As 2009 wrapped up, I wanted to take some positive momentum into the next year. Evaluating what worked and what didn’t work in my music marketing campaign was easy. The hard part is acknowledging it and fixing it.

We are all human, and I fell victim to some bad habits. Stop waiting for the music lottery!

Musicians sometimes are happy with just having all the pieces a band needs. I have a website, Facebook page, Twitter account, and mailing list. I bought my lottery ticket, now its time for me to win. Without any consistent activity, those aspects to your promotion are useless.

There has to be a way to learn from mistakes and build upon what you were good at.

Organization/Time Management

I’ve gotten lost amongst music projects and blogging tasks that at times is overwhelming. The reason it got to this point is because I didn’t have a plan laid out. I was writing whenever I felt like it and lost track of what I really wanted to accomplish.

Create a content calendar and think of specific topics you want to write about for the month. Whether you are writing 1 article a week or 5 a week. This will eliminate time spent on thinking “I don’t know what to write about”. If you get the ball rolling, your tasks get easier later.

This is a must for 2010. I’ve been able to plan out future articles and get more time for myself. The calendar led to projects being completed and kept me motivated to write.

Blog Promotion

Two factors showed positive effects towards my blogging promotion: social networking and getting to know other bloggers.

Social Networking Initiative

Social networking is great. The key was using what worked. Twitter is awesome, at least for me. Use what you enjoy and if you see it has a positive impact on your blog visits, then improve it.

For instance, with Twitter, I could try speaking with 5 new people and introduce them to the blog. I could also hold a Twitter contest to get more mailing list subscribers. Use it with a purpose and learn from your peers.

The emcee in me always comes out: “I wasted time in 2009, that all ends in 2010″

Getting To Know Other Bloggers

Focusing on your website content is key. As your site visitors grow, opportunities will arise. Taking time to get to know other bloggers has helped expand my reach in 2009.

Create a list of music blogs you are interested in and get to know the writers.

Build your promotion from the ground up. Other bloggers can relate to the trials and tribulations of marketing their site. Joining together on random efforts can reap huge returns in visitors later. Be honest and brainstorm as well. You pick up great tips and free promotion.

Helping others goes a long way. Thanks to all the bloggers out there spreading the word about Hip Hop Distribution.

Blog Maintenance

Keyword research has proven positive in my experience. Take time to tag your article correctly, and study the trends from your web stats. Understand your audience and give them more of what they want.

Better linking is very important. Take some old articles and find a way to link it to some newer content or vice versa. Increase reader and search engine relevance. Doing this raised my Page Rank, higher traffic and increased page views. I will build upon this.

Homework

1. Create a list of 3 things that improved your website stats and revenue.
2. Answer why it worked
3. Create tasks to apply this month

The simplicity in this small assignment is to start thinking of building on successful campaigns that worked for YOU. Listing specific accomplishments can be hard, but you have to know if its a winning or losing effort.

I will expand more on specific tasks in later posts. Please share any things that have worked for you below and what you have learned from your blogging in 2009.

If you are just beginning your band blogging mission, this list will help give you an idea of things to monitor and improve your marketing attack.

If you have been blogging for a while, this list is great to make sure your focus is on point. I have been doing recent band consultations and found it necessary to create this PDF. Blogging is one aspect of a music operation but can open up endless networking and promotion opportunities.

This list has made it possible for me to reach a wider audience with my band blog and with Hip Hop Distribution. These 5 factors made my monthly visits increase.

Benchmark your Progress

When I first began it was hard for me to get a steady stream of traffic to my music. I started with getting a couple hundred visitors for the month, wondering what the hell I needed to do to.

When I would check out my stats all I would see is this “roller coaster” graph, watching monthly visits go up and down. I have been a big Search Engine Marketing nut, to say the least, and had been trying different techniques to implement into my operation.

The hard part was finding information that was relevant to music marketing. My initial concerns were how to keep traffic improving, without paying for advertisements, mainly focusing on search engine traffic, organically.

The website’s purpose doesn’t change whether you are a full time artist or a nighttime musician, creating tunes from your home. The website is your mouthpiece, your business card, your storefront, and your forum to connect with people.

The amount of money you want to make is really dependent on your effort and consistency. It’s really easy to create a revenue stream for your music, and offset costs of domain purchases, and web hosting. I did it and all it took was understanding your goals, setting a plan and executing.

