What Should Be Included In Your Music Marketing Mix

marketing-in-music Not that long ago, getting into the music industry meant getting a home-recorded tape into the hands of the right person in a record company or hoping that you’d be discovered at a showcase or local gig. For several reasons, for example the rise in digital sales and the increasing amounts of artists creating their own independent labels, the music industry has changed a lot and thus so has the requirements of musicians.

Music

In order to be able to make a lasting impact on the music industry, a band or artist needs a music marketing team with knowledge, connections and the flexibility to create an individual strategy just for them. The amount of radio plays a single gets is still important as it means more exposure and gets the music to the masses to encourage them to buy the music or even see one of the artist or band’s shows, so a music marketing team must be have a great working relationship with several radio stations to increase the likelihood of the music being played on air.

Even though the majority of sales is via downloads nowadays, the radio is still a very strong promotional tool for gaining new fans, getting exposure for your latest single and even generating more ticket sales for shows. It really is a case of ‘it’s who you know, not what you know’, so a music marketing team needs to be have good connections in the whole of the entertainment industry and know the right people to speak to. As there are so many new artists trying to crack into the music industry, a music marketing team should be able to create a unique and bespoke marketing plan for you that gets your music to your target audience and to the radios and shows that they will listen to or watch.

Bespoke Works

Part of creating a bespoke marketing plan is finding a studio and producer that fits in with your individual needs as well as your budget. Just a few years ago, artists could be in debt to their record companies as they were using recording studios, photographers and music video directors that they couldn’t afford but their record company had connections to.

Your marketing team should also find you the right graphics for the visual side of your campaign and photographers for your promotional shoots that share your vision so that your image is presented in a way that is true to you. Again, a marketing team should also make sure that they fit in with your budget. All of this means that music marketing team puts the power back into the hands of the artists and they get treated as individuals.

Package

Finally, a music marketing package should help drive and direct publishing and distribution so that the artists and musicians have full security and their work is copyrighted, and they receive their fair share of royalties. Your marketing team should give you creative freedom and control over the direction you want to take your music whilst giving you the best advice, connections and selling you to the most important people- the fans.

By Cormac Reynolds

Natasha Bennett currently works for Quite Great a Music PR Company specialising In Music promotion, band promotion and Entertainment in the UK. Natasha uses her vast industry knowledge to contribute as a writer to a variety of publications across music, business, magazines and blogs.

Five Content Promotion Strategies To Win Google

Content and GoogleUnderstanding the need for driving higher traffic and creating the right content for your website is just not enough. You need to address the bigger challenges that necessitate the ideal combination of strategic planning and creative thinking and make your content match up with your defined business goals.

Read on for valuable strategies that discuss effective content promotion strategies that are effective for businesses to win over Google. They will empower your content to navigate targeted traffic from manifold sources (social networks, search engines, referring sites) and help you reap rich dividends and meet your true business goals—in many more ways than one.

White Papers and Freebies for Lead Generation

Offering compelling and free downloads for your targeted audience is a proven and easy means of driving sales leads and developing newsletter lists. Customers always love free stuff coming their way; therefore this content strategy proves to be a great way of funneling new potential customers inside your buying cycle. Freemium downloads usually consist of content that customers find valuable. They include common mediums like PDF files, resourceful lists, instructional videos and even free trials. Take your pick!

Proper keyword research techniques and link building strategies (in social networks and both off site as well as on site) helps in nurturing new site visitors and retaining the loyalty of other regular customers through heavily searched/most sought after topical content.

Guest posting

In contemporary times, this is probably the fastest way of finding a larger audience. Many up-and-coming content marketers are gaining SEO juice and building authority with potential customers, through their ever increasing volumes of guest postings. Smart and innovative guest posts require you to create the best content for finding thousands of readers.

You can use intelligent means to send these “satisfied” readers back to your site, where you have additional terrific content to narrate and share. Guest bloggers boasting of the highest rankings with Google can be hired for the cause.

How-to videos

Successful portals and business forums are based around providing solutions for the queries and problems faced by their customers. Figure out common problems and issues that lend themselves to how-to videos.

You can launch a series of such videos on You Tube and provide proactive solutions to viewers. They should be easy to search, Google friendly and capable of leading your perspective customers back to your site. For best results, you must aim for competitive topics and high quality videos—to differentiate yourself with more effective techniques, an interesting personality and overall better production values, or all of the above. Along with entry-level strategies and tips, you can also provide advanced advice on your products and services.

Professional networking

Along with a decent foundation of content management strategies, you also need to invest your resources in professional networking. By being relevant, interesting and respectful to the views of other bloggers in your niche, you can earn the trust of Google and your viewers alike. Look out for content writers creating interesting content, blogs and other promotional stuff at all levels -large, medium and small. Instead of joining artificial schemes or setting up channels to promote your posts, simply share all the stuff that you feel is cool, and remember to explain why. Upgrading your social media skills and using professional content online can make your presence more visible and valuable.

Product Curation for eCommerce Transactions

Like you see here, in today’s competitive world, it is quite a task to create compelling and unique content to win over the Google landscape. A great way to combat this challenge is by curating products based on user need/interest, developing articles that are fresh and intriguing and finding the right e-commerce products for leveraging the brick-and-mortar solutions of floor salesmen. Your e-commerce site should apply a customer-centric approach to create helpful product guides as well as better defined hands-on approaches for helping viewers find the right products.

