Myspace can at the same time be incredibly effective in promoting your band, or be a waste of your time. The following will help you avoid the pitfalls that you can easily fall into in your Band Promotion.
Myspace offers alot of features that will help you promote your band, and it's website. The key to myspace promotion lies in your number of friends. Not only is it important to have a large number of friends but it is also important to leverage those friends properly.
Your Profile is the gateway to your band. People say first impressions count, and they are right. This is the place to be clear, tell them about your band, and do it in a way that you draw interest. Of course having some tracks on there to draw there interest is one of the most effective ways to get them to journey on from your profile to your website.
Path to your website
There should be a clear and easy to follow link to your website from your Myspace Profile to have people quickly follow that directly to your website, where you have a greater chance of earning them as fans.
How do you keep your friends visiting your Myspace profile, and your website?
- Let them know when something is new (new song, gig etc) via Bulletins.
- Post comments to their profiles, WITH your own images
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- Actually Interact with your friends, this will build their loyalty to you like nothing else.
How do you add friends?
There are two ways, Automated and Non-Automated.
Automated - There are a number of Friend Adder tools out there. They range in price from $30 to $70 dollars US, and most come with an automated Commenter and Adder. These are the two most useful tools. They will generate a list from another profile (friend, similar band, etc.) and then go through one by one and request to be added by those profiles listed.
Non-Automated - This will take you significantly longer than the automated method, especially if you are trying to do it when my space is busy in the evening. This method is as you would assume, just go from one profile to the next, clicking add to friends. It is best to start with a search, on demographics, and use your human intelligence to follow to the next logical profile. The one thing that is better about this method is that you are hand picking your friends. They will most likely be more likely to be interested in your band, since you probably know your band demographics best.
Use Comments Effectively
Posting a comment on someone's profile, is like putting up a billboard. other users who see that profile, will most likely be interested in the same things that the profile's owner are, and if that is your band, then they will check you out.
By using an image, with a link to your website in the comment you can draw that visitor off the profile page, and into your website where you then have the opportunity to show them who you are, and why they should care.
Here is the code that will link and image to a webpage:
<a href="http://www.YOURWEBSITE.com/"><img src="LINKTOPHOTO" border="0"></a>
substitute YOURWEBSITE for the actuall website domain name and LINKTOPHOTO the complete HTTP:// link to the photo.
Caution
When using images for comments, they will be viewed many times a day by people, and because of this, it can easily use up your bandwidth for the month on your host. It is therefore the best idea to link to the photos on a photo storing service like Photobucket. Create an account for each of the images that you will use for promotion, and you'll never have to worry that you will use up all your bandwidth on your comment photos. (if this did happen people would no longer be able to see your website untill the billing cycle re-set, or you would be billed separately for the additional bandwidth, which may be more than you can afford.) Using Photobucket or a similar service will protect you from this, and make your comment promotion cost you very little.