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Four Promotional Steps every
Rapper needs to Implement
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Rap artists today have a wide range of possibilities in
promoting themselves, especially online. But that means you
must compete with other rappers to gain an online presence.
There are four key steps in online marketing to gain a
successful start with promoting your music on the internet. |
Submit to Directories
The first step is to submit. Submit to directories,
online radios, and online magazines – anywhere that
plays or features rap and hip-hop music. The more places
that play your track, the more people will hear and
recognize your music. Thousands of people listen to free
online radios daily and most of these stations allow
artists to submit their music to them. Similarly,
directories permit you to add your website with a brief
description, which is then added to the directory site.
An even better idea is to make a friend submit your site
or music for you so you are not always pushing your own
music.
You must be careful when submitting to sites, however,
because search directories like Google will downgrade
you if your incoming links look unnatural. This means
that when someone performs a search for your site, it
will not show up in the top search results because the
search engine is punishing you. Try submitting your site
or music to a couple sites weekly with various anchor
texts. For example, the words “an awesome rap blog” are
the anchor text to the link
www.eastcoatcriticsarebiased.blogspot.com. Also, do not
always submit your site with a link pointing to your
homepage. Sometimes submit your site with a link to the
secondary page of your website to make the links seem
more natural
Give Away Music
Secondly, offer your music at no cost. With the plethora
of options available to users to download free MP3s,
strictly offering your music for purchase hurts your
online status. When a listener gets your MP3 for free,
he or she has a greater possibility of returning to your
site to hear more music by you if they liked what they
heard. Only after listening and liking your music will
they purchase your album. You have to be sure not to
give away too much music, though, because the listener
will have no reason to purchase your album if they can
find everything for free.
Adding a podcast or MP3 to your sites also allows users
to hear your music without paying anything for it. The
hardest part in adding music to the site, however, is
the recording, so start by focusing on a quality
recording of your music. To add music to the site:
a. 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 out there.
b. 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.
c. From there, there are more complicated ways of
doing it so it is more "presentable" with a nice
embedded player, etc.
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