These content promotion strategies should be coupled with the expertise and experience of a reputed SEO agency to drive potential customers in an exponential fashion. With the right strategies in place, you can look forward to the highest rankings and visibility on Google and other search engines that matter.

So, get a closer look at your present content schemes and gear up to integrate more feasible and effective options to drive higher traffic your way. Today!

Roman Sahakov, who is the author of this article, is a real professional in the sphere of social media marketing and SEO. Long working experience of Roman has given him a big sense of writing exactly what people need to be up-to-date in this sphere.

3 Ways To Make You A Better Freelancer

 

the joys of working from home

Are you finding it hard to attract new customers as a freelancer? Do you feel like you are being held back by low paying jobs? If the answer is yes then you need to change direction as a freelancer and find new ways to improve your career.

Here are three very simple and very effective ways to boost your freelancing career and help you become a better freelancer.

Learn To Deal With Weaknesses And Strengths

Being a freelancer isn’t easy and it actually puts you in a very fragile position. You are under scrutiny a lot and sometimes the criticism might make you feel really bad. But don’t ever crumble under it but learn to use it for your own advantage.

A lot of the times, though unfortunately not always, people can provide you criticism that is only going to help you improve your work and might actually even be a fair point about your performance.

Just by knowing how to take criticism you can also improve your own understanding of your strengths. And knowing what you are good at will help you redefine your work and direct you towards the right career path.

Learn To Pick The Right Jobs

At the start you had to do a lot of jobs just to get some money coming in and to build yourself a reputation. But you don’t need to keep accepting every single job offer you get for the rest of your life. This is going to drain you out of energy and it will not often benefit your career at all.

You have to know how to select just the right jobs for you. If you are browsing for job posts at Odesk or Elance, for instance, think if the job description is something that will help you direct your career to the right direction. If you feel like it isn’t than don’t take it.

Saying no is also something that you have to learn to do. There is a brilliant article at the Freelancery about when to say no and it is something worth reading if you feel guilty about turning down work.

Learn To Market Efficiently

You also need to understand that as a freelancer it is essential to know how to sell yourself to the clients. A lot of freelancers feel out of their comfort zones when they have to try and market themselves.

They might be really good at what they do but when it comes to finding new customers they are unsure of how to act.

The first thing to solving this problem is by improving your online visibility. Just by learning the tricks of using SEO you could transform the way clients find you. With an appropriate SEO agency help you can ensure that just the right kind of traffic is directed to your website.

The second thing you need to focus on is naturally your self-confidence. You have to learn to understand that you are good at what you do and display this emotion to your clients. You don’t need to be cocky but you have to know what you are worth.

This article was sponsored by BoughSEO.com.

How to Get More People to Read Your Articles on Social Media

social media Social media is a wonderful tool that helps expand the networks of a lot of people and businesses, and it’s especially great for people who want to share information. If you write a lot of articles and want them to get more attention, then there are a lot of things you can do to make this happen. If you’re not sure where to get started, then take the tips that are listed below. These can help you make the most of those articles you work hard to write so that they get more attention and you see more traffic through your social media sites.

1. Use Stumbleupon

This is a great tool for driving a lot of traffic to web pages because it finds content and then recommends it to users. It gives even smaller social media accounts the chance to get noticed, so it can be very useful if you’re just getting started. In fact, many users have had their sites get tens of thousands of hits just because they used Stumbleupon to drive traffic to an article they wrote. The best part is that if people like what you wrote, they are likely to follow you or bookmark your site for future use.

2. Use Your Connections

It never hurts to use your friends, especially when it comes to social media sharing. Get some of your friends who have popular accounts through social media. Ask them if they would be willing to share your article with the audiences that they have. Their sharing (and linking back to your websites) can result in a lot of traffic to your site and an incredible amount of exposure to your article. Tell your friends that you will share their articles as well, especially if it’s related to content you already have.

3. Submit to Editors

Article publishing is becoming much easier than it ever was before, so it’s something you might want to try out for yourself. As long as you don’t have a piece that is a complete ad for your products or company, you may be able to get it published. There are tons of websites you can find by doing just a simple search online for editors looking to publish articles. Send it out along with information about yourself so that the editor knows more about you. Also make sure you only send a portion of the article as a teaser, and so your content doesn’t get stolen. If you have a great article then it can easily lead to exposure through publications you may have never considered!

4. Publish it Online

If you only save your article on your computer and send it out as an e-mail, it is never going to get noticed. Instead of just sending it out to a few people, mass market it! Publish your article on your most popular social media site and then link back to it on all of your other accounts. For example, you could post your article on your blog and then link to it through your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and any other accounts. This is basically free advertising and can lead to thousands of people seeing your article without you have to do more than link to a page!

5. Use Digg

The website digg.com is a great website for people who are looking to get their interesting articles written. It’s packed full of great articles about political issues, science, the internet and so much more. You can submit to them a link for your article and see if it gets approved. If it does, then you will soon get a ton of traffic to your page. This can lead to a lot of views, but also a lot of loyal followers, if they enjoy the information that you write.

6. Keep at It

Don’t let one unsuccessful article ruin your writing for good. Keep doing it and you may find that your future pieces are more popular than you could have imagined. You never know what topics are going to gain the interest of the masses and get you more popularity on your social networking sites. Just make sure you still write articles that look nice and have good content, or else people may not want to continue reading them as you release them.

Author Bio: Joe Laden is the owner of WBTutorial.com where he reviews the best website builders and writes helpful tutorials like this Weebly tutorial.