Don't Flood The Gate: Find the best time to fish!

     Anyone who is active in social media, whether it is Facebook, Twitter, Myspace (yeah right), or even territory specific pages like Nexopia, IRC-Galleria, etc, is done being bombarded with the same exact messages everyday. We will not begin to get into the fact that the messages asking you to actually buy are largely ignored (see previous post below) but we should talk about the actual timing of these messages and how they might be most effective, and most importantly not completely annoy one's target audience.

     First of all, please if you have not already, please do try and keep your direct marketing by e-mail if you are selling anything or trying to gain any kind of true response and growth (again, see previous post below). This goes double for contacting those within the industry. While one does obviously make new connections and does have the opportunity to go "viral", social media is for interaction and fan "support", not sales and not true "support" in terms of longevity and product movement in the long tail.

     According to musicthinktank.com's Bobby Owinski there is an actual "Science of Email Timing” that can help you to take this one step further to make sure that your campaign is not wasted and your analytics actually move whilst you stare at them for any signs of life in the universe you are working so desperately to create.

     No? Okay, so if your analytics are showing growth this is perhaps even more important for you, because there are techniques one can employ to begin making sure that growth becomes exponential, and not just on your social media pages, but also next time you check the $ page of your distributor. For one, after looking over the "timing" list provided in the article, consider the suggestion added in the last paragraph. If your already experiencing a bit of success and have fans in different places in the world consider dividing your contact list by time zone and setting up automated services like Fanbridge, Reverb Nation, and the like.

Long-Tail 101: Create Your Own End Cap, And then Leave It There

     I find that while there are plenty of independent artists that naturally understand, or have become familiar with the practice of long-tail marketing, there are still a number of independents who insist on taking down an "old" single, CD, or product when "making room" for the new. As a professional in the industry I come across many artists and management teams each week and I have heard just about every excuse for this practice; I stand firm in my opinion that this is the absolute worse choice one could make. Of course, there are exceptions for very new and beginning artists whose prior work was complete garbage and needed to be taken down to make room for a polished product handled by a producer, etc, but outside of these cases of truly poor production/content, the product needs to stay, forever.

     One of the very first things a true artist should be concerned with is their repertoire and total catalog. How many times have you been to a concert or watched an awards show and the songs by any particular artist have come from multiple albums? How many times have been to an online store or merchandise booth only to see 20 different designs for shirts, key chains, USB drives, and the like, some of them from three tours ago? Artists have websites, social pages, mobile pages and apps… each with never-ending shelf space and the front page is their very own end-cap. If shelf space is unlimited why not have all of your products listed for sale, and since it never goes away, why not keep it there forever?

     The benefits of this are not only that you will undoubtedly gain new fans in the long run who happen to like an older song better than a new one or perhaps just happened to hear that one first, but this will also tremendously help sales numbers over the long-tail as older products continue to sell along side the new ones. This also gives you a chance to actively promote older product or even group the older product with even better performing product to gain numbers for those that have fallen behind. What if an advertising agent or music supervisor heard about a song you did and came by that page looking for something very specific? You’d better have it there for them! Get the picture? It is all about the long-tail kids.