If you don’t already have your social accounts (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, etc) now is a good time to create them – why not! You CAN put that off till later, but you will find that doing this already at this early stage will make things easier further down the road.
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The social general-purpose accounts that you “must†have in order to assure maximum power of your site include:
- YouTube
- Google Plus (check out the dedicated course here)
- WordPress.com (yes that’s the “hosted†WordPress, you want an account there too!)
- HubPages
- Squidoo
- Other social accounts which are HIGHLY RECOMMENDED that you also register with include:
- All the major “social bookmarking†sites such as StumbleUpon, Digg and about 50 others. I will provide you with a full list of those in the Resources section at the end of this course.
Once again, you can do all this easily by yourself – or you can get an inexpensive outsourcer to register your accounts for you.
At this point, we strongly urge you to peruse our bonus course Social Basics.
Next, you also NEED to sign up to many of the most important music-related social networks. The most important among them all is YouTube, which is also a “general-purpose†network, but it just happens to be the biggest thing going for music as well. Many people forget that YouTube is in fact a SOCIAL NETWORK. So you need to create your profile page, set up your account – and do pretty much the same sort of thing you do on any other network.
But then there are also specialized networks which focus more or less entirely on music. Here are some of the most important ones (the rest will be listed in the Resource section at the end:
- Apple Ping
- SoundCloud
- MySpace
- LastFM
- ReverbNation
- MixCloud
- 8Tracks
- HulkShare
- Eventful
- BuzzNet
- FanBridge
- OurStage
It’s highly advisable that you set up a profile on each of those and that you post there regularly. Take part in the ongoing conversations.
All social networks allow you to have a member’s account and a “profileâ€, and some also allow you to have a signature (much like all “forums†do). Always ensure that your signature contains a short blurb about your and/or your music (or your product) – something that is intriguing enough for people to click through on, and it must also contain a link to either your home page or your particular sales page.
It is possible to integrate many of your social accounts with your WordPress site, so that when you post something there, it will automatically show up on your Facebook and/or your Twitter, and so on.
In other cases it may not be possible, and the only way you will be able to interact is by posting comments, answering questions, etc.
Posting INTELLIGENT comments or answers can give you excellent quality traffic. I sometimes post on various forums (music, marketing as well some political ones!) and if I do a good job of formulating my post well, I’ll get an instant hit of 5, 10 even 20 visits. Sometimes even more. And later on the visits from that one post will continue trickling in for weeks or even months. And each time, the person clicking through is “highly targeted†and potentially interested in what I’ve got to offer.
Another interesting variation on the above is posting answers on Q&A sites such as Yahoo Answers, Reddit or dozens of others. The same principle is involved – if you write something useful and intelligent people WILL click through your signature link. But a word of caution: some sites, especially Yahoo Answers, are dominated by marketers who can attack you and even get you banned if you’re seen to be deliberately self-promoting – or if you’re perceived as too much of a “threat!†For this reason I rarely use these any more, but I have done so in the past with good results.
NOTE: your measure of social success is measured by the number of “likesâ€, “followers†and comments you receive. There are ways to increase or speed up this process, which I’ll get to a bit later, but be careful when outsourcing this – more often than not you’ll receive thousands of MEANINGLESS “fans†who will never interact with your site. I’ll cover this and other related topics further in this course.
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| Book 3 – Chapter 14Extended Setup |
Course Overview | Book 3 – Chapter 16Subscriptions & Services |
Book 3: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, , 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, Overview
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