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Category ArtistServer
Date Wednesday, Jul 27, 2005 11:13:45 AM
20 Ways to Maximize Your Exposure on ArtistServer - Pt. 4 of 4
18)Offer Ringtones with each of your songs – As of the date that this is being written, there are approximately 160 different mobile phones which support the use of mp3 files as ringtones. This number will double over the next year as nearly all mobile phones take on mp3s as a ringtone format. You might be seeing some dollar signs right now as you realize that the ringtone market is fairly healthy, but I'm going to suggest that you not sell your ringtones, and that you give them away for free as a marketing tool.

An mp3 ringtone is usually very short and hopefully optimized for the tiny speaker on mobile phones. You can pick the intro of your song, the chorus, or even go back to the masters and mix down something new just for the ringtone. The following are some specific tips on creating your own mp3 ringtones:
  • 100KB - make sure your ringtones are near or below 100KB in size
  • mono - phones do not need stereo ringers, make your ringtone MONO
  • less than 25sec - try to make your ringtones 15sec. in length or less, and no more than 25sec
  • 64kbps - some phones support lower bit rates only - 128 should work for most, but 64kbps might be the better bit rate to use
  • select clear sections - ringtones are most effective if they are clear and do not have a lot of sounds in the background
  • selecting the loop - try selecting the chorus section or the intro of your song if you are not sure of what to use - don't expect the ringtone to 'loop' perfectly, most phones will have a pause at the end before they repeat the mp3 ringtone
  • cut the low end - phones do not reproduce bass well, a good ringtone has more treble/hight end
  • normalized - if you normalize your ringtone, you'll ensure that it will be loud enough, just don't fry the signal
  • loud - again, make sure your ringtone is LOUD - not distorting, but very loud and clear
  • fades - consider doing a fade at the end of your ringtone - phones may not 'loop' the ringtone, but have a pause at the end
  • ringtone mix - you may find you'll get best results if you mix down a ringtone than extract one out of your finished song
  • test it - test your ringtone on a mobile phone if you can
Once you've created your ringtone, ArtistServer provides you the option of uploading it to our site and associating it to the song you created it from. Once you do this, your song will now show up in more locations on the site, and you'll see a small phone icon displayed along with your song. With this in place, our site visitors can use our Ringtone Transfer Tool to send it to their phone – for free! I suggest spending an afternoon creating ringers for all of your songs and uploading them to ArtistServer. After uploading them to the site, make some announcements in your blog, on your site, on discussion boards – anywhere, and let people know that they can now get your free ringtones. Just be sure to use the words “Free mp3 ringtones” and link directly to your music/ringtone page – this way search engines will index your link and help send users to your site when they search on those keywords.

19)Publishing your RSS feeds and 'Ping blog service sites' – Each artist is provided with three RSS feeds to their content. One to their Blog, one to cover their songs, and the third to reviews about their songs. In each case, the 15 most recent items are always displayed – this way your feed is always up to date. (If you are wondering what RSS is, just do a Google search on “What is RSS.”) With the urls from your feeds, you could spend a good few hours submitting your feeds to various RSS and blog search engines. Here is a listing of places for you to submit to: http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/ The reason you want to do this, is the same reason why you'd want to submit your Website to a search engine – you want them to index it so people can find your content. There's a concept called “pinging” where you are informing a site that your content has been updated so they will index it. Fortunately, someone launched a site that 'pings' many of these sites for you in one swoop – visit: http://www.PingOMatic.com – submit your RSS link – then bookmark the results. The bookmark allows you to trigger that same ping request again, so each time your post new content, you click on that bookmark – watch the ping results – the carry on with your day.

20)Support other artists – It might sound strange, but yes, you can promote yourself by promoting others. A simple example would be a “song of the week” selection that you pick and promote on your site. People will come back to see what is picked next – artists will email you asking them to check out their songs – and music fans will start using you as a filter to finding great music. And... while they stop by to see your 'song of the week' selection... they'll also see links to your music! Some of these people will definitely want to hear what your music sounds like – and there is your opportunity. The only issue with this, is that you can't fake it – your efforts to promote others must be true and not stuffed with fluff.

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Gideon Marken
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