This page is a short guide of just a few, but important tips for our current and future long term customers. As your plays and requests come in, there are a few things you can do to that will help you get the most out of your new exposure.
Communication
Communicate with the friends or fans that request you or send you messeges and comments. Make these as personal as possible and if you can, mention something about their page, or a song on their page as well. Thank them for listening and adding you, comment on their pictures, ask them about something that lets them know you did take a listen to their music or looked at their page. This is most important as they will keep coming back if you engage and are sincere with them. Answer every question asked and every comment. No matter how overwelmed you are you must do this. Promoting and exposing yourself should be your number one priority if you are to succeed.
Presentation
Image
Your image is very important and will make a difference on whether others initially go to your profile or not. Your default profile picture is a critical factor to drawing more attention. Make sure it stands out. Make it longer than most, rotate with a black and white etc. Make sure its a great interesting picture. Rotating a different picture on a constant basis increases chances of fans returning to your page.
Always appear professional. This includes the friends you have listed on your Top friends sections. Whether right or wrong, visitors will judge you by the friends you keep. If you have excessive profanity or offensive material on your page, you could be sending the message that you aren't taking your career seriously.
Myspace Layouts
Be sure your profile layout is neat and clean. We find too many artists that use too many images, objects, widgets and bad graphics on their myspace layout. This distracts and is often undesirable. Be smart and check your image sizes to ensure they don't "overstretch" your layout cause visitors to have to scroll sideways just to view your music player.
Comments
Set your profile to screen comments before posting. Be judicious about which comments you approve. Tell your close friends to message you privately rather than conducting business or conversations thru comments. Try to limit your comments to only those that praise your music, your page or that express something toward you or your project. Don't let your comments fill up with advertisements from other bands or spam that distract your fans from focusing on you.
Press
As you hit high amounts of total plays (50,000, 100,000, 500,000, etc), you must immediately market your success to the local press, agents, venues etc. This will help you build your local presence, get attention and get more gigs and local radio play. Let them also know about your MySpace chart action as well. As you continue to build you can branch out nationaly as your fan base builds. The initial goal is to be featured and mentioned in newspapers, magazines, and radio stations about your MySpace and Success.
MySpace Chart Positions
The MySpace Charts are driven primarily by consistenly high Plays and views activity from day to day. However, other factors may include profile and pic comments. The charts use a ratio of plays to profile views to determine your Myspace chart ranking. For example, if some has a 2 to 1 ratio then they would have 5,000 total plays and 2500 profile views. Ratios that exceed 5 to 1 or higher may have a negative impact on your ranking. Sudden jumps in play activity relative to your previous two-week daily average may also negatively impact your chart ranking.
Overall, from our experience it's clearly a consistent mixture of plays and visits. You have to maintain a higher ratio for a long period of time - like at least 7-10 days or more. We believe comments might play a factor as well. However, Your Total Plays, Plays Today and daily profile views seem to be the most important factor. We have also observed that the MySpace charts do not respond to immediate "jumps" in plays and views activity. Also, the number of friends you have seems to have ZERO impact on your Myspace chart rankings - although having a large friendbase is very invaluable overall. Artists that use our services and follow our advices are consistently charted in the Top 100 in their genres.
This significantly impresses the labels and the press as it shows that you are popular and your songs are reacting with fans.
For more information or consulation on any of our services, feel free to contact us.
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