Answer all Questions in your Fan mail on a regularly basis (maybe weekly) on your website!

Answering fanmail one by one is really taking a lot of power. You could rather answer them publicly on your website. So if someone sends you an mail and puts some questions inside you will extract the question and post it in some section of your homepage. you order the questions and answers by date to show that you are actually answering questions regularly and thereby show that you are happy about more questions. you write something like

2011 August 30 – Bob asks: Hey band, I was always wondering could you do a show in ….
Musician from Band: Dear Bob thanks for your question. We would love to do a show in …

If there are more and more questions you can later on think about grouping them by topic and make it easier for your fans to navigate through them!
And by the way you can also extract questions from social media. Whenever you answer a question you should sent a quick reply to the person that asked the question notifying him or her that you answered it at the following link…

There are several reasons for this process:

1. For your fans it is really great and interesting content and they will visit your homepage more frequently. Especially because you also have several updates.
2. You don’t have to answer same questions several times. Which saves you time!
3. It shows that you actually answer to questions (especially if you post the date of the question!)
4. it is better than answering on facebook! because you controll the content and people are on your homepage (where one can also find your shop!)
5. it is content around your band name that will make your page also relevant for longtail queries for search queries. Which will in turn bring more natural traffic to your page.
6. Since you answer the question as a response it it still a pretty personal way to communicate.
7. you can later on refere to what you wrote!

I have seen an author of a book doing something similar 3 years ago and it worked perfect. She just answered 5 or 6 questions a month. I am excited to see what my bandmates from In Legend think about this idea!
By the way I am doing nothing else here in this blog. Earlier days if I had an idea I sent an mail to In Legend and later we discussed the idea and eather followed it or threw it away. That is time consuming. By blogging my ideas they are available for the future. If in Legend can’t follow the idea hopefully other people and bands find it useful! This is is a philosophy! The internet has shown in many great examples that open source and openess in general works amazingly fine!
The whole topic is by the way part of Customer relation management! I have never learned that in theory. So if you have some great resources on CRM (especially in music) I’ll be happy to get your reading recommendations.

Quick answer: “where to upload your music”:

• You upload all of your music to the internet.
• It is your best asset and marketing tool. Nothing will help more to attract fans
• But you don’t upload it everywhere. You only upload it on your website.

There might be exceptions to the rule but the fact of the matter ist that your music is the best content you have. Why woud you want to put it to some other site and increase that sites value?
In fact everything I describe here works even better if you give your music away as a download

Explainations

If there is one thing your fan is most certainly interested from you it is probably your music. On the other side you are – or at least should be – interested in talking to your fans. Myspace became so popular because it was the first more or less legal spaces where fans could listen to music. Great for the founders but what about the musicians? There have been complaints that myspace wasn’t paying royalties for the music…
Look at the following graphic by http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/how-much-do-music-artists-earn-online/ and understand the flow of money and value chain in music industry.

Even though you don’ tmake money directly when streaming from your site. You give away user data something much more valueable if your music is being streamed on other sites (no matter if they pay you royalties like last.fm and spotify or not just like our good old friend Facebook!)
You don’t belief how valueable user data are? Remember Google one of the most valuable companies in the world has business models around user data and making 30 billion $ per year of it.
Of course having music on other sites might lead some of the customers from those sites to get to know your music but let us have a look at the numbers and understand the potentials of streaming the music yourself and making profit of the data.

Having music on your page results in huge benefit and sales opportunities

From the image we saw 1.5 Mio. listens on last.fm are equivelent to selling and distributing your music just by yourself to 143 people. Let us see how many sales 1.5 Mio. streams on your homepage should produce once you start a conversion with the people streaming your music.
Let us assume the player on your homepage allows a user to stream 2 or 3 songs right away but asks him to register before he streams more music. Since you also needed to be registered with last.fm let us assume that the 1.5 Mio streams really came from people who registered on your site! Also assume that next to the player are several shopping opportunities for merchandise and cds.

50’000 Fans produce 1.5 Mio streams

According to Lady Gagas Last.fm profile 2.389.882 fans produced 122.908.193 streams. This means 51 streams per fan. With the In Legend facebook app I recorded about 10 Streams per registered fan. Let us take the average of 30 streams per registered fan. Under this assumption 1.5 Mio streams are produced by 50’000 registered fans!

