In this post I want to highlight the process / strategy of expanding your reach, engaging with fans, and gaining permission to market directly to those fans. So here are the 3 Tips on best practices for kickstarting a fan network.

1. Assets

Starting out you need to identify the assets that you can give away in exchange for emails via an email for media widget (E4M). Choose quality tracks, not leftovers of dubious quality. Fans will give up their emails in exchange for a track if they sense that it’s buzz-worthy. Consider giving away the lead single from your album, or potentially an alternate version of it such as an acoustic version. Or even a home made video recording of your band hard at work in the studio. Fans want backstage insights, give it to them.

2. Deployment

Create different widgets for each platform. If you are putting up an E4M widget on both MySpace and your artist site, then make sure you settle on a naming convention for the duplicate widgets. This will allow you to track their metrics separately and see which channel is delivering the most fans. Another is to duplicate E4M widgets whenever you gain some interest from a blogger wanting to do a write up of your new release. Offer them a widget to include with the review. This type of promotion goes down well with the reviewer, their readers and you get a review and more fans on your mailing list. Win, win, win. Nice.

3. Monitor, Rinse & Repeat

Monitor your analytics to determine which strategies are most successful. If a particular channel is not doing so well, consider others ways to improve the performance. Check your Google Analytics to see how fans are discovering your site, you might have been picked up by a blog or forum thats sending loads of new potential fans to you, wouldn’t it be smart to contact that blog and offer to do an exclusive interview, CD/merch give away etc. We think so.

I wanted to go into a bit more detail on how you can set up Google Analytics link tracking, which will give you so much more web traffic data to slice and dice, but I think it deserves its own post as its quite a complex process when you’re first trying to get your head around it. So let me ask you, do you want to see a post dedicated to Google link tracking? Let me know in the comments below.

Happy list building.

Stevo

1. 

   Tracey · July 14, 2011 at 7:43 pm · Reply

   I’ve heard about link tracking and wouldn’t mind learning about it here. I mean all the other posts about link tracking come at it from a business perspective. would be great to see how to approach this technique as a musician might be able to use it.
2. 

   Stevo · July 26, 2011 at 3:18 pm · Reply

   Hi Tracey,

   Thats a great idea. I will plan to write about this for one of my next posts. Not sure when that will be thought – still touring with TPBR. So best subscribe to my RSS feed so you dont miss the update or if not already maybe follow me on Twitter @amplifiedsteve

   Thanks!