Welcome to another segment of our Must Know Strategies of Growing Your Fan Base in 2020. Be sure to follow along and sign up to receive each of the 20 articles of our series as they’re released straight to your inbox.
Whether you are promoting a product, service or yourself, it is detrimental to create an online presence. We live in a world that revolves around technology and most people are spending more time on the internet than they don’t.
Official Website
The first thing that should be invested in online is a proper, professional website. Websites can be expensive, depending who you hire to design it for you and how interactive you want it to be. If you want to cut down on these costs, alternatively you could hire a student graphic designer who is building their portfolio, sign up for a website building course or take the time and teach yourself. Taking a course will also help you in the future of maintaining and updating your website effortlessly when you have new releases, news or other information to share with your fans.
There are a few different website builders you can choose from that are user friendly such as Wix, Squarespace or WordPress. All are great in their own way but opinions and preference vary from person to person so it’s best to formulate your own consensus.
Here is a breakdown of pricing and what each of these website builders offer:
Social Media
Every artist should have social media accounts on every platform. If you don’t already have an artist account for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or even TikTok, for example, create one. This is the easiest, and free, way to self promote. With the large amount of time people spend on social media, this is a no-brainer.
Posting to your social media accounts can become a little exhausting especially when you are doing it everyday. If you aren’t the type of person who enjoys using social media or you simply don’t have the time, there are platforms that allow you to schedule posts. Later.com is a great example of an online scheduling platform that can be linked to multiple social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. This platform comes with a small fee but it could save you a lot of time and stress of only having to create one post for multiple accounts.
Sign up for Later and manage your social accounts here → https://later.com
Brand Consistency
Another thing to keep in mind is keeping everything up-to-date, streamlined and consistent with your website and social media pages. By doing so, this will allow for fans or other professionals searching for you online to easily recognize your brand. You also want to make sure that your pages aren’t outdated. Even if you don’t have any new music coming out in the near future, you should still be posting something to keep your fans interested and show you are still relevant and current. Fans need to be continuously entertained and engaged, otherwise they will become uninterested and will likely forget about you. Fans love the behind the scenes look into artists’ lives. Post short videos or images of you working in the studio, doing your daily workout, writing music or participating in any hobbies and your fans will be happy.
High Quality Content
The quality of your images/ content you use is also of importance. Seems a little obvious to some, but the amount of times we’ve seen artists post a blurry photo, the sound of a video isn’t clear or the content looks like a five year old created it, is countless. If you are networking with industry professionals, refer them to your social accounts or website where everything is low quality, this could steer them away from potentially wanting to work with you. Remember that an artist’s image is everything. You need to appear to be a true professional who has invested time and money into their career, otherwise the people you want to work with will not. If you need a good free online photo editing platform, we suggest Canva.com. This platform gives you all the basic editing tools. If you want something a little more advanced and less expensive than Photoshop, they also offer a paid “Pro” option.
Put your best foot forward when representing your brand online. It will go a long way and the time, effort and money you put into it will pay off in the long run.
Bringing everything together can be tough…Creating, Posting and Promoting your music across platforms…(Spotify, Facebook, Instagram, Apple, iTunes, PR Websites just to name a few…)
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