Greg Rollett: Leverage Other People’s Audiences
(# mashsmday #smday)
Social media gives everyone a voice, but not all voices are created equal. As an indie musician, you have to understand that some people have bigger, wider and more responsive audiences that you do. 
All the music marketing teachers, coaches and bloggers out here today (including me) tell everyone to create content, blog, blog, blog and connect with your fans.
Where this fails to work is when you do not have the audience to even watch your videos, read your blogs and check out your content, even if its dope content.
Over the past year we have been working with our musicians to create content that leverages Other People's Audiences. What that means is taking your content and framing it for someone else's site. What you are doing is a reverse "Field Of Dreams." Think about it. If a site has 100,000 unique visitors or a ton of RSS subscribers and your site has 100 readers – does it make more sense to put your content on your site, cross your fingers, hope and pray, or guest post, get interviewed or put some solid and valuable content on someone else's site and drive traffic back to your site?
At the end of the day this will help you grow your audience, build your mailing list and start engaging with more fans on your home turf.
–Greg Rollett, Internet Entrepreneur and Music Marketing Guy
Throwing a tactical name to this, guest blogging is a great tool to build your web presence. As a tip, make sure your post are relevant for the host blogger’s audience. It does you no good to ask to guest blog and have nothing of value to offer the kind blogger’s readership.
Tasty stuff, Greg. Social Media is definitely the right barrel to go fishing in…
@Hubert – Yes guest blogging is a crucial part of this tactic. There are a multitude of ways to go about finding sites that allow them, but one overlooked thing musicians do is they skip the nonmusic related sites. There is a ton of gold and strong blogs that focus on everything from cooking to MMA fights to video games. If you have a hobby outside of the guitar or the mic, write about those topics and use the author byline to send traffic back to your music site.
@Justin – depends which pole you bring to the pond
Awesome post Greg! This reminds me of a gem you had said in a few meeting we had when you cam out to the SF Bay…
“when was the last time someone who visited 2dopeboyz.com bought actual music or visited with the intent to purchase a new track?”
Reaching out to communities and bloggers outside of music is definitely a strategy that more artists should try!
@Danny Dee – that was a gem! But so true. Focus on finding fans that will support you longer than the 20 minutes a post goes up before the next one goes up.
Absolutely agree with all this. You may as well be selfless and giving on the web, because being the opposite gets you nowhere.