5 Secrets for Promoting your band on Myspace

Ok, so you’ve got an automated adder and you’ve been at this for a few weeks and months. Once you hit the about 3-4 month period of promoting your band on myspace you’re going to need some new ideas.

1) Swap friends.

You’ve heard of swapping shows right? This is when you have an out of town band play infront of your crowd for exposure and you go play in front of their crowd at a later date. Find someone similar to you, and ask to swap songs on the players. Agree to keep the songs up for a week and trade links on your myspace. A simple “Check out our friends in…blah” will do. You can also swap banners. Don’t worry about your “friends” on myspace finding a new favorite band, this is going to happen anyway. The best thing you can do is to facilitate this. Show them bands they’re going to like. Then when you two play together you’ve just doubled the reason for them to get their ass out there.

2) News

There’s more going on in the music world than just your band, incase you didnt know. Posting a small opinion piece or just a hilarious link you found in your bulletins WILL help. “But it’s sending them to another website, the focus should be on me!” Yes, thats why there’s a back button. And, if you’ve chosen your content correctly, this will only humanize and build your relationship with that fan. Use sites like Digg.com and Fark.com to get some random news. For a specific example, when i heard that The Used fired their drummer, I immediately posted a bulletin concerning the change in their lineup and how i felt about it. The response was not only immediate, but extensive! It drew attention to The Used, a band many of our fans are familiar with and created a link between us and them. Try to do this once or twice a month and you will increase loyalty.

3) Your e-mailing list.

What? You dont have one??? Oh, phew, good thing. You had me worried there. Guess what, one day Myspace is going to go the way of the ghost and you’re going to lose all those “friends” you had. Your account may one day be deleted. This is obviously a BIG problem and one you should begin addressing before you even open a myspace account for your band. There has been no advancement in the adders concerning email addresses. I wish there was a way to extract users email addresses. But currently there’s not. Posting links to exclusive content to your myspace blog and attracting your friends to the content on your website is paramount. Even better is when you have some sort of dhtml popup asking them to join your mailing list. The whole idea of #3 is to GET YOUR FRIENDS OFF MYSPACE. Build a community at your website and you will increase traffic, loyalty, and attention.

4) Not everyone is on Myspace.

Myspace attendance is declining BAD. Check out other avenues for posting your music on different social networks. Bebo, Tagworld, Hi5, all offer special profiles for bands. AND there are adders out for them. =) USE THEM. Once you’ve got some content and some friends on whatsay Tagworld, invite your Myspace friends to join your Tagworld. There are affiliate programs you can signup for that pay upwards of $ .80 per signup. How many friends do you have on myspace? Do the math. =)

5) Don’t mistake online promotion for offline promotion.

Use the internet to prompt your friends for action ONLINE. (Vote for Warp Tour, Vote for Bodog, Visit your new website)

Use street level promotion to prompt your friends for action OFFLINE. (Come to shows, Buy Merch)

There are guidelines which have served me well in the past. Sending flyers to a venue a few weeks before your show does as much as posting a bulletin does about the same show. Main point here is that doing the bare minimum promotion is the same as doing no promotion at all. Make it easy for people to help you and ask for their help!

Best of luck to all in 2007!

Jason
BotReviewer.com