More or less, indie artists have an easier time grasping the basic concepts of promoting an audio record but are struggling when it comes to promoting a music video. There are many things you can do, many for free, to promote your new visual and enlarge your fan base with it. Because let’s admit it, nothing will get you major traction like a fire video that exceeds the expectations of your 3 Fs (friends, family, fans). So we’ve compiled for you a checklist of 5 things you should engage in as an independent artist when you put a new music video on the market. Read on and share our content across social media if you keep coming back to us for new, free knowledge.
5. Upload it on the top video platforms while applying the correct SEO video rules.
Having your music video just on YouTube alone is a high risk gamble. Why? We’ve seen artists succumb to either hackers or natural disasters like an earthquake or fire and lose all of their hardware and backup drivers. Consequently, the only archive they had access to became what they uploaded online throughout the years. And if you lose access to your YouTube channel, you’re out of the game pretty much. Equally if your Facebook gets hacked and you heavily promoted yourself on it, those hackers can single handedly remove your artist page, videos, profile, friends, and any trace of your past artistic activities and there’ll be no proof of you ever having even done any music. Don’t be stupid and upload your video everywhere possible even if you are never on that website. Platforms you should always upload all of your music videos to concomitantly: Vimeo, Facebook, IGTV, YouTube, Dailymotion, TikTok (yes, now TikTok videos will get indexed by Google and they also allow for up to 3 minutes of upload time), Wave, BitChute, GodTube (only for Gospel and Christian musicians), Rumble, Flickr, Archive Today, Internet Archive, VK (the Russian Facebook), and if you’re okay with possibly getting pirated create torrents of your own music video and set them free. You’d be shocked how many labels actually engaged in this uncommon method to push their artists organically to the top of torrent sharing websites. We can’t talk more about this as we’re not legally allowed to encourage such things but you got the freedom to make your own choices and take calculated risks.
As for SEO, make sure your title and description are very fine tuned, that your thumbnail is a frame from the music video (more on that HERE), that your caption is respecting the current internet state (around 2010 repeating the title 7 times in the caption did the trick for higher SEO ranking whereas around 2015 and onwards it became all about the content within the video and matching it against the caption. Yes they are able to do that now with very smart AI-based algorithms), and that it is of a high resolution. Anything under 1080P will be automatically disfavored for the 4k format if available. Do your homework regarding video SEO at least once a year and fix your past, present, and future videos based on the updated information.
4. Let everyone know about it.
Make a list of all social media platforms where you’re present and visually update your branding through the banners, cover photos, profile picture, bio link, about section to obviously and loudly conduct the new visitors and exisitng fans to seeing your new video. By optimizing your branding online you’ll be getting organic traffic to your music video and sometimes just as much as if you had been running an ad campaign. Plus, if you’re not gonna do it, who will??? Remember that no one cares more about your career than yourself.
3. Talk about it in official interviews.
Creating backlinks to your music video when first releasing it is HUGE and VITAL to both novel and continued traffic. And there’s literally no better way to do this than to get interviewed on as many blogs as possible talking about your new music video and having the author embed your YT music video link within the interview. The more websites you can get on (NOTE! Video interviews are NOT of any help in this scenario. You need text format to boost your video. And do make sure they are original articles and not press release reposts as Google doesn’t even index websites that post content that has been repeated elsewhere), the more views and higher ranking on search results pages you will get. This is valid for all search engines and not just for Bing or Google for example.
2. Reach your average engagement numbers.
That means that by now, you should know your average engagement rate based on your previous releases. If you average 10k views and 1k likes, DO NOT STOP promoting the new video until you’ve reached your average. People are very much followers way more than they are independent thinkers so when someone who has no knowledge of how fast things change online, sees your past videos crossing the 100k mark but your new video only has 5k, they unfortunately won’t even bother checking it out. Something truly insane as you’ll see LEGENDS losing fans because of it. If you go to Lil Wayne’s new music videos (yes, we were shocked too but apparently he never stopped putting out new material), you’ll see how fans judge him in the comments saying he fell off, that he’s being forgotten, and that he now is only relevant in the eyes of his old fans. This is why it is monumental to NOT buy fake views and fake engagement (ESPECIALLY in the beginning) because keeping up that average for credibility is damn near impossible unless your father is a millionaire, in which case you probably wouldn’t be reading our articles right now and you’d be leaving all the hard work to a full time employed marketing team.
1. Get all participating parties involved in promoting the music video organically and acknowledging their association with it.
Long headline, we know, but vitally important for the organic push of your music video. It is very rare that a good music video only has one person behind it. Yes, it does happen but it is uber rare. Most music videos involve a plethora of talented individuals who’ve squeezed their creative juices into your final visual. So get those people involved in pushing your team effort to the masses. Send thank you notes for being part of your music video in advance. Preferably as soon as the work is done but before the video is released. Then when it does get released, tag them in all your socials and half of them should repost it without you even asking them to. But in case they don’t, don’t be afraid to tell them how much it would help the music video with SEO if they too individually shared the link to it with some context behind it. This will work like magic if you get everyone involved to talk about this project they worked on. It will bring you more credibility and fans than any marketing campaign could possibly do for you in the incipient phases of transitioning to a full-time music artist. Your personality and good manners will be much needed to lead indirectly and efficiently. You pull the strings and you decide how people feel about you and their work with you. So be nice.
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