As an artist, chances are pretty good that marketing is a major turn-off to you. When you hear the word, you shudder a bit. Chances are equally good that people are constantly talking at you about marketing yourself, branding yourself, and “getting the word out” about your work.
The conundrum is that you’d like to make money doing what you do best, right? Not really because of the money, but because of pesky things like food and rent. This series is about a different approach to connecting with people. It’s not a novel idea: find the people who are interested and the rest will take care of itself. Doing that, however, turns out to be pretty tricky.
During my former life as an aspiring avant-rockstar, I worked really hard at marketing. Flyers, press releases, MySpace (when it was cool, natch), blah blah blah. Did any of it work? Not really.
There was only one strategy that I tried that actually had any effect on how many people heard the glory that was Voodoo Economics: talking to people.
Kind of by accident, I started using last.fm as a place to interact with people, and those interactions were always tied to the band. It turned out that, when I met and talked with the kinds of people who had similar musical interests to mine, they were interested in my music. Who knew?
Through the course of creating a network of last.fm connections, I found out something pretty interesting: for some reason, Eastern Europeans tended to like Voodoo Economics more than most. Unfortunately, I was too wrapped up in fliers, press releases and MySpace to properly take notice this useful tidbit of information.
In Part 2 and Part 3 of the series, I’ll talk about how to identify valuable information, then how to actually use it to improve your career, hence making your life better and making the world a more wonderful place for all of us!