50’000 fans streaming music in your page can result in sales of 28’400 $

To understand this let us talk about conversion rates in online marketing. For selling Ballads n Bullets I have experienced conversionrates around 4% which is not to high for online marketing but still reasonable.
4% of 50’000 fans = 2’000 cd’s your fans should buy. If you earn $8 per CD because you distribute it yourself this makes you earn 16’000 $ which is about 14 times more than your royalties at last.fm
If you ditribute via amazon you will get additionally comissions for the other purchases of users. In this amount of purchases you should earn 7,5 % comission on amazon. From my experience about only 1/3 of your amazon sales come from your music. So you can add another 7.5% of 32’000 $ which is 2’400 $
Let us assume the conversionrate on merchandise is half the one from your cd. On merch you should also have earnings of 10$ ==> 10’000 $ of merchandise earnings
Result: 16’000$ (CD) + 2’400$ (Amazon Comission) + 10’000$ (merchandise) = 28’400 $ earnings!
Do you see how much potential you give to other sites if they have your music or videos! I did not include selling tour tickets or increased benefits in search engine optimization and other options for Customer Relation Management!

Make a valuable resource (lists, special reports, history of, how to, etc.)

This obviously translates to: Put your music and videos on your website. And especially while first publishing this kind of stuff put it nowhere else. No MySpace and of course no Facebook. Fans / Webzines and so on will talk about you but it will be your website they are linking to. So you get the relevance points from the search engines and not Facebook or MySpace. Why would you make those websites better when you can improve your own? I just realize that this point is so crucial that I will craft a standalone article about where to put your music on the web. So long you can see my similar article about sharing music

Interview (e-mail/phone) prominent people and publish it.

well you are already famouse and prominent. But why do you need to be on MTV to be interviewed. Of course because you can reach a new audience. Guess what. Asking your fans to ask you questions making your own video interview on your homepage is fun, challenging and will drive back those fans and if their like it their friends on your page. Some other blogs / mags might talk about it. Give it a try!

Build a useful tool

All right you got me here. I don’t see any translation for the musician. Maybe you could build an app for the newer smartphones but still distribute it over your website.

Write an interesting article

As a musician you are kind of an oppinion leader. Why don’t you comment on other music you like. You are obviously an expert on your topic and it will be very interesting for your fans and the fans of other bands to read your reviews and comments on their music. Just Imagine Lady Gaga had her own blog where she reviewed other music. Damn this would attract many people.

Run a newsworthy ‘event’ such as a contest

That is a great one. You are going on tour or you are organizing the tour? Well local bands will be interested to open the concert for you. Have contests for this. Not a contest where they just have to make their fans click somewhere on your page. But making a bandcontest can be fun and other bands will try hard to get this slot on your shows!
Have your fans create youtube videos with one of your songs and give them the chance to win something really cool. You have a personal Gig on their birthday party!

Test something new that has not been done before

Well this might sound hard but as a musician you should be creative. When Radiohead first put their album on the web for free download they tested how it would work and a lot of people like me still talk about it. The crucial part is that it has not been done before. Now if I reference to this event / happening I always use the radiohead example even though many others also did it.

Be the first in doing something on the internet

This one is very similar to the one above. The internet is a huge playground just experiment around. There are many possibilities.

Write something controversial

It is sad but true. But In the entire timephase of promoting In Legends record most of them have been sold on april first when we did our somewhat funny somewhat controversial april’s fool telling the world that the band members have been replaced by some hot chicks because it’s a better visual effect for our live shows. not even the news that our album is out resulted in more comments. That’s kind of surprising.

Be the first to write the latest news in your niche

Easy score. Eerytime you have a press release you do this by putting it on your website and then you contact the mags with a short mail and state that you put the press release on your page. they will eather reference to your page or copy the release. You do not put the press release on Facebook or any other community. The only thing you can do there is to make an update saying you put something on your website.

Be the first to expose a scammer

well the scammer could be within the industry but remember you might loose a friend or close some other doors. But hey maybe there is this critic you always had an open bill with. Or this guy organizing a festival you don’t agree with. Since your connection is already bad why not making this public and getting a profit out of it.

Disagree with an authority

Again think about record labels / festival bookers. What would happen if Metallica posted an article on their page stating that this years Wacken festival had a bad or boaring line up? Well at least I would really enjoy the following and ongoing discussion.

Write some funny humor

Funny things happen to musicians. While recording the music while beeing on tour. In day life. Just think about stories that most people lough at and share them. Or remember the april’s fool we did.

