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!