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Eleven
Ways to Promote Rap Music Utilising Your Website
Display contact information
Not only should your fans have an
email address they can easy contact you at, but also
people seeking to book you should have the ability to
contact you with ease. Nothing would turn off a
booking agent more than difficulties trying to book you
for a performance!
Make sure these email addresses are for
music-related topics only; displaying a personal email
would be a BIG mistake. Also, write the address in
context that fans / bookers can read but spam programs
cannot, like name(at)website(dot)com.
Placing the contact information on your
homepage in a key position will draw their eye to the information and
make their life easier. (People tend to first notice content in the
middle of the webpage, then the top and left sides of the page.)
Present your page at every occasion
When performing live, promptly display your webpage and blog website.
Make sure fans know where to reach you online.
In addition, allow them
to sign-up for fan newsletters – collect as many email address as
possible at these shows. Just one more fan is worth the effort.
Word-of-mouth is the best form of marketing, so if you treat the one
additional fan well, they will in turn promote you to their friends.
Make band merchandise Selling merchandise is one of the best and only ways to generate a
profit within a group.
One good online tactic is to create shirts at
Café Press and link to them to allow fans to buy the shirt you
created from their site. Fans also love limited edition merchandise, so
have a t-shirt available for a month only and sell them strictly at your
live performances for that month.
Create a review page When others say nice things about you, display it. If an online
newspaper wrote a good review about your rapping skills, put a link to
the article prompting others visiting your site to read the review.
These reviews and testimonials create good PR for you.
Because others
are commenting about you, it shows first time visitors to your site that
you are a known artist and they should listen to you. Remember to save
a copy of the review as well, in case the online newspaper only runs the
article for a limited time so you can directly post the review onto your
site.
Put music on the site
Encourage
file sharing of select songs and add music to your site.
Find a
computer with audio input capability and an easy to use audio encoding
application. This is easy if your music is on CD, just rip it with
iTunes or a similar application. If it is in some other analog or
digital (mini-disc) format, it gets a little harder, but applications
are freely available.
Then with MP3 file in
hand, you can upload the file to your web site and link like you would
link a web page or other media/image file.
From there, there are
more complicated ways of doing it so it is more "presentable" with a
nice embedded player, etc.
Post an event calendar The webpage should display a neat calendar of upcoming show’s location
(city and state), time and venue. Fans use your site for a resource and
need to be able to find this information quickly.
Yahoo Groups allow fans to subscribe to your calendar and receive
updates when you post a new event, which makes it extremely easy for
your fans.
Sign-up
for on-the-road content updates
There are many software programs, which allow you to
update blogs via cell phone. This is a great technique because fans
can get updates even when you do not have time to update your whole
website. You can also take quick photos or video from your phone and
send it to your account online.
By utilizing all
these techniques on your site, the reach of your group will greatly
expand online. Fans will return to your site for the latest updates,
booking agents will easily be able to contact you and labels will be
able to see that you are serious about your rap music and the business.
Online marketing is not just one easy-to-accomplish task. Rather, it is
a series of equally important tasks that you must carry out on your road
to success.
Lance Trebesch
www.TicketPrinting.com
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