YOU'VE ALREADY BEGUN NOW LETS GET YOU MOVING FORWARD

Let's say you have a just created your new site, blog, or social network profile and really don't know how to best get the word out so you can build your audience. You may not know what to do next. I'd say the best thing to do is get your website, blog, and social network profile links out there. The more backlinks you can setup, the more traffic, visitors, and views you can get. This can raise your internet visibility with the search engines and get more likes and followers. Now I'm writing this off the top of my head. If you blog, you have my permission to copy and paste this into a blog post. Just give credit where credit is due, ok?? I can guarantee that if you share this info, a ton of people will take notice. Everyone from brands to fans would love to get their hands on this all this info in one place. The best thing about this post is that nearly 99% of the stuff in these tips can be implemented for free! So lets get started!

WE BOUT TO KICK ASS AWESOMELY TOGETHER!!

Directories
1. Search Google for Social Network Directories. For example: Facebook Fan Page Directories, Blog/Forum Directories, Twitter Directories, Free URL/Search Engine Submission Sites, Submit Facebook Fan Page, Submit your blog, etc. Find as many of these as you can and check how many will let you submit for free. There are many of them that will want you to pay but a lot of them offer their services at a free level. 

Use this search box to help you. Results will open in a separate window. 

Forums/Blogs/Bulletin Boards
2. Use forums, bulletin boards, and blogs. They are incredible for building backlinks. I have several profiles on forums relevant to my brand and I be sure to at least make 10 replies/posts so my links can be activated on my profile. Blogs are great for backlinks because when you comment on blog posts, it usually asks for your URL then adds that to your commentor name. 

Social Bookmarking
3. I use all of the major social bookmarking sites too. StumbledUpon, Reddit, Digg, and Delicious are great ways to create backlinks to your site. With those you don't just want to submit your site, you want to submit ANY site relevant to your style of music or brand and follow people as well. They're like social networks for links. Too many musicians fail to use these services. 

Classified Ad Sites
4. Here's something many musicians fail to use - Classified Ad sites! You can generate tons of backlinks using Craigslists and other free classified ad sites. As always use the google search box in this post to do a search for Lists of Classified Ad sites and you should bring up several sites that have most, if not, all of the classified ad sites listed. Some are pay, some are free. You aint gotta use them all. Start with Craigslist and make your way from there. 

Use this search box to help you. Results will open in a separate window.

Social Sharing Tools
5. Make it easy for your visitors to share your site or blog and to follow or like your profiles. Services like AddThis and ShareThis are great for that. Use the google search box in this post to search for Facebook/Twitter Popup widget. You can find a free HTML code to add to your site or blog that creates a popup as soon as people visit your page! Most people will think they can't view your site without clicking like or follow first. If you're cool with editing HTML you can change the settings so the Popup only shows once every 15, 30, or 45 days based on browser cookie settings. 

Consistency
6. One very important tip, no matter where you setup your profiles be sure your bios are consistent across them. Have a list of keywords relevant to your brand, style of music, and fan/customer types. Google Keyword tool can help with that. Use those keywords in your tweets, blog posts and post titles, hashtags, descriptions, bios, etc. Thats good SEO practice and Google likes that stuff. You may just move up in your search engine rankings. 

Use this search box to help you. Results will open in a separate window.

Share Always, Share Often!
7. Share, Share, Share! Share your posts, pictures, videos, audio, and content fairly often. Use the 9/1 or 8/2 rule. For every 8 or 9 posts/tweets you make, have at least 1 or 2 about your music or brand. If you're engaging your followers and fans, this shouldn't be hard. Share stuff you find of interest on the web as well. Share other musician's profiles and URLs. Share stuff people can use. Share this blog post. People will be more inclined to click your links if they think you're not always talking about yourself because people will really not care at all. Lol Repost/retweet what other people share. People love that. Specially on Twitter. Retweeting, favoriting, and adding people to lists will gives them and their followers incentive to follow you.

Groups
8. Groups...Gotta use groups. Just like forums they are great ways to build backlinks. LinkedIn, Soundcloud, and Facebook have tons of groups although facebook doesn't make it easy to find them. I have joined hundreds of groups and periodically make posts and add my links.

Friend Adding Services
9. Look up Friend Rise, its a pretty cool site to build fans, followers, views, and stuff. Problem is, its not targeted. So you're bound to get people who truly are not interested in your brand or music. But hey, aint nothing wrong with a few scattered pennies in a jar of silver coins right? Just don't expect for these users to be loyal to your brand or music. There are other sites as well, I'd suggest you use the search box in this post to help you find them. I can't give up any sites because...well, I don't use them. I don't use FriendRise alot but it comes in handy here and there. 


Use this search box to help you. Results will open in a separate window.

RSS Aggregators

10. Look up Twitterfeed. This service is incredible! You can aggregate several RSS Feeds (that lil orange wifi symbol) and send them to your Twitter! Twitterfeed lets you control how often Feed updates are sent to your account so that it doesn't seem overbearing. It works for facebook and linkedin too. Now here's what's interesting about Twitterfeed you can add your URL to each aggregated feed. Doing that embeds your link to each tweet/post coming from Twitterfeed to your accounts. You can also add a hashtag to each post if you like. Using Twitterfeed isn't a mandate, just something I picked up on in my travels on the web. It builds links and share's info automatically...that's the whole idea behind it. 

Track Your Social Influence
To help track your influence online sign up with Klout.com, Empire Ave, and Grader.com. Grader.com grades your marketing performance and gives you advice on how to raise your score and beat your competitors. There's even a free smartphone app for it. Empire Ave is like the equivalent of a Social Media Stock Market.  

I hope this helps you. Take your time and work your way through it, there's no need to do everything at once. This isn't hard its just time consuming you know. But I've been building backlinks for a couple years and have a few thousand coming back to my sites. Some are easy to find, others are just archived. It's usually an ongoing  process. Can you believe this only a drop in the bucket for internet marketing?? Smh...