The big thing to avoid initially is getting overwhelmed with too much promotion. This led to burnout and at the time I wasn’t grading how good my promotion was and what was working. This was an important step.

Don’t waste time; it will catch up with you in the long run. I created this sheet to evaluate what was working and what showed potential. From here I could create a solid foundation and add to the list different solutions to positive promotion.

These five factors were huge for my increasing visitors and counting.

Blogging
Social Bookmarking
Commenting Around the Web
Keyword Research
Free Music Strategy

The crazy thing I realized is these 5 factors are dependent on one another. For example, Keyword research will improve your search engine rankings for your articles. Writing an article needs social bookmarking and commenting around social networks for best reach, they don’t market themselves. A free music strategy creates incentive for fans to interact with your website or mailing list.

When these clicked on all cylinders, my visitors and comments started increasing. I was getting help from people on social networks, because I interacted with them. My keyword searches started increasing and I had data to evaluate how people could find me better.

This is just one checklist I created for my Internet marketing campaign and have stuck by it with nice results. Do it yourself doesn’t mean you cant make a huge impact. Feel free to download here. Evaluate Your Band Blog (81)

Hindsight

“Do It Yourself” is not to be taken literally. For success to be achieved you have to be able to delegate responsibility to your strong points. Some band members may enjoy writing more, while others enjoy social networking on Twitter and Facebook. Once you have a list of areas you feel need to be built on, fill in the blanks with team members that can execute.

Simplicity dominated this project. After years worth of work, fading trends and social networks, this PDF is a constant for my websites. Create your own list, and evaluate your effort, and strategy. DIY operations can survive, but the importance of team work and active promotion can never be underestimated.

Download Free Chart Here

Evaluate Your Band Blog (81)

Keep working at your goals, but you have to set them to achieve them. Let me know what kind of things you as a musician use to benchmark your progress and failures.

The ultimate goal is creating a music marketing plan that works. Music 2.0 has offered an amazing amount of options and tools for independent musicians. The one thing I have realized is that every music operation is unique in its own sense.

Finding the right mixture is dependent now on the expectations of the artist. I’ve put a big emphasis on blogging for my Label in hopes of reaching value in time to come. Maybe its my Finance degree yelling at me to keep investing in this stock that is bound to take off.

The reason I find value is monthly visitors keep increasing and digital sales are coming in slowly but surely. The key component is converting sales. It’s a common problem many internet marketers face with monetizing their blogs and its a big issue for musicians. How can we become creative and use successful principles in relation to our music?

I want to take a pro active approach and test out different ideas that will take time but will be worth the effort. The first experiments will involve building Mailing list exchanges and affiliate marketing opportunities.

Mailing List Exchanges

Every musician needs a mailing list. Nothing new here, but we have to think about what do we want to get from our mailing list?

The discouraging thing for many new bloggers is building a mailing list takes some time and then they neglect its importance. I want to plan networking with fellow bloggers and exchange mailing list opportunities and let the test begin.

Step 1 involves you getting to know fellow music bloggers and establishing relationships. The main reason I see this as a good move is we got to think like an artist on a tour. Most tours have several opening acts that are the warm ups for the big show. The opening acts generally are in related genres and the opening acts benefit from the exposure to the bigger fanbase.

Why not treat our mailing list with a Pandora mentality? “If you enjoyed this song then you might enjoy hearing this band”. The key here is not whoring it out. Work with artists whose music you enjoy and brainstorm with these musicians. Offer to promote their song/album, blog article in a newsletter in exchange for the same effort. The power here lies in the numbers: building stronger exposure and branding while establishing a fanbase and networking.

Your blog visitors are just as important as your mailing list subscribers. These assets were built from your hard effort, now its time to put them to work for you.

The plan now involves talking with hungry musicians like you who are willing to share exposure. Take time to find the right partnerships. Power in numbers.

Affiliate Marketing and Music

Affiliate marketing provides a great way for you to get some extra income for your music operation. You essentially promote other services or products and in exchange get a commission. Many bloggers use this to make some extra money to cover hosting costs and promotion. I promote only products I use, so I feel comfortable promoting it and relaying my experience with it.

I am looking to flip this script and have other people promote for me. Affiliate promotion is ready for the music arena. This is not new but I personally have never been offered the opportunity to promote a musician’s cd and am shocked. The incentives through Amazon and iTunes affiliates provides a low commission rate, thus low incentive for people to promote.

