are a good example of a site which gets unknown content heard. I have heard many good things about them so my plan is to set up a dynamic (spun) message that goes in comments to see if I can drive traffic from there. My plan is to find an artist that's got similar music, and then using that artists fans as my target market. I'm going to leave soundcloud and soundclick running as well so I can get the full benefit of webDOM.

So I'm going to similar artists pages, then gathering from the main profile page. After that I click on "See more listeners" on the right and usually last.fm gives about 5 pages of listeners or 100 most recent listeners. This is great because these are people recently involved in the site, fans of a similar artist, and will be perfect candidates for my music. I'm starting small with about 400 listeners of similar artists. Then I'm setting up my profile with the new link to my site and sending out a very targeted message. I'm using Last.fm plugin's Auto-Shout custom action in order to get the job done.

We'll see how last.fm pans out tomorrow. Happy marketing!

Marketing Day 3: Tackling SoundCloud

Okay, so in my blog from yesterday, I mentioned that I would be doing a couple of things. One of them is hitting up a new network like SoundCloud.com and uploading a beat or two there, then starting invites/messages. For a producer of many styles, I decided to upload 2 songs in the dub-step range of my production so as to keep things simple on the site and to keep my target market firm. I can just search on SoundCloud for the dubstep tag and then collect all those users and begin my campaign.

To start out with, I uploaded 2 more tracks, I already had one uploaded 3 months ago... 4 plays, hah! This is what you get if you just rely on the social network to get you plays. I also provided a link to my website, and the rest of my social networking profiles, plus this blog. Next, I did a search in the soundcloud search box (yes, in the webDOM browser) for simply "dubstep" and I got 500+ song results, 500+ person results, and 500+ group results. Now... the way I figure it... the people in the groups are going to be interconnected to eachother as well through commenting. One thing that's great about soundcloud is that on profiles with songs, there's usually hundreds of different people who comment. This gave me the idea to do auto-gathering while adding these people as a friend. The idea in the end is to get them back to my website, but I'm going to try adding first to see how many people actually click through to my website from my profile. On each of my comments and in my description I mention that there's more songs on my website free for download.

So, what I did was auto-gathered the list of users given... got about 448 results from the gather before it finished, and then I set up my add action to automatically gather from the user's profile before it adds them as a friend. This was done simply by adding a "gather" command in the first line of my Add script.

To do this:
1. Click Scripts in the webDOM toolbar
2. Click the "ADD" tab
3. In the script you're going to see

wait:1
click:dom.a.Start following

You need to change this to be...

gather
wait:1
click:dom.a.Start following

4. Click the "Save" button in the Script editor toolbar

Now that you are done with the auto-gather, what it should do is gather while it's adding so your list just keeps growing through the interconnections. It's important to remember that the target market will get further and further away from the original target market as this goes on. This is because for instance, a friend of someone who makes dubstep, does not necessarily make or have dubstep on their profile... so the friend of the friend may not be related at all. Though it's been seen that with every level of extra people gathered after the first set of targeted users (in my case these first 448) there's on average a 20% deriviation from the original group.

What does this mean for me? Maybe I should gather some soundcloud users from google search too so that my original set of people is larger. I figure a good 1,500 people will do the trick. This will get down my deriviation from the target market considerably, because you figure if 1,500 people all have an average of 70 comments per page, then the next level of gathered users is going to be about 105,000 people which is a decent number of people who are directly related to the target market... after that, the next level 7,350,000 people, of them, about 60% to 80% of them are going to be actually interested in dubstep in my case, but that's still good considering I probably won't need 7 million people to come to my site anyway.

My google search...

site:soundcloud.com dubstep -inurl:groups -inurl:tags

and sure enough... I stick that in, get 100 results per page, google says there's about 228,000 people on soundcloud who either have dubstep in their name, or is a major factor or mentioned on their profile. So now I only need a couple thousand, that way I up my number of secondary level targeted people during my add gather.

I autogather on webDOM from the google search, and as usual google gives me about 800 results... with uniqueness in my list that comes out to about 1,032 users in my list... so I refine my google search...

site:soundcloud.com dubstep "hip hop" -inurl:groups -inurl:tags

The idea here is to get only the people who have for instance hip hop and dubstep both. I can rinse and repeat this idea with other sub-genres of dubstep and other genres dub steppers like, this way I get more results from google. So I use "hip hop", "dark", "ambient", "hardcore", etc. until I get a list of 2,532.

After gathering, I begin to add people as friends with my modified Add script and I'm getting over 100 extra people (the commenters on the tracks) per user, so it seems that my second level set of gathered users is going to be about 25k instead of 7k. I'm going to leave this running and come back tomorrow to see the results of adding people. If they like my tracks, they will most likely come to the site is what I'm hoping. If tomorrow I don't see any good stats coming in from soundcloud I'll try different methods like commenting or messaging. I set my wait counter to 15 so that at least 15 seconds passes between each friend request. By this time tomorrow I should have sent a couple thousand out to test the waters on soundcloud.

Until tomorrow then...

Step 2: The Marketing

I've already posted the blog entry for Step 1 and I've placed a link to that blog entry in an internet marketing forum that I've been a member of for awhile. I did not just copy my content to the forum post, but rather I made a more personalized message then linked to the site and the blog (backlink power there). It also helps that I posted on a forum that I've been a member of for awhile, because the people that know me on that site will most likely visit my page, even if they don't really care for my type of music.

