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  4. any luck with advertising?

  • any luck with advertising?

    C
    C
    Does anyone have a web site?

    If so, 1) how do you increase traffic to your site and 2) when people visit how can you get them to purchase your music?

    Any tips or helpful hints would be most welcome!

    calaf
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    G
    From my current site, you wouldn't believe me ... but anyway, it's true: if you have a lot of text, with correctly spelled words strung together meaningfully for your area of music, you will collect traffic. Turning that into purchases is still a mystery to me, however.
  • P
    P
    Have you listed and studied websites of other composers who "sell" music through their website?

    Sorry to disappoint you, but I don't believe this is really possible. I think networking and getting to know the right people face to face is probably a route that more reliably will lead to results.
  • A
    A
    Nothing is impossible. If you advertise the web page some how yes they will see you and hear you (demos) BUT the best thing is to have a nice web page (professional look) So you will be taken seriously.
  • F
    F
    Some years ago I remember reading a poll of hundreds of top business decision makers about how they decide on who to hire as vendors. (Which we are, technically.)

    They all said their first impression determines whether they take a company or individual serious. And 86% said that first impression comes from the quality of the 'collateral' material. (Marketing material, etc.)

    These days, a website is certainly a prime form of 'collateral' material. I can't say we've ever gotten one piece of unsolicited work from our website. But when a client calls on a referral from another client, we often direct them there to learn more about us and to listen to samples of our work...often WHILE we're on the phone having our first conversation. Sometimes, based on a referral, they've checked out our website already and have called or emailed for more info based on what they heard.

    So basically, I don't see our website as a direct way to solicit new work...but an EXTREMELY valuable resource once prospective clients are already nudged in our direction.

    Fred Story
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    C
    all good advice guys...thanks for the input!

    calaf
  • C
    C
    Personally I'm still in the process of completeling my website so I haven't gone full throttle on publicity yet, BUT, here's what I do so far:

    1. Post in as many forums as possible. (in my case its easy since I'm doing a series of fan works inspired by a video game)

    2. Submit to all major search engines (I doubled my initial traffic when I did this)

    3. Tweak the meta-tags on your pages. You want huge traffic spills from meta-crawler type search engines.

    4. Have a business card IRL with the address, give it to every person who looks at you [6]

    5. Get as many people on the web to link to your site as possible. One of google's euristics for ranking pages counts the number of other sites that link to yours.

    6. content content content. If your content changes daily more people will visit more often, if it doesn't, then you're more prone to get one time visitors. (although actually my pic-of-the-day is broken atm >.<[;)] Also, the more interactive the website is, the more people will pay attention, and the more accurate feedback you can aquire.

    things I am planning on doing upon completion of an acceptably presentable website:

    1. on the content side, I'm planning on adding source files from certain projects so that anyone can compile and remix certain songs in their own style. Recently there was a guy who did this with a song and he ended up with a reccord deal from the publicity. Also, I'll go back to blogging daily and get some other daily-things fixed.

    2. Post in more forums, newsgroups. I'll try to find anything audio/music related and post there.

    I'm sure I'll think of more later, I used to work for an IT company that did website production as a major side of the business, but its been awhile so I'm forgetting a few things...