As my label emerges, I would love to reward faithful fans with a commission for promoting my album. You share some album sales but may gain long term customers and loyalty. Who knows, even promoting an affiliate in your newsletter. Earn a commission while rewarding someone who is helping you. Monetize where you can and do it in a Ron Burgundy manner, “Stay Classy San Diego”.

Giving away some money to affiliates is not a bad thing. You would have to hire a street team for that kind of promotion and pay some money anyway. Share the wealth and watch your sales expand. The one thing I will be looking for is finding how to set up your own affiliate program or better solutions to establish this plan.

Why Is This Important for My Band

Judge what fits right for you in your operation. Some musicians use multiple blogs to promote their band while others prefer traditional methods. Do what you feel comfortable with. Most musicians play multiple roles to increase chances for success. The important part is finding what you enjoy and working hard at that goal. Build a fundamental business, with strategies in place, and watch your expansion take place.

The planning now begins and building these relationships with fellow musicians to stimulate sales and exposure. Selling music is just one aspect of a music operation for many bands. Build equity through your blog and use that leverage to expand on your ideas.

As Day 2 begins, I took my list of keywords and focused on writing one article based around a couple of those keywords. The key for me was mentioning the keywords and making sure my articles had the correct tags related to those words. Once your article is published, it is time to share it.

Social bookmarking is a blogger’s best friend. When I first began writing, I realized that I used many of the social bookmarking sites but just didn’t use it to my advantage. The goal here is to manage your time and expose your articles to different audiences.

I currently use WordPress as my blogging platform and find their bookmarking plugins very easy to use and helpful. This plugin allows my visitors to save my webpage to their favorite social bookmarking site on my list. Some of the networks I use are Digg, Delicious, Stumbleupon, Reddit and Myspace.

If you don’t have accounts with these sites it’s ok. The setup is free. You sign up, create a profile and list some of your links to your blog. Great way to just create another entry point to your article or website. To submit your article just fill in the appropriate sections such as: Title, URL, Description, and tags. Remember your tags should be some of the keywords you wrote about in your article. The key here is also using the respective sites. For instance, the more I used Digg and interacted with friends there, the more views my articles were getting. Be human and don’t look like a robot.

I chose “Sexy Bookmarks” as my wordpress plugin for social bookmarking. The main reason I chose it is because it had a link to Myspace. I wanted to promote my blog posts on my Myspace profile. This link allows me to click and submit my article to my Myspace blog. Other plugins didn’t have a Myspace link, but as a musician, I want my 3,431 friends to find my blog posts. Find a plugin that matches the sites you like. Mix and match sites and see which ones are better for your niche. Think big, some of those friends may turn into mailing list subscribers.

The one thing I’ve been taught is to chose a handful of these Social bookmark sites and be honest when promoting. Gain followers, and share articles. Submitting your article to too many sites may cause your site to look spammy by the search enginges. Dedicate time to each network gradually and increase your web presence.

Step 2: After writing your article, its time to promote. Submit your article to some new Social Bookmarking sites and let fans help share your work.

While writing for Hip Hop Distribution, I have noticed an increase in music bloggers searching for tips on increasing visitors for showcasing their music. Whether you are and experienced blogger or newbie, traffic always seems to be an area of improvement.

I enjoy blogging and aside from music blogging I find fun in internet affiliate marketing. The great thing here is I try to see any parallels between affiliate marketing and marketing your albums. The main difference with musicians and their product is we have to sell an emotion and aside from just hearing our music, our content can explain in detail what feeling we were trying to convey.

The last article I wrote on Bandcamp stressed an important point with their setup: express the emotion related to the track and write about each track. You don’t have to use Bandcamp to integrate this into your music operation, you just have to be aware of how you are displaying your message. Content is king, and sometimes you can have a well mastered, powerful track but noone can find it. Your descriptions and keywords used play an important factor.

The main thing I have learned from all the Pro Blogging sites and endless blogs out there is, their is no definite guideline to guarantee you endless visitors. You as a music blogger are required to work at this and always remember, what works for others may not work for you. The key here is finding different techniques that work for your specific music operation and be creative in implementing it and adding different facets such as social bookmarking and endless social networks out there.

Within the next couple of days, I plan to provide some tips on some free tools out there to give you some sort of idea how I brainstorm and find keywords or article topics that can bring in some extra, free traffic.