The internet offers countless opportunities for dance artists to market dance music. Only a fraction of those opportunities, however, provide a significant return for the effort.
Knowing where and how to get the best return for your dollar and your time is the key to maximizing exposure and sales. Here are six ways to effectively market your dance music online:
1. Distribution. The first step in marketing music online is making it available for purchase. CD Baby offers one of the easiest, most comprehensive ways of distributing music online. Through their extensive partner network, this site allows everyone from absolute beginners to pros to sell their MP3s everywhere from iTunes to Facebook.
2. Search Engine Marketing. Getting a website online is another key step but not just any site will do. To be effective, a site should incorporate pages that are built around keywords that are commonly searched in the niche market being targeted. For a dance artist, the broadest niche would be “dance music”. This could be subdivided even further to “club music,” “house music,” “electronic dance music,” “electronica,” etc. Sitesell includes all the tools to research a niche market and build a site that organically targets people searching on relevant keywords.
3. Social Media. The biggest social media sites are Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+ and MySpace. Set up artist pages on the sites that are most heavily used by your target market. For music fans, this would likely be Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace. Interact with fans on these sites, engage them, and share news of interest. Posts links to the main website and other social media sites.
4. Press Releases. Thanks to the internet, news releases are no longer just for journalists. They can now be used to reach fans directly with news of an upcoming single or show. Find good reasons to send them all the time to keep fans engaged. Use keyword rich copy and link back to the website.
5. Blogging. A blog is a great place to post ideas big and small. Engage fans by commenting on music news of the day, posting career updates, telling insider stories, and sharing photos, videos, and songs. Focus on the dance music niche and label posts with appropriate keywords.
6. Video. Videos are powerful tools for promoting music. YouTube is now the internet’s second most used search engine after Google. Posting to YouTube and other video sharing sites will expose your videos to millions of users. Tag videos using niche relevant keywords for maximum exposure and link directly to your website from the description.