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.