Newscasting And Music Promotion: Quick Hits For Quick Results
� 2000 David Nevue, Midnight Rain Productions - www.rainmusic.com, All rights reserved.

Any musicians selling their music on the Internet know how hard it is to draw traffic to their web site. It's even harder to find the right kind of traffic... visitors with the potential to buy your product. The competition for visitors is fierce, and if you're just getting started on the net you can bet you have an uphill climb ahead of you. In our book, 'How to Promote Your Music Successfully on the Internet' we suggest a number of proven strategies for drawing traffic to your site. These strategies, when used together, create a very powerful means of attracting targeted traffic to your web site.

One of these is a relatively simple strategy we call Newscasting. It's perfect for bringing traffic to your site quickly if your timing is right. With Newscasting, timing is everything!

If you've done your research you should already know who your targeted audience is. You probably also know what kinds of things they are interested in. These potential customers most often surf the net looking for information. Some of this information is news-based. With Newscasting, your goal is to satisfy this need, and while the implementation of this strategy is fairly simple, it may take some initial research to determine how best to employ this on your own web site.

The concept is simple: create a "news" page and keep a close eye on breaking news that would be of interest to your visitors. (Note, this shouldn't just be any old news, but news that would bring in people who would also tend to gravitate toward your style of music). The news might involve popular music groups, entertainers, or any other information of interest to your potential target audience (for more information on targeting your audience, see our article Selling Your Music on the Net: Key Strategies for Success. As soon as this big news breaks, update your news web page with links, pictures, or whatever else you can find relating to that story. Then, prepare your web page for search engine registration by fine-tuning your meta tags and publish that page immediately to the search engines.

A recent example of this on our own web site involved the film Titanic. As soon as sheet music was available from the film, we put information on where to find that sheet music at our Pianist Resource Center. We then submitted that page to the search engines. The result was a flood of hits from pianists looking for the sheet music. That brought in a lot of traffic and introduced our site to a number of pianists who might not have found it otherwise. Not only did we provide them with useful information they were interested in, we also had the opportunity to put our solo piano CDs in front of them.

This marketing technique does require excellent timing. Whenever big news breaks, sites using this technique to market themselves pop up everywhere. You have to jump on it first to get the first big wave of visitors.

While not a permanent traffic builder, if you continue to update your news page with information that's current and just breaking, you'll find Newscasting a good tool for introducing new visitors to your web site.

David Nevue is the founder of RainMusic.com and The Music Promotion Academy. He is also a professional pianist, recording artist, and author of the book, "How to Promote Your Music Successfully on the Internet."