Make an interesting picture

Well this could relate to promotional pictures. But there could also be pictures of fans or of you taking a sh** behind the tourbus. People are attracted by pictures and you certainly have a lot. On the internet quality does not have to be as high as in print mags. More important is the activity.

Be the first to research and document something

I guess this is one of the few points that holds best for bloggers.

Make a theme, plugin or piece of software

This things could relate to your music or artwork or what so ever.

Make a tool that others can put on their sites but that links to you

the best thing would be some kind of concertfeed or newsfeed. If you really aggregate all reviews on your music that apear on the web you could also use those as a content and still link to them and say tool powered by “your band page”

Make a joke about a known person

Well you have to know the person and everyone has to understand it. But I still remember Children of bodom playing umbrella at wacken open air. That was pretty funny. I guess you could transfer ideas like this to the web but in the case of musicians it would not be my first choice.

Make a resource that is just in time for a major event

you finnaly got your record release world wide or play the gig on this huge festival? well you better get an mobile app or some other cool stuff on your page to support it!

Write an outrageous theory and back it up with logics

Another point that fits best with bloggers. Anyone has an idea? Feel free to use the comments.

Write useful comments on something that is happening

it is what people do on facebook. Writing the tour diary or some other things about what is going on in the studio. Well do it on your page and attract the people to your page! not on facebook!

Give something valuable for free

Well I have a whole article about sharing music! I encourage you it is your very best marketing tool!

Coin a new acronym in your niche and get people to talk about it

Well this is what you do. You create new music or a new style. Van Canto have been the first to do a capella metal and now people talk about a capella metal and know right away they have to look into van canto.

Become an expert in your niche and write valuable information

as a serious musician you already are an expert and since you have fans your information will be valuable.
I guess you see the pattern that comes from Jim’s ideas and how they transfere to music. If you quote this list please also consider to link back to Jim since he really is the initial creator of this list. My article is just an interpretation of this list for musicians.

What do you need for an youtube video

• a song
• a camera team (and an idea for the video)
• someone to cut the video

Well these things where already mandetory in an offline world so I won’t discuss them any further.

What is important while uploading the video?

First of all it is important to understand how your video will spread through the Internet

1. On webzines if you contact them an tell them about your video
2. It will pass on from person to person once they find, watch and like it
3. It appears as a similar video besides other videos
4. Via search functions (be it google search or the video search of youtube)

The first two points are mainly your responsability. Once your video is great and you contact a lot of magzines and give them a press release the video might appear on a lot of websites. If your song and video are really great people might spread the word. But be warned everyone is talking about becoming viral. If all the music videos out there became viral everyone would be constantly watching music videos. So don’t forget that becoming viral hardly ever happens.
The 3rd and 4th point are your responsability. To some degree youself can decide where your video is supposed to appear. Search and recommendation engines are responsible to battle with these two points. But machines can undersand text documents like websites much better in comparison to rich media content like your video. That is why the algorithms on these machines probably pay a lot of attention to the tags you use while tagging the video, the title you put in and the description text. Of course they will probably also look at the websites on which the video is embedded and analyse what users this video watched an which other videos these users watched.
Anyway: your video should have the following title: “Bandname – Songname on Recordname” because this is what people are most likely to search for.

A short discussion on cover songs and guest musicians

Doing coversongs is by the way a great method to gain publicity. Look at the Van Canto videos. They have covered many bands and have those names in their title. If you search for “wishmaster” in youtube you easily find the van canto cover of wishmaster! Imagine how often people search for music by a famous musician in comparison to your music!
I did the work for you and just looked it up for Wishmaster and Van Canto:
On last.fm 317.207 people listen to the record wishmaster by Nightwish. On the other hand only 49.164 people listen to Van Canto! So you can do the math and decide what kind of songs you want to upload for promo reasons.
here you go with a title for a song with a guest musician: “your band’s name – songname feat. musician’s name from his band’s name”

illegal content on your videos

Most songs are on youtube in some form. Be happy about the fact that people like your music! A lot of artists wish they had so much attention. My article Why open source is the way to go holds perfectly as my contribution on copy rights in music anyway – also compare my article on sharing music. So what can you do to profit from the fact that most songs are on youtube anyway?
Upload them yourself. Use good tags, nice pictures, and provide the lyrics. Promote them! Put them on your search engine optimizied pages and ask people to connect with you and buy the album or donate for your music.
THINK ABOUT IT!
If you are Lady Gaga and your videos are being watched million times and some one else put them on youtube you don’t have as much benefit as they are watched on YOUR youtube channel. Where people could become subscribers or where you are able to embed AND change messages for your tour / album within the videos.!
So do you really want to be angry if someone else puts your videos on youtube. A very nice example is Blind Guardian. About one year ago they uploaded all their videos to their youtube channel. But the videos where already out there and other videos already made rank1 in search for videos. Again algorithms are just not that smart and the user doesn’t care as long as he sees the video!

