1: WEB DESIGN + DEVELOPMENT: Most musicians websites don’t provide a compelling experience for fans or prospects who visit their site. Don’t see your site as a static platform. Your site is a channel -here, you interact and present yourself to all those who are not fans yet. It must develop at least every month. Continued commitment to developing website design and content that more effectively express your brand as well as deepen your fans experience, so that they are confident and invested enough to make purchases…then sales happen. Industry people who provide opportunities are a whole separate group from your fan base and also have to be addressed directly through your website as the primary point of formal introduction to your brand, and a platform from which to broker propositions.

2: EMAIL MANAGEMENT: Maintaining fan engagement and interaction with email marketing management is still one the most dependable ways to create recurring revenue online, managing fans in such a way to optimize engagement that leads to sales over time through ongoing offers. Successful music marketing requires professional email management for musicians. Those who are interested in email marketing should know you will have to build your contacts with other online marketing efforts, most often a blog, or appc campaign to get sign ups. Then you must maintain your mail out, which is going to need regular content with which to present new propositions but once you can graduate to greater levels of automated email marketing, you can implement powerful systems to create wealth with minimum maintenance.

3: PPC MANAGEMENT / ADWORDS: AdWords Pay per click advertising through Google and other content networks is the quickest and most powerfully qualified option for advertising spending in 2009. With only as little as $20 p/week you can begin highly measured and finely targeted campaigns through AdWords. Google PPC is great for any entertainers or content providers who have put in the preparation of building an online platform that retains fan engagement and is also effective targeting specific genders, age groups and cities/regions for products or events and gigs. Even beginners can do well on Google through AdWords, but there are many typical mistakes made by those who fail to comprehend the complexity of how the system is balanced. Experience in using the PPC can lead to radically improved outcomes, minimizing AdWords costs.

4: SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING: Anyone who tells you they are a social media guru had better be ready to back that up . Social Media Marketing is not a strategy for direct profit for musicians, it’s an extension of fan management. The aim of social media is to build authentic interactions with engaged social media users who can then promote you through powerful, authoritative viral word of mouth. Just like blogs, creating a robust social media presence has many advantages for musicians, and usually it’s the easiest way for musicians to start negotiating fan relationships and building branded platforms online. It’s just it’s best to remain clear about social media promotions strategies and address it’s marketing value practically.

5: BLOG PROMOTION: Creating a Blog is still a valuable strategy for music promotion online as long as it doesn’t interrupt normal core operations or become your only marketing tactic. A well maintained blog developed over months can have many benefits and promotes your online music marketing presence in multiple ways – it reinforces your online marketing campaign through SEO, developing fan interaction, website development, and good content publishing practices – building a lively and dynamic blog will always pay off the commitment put into it over time. Make sure when you choose a music promotion service that they include blog set up including hosting, domain name, custom blog design, blog promotion and are able to create content and run your blog for you when you start breaking through.

6: ONLINE VIDEO: Online video is the quickly becoming the new star of online music marketing. Because fans seek engagement, trust and authority with musicians products, services and brands. So as the range of what’s available begins to diversify dramatically, music fans will seek stories that give commodities and their brands value and credibility. Online video is the most powerful way to engage people and quickly create trust, authority as well as impact online. The Musicians who use video in new, more and different ways to communicate with fans will be more compelling, more real and have more opportunities to connect, and online video is only going to get bigger and continue to steal more influence from traditional broadcast mediums such as radio and TV.

7: SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION AND MARKETING: Search engine optimization is still the strongest internet marketing tactic available to enterprising performers on small budgets, but for this reason SEO finds itself at #7 on this list. SEO is very competitive. SEO is a challenge for new websites and new promotions. Ranking highly in Google for your favored keyword search terms is better than any advertising and would give you unmatched access to your market. But the outcome of SEO work can vary. A good SEO campaign takes some research, and requires a lot of tedious tasks, and that of course costs. SEO can be powerfully effective but you must have the patience for it if you are in a competitive niche or you’re not hyper-targeting a specific niche..

8: Article Marketing and Syndication: Syndication of content by way of online press releases or Article Marketing uses written content for exposure through making it available on content networks for permissible circulation far and wide by web publishers who agree to retain your author footer, therefore generating brand mentions, click through traffic and most importantly considerable SEO benefits. Article syndication writing and services are need ed as part of an musicians general online marketing strategies. If you don’t have time to build your internet exposure, it’s better to have someone else create monthly content for you then having no new content at all. Online marketing is all about the snowball effect of more content going out and more back links leading back to your site and creating more traffic through search authority.

9: Viral Marketing: More powerful than spreading ideas is building an idea that spreads itself. Whether a clever video or other online content, or proposition – a competition or a mash up – or even a piece of software or app, the possibilities are limitless. The essential concept is an idea or meme that proliferates through online sharing -without any secondary involvement from the musician or their marketing team. The success of Viral Marketing is never promised and taking risks to put forward powerful branding messages or leverage powerful value propositions that engage so deeply that it spreads online or through word of mouth is a long shot but always has the potential to be outrageously successful with a bit of character and flair.

10: Community building: Again building a forum or community for your fans to amass around your brand takes long term commitment and a large personal contribution to keep the buzz of the community alive – this can be a successful strategy if executed well, but must be timed well in an musicians career. But you can’t just create a strong forum based loyalty to an artist overnight. Certainly, strategies to nurture your community and provide functionality by way of a forum or other platforms that encourage different kinds of interaction and user driven content creation around your brand can be provided easily and inexpensively and provide great leverage, but early on there will need to be a dedicated effort to inject activity into the community space. This can be very time consuming and long term than many musicians are prepared for.