To get seen in a marketplace that has thousands of competing music tracks is a challenge. That people hear your music is a must. You can have the best music in the world but if nobody ever views your clips no one is gonna buy. In this post I will give you an idea of my music marketing plan. 

Will music promote itself on the media stock sites?

I would say no. Of cause you have the opportunity to optimize clip titles, add tags and write a good description. But when your potential customers do a search on one of the stock media sites, you media clip will in most cases not be found on the first couple of pages.

It is clear to me that the stock media sites also look at views and downloads (sales) when calculating in what order to list the tracks. This is if  the default searching mode is used. So in order to get somewhere we need to get some views and sales. I also think the customer often choose to sort by downloads, and then again we are getting no where.

Visits from the grand old Internet will hopefully save the day

My plan is to cut through the clutter by getting direct visits from other sources. I want potential customers to go directly to my  portfolio / artist pages on the stock media sites. By doing this I think I can get the snowball to start rolling and slowly get those all important views and sales. Afterwards sales coming directly from the stock media sites, might pick up.

Can affiliate marketing tactics be transferred to promoting stock music online?

Besides being a musician I am also an affiliate marketer. When marketing affiliate sites my focus is primarily on search engine optimization (SEO). By optimizing my code, writing SEO friendly text and getting good incoming links I have been relatively successful in getting free visits from Google and making sales (making $1300+ a month).

One of the reasons for making this blog was to have a platform for making a SEO effort, where I am 100% in control.  My hope is that I can send some of my users directly to my portfolio at pond5.com and thereby make a sale now and then. As SEO is a long term strategy I will also be doing a lot of other stuff.

Attack on all fronts! YouTube, Twitter and Facebook

The more places you are visible the more chances of being seen. So for a start I am going to use YouTube, Twitter and Facebook in my marketing.  I have no experience in using Twitter and Facebook for marketing so there will be a lot of stuff for me to learn. My first task will be to find out how I automate updates as much as possible.

YouTube I know more about because I have had my own YouTube channel for couple of years. With little effort my videos has (at the time of this writing) been seen 40.000+ times, so with a dedicated effort YouTube will defiantly be a great way to promote music.

So what else do you do to promote your music? Ideas are more that welcome 🙂