new forms of marketing

This is the best part of the message. have a look at this great video (thogh it has nothing to do with music!) and realize that you have to act differently on the internet.

Understand?
Well here is a list of things you can do to be interesting and attract people on youtube if you are a musician:

1. Fans love interviews: make a video interviews. Have your fans ask you questions and answer them in a video
2. medleys (album introduction)
3. have a prelistening session of your album. You can tune into every song and discuss the song. What do you need print  media or similar for? You can reach your audiance in a much more interesting way
4. live videos: Ask your fans to tape your show. You will easily get a 20 + cam mix of a song. This will create much more feeling and will be much cheaper than any professional music video
5. Record short stories,
6. Interact with the world. Remember what old spice – even though not a band – did? If not have a look at my upcoming blog article on old spice.
7. Make competitions: Ask your fans to create funny videos using your songs. Don’t be afraid that the quallity might be bad. (if the quality is bad it won’t spread on the web)

Be creative be fun and especially forget about the old business models! On the internet you want to be open!

Tie your fans to your website:

There is nothing worse than an artist putting a news on his website and thinking that now every fan of him in the world has received the information. If your website has just a news section and some other static content (like discography, some pictures and maybe even a mp3 snipped) your fans will not be informed just because you put some message in your news system! They just don’t visit your website!
Of course your band’s name might be Metallica or Rammstein or your name might even be Lady Gaga (in this case, thanks for reading, I like your music!) In this unlikely case your reputation is so high that putting a news on your page is sufficient for other people to quickly talk about it and reach media and getting spread. But let’s be honest even if you play the main stage of Wacken Festival your the reach of some news on your website will probably not be on all webzines within a couple of minutes or hours.
So you have to make your website more interesting to tie your fans to it. Good luck this is easy to do! Just make your page interactive. Some suggestions:

• Have guest book.
• Give your fans the possibility to post comments on every single subpage of your site.
• Run a message board
• Have some contests
• allow your fans to upload photos on your site
• allow your fans to upload videos on your site
• you can not only embade your youtube videos on your page but also include all the comments and ratings via youtube api.

Notice that interacting users also create user generated content on your website which increases the amount of content on your website and there by is great for your search engine optimization. For more info on band page seo please read part 1 of this series.
So you have implemented all that stuff? Great! But you can do even better. You will realize that some fans will be tied to your website discovering new information very quickly. But the information will still miss a lot of your fans. So it is better to establish a connection with every fan. On the Internet this connection can be established in several ways:

• collect the email address of your fans
• try to make the fan become your fan on Facebook
• run and operate a Twitter channel (with more content than 5 tweets per year)
• add your fans on MySpace and other minor social networks
• send newsletters to web magazines and make interviews with them

Even though all of these methods are important and I recommend you to do all of them. There is one single method that is definitely the best.

Have them sign to your newsletter and collect their email address.

Yes I know Facebook is much cooler but remember not long ago MySapce was cool. Today you are sitting on your notebook reading my blog having 100’000 inactive myspace friends in your basement and don’t know what to do with them… Imagine you would have had only 50’000 email addresses! You could still inform your fans about new cool stuff.
The best thing about it: You tried to tie people to your site but some people still don’t come back frequently. Informing them of an update per mail, thereby pulling them back to your site gives you a new chance to tie them to your site!
Ok so now you want to collect email addresses and you don’t know why. Well there are several possibilities:

• newsletter registration form on every subpage!
• Ask for an email address once your fan is interacting on your site
• make riffles
• make a contest
• or if you have read my article “Share your Music! but do it the right way!” you might even consider to exchange some of your music for a valid email address
• run a web shop and let your fans purchase merchandise and music from your site and not from amazon (you earn more in this way anyway)
• Even allowing users to login with open authentication methods like Facebook it is usually possible to download and save the email address.

