How Adwords Is Fatal For Indi Musicians


by Djhmfm - Date: 2007-12-20 - Word Count: 848 Share This!

Adwords...the home of the profit machine right? Put your Advert onto Google and watch loads of people downloading your tracks, paying you tons of money and in one week you are living in a Penthouse...

In reality Adwords is a brilliantly simple concept..so much so that once it went online (with a few glitches ironed out) it blew away the competition. Yahoo! and now MSN has followed suit. The brilliant concept is very easy to understand:

You lazer target specific people who are searching for something specific. In essence, you are highlighting a specific solution to a specific problem. And the cool thing is, because they know it is an advert they are less surprised that they are being sold to- therefore less likely to click off your site straight away.

That is what Adwords is about. If anyone tells you any different, then they are not making anything from Adwords.

So what has this got to do with the indi musician?

Now when I look at my site, which has Adsense on it, do you know what I see? Musician adverts!

So what?

Well, they are not named musicians, and the worst thing of all, they are pointing their advert at their Myspace page! I had to look at the Advert to make sure that I wasn't going senile. Why would they do this? It is not the right way to go at all.

Do you know what the ad said? (Names removed to protect the artists) "Bob and Daves New Album Released, Check it out here! myspace.com/bobanddave"

Adwords as we have shown, targets specific people, so why would anyone in their right mind click on an advert that targets someone they don't know? Also, how much is the album and what style is it (with an unknown you can't tell)?

You see this type of ad is only going to target the inquisitive rather than the targeted audience- they increase your click cost but don't buy anything. The likeliness of this working...nil. The likeliness of the artists paying out and getting nothing in return....very likely.

So what do we do?

Adwords should never really be used for traffic generation, especially on a huge megamonster like MySpace. Simple search engine techniques can simply be employed that attracts the targeted audience.

2 simple music marketing techniques can be emplyed on MySpace: Leaving comments on similar artists pages with a link back to your MySpace page, and mailing out to subscribers are two of the main techniques that really work. It is time and effort that is well rewarded.

What other music marketing techniques can we use?

1. First off, we should always have our own domain. With this, we are free to do what we like without the constraints of MySpace. We can also drive traffic to and from MySpace to our Page. Having our own domain looks more professional, especially in a tough market like the music industry.
2. We can write web pages to entice people to our site who are actually interested in our music (best chart artists, best songs, best albums etc).
3. We can write articles on our favourite artists and post them in ezine directories.
4. Put music up on our site and offer them as free downloads. Have a forum dedicated to our style of music.
5. How about check out similar artists and see if they want to do a collaberation with you?
6. Have competitions with PayPal donations as the prize winnings.

Once you get your mind wirring away, the music marketing ideas start to flow.

Adwords is used for musicians who are already known. However, 100% of the time they have already emailed their newsletter list the news that a new release is imminent. They always give their readership a discount to the new album and give them free tracks (to wet their appetite and to virtually gurantee a sale). They know the benefit of their subscriber list.

Anyone who uses Adwords knows exactly what they want as soon as they sign up to the service. The 5 common ones are these:

1. To sell something directly
2. To increase their subscriber list, and then sell to that list a week or so after subscription
3. To give away a free report which presells the customer to buy something.
4. To sell something from a sales page- they know how the page converts visitors to customers so they know how much one customer is worth.
5. To test a page and advertising text

No-where is there mentioned about Adwords generating traffic. All specific targets, all specificly searched for topics.

So please, use simple music marketing techniques to get the traffic, gain the click to your newsletter subscription pages and then treat the subscriber like gold. That way you will be able to sell more albums at a profit.



FACT: Musicians should never be poor. The Internet is swarming with side income generators that are exceptionally suited to the music website. I have created a freely downloadable 87 page ebook that shows you exactly how to use 20 of the most profitable money making techniques. I call it "The 20 Money Making Music Blueprints". It can be downloaded from here


Related Tags: myspace music, music promotion, music marketing, music money, adwords music

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