Below are 5 pieces of info you might find helpful!
1) How To Use RepostExchange For Marketing RepostExchange.com is an artist promotional program that makes use of Soundclouds API to create engagement on your music. It works on the basic principle of being a community where reposts can be exchanged with other artists. The more reposts you do, the more points credits you get that you can use to collect reposts from other artists. I'll be providing what I believe to be the ideal marketing and budgeting plan on this platform to satisfy marketing goals from the perspective of a beginner artist. The info will still be valuable and scale able to whatever stage you are at. Selecting A Plan You may be tempted to go with the free plan, but the limitations that come with it could prove costly. The main limitation is that you don't get to choose the kind of Accounts that repost your tracks. For example, lets say you've gotten a lot of credits from doing reposts; Then you put your own track into their system to get reposts. If an account that has 1 million followers but no engagement reposts your track, you could waste all the hard earned credits you've collected. Its more ideal, to select the $9 or $20 Plan. This will let choose Accounts with a max number of followers such as 1,000-2,000 followers. By doing this you'll get a lot more guaranteed likes and reposts directly from repost exchange users while also getting engagement from their followers. Buying Promo Credits Rather than spending all your time reposting other tracks to get credits, you could set aside $25 every month to get a 1000 credits (100,000 Follower Reach) If you have a release schedule of one song per month, that $25 can be an investment to reach up to a 100,000 Followers per song. Additionally, because you're not over saturating your current SC followers with reposts of other tracks, your audience will be more engage every time you release your own song. Selecting A Genre Its important to select one of soundclouds pre-selected genre's when you upload your song to soundcloud. Repostexchange will then be able to show your music to more Repostexchange users and also make it more targeted to your desired audience. What I personally do though, is always select 'Hip-hop & Rap' during the period its on Repostexchange regardless of the genre. Just simply for the fact that theres a far more larger audience in Rap, and a lot of times you wont reach that many other people with a lot of other genres. Then once the campaign is done, I change the genre back to its original. $9 Vs $20 I'd say what the biggest deciding factor for a beginner artist between these two plans is, The Featured Campaign. One you post a new song on Repostexchange, it will start out at the top of all tracks, but eventually get lower and lower once other people add their tracks as well. The lower your track gets, the less likely its going to be reposted since its not being seen as much. But If you got the $20 Plan, You could add your song to the Featured Campaign and it will always be put amongst the top of songs on Repostexchange which would lead to more reposts. Conclusion So with all that said, you could budget up to $35-$45 per month to optimize your marketing on RepostExchange. Hope you found this helpful! 2) Incorporation Of Your Music Business There are a couple of benefits that are good to know as musicians with regards to incorporating either by yourself or as a team/band. Tax Benefits: The more income you generate as a non-incorporated musician, or even in addition to your current day job, the higher the tax bracket you'll eventually fall into. But depending on the country you're from, Canada for example, as opposed to lets say paying 33% on your personal taxes, you could qualify for a 11% on corporate taxes when incorporated and recognized as a small business. Business Transactions: Depending on your Country/State, you could be eligible for various favorable financial opportunities such as grants and loans as an incorporated entity. You can simply find these in google by typing key words such as "new york small business loans", "Usa business grants", etc. Liability Protection: This is important because it helps protect your personal assets. When you're not incorporated, you and your business are generally seen as one entity whereas, when incorporated, its seen as a different entity. So if your incorporated entity is ever sued or runs into debts, they can only come after your company assets and not your personal properties such as family house, car, etc. Hope you found this insightful! As this is general Information and not legal advice, you should always contact a lawyer when necessary. 3) Instagram Hashtag Marketing An effective marketing strategy to use on IG is one called "Staircasing" Its simply based on using different groups of Hashtags that have a small to large number of posts within those hashtags. So for example, if you use 20 total hashtags, 5 could have 10-30k posts, another 5 could have 30-70k posts, etc. The reason why you do this, is that when you have engaging content, it will likely rank easily in the smaller hashtags. Then because its done well in the smaller hashtags, the algorithms will begin to pick it up in the larger hashtags too. So if you have a really good understanding of your audience and making good content, you can effectively hack their algorithms. hope you find this helpful! 4) Instagram Call To Action So because sending links can be very limited on Instagram, it can be difficult for your audience to get content they want immediately. For example, if they ask for something in the comment section, you cant respond to them right there with a link. You'd have to send them to the link in your bio, and the more out of their way they have to go (more than to 2 clicks), the less likely they'll follow through. A simple but effective strategy to navigate this, is to create a second or multiple Instagrams based on your needs. For example, anytime someone asks my for beats, tips, etc in the comments, I can reply back in comments, and send them to my second IG @dsbx.club that has all that information. Additionally, people are more trusting of going to an instagram page than going to a website they've never seen before. Another example, Lets say In my IG stories I have a 'swipe up' that gets about 30 swipes. in my personal experience, on average, I can get 2-3 times that number if I put lets say 'visit @dsbx.club' in my stories instead. Its such a simple hack, but so effective! I definitely recommend it if you have new songs, merch, etc to promote hope you find this helpful! 5) How to Submit to Blogs, Labels, etc Since creating my business platforms, on occasion I can end up receiving about a 100 submissions a week. In this time, I noticed a few a things artists could do to improve their chances when submitting to blogs/labels (Influencers). - Be Concise Keep your pitch as efficient as possible. Majority of Influencers just want to hear the song to see if it fits with their platforms, then if needed, will request more info from you. For example if you're submitting to an email: Your Subject Line Should Be: Track Submission: Artist Name - Track Title (Genre) - Your Body Should Be : Hey 'Influencers name', Hope all's well with you. I have this new track I thought you might like! Listen/Download link: Regards ' Your Artist Name' - Listen/Download links Please, please and please do not send Mp3's unless asked for. Influencers don't want to have to download when they haven't decided if they want to feature it or not. Your best bet is to send a SoundCloud link and enable the downloads. This is also good for you because you can see in the stats whether its been listened to and downloaded by the influencer. - Submission emails and tools Always check to see if they have an email or tool specifically for submissions. When you send it to the wrong email and such, it gives an impression that you couldn't take the time to research their platform and you could be listed under spam. Comments are closed.
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