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.

Marketing: Results from Last.FM and viral marketing

Yesterday I talked about my Last.fm strategy. I did not mention the customizations I did on the Auto-Shout script. I added a couple lines to get the username of the user into a variable and then used that variable in my message. I then made use of DynamicPhrases (text spinning in webDOM) in order to really get the most of out my comment posts. Also so that no two comment posts would be the same. This is the full message as a dynamic phrase...

Hey ^global.name|global.tname^!|.| -^ ^I see you like|been listenin to^ ^Kode 9^?| i see.^ ^People who like him usually get along with my music well.|I think you would like my music too.|you might like my stuff as well!|I know you'd like my tracks too.^ ^If you'd be so kind please|^ ^drop over to|go to|hit up|check out^ my profile at http://last.fm/music/Wise+Eyes and have a listen. ^I have the newest album Om posted with a couple new songs.||I'll bet you love it :)|thanks :)|Leave a comment and tell me if I was right or not.^

If you want downloads of my ^tracks|music|songs^, I offer them free on my site at http://WiseEyesMusic.com so ^head over there|check it out|head on over|you can go^ and get all the downloads you ^want|need|desire^ (new tracks every couple days)|^. Thanks for ^taking the time time to read this|reading this|supporting independent music|supporting me^ ^:)|:D|=)|;)|:o)|=o)^

When webDOM parses this out, it can come up with some pretty different messages, but still carry the same meaning. Here are some examples of how it works out...

Example Output 1:

Hey Amiecn! been listenin to Kode 9? People who like him usually get along with my music well. If you'd be so kind please go to my profile at http://last.fm/music/Wise+Eyes and have a listen. I have the newest album Om posted with a couple new songs.

If you want downloads of my songs, I offer them free on my site at http://WiseEyesMusic.com so check it out and get all the downloads you want (new tracks every couple days). Thanks for reading this :)

Example Output 2:

Hey amiecn! been listenin to Kode 9? you might like my stuff as well! check out my profile at http://last.fm/music/Wise+Eyes and have a listen.

If you want downloads of my songs, I offer them free on my site at http://WiseEyesMusic.com so you can go and get all the downloads you want. Thanks for supporting me :)

So I just went about Auto-Shouting this using a 90 second wait counter (at least 90 seconds between each comment sent). I was able to pull 7 people from last.fm directly since yesterday. I checked my last.fm account and I got 1 play yesterday. A comment, and some people tagged my account and added my music to their last.fm library. This is modest so far, so I'll see if it's just the fact that not everyone's on last.fm every day. I'll give last.fm a rest for a couple days and see if any of the effort from yesterday has some continuing payoffs.

As far as the viral part of the site goes... I'm delighted to see that facebook is sending me a nice constant stream of people. I looked at my stats on the site this morning and I've already had 30 full plays and 5 downloads (which means 5 shares of my tracks, most likely somewhere on facebook) Only about 8 people per day on average, but return visitors and new people alike. Here's my google analytics output on that...



Overall as well, here's a view of my GA dashboard. Visitors are going up, so that's awesome. Direct traffic being the biggest contributor, followed by facebook.


Onward and upward! Today I'm going to try out Mixcloud plugin and see where it takes me

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...