How do you make music to increase your traffic?
Ohh that is a good title, how do you make music to increase
your traffic? But it is a title with good meaning. What are
we going to do with our music when we make it, put it on a web
site then wait for the downloads? We need a plan, and we need to
attract surfers before any downloading can happen.
Well, we are all surfers though aren't we? We seem so buried in
our sites that we forget sometimes that we are actually
the people that create internet traffic to other sites. It is
such a radical, yet simple solution to most of our problems,
that because it is so simple, we forget about the thought. So we
must think like surfers.
I know that when I search through the free engines (Google,
directory sites, etc) I never search for techno. What!
You may be thinking. Well, do you know how many sites are
dedicated to techno? Millions, absolutley millions, and that is
not a good sign. So what do I search for? Well I search for a
type of techno, a group, etc.
This is a really fundamental fact that is generally
forgotten, and it also has a drastic effect on your traffic, and
what you actually produce. Honestly, I have seen someone write,
"I want to make a techno site", and the reply has been..."well,
what type of techno do you want to focus on?"..."ermm, there are
different types?" came the reply.
My friend has made a rock band, and has produced some MP3s. They
are cool, and so they are now housed on a general MP3 site, that
has some traffic coming to it, listening to the free MP3s. The
main problem comes in that why is he getting little
traffic, and why aren't people downloading these great MP3s
at a greater rate?
Well there is one answer that will answer both questions.
Why should they? They like the type of music, but do they
trust the music to fully download it? Come on, 3.5 MB is
nothing, but it is a chore to download. Also, there are
different styles of rock music- punk, death, soft etc, so why
should they pick his?
A technique that should be used is to pre-sell. This
pre-selling technique should be used on any type of music, or
software that you would like your surfers to download, if used
properly it will lead to increased downloads. So how do we
utilise this?
Well first off we must see what type of music we are
producing. If it is similar to say the Prodigy well, make a few
pages dedicated to the Prodigy style of music, give a mini bio,
your favourite tunes and maybe even a step-by-step discussion
and description of one of their tunes. By making a page
dedicated to a style of techno who are your influences, you are
then targeting the right type of people of similar
interest, attracting those people who like your certain type of
techno.
When you target surfers by this method, they really like the
style of music that you are writing about. Remember the Internet
is full of free information hungry surfers willing to devour
any type of information on their chosen topic. You are
preping the reader, getting them in the right frame of mind-
preselling them. They are excited, curious and warm to your
thoughts and views. Now within the text, or at the bottom of the
page, you can recommend, free MP3s that the reader would be
interested in- your download rate will increase. Because you
have recommended something, subconciously the surfer goes "hmm,
I like what he has written, it is true, and if they are
recommending something free, well what have I got to loose?"
What else could you add? How could you increase your
download rates even more? How about covers, remixes of
the tracks that you like...freely available, and then state
something like "if you are interested in these songs, take a
look at these...that have a similar style and can be downloadd
for free". You could even have loads of pages dedicated
to many influences, and you could "capture" many targeted
surfers with this approach- highlighting your MP3s on each page,
as well as a main page linking to each of the influences, and to
each other.
Now when people type into the search engines they will look for
Prodigy MP3s, or Prodigy style MP3s, Prodigy remixes, your music
and web pages will be placed higher, because they are much more
relevent to the surfers question than before and your traffic
will increase, likewise increasing your download rates.