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...