Today we are going to talk about ways to promote your music for free. As an Independent Artist, the most difficult thing is coming up with the money to promote your music. And when you have the money, it’s still hard for some people to justify parting with it in order to gain new fans.
People ask me all the time about the best ways to promote their music on a tight budget. That’s why I wrote “The Ultimate Guide to Indie Music Promotion” and it’s why I am taking some time to give you some ideas now.
Here Are the Top 5, Easiest Ways to Promote Your Music for Free
At first, I thought that I should group all social media together, then I realized that as an artist, you should really be focusing on three social media platforms the most. Let’s begin with
Promote Your Music on Instagram
Unfortunately, the days of choosing 30 relevant hashtags for your post and having it seen by potential fans are over. The hashtags are overly saturated with crap that has NOTHING TO DO WITH the hashtag itself. People started to realize that there are some hashtags that are followed more than others and now they use them on all their posts, whether they are relevant or not.
A search on Instagram for #rap brings up over 8 million posts! And thousands of those posts are irrelevant. I fail to see how your yoga poses (though impressive) are Hip Hop related.
You’re going to have to be more creative and post killer content in order to stand out in a crowd of over 8 million posts. So, how do you do that exactly? While choosing 30 hashtags and commenting them on your post is still good practice, you’re going to have to do some keyword research in order to figure out what hashtags to use that are going to get you noticed.
Keyword research
The easiest way to do this is to make a list of anchor keywords, such as:
1. Hiphop
2. Rap
3. Rapper
4. Music
Once you have a list of about 5-10 anchor keywords, you can create a test post and post it to Instagram (don’t worry, you can delete it when you’re done). Once you post it, open up a new comment and type in your first anchor keyword with a # in front of it. This will bring up a list of a ton of hashtags that you can use for the post. Write down the ones that have over 100k posts, but under a million.
Repeat this process for all of your anchor keywords and then with that list, separate them into lists of 30 and save pin those lists on your clipboard on your phone. This will make it so that you only have to do the research once in a while.
While hashtags are still important, the most important thing about posting any content is that it is entertaining and grabs peoples’ attention IMMEDIATELY.
For instance, if your video starts off with a 15 second intro or with you setting up the video, people are going to scroll right past it. Grab them from the beginning because people are used to instant gratification these days.
This brings us to
Promote Your Music on YouTube
YouTube is an AMAZING tool for promoting your music. Creating content for YouTube takes a lot more work, but the payoff can be huge. My latest video on YouTube got 1.5k views in the first 48 hours! I attribute this to it being a “short”. This is a relatively new way to post content on YouTube and the way that these “shorts” are promoted by YouTube makes them much more likely to be seen than your longer form content.
For longer videos, what I said above about grabbing their attention immediately goes for YouTube as well. You want your videos to be high quality, eye catching and to have great sound quality. A lyric video will still do the trick, but you should make it a live action lyric video, rather than a still photo. There are websites like Videobolt where you can create cool lyric videos.
Again, you’re going to want to do some keyword research for YouTube. You can go into your creator studio and add keywords to your video after you publish it.
Another very important thing to consider when you’re posting on YouTube is the title. The title should be something catchy that describes the video and gets people attention.
Tik Tok
Tik Tok is another great way to get your music noticed. The idea here is to use Tik Tok mostly for short form content that showcases your life and your music journey. These videos should be under a minute long and entertaining. Record yourself telling a funny story, doing a freestyle, recording a music video… these are the kinds of things that are going to get attention on Tik Tok more than a long music video.
On Tik Tok, you can use a couple hashtags. I wouldn’t overdo it. And be sure to interact with other people’s Tik toks too. Remix popular videos and play around with different ideas that support what you’re trying to do, which is to bring awareness to your music and your personal brand.
Playlister.club
I recently tested out playlister.club. I posted 5am Zeri’s track “State Lines” to see how the site worked. It costs $40 to post a song on this platform but it is SO worth it, believe me. At first, it was very slow going. The first 10 days, the track was getting viewed, but no one was adding it to their playlist or reviewing it and then suddenly, BAM! In the 30 days that it was posted on playlister.club, the track got added to 12 VERY popular playlists.
You might be thinking that $40 is a lot of money to spend in order to get on 12 playlists. To that I say, have you ever tried the traditional way to get on playlists? It is a grueling process and you really don’t gain a lot of traction unless you already have a ton of followers on Spotify. 5am did not have a lot of followers on Spotify. However, his track got 4k listens in those 30 days and his follower count went way up.
The best part is that the campaign is over and his followers and listens are still growing, because now his track is on those playlists and tons of people are hearing it.
So, get off the dough and go sign up!
Submitting to blogs
This is still one of the best ways to get your music in front of thousands of potential new fans. It is a process though and requires motivation and follow through.
While you’re at it, submit your links to Nevernaire!
CLICK HERE TO GO TO THE SUBMISSIONS PAGE
I’m VERY picky about who I will feature on Nevernaire, so a feature is not guaranteed. But you should submit your links anyway.
So, you have some work to do. I would suggest choosing the option that seems the most entertaining to you and going with that first. Don’t try to tackle these all at once. And definitely try out playlister.club. You could really do well there for short money.
DID YOU ENJOY THIS ARTICLE? DO YOU HAVE SOME TIPS TO SHARE WITH US? COMMENT BELOW!
Subscribe to our newsletter!
[…] “5 EASY WAYS TO PROMOTE YOUR MUSIC FOR FREE” […]