The viral marketing and SEO will take place automatically due to the way the site is built, so that covers those two aspects. The Blog is linking back to all of my sources and points of interest so it provides a site/music back-story for people to follow. I'm going to set up an RSS feed in PHP that combines these blog entries along with my music releases so that people can have some reading while jamming to my beats. The only real thing left to do is start up my Social Network Marketing campaign. This will start to drive instant traffic to the site so that the the rest of the marketing plan can take place there. I've started by creating a facebook page, a twitter account, and linking in my age-old MySpace profile too. These are all linked to from the site and they represent the upper crust of the social networking world. Now the only thing left to do is target some social network sites and hit my niche.

This is done using webDOMinator and some pre-built plugins that have come recommended by music/beats producers who use webDOM. Here's my list of target sites in this campaign:

SoundClick.com
Last.FM
SoundCloud.com
Youtube.com
ReverbNation.com

These sites come highly recommended by my clients. I've already got at least one account on all of these sites, so it's a matter of making sure the profile's are ready with all the information people are going to need, maybe a song or two uploaded, and link back to my sites. As far as youtube goes, I'm just going to make a youtube slideshow type video with one of my more commercial sounding tracks on it and I'll get to that in an upcoming update.

I already have been working with Soundclick the last day to see how my stats would turn out. I ran it all yesterday. They don't really show up on google analytics as a referring site, but they show up as direct hits. This is because as I'm commenting on the profiles on that site, the URL to the site does not show up as a link, and the commenting feature on SoundClick does not let me include HTML. I did however notice quite a bit of traffic for the 9th.

Here's some of my stats... the plays, full plays, and downloads are noted in my internal stats system on my site. On that display, starts of plays are in red... full plays (when a person finishes a song) are in yellow, and downloads are in blue. Notice yesterday I got one/two downloads on some of my songs. I think this was due to past fans of my music who found my site on facebook, because one of them thanked me on my wall for the new beats. The google analytics side of my stats I can't give everyone access to, but here's a screenshot. Overall I think that yesterday went pretty well.


The thing I'm liking is the return visitors. This means that people are at least enjoying the music. Out of 121 overall visits, 42 of those were return visits. The soundclick visitors are marked as they are direct visits and new people. Notice on the 9th that there was an increase of about 500% or something because of the soundclick campaign and other things noted above. It's still not the amount of traffic to write home about, but it's quite a nice increase from the webDOM automation I ran all day yesterday. Note, with SoundClick I sent out about 2,500 comments, and got 42 new visitors from them. I assume the lower conversion rate is coming from the fact that I'm not really targeting on soundclick as much as just commenting out on every profile the bot comes across... so ofcourse there's going to be people disinterested, and then there's also the fact that the link I'm posting is not clickable. So the people who are coming from there are only people who like my genre of music, and those who realize they need to copy and paste the URL into their address bar.

All in all, things are in progress and I'm going to try out commenting/PMing a new network like SoundCloud tomorrow to see how it goes. I think I'll get better results than SoundClick. Also, still no Search engine hits... but that will come with my page rank and after my site has been around for awhile.

The Site: Step 1

So here's my new take on a plan for marketing my music online. I've already implemented all of step 1.

The site is an idea generated from a conversation I had with a fellow artist Kenny Jaworski and another long time client and also fellow musician Mr. Meeble. Thanks Meeble for the inspiration. It was also inspired by SyntheticSubstance. This idea consists of a viral marketing method, a method in webDOM, and covers the four corners of internet marketing altogether.

I already have the site implemented. It's at: http://wiseeyesmusic.com

It's basically just a one-pager or what many call a "squeeze page" because it only has the minimal elements needed on it to make the visitor do what I really want them to do when all is said and done. The site consists of just the music player (which I made the custom interface for and the back end is thanks to the code over at http://flash-mp3-player.net/players/js/preview/medias/ ), Social links (to give my social network profiles some love,) and then I'm going to include a way to buy uncompressed raw WAV format for DJ's and other professionals. I've got 12 tracks uploaded to it to begin with. The site is viral because of one major factor: The downloads are "free" in exchange for spreading the word. (thanks Kenny!)

When clicking the download button for a song, (right next to the play button,) the user gets a pop up menu which asks them to do one of the following in order to get the download: share on facebook, tweet on twitter, digg the track, stumble it, or bookmark it on reddit. (will probably add more bookmarking services like del.icio.us, etc.) The site is made from scratch (besides that bad ass js/flash mp3 player core back-end); I even gave the player a playlist, position-seeking, next/back buttons, and a nice graphic of me spinning fire poi back in Goa. With this simple design, and the fact that the music player starts right up on the page load, I've seen average visit lengths of 9 minutes 55 seconds in my Google Analytics site statistics.

There are four major things I consider important in internet marketing: SEO, Social Networks, Blogging, and E-Mailing. Blogging, and SEO are being covered in the fact that you're reading this blog entry, and that the site itself is providing SEO through the viral quality of those who will be linking back to it. The Social actions that the site requires the user to make provide back-links as well as helping map the site with search engines. The link that goes back to each track is actually a link that looks like http://wiseeyesmusic.com/tracks-Habibi and is SEO friendly with the title/keywords/description, but basically the same exact player page.

As far as E-Mailing goes... That's double-opt-in E-Mailing for those of you white hats reading this. In the pop-up, a person can enter their e-mail address as well, which will mail them the song link directly. I can then use their e-mail for my mailing list, where my site will automatically send them a new email when I release a new track on the site. This leads us to Step 2, the Marketing.

The Music Virus: Spreading your music virally

This blog is set up to track progress on my new site at http://WiseEyesMusic.com and explain about the site, it's success rate, and whether or not it would be a good plot for making an online superstar out of any band or artist with good music.

I will be talking about music marketing, online social network marketing, SEO marketing, blog based marketing, visitor retention, getting return visitors, and viral marketing on this site. More to come in newer entries. Get ready to do some reading!