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I was cruising through some of Jimmy Shelter’s posts this morning. If you haven’t been to Jimmy’s blog recently, you should check it out. He has a great collection of resources for do-it-yourself indie music marketing.

In his Band Promotion Links IV post, Jimmy links to a really important article by Ariel Hyatt posted at musicthinktank.com (check it out). Ariel talks about Twitter, and how it’s a great tool to use for reaching new fans and making industry contacts.

Don’t underestimate the power of Twitter. If you happened to be watching Twitter’s election pages after Obama’s big win, you would have been amazed at the volume of ‘tweets’ that were rolling down the page, and the stories that were being told with just a few characters of text.

This is what you want to achieve with Twitter. No, I’m not talking about thousands of messages, but messages that help you tell a story about your act – to build a relationship with people who are following you and create a unique and interesting reason for them to care about who you are and what you do.

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That’s right. Internet marketing legend/guru/all around pro Mark Joyner has put together a complete course on promoting your music on the internet for only $97.

Granted, that’s more than 3 times the price tag of my Ultimate Guide to Promoting Your Music Online, but come on. It’s freakin’ Mark Joyner! Continue Reading

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When I was in elementary school there was a kid in my class who was born on February 29th. It took me the longest time to realize he was growing just as fast as the rest of us, even though he only had a birthday once every four years. Continue Reading

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I usually limit myself to a post a day, but I couldn’t wait to point out this post titled “Study: Blogs Trump MySpace for Selling Music” by Mack Collier over at mpdailyfix.com.

He’s talking about this study from NYU’s Stern School of Business that found blogging has a positive impact on the success of a CD release – more than the number of friends you have on your MySpace profile.

This is something I’ve been saying for a while. It’s why I dedicated a section of my eBook, The Ultimate Guide to Promoting Your Music Online, to introducing the concept of blogging for music promotion.

HypeBot has reported on this as well. As they point out:

“According to the study, if 40 or more blog posts were made before an album’s release sales ended up being three to four times times the average for both indie and major releases. If blog posts crossed 250, album sales rose to six times the average regardless of label.”

Of course, major labels still have success using traditional methods, but this goes to show that it’s possible to get serious results by embracing the world of Web 2.0.

If you haven’t jumped on board social marketing to support your music marketing yet, you’re missing out! Download a FREE preview of The Ultimate Guide to Promoting Your Music Online today, surf this blog, and gain an advantage in your music promotion strategy before the others catch on!

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Back from a month’s worth of vacation and what better way to get back into the game with than a post about a (very?) successful viral marketing effort by California based A Cursive Memory.

I stumbled across this campaign in a post titled ‘Music Videos and Viral Marketing‘ from the folks at musicmarketing.com.

Check out the post (and the band) for yourself, but these guys have hit on a great viral concept. It’s unique, funny, interesting, and clever enough that I’ve shared it with all my friends, and you probably will too. That’s the goal when you’re trying to come up with a viral concept. You want to create content that viewers can’t resist sharing with their friends, who share it with their friends, and on and on it goes…

Have you had success promoting your music with viral marketing, viral video or social networking? Enter the maxlowe.net Socially Awesome Band of the Week contest and you could win a FREE downloadable copy of my Ultimate Guide to Promoting Your Music Online eBook! Winners will be announced every Monday morning starting March 3rd, 2008.

If you’ve tried viral marketing, but haven’t quite managed to make it work for you, I’d like to hear about that too! Leave your story in the comments below and you can get valuable feedback (and exposure) for your efforts.

On another note, I’m back in the blogosphere after a much needed break! My apologies to anyone who has been waiting with baited breath for updates over the last couple of weeks. Expect regular updates to resume today!

Thanks for sticking around!

- Max

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