It’s 2016 and I only have one question for artists online: Why aren’t you on YouTube yet!?
As you may know, YouTube is the best place for artists to host their music. YouTube videos in total get around a billion views each day. As a music artist, you cannot afford to not be on YouTube. It is also the number one search engine for music – Nine times out of ten; you can find leaked tracks and lyric videos of nearly any song you can think of. Aside from Soundcloud and hip hop blogs, the average person will search YouTube for a song they have in mind. Even if they can’t think of the title, the search engine will still return highly accurate results from the keywords the user enters.
Here are ways you can use YouTube to grow your fan base:
Music Videos
This is the most obvious piece of advice which is why we should get it out of the way first. Music videos are valuable because of their many uses. It shows professionalism in an artist’s brand and is a highly entertaining form of content. You can also use music videos in your Press Kits and Press Releases. Lastly, it gives people another reason to listen to your whole song if they find the music video intriguing. Keep in mind that most people these days are visual learners so your music video can also assist in getting your message out clearly.
Video Blogs
Doing video blogs is another powerful form of content because it humanizes artists and gives a behind the scenes tour of their minds and daily lives. Provide content that people can relate to and you will have new followers each day. If you can inspire and motivate viewers, they will hit that subscribe button. In fact, doing video blogs will help drive potential fans to your music. We live in the time of reality based entertainment and what is more reality based than you speaking into the camera while expressing what’s on your mind?
Give value to your viewers
There are so many ways you can give your viewers value as an artist. It doesn’t matter if you’re a producer with hip hop beats for sale or an emcee looking to grow their fan base, the end result should be gaining subscribers. You can do tutorials on making beats, mixing vocals, songwriting techniques, singing lessons, or even give tips on promoting music. The possibilities are practically endless so think of the things you do best and how you can share that skill with other people. Inspiring people is extremely valuable so if you need a reason to start video blogging, that should be more than enough.
YouTube AdSense account
If you are already driving a ton of traffic to your music videos and content, YouTube will actually pay you for it. In fact, they will pay you each time the video is played and over time, it adds up. There are already plenty of independent artists who are making thousands of dollars just by finding ways to drive traffic to their videos in order to receive a payout from YouTube.
Properly tag your videos and use keywords
Like Google, Youtube returns results and makes suggestions based on certain keywords in the text of videos. If you simply post your video without including tags and keywords, you will be losing out on potential views and traffic to your video. For example, when making tags for your video, you should enter artists that your style is similar to. That way, when someone searches that artist’s music, there will be the chance that your video will be suggested. The more views and interactions you have on your videos, the higher it climbs up the ranks and the more likely it will be suggested. If you’ve hit the tag limit, don’t worry, you can still add keywords in the description of your video. That’s a little trick not too many artists online know about.
Check TheWordIsBond YouTube channel, to see some of the points above in action
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