Selling 1,000 CD singles a week on iTunes and signed to a record deal. How did one band do this?
HOW TO DO IT?
They decided to make a full time business out of their band. Everyday at 9 AM, three of the four members met in what they called "The War Room," which was a room reserved in one of their homes. They took it seriously, just like a job, and every day they would set simple goals.
“In the beginning we really did not know what we were doing, the daily goal was to make the maximum amount of fans on Facebook, which is 400 a day. Between three of us, that was 133 each.” Here’s how it went from there.
Step 1: Find sound alikes – famous bands similar to you
They started by looking at similar bands in their genre that had large fan lists. They would go and they would ping each and every fan.
Step 2: Ping each person
And then they would go to the comments and post: "Hey if you like *MAJORARTIST/BAND*, you're probably going to like *Your band/artist name*. Would you please come check us out and leave a comment?" Then, people would check them out and leave comments.
Step 3: Get personal
The band would then personally respond and personally thank everyone that left a comment. And they always signed their name using a sig file, which included their IM address.
Step 4: Instant Messenger bonanza
Then they would get their new fans’ information through Instant Messenger, and they would sit all day long on Instant Messenger chatting back and forth with their new friends. They actually couldn't turn on their IM because the minute they would open it up, they’d get thousands of people trying to ping them. So they had to post their status as “Away” on their IM because their buddy list was insane.
TIP! Give your music away. The whole time, they were giving away their music for free to build their audience.
Step 5: Run contests
After several months making thousands of personal contacts, a new marketing idea struck them: create a contest to run for their fans. Each of the 20 people in the contest got points for convincing others to add their
video and/or song. After this successful contest, a company called Brickfish took notice and offered to help them launch a second contest.
Entrants had to design a T-shirt, and in return the band would write a song for the winner. So, out of a well planned T-shirt contest they got an additional 100,000 hits to their page in two weeks, and the winner got a shirt, a personal call from the band, and an original song written about them. “It was unbelievable.”
Step 6: Engage your audience consistently
Another of their strategies was to send out a bulletin every single day. Not a hypey bulletin pushing themselves, but a simple one that would engage their fans by asking a question like, “Should we get chunky peanut butter or smooth”
They felt that there was no reason to blog because they weren't really on the road, and they didn’t have a lot of news to report, so they just kept asking questions on their bulletins, day in and day out. And they had a call to action: They would ask everyone on the bulletins to comment back on their pages. They would get hundreds of responses from people, which then would add a track play and a front page hit to their FB page. Just due to the question, they would get 500 messages instantly, and 600+ comments a day.
Step 7: MTV action
After their wildly successful Brickfish contest, they got a song placed on MTV’s “Laguna Beach.” They don't really know how they ended up on that show – they think a fan probably e-mailed the track to MTV – but the episode aired three times, and all of a sudden they noticed people started to buy the download.
Step 8: Get ready to charge for tracks (after a solid fan base is built)
It was only after all of this traction and attention that they started pushing their iTunes page. This was after a full year of solid online promotions. They took the free MP3s off of and they started seeing their sales pick up.
Step 9: Repeat and repeat and repeat… and repeat
They put a big wall-mounted dry erase board on the wall of the war room, and every day they each had a goal to make 150 friends and comment back personally.
Step 10: Measure your goals and write them down
Then they laid out a weekly plan to hit their goals and numbers at iTunes, which were 200 plays and 400 friends a day. They also went after the friends of another a band (who blew up after becoming the number one unsigned artist at MySpace).
Step 11: Be masterful at one thing
They didn't do blogging, podcasting, Twitter, or other social networking sites. They did this all on FB alone. The goal for FB was to consistently add 200 friend requests and 400 plays to the traffic they were already
generating.
Step 12: A record deal
Because of all of their solid dedicated focus, Universal Republic Records took notice and offered them a deal. The moral of the story and the end result of all this work: They got a deal.
Was this process easy? No. It took solid dedication, trial and error, and a hell of a lot of time invested, but the band managed to be one of the top selling bands at iTunes in 2007 and they beat a vast majority of artists signed to major labels.
I think this is a phenomenal and an inspirational story and one that teaches us lots of lessons. From my experience, musicians tend to give up too easily and lose focus, and then become defeated and give up.
by Ariel Hyatt
© 2010 All Rights Reserved. Used By Permission
