I have a music video to promote. Hopefully people will like it enough that it will take off through word of mouth, but I'd like to give it the best possible boost I can in order to get those mouths talking and fingers typing. The video is for my own song, so I'll be asking friends and family to help promote it as much as they can. The release date is May 23rd. Here's what I have planned so far: - post the video on a video sharing site and embed it in my website. - include social bookmarking links with the post that contains the embedded video. - include a story with the video and tell people how they can help promote it. - email everyone I know and ask them to forward it to their friends. - post it on Myspace, Youtube, and Facebook. - have the cast promote it (a couple dozen people) I'm looking for any free ideas and online resources that could help. High traffic music forums, blogs, etc. would be a great start. One thing I'm not interested in is using any sort of adderbot or similar with Myspace. I don't want to get spammy with this. I also have a question about digg. If 50 of my friends signed up on the day of the video launch and dugg the video, would that throw and warning signs with digg? It'd be actual individuals doing it. Thanks.
ask your friends to sign up on digg before the release day. And not all in the same day. You should also ask them to sign up for stumbleupon and other social bookmarking sites. That can get you a lot of traffic
For starters you can simply search for forums & blogs related to the genre your song is in. Also go to Google Groups & Yahoo Groups. Many groups are geared toward specific artists, but some are for whole genres. Start to get involved in some groups & forums now, so when you're ready to launch you're not just jumping in and spamming. Create a Squidoo page about some aspect of music to establish yourself as an expert in some way, or just provide something amusing/interesting for people. All about musical instruction, all about guitars (or whatever instrument you play), music promotion, popular song lyrics... could be anything. Link it to your website. When your video is released add it to your Squidoo page. Then get all your friends & family to rate your Squidoo page to try to get in the Top 100 for a while, you'll get lots of traffic that way. It would be helpful if you could figure out an 'angle'. Do you have an interesting personal story? Is there anything unusual about your personal/musical journey? Any obstacles you've had to overcome? Is there any offline buzz about your music? What makes your music different and why do you think I'd like it? If you can figure out your angle, choose some good keywords to use and submit an online press release at PRWeb. I'm curious though... are you planning on trying to monetize this in some way? Do you have a subsequent CD planned? Let's say you get the entire Internet talking about your video. What would you do with all that buzz?
Good idea about having signing up for digg, stumble upon, etc. early. I'll get started on that soon. Great tips djazz! I'm definitely planning on spending time in the forums/groups before the launch. I do have an angle. The way the video itself is made is the angle. I'm not going to talk about it until the launch day. I don't have anything to sell. The plan is to have some recording equipment and instruments listed on the site, with a graphic that shows the cost, and how much I have saved up for it. If people like what I'm up to then they can make a donation. I'll be using the equipment to record songs, and they'll be available online for free. I want to be able to get some decent quality recordings and share them with people. It'd be years before I can afford to do that unless I get some help. So basically it's saying, throw in a few dollars now, and you can get whatever I make for free from this point on. I rarely buy CDs, so I don't expect my fans to either. Every donor can have their name listed on the site if they wish. I'm thinking about setting something up where people get to do little extras if they donate more: $10.00 - you can post a message. $20.00 - you can post a link. I'm not sure about that yet though. I don't want spammy stuff ending up on my site. I'd really just like it to be people donating because they think what I'm trying to do is cool. If I got 500,000 to the site and only 20 donated, whatever. At least people saw the video. I can understand how one video wouldn't necessarily be enough to make people want to give out money, even if they really liked it. Getting some exposure and some fans is good enough for me. I'll also have a mailing list signup, and link to my Myspace so that I can pull some people back in once I do something else.
You know, if your website also had some other kind of a draw *in addition* to you & your quest, something that was useful or interesting, blah... I'd have to think about this because I'm drawing a blank right now, but you've got to think real hard about your target market and what they want. Maybe offer them something (information? entertaining popular news? instruction on how to do something cool?) and start a forum. Maybe *don't* charge people to post a message, you'd get tons more traffic that way if you've also got content that gives people a reason to return to your site. If an idea like that works, eventually the forum itself becomes the draw (DP is a perfect example). I just think that if all you've got is one song & one music video, and you don't crank new ones out pretty darn regularly, all people will do is visit once, decide to donate or not, and then never come back. "Been there, done that", you know? Sounds harsh, but The Public is pretty fickle. Their attention span is short and they're always looking for the next cool thing. Heck, if you just allow people to post messages for free in some cool way, THAT could be the draw. Two good examples of that are: http://postsecret.blogspot.com/ http://futureme.org/ Are you familiar with the "Buy me a beer" script that's in some forums? You could set something like that up on your website for donations. It's just something kinda cool & different, people have fun with it. Anyway, just some wild & crazy ideas...
Thanks for the compliment, Reprobate, I'm very flattered considering that you're obviously more of an expert at Squidoo than I am! Except that, "he" happens to be a gurl. Deborah