12 Success Tips For Myspace

The band Making April regularly sells 1000 singles a week on I-Tunes. So how did they get to this point using only Myspace? Here I bring you from Ariel Publicity the 12 steps used by the band (recently signed to a label). I am starting to expand even more on each one of these steps so please check titles for links to other posts.

Step 1: Find Sounds Like / Similar Famous Bands To You
They started by looking at similar bands in their genre that had large friends lists at MySpace. For example: Dashboard Confessional. They would go and they would ping each and every friend in Dashboard Confessional's friends list. (I suggest only those that leave comments on the profile you are looking at.)

Step 2: Ping Each Person
And then they would go to the comments and post:

"Hey if you like Dashboard Confessional, you're probably going to like Making April. Would you please come check us out and leave a comment?" Then, people would check them out and leave comments.

Step 3: Get Personal
The band would then personally respond to everyone that left a comment, and thank personally. And they always signed their name using a sig file, which included their IM address.

Step 4: Instant Messenger Bonanza
Then they would get their new fans information through Instant Messenger, and they would sit all day long on Instant Messenger chatting back and forth with their new friends, and according to Greg it was crazy. They actually can't turn on their AIM because the minute they open it up, they get thousands and thousands of people trying to ping them. So they have to leave the “away” on their IM because their buddy list is insane.

Step 5: Run Contests
After several months and thousands of personal contacts a new marketing, Making April decided to create a contest for their fans. They asked fans to add them in their “Top 8.” friends and had success with the contest getting even more MySpace traction.

And, the 20 people that were in the contest, each got points for convincing users to add their video, and/ or their song, and according to Greg it got completely out of control.

After this successful contest, a company called Brickfish took notice and offered to help them launch a second contest. This contest was a T-Shirt design contest where entrants had to design a T-shirt and in return the band would write a song for the winner.

So, out of a well planned T-shirt contest they got an additional 100,000 hits to their page in two weeks, and the winner got a shirt, a personal call from the band and an original song written about them. “It was unbelievable.”

Step 6: Engage Your Audience Consistently/Create Relationship & Participation
Another one of their strategies was to send out a bulletin every single day, not a hype bulletin pushing themselves, But a simple one that would engage their fans by asking a question to their fan base like: “Should we get chunky peanut butter or smooth”

They felt that there was no reason to blog because they weren't really on the road, they didn’t have a lot of news to report, and so they just kept asking questions on their bulletins, day in and day out.

And, they had a call to action: They would ask everyone on the bulletins to comment back on their pages and what they noticed were hundreds of responses from people saying, get smooth peanut butter, no get chunky peanut butter and then they would get a track play and a front page hit off the daily question and they would get 500 messages instantly every time they would send the stupid question and 600+ comments.

Step 7: MTV Action
After their wildly successful Brickfish contest they got a song placed on Laguna Beach on MTV. They don't really know how they ended up on that show (they think a fan probably e-mailed the track to MTV). But the episode aired three times and all of a sudden they noticed that people started to buy the download.

Step 8: Get Ready To Charge For Tracks (after a solid fan base is built)
It was only after all of this traction and attention that Making April started pushing their I-Tunes page. This was after a full year of solid online promotions. They took the free MP3s off of their MySpace page and they started seeing their sales were picking up.

Step 9: Repeat and Repeat and Repeat… and Repeat
They put a big wall mounted dry erase board on the wall of the war room and every day they each had a goal to make 150 friends and comment back personally.

Step 10: Measure Your Goals and Write Them Down
Nothing Gets Manifested Faster Than Goals Written Out
Then they laid out a weekly plan to hit their goals and numbers and at I-Tunes, which were 200 plays a day and 400 friends a day. They also went after the friends of another a band called Secondhand Serenade (who blew up after becoming the number one unsigned artist at MySpace).

Step 11: Be Masterful At One Thing
I asked Greg if they did blogging and podcasting and Twitter and other social networking sites and he (to my surprise) said no…. They did this all on MySpace alone. The goal for MySpace was to consistently add 200 friend requests and 400 plays to the traffic they were already generating.

Step 12: A Record Deal
Because of all of their solid dedicated focus a Universal Republic Records took notice and offered them a deal.

From the above you can see how adding 2 friends on your social network a week can be helpful. Though Making April added over 100 a day.