Each website has a formula of actions that are necessary in order to get visitors from that site to your site. This formula consists of the target, content, message, and call to action which are chosen. The details of your target market, the content of your profile, the message that you portray, and the way that you make your call to action all depend on the community that you're dealing with. Each social network is it's own community. I believe I have now cracked the SoundCloud formula on how to get a large number of visits to any music based website. This blog entry is an attempt to cover so far what was needed to do this.
To Summarize what I did:
Target: Since my music is a mix of electronica I could say all people who like electronic music, but I wanted to focus on a specific niche in soundcloud specifically which was the dubstep fans and other dubstep artists. This allows me to easily craft my message so that it calls to everyone who I'm targeting.
Content: A small selection of my own original music. The profile description, and the song descriptions and tags were all set up and targeted toward my chosen target market (dubstep fans)
Message: Because of my target market and because of the site, my message is based on artists and based on the way soundcloud works. I used the SuperFollow custom action which will comment on other artist's tracks. In the comment I give them a compliment on the music. I know, as an artist, that I love getting compliments. It fills me with the want to create more music.
Call to action: I drop my link and ask them to check out my stuff too. This comment can be seen by anyone, thus giving my link better exposure than if I was to simply send a message to this person. This uses the idea that giving a compliment and then dropping my own link and asking them to check out my music (from an artist to artist point of view), will have them more inclined to click on my link because artists love compliments and because there's a natural sort of mutuality effect that happens in human psychology.
As for how I did all this, I just ran SuperFollow on 1,000 ID's at the beginning of the day. I then run the new "Mutualize" custom action I made that allows me to unfollow all that are not following me mutually. Yesterday, I also ran a new custom action I added called "Share to Followers" which shares my latest track with everyone who's following me.
The Results
The resulting visits to my site so far from the last two days is way above what any other method I've tried has gotten me:
A total of 49 hits in the last two days just from soundcloud. Each day I've had 2 or more downloads, thus causing the viral aspect of the site to kick into gear and asking the user to share the track link on a social network in order to get the download. It's either that, or they give me their email address. I've now got 21 email addresses that my site can automatically send new tracks to.
Quite a few plays: my soundcloud stats show 98 plays / 15 comments / 4 favoritings this week, and that counter reset this morning at 12:00am Soundcloud time. In total I'm now over 3,000 plays on soundcloud. I also have over 600 followers from that site.
My site stats show 86 plays yesterday with 15 full plays and 2 downloads. The two downloads were also tracks that were up on my SoundCloud account so I'm quite sure that these two downloads were from people who listened and would have converted to a download on soundcloud, but instead I got that download juice for myself and thus caused the link to those songs to be spread more to other people who will possibly like it.
Google Shows this for soundcloud referrals:
It's been a good couple of days on soundcloud.
