ShawkCityBeats

I’ve recently been asked about forum marketing so I decided to put together a short guide for musicians about some of the strategies I use to drive traffic to my music site. Hopefully this is helpful to some of you out there. These methods can be used to drive traffic for any kind of musician or music related business. There are 6 components you need to consider to be successful with forum marketing: Determining your audience, finding your audience, planning, being consistent, making your brand visible, and creating quality posts. Determine Your Audience: This is the first and one of the most important parts in the entire process. If you do not target your efforts appropriately, the rest of the steps will not matter. You must always keep your target audience in mind. Lets say you are a R&B artist with a modern commercial pop sound. It wouldn’t make sense to target fans of old school hip hop or rap metal. That’s not your audience. They probably aren’t buying music from artists like you. If they aren’t the kind of people that are willing to put money into your pockets, it is safe to say they are not the ones you want to be dealing with. You need to target those who buy the kind of music you produce! I can’t stress this enough! Fans of R&B should be your main focus with your secondary focus on Pop fans. Finding your audience is easy once you determine your audience. Find Your Audience: Ok. You now know what kind of fans you want to target but what kinds of forums are they on? I’ll continue with the R&B artist scenario. General R&B forums Official Artist Website Forums (simply google “Usher forum†or “R. Kelly forum†or whatever and see what pops up) Unofficial Artist Website Forums General Pop forums Search engines make the whole process easy and simple. Make sure you right down all the forums you want to target once you find them. Plan: Write down what it is you are going to do. Example: I am going to spend 45 minutes 4 times a week creating and responding to posts on 5 forums. Those forums are blah, blah, blah, blah, and blah. I’ll start one new thread (topic) a week on each forum. You can always do more but make sure your plan is manageable so you wont do less. Consistency is king when it comes to marketing success on forums. Consistency: Be responsible to yourself and follow your plan. Your plan will only work as well as you do. If you are not consistent, you won’t recieve as much traffic to your site. Make Your Brand Visible (!!!!!) This is extremely important. Once you sign up for all the forums you would like to use, put your music website link and everything else (YouTube, Facebook, Twitter) you want to drive traffic to in your profile signature. Make sure they are hyperlinked. If you have a banner, use it. If not, there are several websites that you can use to make banners for free. Here’s a few: Facebook Banners - Free Banner Maker - Free Banners - BannerBreak.com Banner Maker - Free Banner Creator for your website, Myspace, Facebook, and more! BannerFans - Free Banner Maker www.123-banner.com/ If you don’t want to use a banner (although I suggest it) make sure you absolutely have a hyperlink to your main music site. This is how you funnel people into your brand and make money. Don’t neglect this. Create Quality Posts The key ingredient in creating quality post is engaging in honest interactions. The goal is to have forum goers become interested in you as an person first, then an artist. People will be more receptive to clicking on a link to your music sites if you seem likeable and interesting. Do’s: Create topics that you feel others in the forum would be interested of – topics could include: Links to recent music, new album reviews, opinions on different artists, questions for others on the forum about the music business Respond to posts of others when you have something worth adding to the conversation Make sure your posts are thought out before publishing Be honest about your opinions but if you disagree with others in a forum make sure you do it respectfully Don’ts Don’t spam. Everyone hates it. Don’t respond to a post just the sake of it. Respond if you have something to say Thanks for reading. Hope it was helpful. If you have anything else to add, please feel free.

Just however I'm feeling at that moment. It always tends to color the work I do whether it is a rock song or a hip hop beat. There are those who say the best music comes out the sadness but I've written some nice stuff when I was feeling just fine! ------ http://www.shawkcity.com

I am in the market for a solid electric guitar VST. Any ideas? ------ http://www.shawkcity.com