Online Viral Marketing

***Do not limit yourself any longer to promoting just Myspace or YouTube.  There are many social networking sites and music discovery sites which are actually brimming with even more people looking to discover new music.  Don’t ignore them!  There are real fans out there!

Best promotional times and reasons to run campaigns:

* when you’re releasing new music
* when you’re actively promoting to industry / interested parties you want to impress
* when you’re playing special events
* on a consistent basis when you want to show an active daily fanbase
* when you have thousands of friends and no song plays registering
* when you’ve released a new video
* when you have a contest going on
* when you don’t have the time yourself to be on myspace 24-7 promoting because you have a life outside of social networking
* when you’re so far down on the charts that myspace users can’t find you.

Running trial campaigns and full-length campaigns:

* if you start out with a one-day campaign and you like your increases, remember that if you want to attract the same amount of for a full-length campaign, you must purchase one of the “B” heavier campaigns (one-day campaigns are based on “B” campaign numbers.)  “A” campaigns will give half the results of a “B” campaign.
* on longer campaigns, don’t expect the same exact numbers every day.  we cannot predict the same amount every day, although it should be very close.

Making sure your page is optimal for viewing and loading:

* with myspace and other social networking sites, make sure your songs are set to auto-play
* make sure you don’t have lots of images loading on your myspace page or webpage, taking forever to finish.  viewers don’t want to wait.
* generally, pages using the “transparent” option take longer to load.
* don’t use gigantic images on your page that throw it out of alignment.  it looks amateurish.  try to make the page as clean as you can with simple lines.
* give people a reason to come back

While your campaign is running:

* now’s the time to invite everyone to your page
* browse for friends when you have some spare moments by going over to a similar well-known band’s page and clicking through their list of friends saying hello, would you like to check us out?  click through the people on the page first who have left a comment – those are the people who are more active on myspace and will visit your page over and over leaving comments, etc.  yes, i know you used to be able to do that with bots – it was a very cool marketing technique – but those days are over.  remember something very important:  it’s not about how many friends you can click through.  it’s about gaining the respect and admiration of even just as many as 20 people who will then, in turn, promote you (with love) to all of their friends.   the myspace artists who are the most successful know that it’s definitely a tell-a-friend game…and so on, and so on, and so on.  it’s about the avalanche.  it’s about the snowball effect.  you need your fans working for you.  it’s too much to do by yourself.