The SoundCloud Formula

As most of you return readers know, I have been working on figuring out a way to get visitors to my site from SoundCloud. I've been working with low numbers of actions using webDOMinator friend adder and some customizations I made in it, to achieve this result.

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.

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.