So, I'll start by saying that I am not a very social person. It takes a great deal of energy and effort to communicate with people both online and off, so obviously promotion is extremely difficult given that a huge a proponent of promotion is communication.
With my last E.P.'s and Single, I utilized Instagrams tools and also starting using the music service Musosoup.
I've had some growth with both releases. My Instagram following grew from around 350 to 720 or so. My Pandora, Apple Music and Spotify plays, listeners and followers all grew. And obviously SoundCloud continues to grow with monthly SoundCloud plays increasing from about 1,000 a month to over 5,000 a month over the past year.
I've found Instagram stories to be fairly useful for engaging my current listeners while maintaining my social distance. I also utilize the Reels and will post from time to time.
I hired a digital artist to design a logo and also had photos shot in September. I will probably do another photoshoot in late Spring and will have more digital art done for future releases. Having a semi-professional image seems to help with attracting blogs, playlist ads, Reels, Tik Toks, and influencers. Speaking of which, I've found that Musosoup to be much more useful than Submithub (etc.). It seems it isn't without risks as even though Musosoup itself is legit, not all of its users are so.... buyer beware I guess.
Blog reviews etc. are not very useful for growing listeners. But... they are good for padding the EPK and attracting more influencers so I guess that's a thing. Most of them come with a playlist placement so there's that. Playlists are just well.... playlist ads. They up listener counts and occasionally net another follow. Getting a Reel or Tik Tok influencer does hardly nothing for gaining new followers, but influencers with high follower counts can pull in some money so, I was able to make the money I spent back for the first time ever. Instagram stories on influencers pages are completely useless (at least that was my experience).
I've testing running Instagram ads both turning traffic towards my website and towards my Instagram account. In my experience, turning traffic towards your Instagram page nets better results. It doesn't seem all that useful at first. But, advertising to my own followers has netted the best results out of every playlist ad and blog post ever, so growing the Instagram page doesn't seem to be that bad of an idea. It's just slow and cumbersome.
On the SoundCloud side of things, I cannot reccoment RepostExchange enough. It takes a long time to gain traction using it's free services, but give it time and it will work.
I'm still working with baby numbers, but the meager growth I'm enjoying is nice given my difficulties. I will obviously work on being a bit more social and will continue to throw sh*t at the walls to see what works and what doesn't. I didn't go into this expecting it to be anything more than a hobby so knowing that someone out there is listening is it's own reward and I need to keep reminding myself of that every time I get myself down with life.