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 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!