Let me clarify my statement. I do not encourage you to not use Facebook or other tools to interact with your fans. But in the center of your activities should always be your website and your newsletter. This is stable! Facebook could change its policies or even become unpopular. You don’t want to rely on someone else or even make advertising for Facebook with your own brand and music! So once your website is done correctly you can expand your activities to other places such as Facebook, MySpace and so on.
And one last word: Don’t give the email address to anyone else. Don’t sent Spam and don’t sent emails to fans that wish not to receive information. Always give them the option to unsubscribe from your mailing list.

Summary:

Your Website exists to inform your fans about your music, upcoming concerts, releases and other stuff related to your band. If you just have some static pages you can also stop having a webpage and stay with myspace. Alestorm is great example on how to not do it. For the first two releases they only had a myspace profile and now when you google alestorm you end up on the kind of dead myspace page.
Even though you are a band and popular and people actually are interested in you you still need to have an excellent website. User interaction is one way to make your website more interesting another way is to establish a communication line with your fans to inform them about changes!
So how do you take care of your fans? Tell me via comment if you think I am missing some important points!

Basics you need to understand:

The Internet is one of your distribution channels to attract new fans at relatively low cost. It also gives you the chance to sell your products (cds, mp3’s, merchandise, concert tickets,…) with the highest possible profit margin.
Your website is the single most effective marketing tool you have on the web. Years ago every artist needed to be on myspace. Today it is called Facebook and do you know what will be tomorrow? In opposite to those portals your website will be perpetual and should be the center of all your online activities. It doesn’t make sense to have music streaming on myspace and give news corp your greatest treasure and raise your myspace page over your webpage. Remember News Corp not only doesn’t pay the musicans licence fees for streaming but they also drive traffic from your website to myspace.
Most important: People don’t look on your website for information. They look on google for information! You might be lucky and someone who wants to buy merchandise or a CD will type in your band name and then clicks on your website in order to find more information. But chances are much higher that he will type in your name and the word merchandise and then browse to the first results of the Google search result page. So will your band page appear in that case?

Usual difficulties of Search Engine Optimization

Very simplified speaking search engine rankings are calculated by the amount of back links (which means the number of other websites linking to your website) the anchor text of the back links and the site’s structure, format and keywords. A shop or everyday website faces the very hard challenge that not many other Webpages or magazines talks about them on the Internet. In these cases on page optimization, link building and link baiting – which needs a lot of effort, time and money are mandatory.

The special case for bandpages:

Since a music band is likely to have fans and gain attention by media websites it usually gains tons of back links (we remember the hard stuff for your search engine rankings) in a very short time. The best thing is: Most links will contain your band name as an anchor text making it the most relevant result for this keyword and also for moste keywords related to it as long as you place your content with a good structure and follow basic formatting rules. Your webmaster should be aware of these things. If not, well… you could change?
So your question should be: Which keywords do my fans type into Google that should always lead them to my homepage? Once you know the answer to this question due to your fame and relevance on the web any webmaster should be able to optimize your page for these keywords.

Keyword list for your band’s page SEO:

Since bands do not seem to have the experience to choose the good keywords and bandpage SEO is as explained really 90% the choice of keywords I will now give you a list of keywords that your page should be optimized for.

• Your band name +…
• merchandise
• shop
• ticket
• concert
• tour
• album
• reviews
• lyrics / song text
• mp3
• download
• video
• listen
• CD
• tabs / chords / notes
• buy

Note, since the internet is full with piracy anyway it would be wise at this point not only to win these keywords but also to provide the fans with the content they are looking for. This means put up the tabs and chords of your songs. They are on the web anyway and other people earn a lot of advertising dollars.
futher more (maybe in combination with some of the keywords listed above):

• name of your band members
• song titles
• titles of your records
• Names of the band you are on tour with / Name of the tour

and if you want to be really cool:

• your band name + name of the releases in combination with:
• rapidshare
• bit torrent
• megashare
• Napster
• …

There is much more to band page optimization (e.g.: photos, videos, social media optimization, crm, reviews, community building, newsletter…) and i will continue to write about it. If you do not know how to optimize for those keywords have a look at the In Legend website. If you need help for implementation feel free to contact me! If you think I am missing some points feel also free to tell me via comment. And please give me feedback on my Question: Do you think band page SEO is useful / important to online music marketing of bands?