Every successful music promotion campaign (whether online or offline) requires a clearly thought out strategy; so in this post, I will share with you some strategies you can use to promote your music. Many of the promotion strategies I will share with you, you need to keep doing on a constant basis in order to keep your music in the consciousness of people and buy a critical mass of mindshare.

As much as the strategies I will share here can be used in any country in the world, the intent of this post is primarily targeted to online music promotion in Nigeria.

Do note that I will constantly update this post as I keep discovering new strategies you can use to promote your music. So far, this is the third time it has been updated since it was first published in 2017.

My goal is to make this the best resource post to read if you are searching for how to promote your music in Nigeria. I will also appreciate you share your thoughts with me in the comments section about other ways not covered here so I can update this post accordingly. I will definitely give you due credit.

Also included in this post is an offer for any artiste who truly wants to give his/her music good exposure online. You will only get it if you read through this post to the end.

…let’s proceed.

So here’s what we will cover:

1. The Basics Of Music Promotion
2. How To Upload Your Song On Music Streaming Sites
3. What Is PPC Advertising And Why You Should Promote Your Music Through It
4. How To Promote Your Music Using PPC (Pay Per Click) Advertising
5. What Is A Chatbot And Why You Should Promote Your Music Using Chatbots
6. How To Promote Your Music Through Facebook Messenger Chatbots

…so here we go!

 1. The Basics of Music Promotion

The advent of the internet has created a world of opportunities; and being able to easily promote your music online is one of those opportunities. The web is full of lots of ways to promote your music on entertainment sites, ad networks, social media and relevant forum but no matter what strategy you choose to deploy in getting your music out, the points I will outline below need to be adhered to, to have a smooth sail.

a. Make Good Music

You probably must have heard the saying, “A good market sells itself”. So it is with music; if you do a good job, anyone who listens to it will want to share it with their friends, use it as their ringtone and callertune, always request DJs and radio station OAPs to play it. Getting this step right is very important and will help the virality of your music distribution.

Come to think of it, how likely are you to share a song that’s not off the hook? A song that has low quality lyrics, instrumentation and mix? I bet you’re never likely to share low quality music with your friends before they start wondering if you don’t know “what’s up”.

So bottom line, take your time to do a good job but don’t spend too much time doing one song or else you will lose fire power and your song might never be released.

Some other factors you should also really consider that will affect the quality of music you produce are:

i. Get great music models or mentors

ii. Get an experienced music director/producer and engineer to work on your song; if you can, get signed under a record label.

b. Share Your Music On Music Promotion Sites

There are lots of free music streaming sites like Soundcloud, Youtube (perfect for music videos) etc where you can upload your song for free download. Also engaging other bloggers and nigerian music promotion websites like Wavitude, Naijaloaded, NotjustOk, Tooxclusive etc is a key part of today’s music industry.

Having your music on as many sites as possible not only increases your reach and popularity but also helps people easily find it via the search engines. If you don’t have your song on these promotion sites, Search Engines like Google will have nothing to show when people go searching for it.

In this industry, you’ve got to be visible; your goal should be to get you and your music out to the right places, at the right time and before as many people as possible.

Later in this post, I will show you how to upload your song on music streaming sites with focus to Wavitude – one of the top free music streaming websites.

c. Share Your Music On Social Media

The power of social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and many more cannot be overemphasized. To easily promote your music on any of these platforms, you should have already accomplished point #b above. Posting your songs on Social media makes it easy for your song to go viral. How viral your song goes depends on Point #a above.

One more key to sharing your music via social media is joining relevant Entertainment groups that talk about music and the likes. I will share more strategies on how you can promote your music via social media later in this post.

d. Collaborate With Other Artistes

A popular African proverb says, “if you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.”

You have got to always be on the lookout for networking opportunities. Doing a ‘collabo’ with other artistes will have you tap into their fan base which will help you increase your reach and also get you new fans too. Don’t be a lone ranger.

I believe this is clear enough and there’s no need to dwell so much on this point.

e. Get Airplay On Radio Stations

One major way to get your music out there is to make sure it is aired on top radio stations in Nigeria. Engaging OAPs(On Air Presenters) and DJs from lots of radio stations to play your music on their shows and participating in the music contests organized by radio stations is also a great way to have people hear your song.

Here’s another idea for promoting your music on radio

Discuss with the OAPs who anchor key programs with huge listenership and have them share airtime (you have paid for) to your fans who call in. The criteria for qualification might be to have those who call in sing a sizeable part of your song to win stand the chance of winning the airtime.

Secondly, if you have an upcoming event in a city where the radio station has reach, you can give out free event tickets to fans who call into the show and sing your song.

…I believe this will give you some ideas.

f. Go For Shows

Like I shared earlier, your goal should be to get your music out to the right places, at the right time and before many people as possible. So you can’t downplay the place of Live events.

Going for Live Shows exposes your music to new fans and also avails you the opportunity to gradually start getting paid for your work.

g. Engage Social Media Influencers

I believe this point is quite obvious as Social Media Influencers have a huge following online and tapping into their fan base will be beneficial to exposing you and your music.

2. How To Upload Your Song On Music Streaming Sites (with focus on Wavitude)

Music streaming sites form the foundation from where you can generate the link to your song online and share on different social media platforms. They also help make your song visible on search engines when people go searching for them.

Wavitude is one of such free music streaming sites where you can upload and stream your music. It has an array of features which makes it stand out; but first, let me show you how to upload your music on it ….it’s a pretty straight forward process though.

So to get started;

a. Visit www.wavitude.com and register your account

b. After registering, check your mail to verify your account and login. If you don’t see the mail in your inbox, check other folders like your Spam folder or Promotion folder if you use Gmail.

c. Once logged in, click on the Upload button from where you can upload either a single song or your album.

Do well to fill in other fields like the description of your song, its lyrics and your song’s artwork. Be as descriptive as you can, it’s your music career that is at stake here.

Once you have successfully uploaded your song, a link will be generated for your song which you can now share on different social media platforms. You will also have the option to generate the embed code you can give to other bloggers to embed your song on their sites.

Cheap Music Promo: Wavitude currently has an ongoing offer where you can promote your music on our network for a far less cost and reach thousands of people. Learn more about it here – http://bit.ly/CheapMusicPromo

Quick Update: Wavitude is our sister company and we are the official advertising agency that handles all their marketing campaigns. So with as low as $3 monthly subscription, you can have your song on Wavitude promoted on all the sites on our network. This is just one of our ways of supporting budding music artistes to promote their music online.

There are many more features on Wavitude; but since my focus is about showing you how to upload your song, I believe I’ve done justice to that.

3. What Is PPC Advertising And Why You Should Promote Your Music Through It

Just incase you are new to the term PPC, it means Pay Per Click and it’s a type of advertising service we offer here at NG Adverts. Understanding the benefits of PPC Advertising will make you use it massively for your promotions as it is one of the top most cost effective ways to promote what you do online. Let me give you a quick, live illustration on how PPC works in real life.

Imagine you contract some young boys to go around town with your banner or flier to advertise your business. You tell them that you will pay them N50 (or whatever amount you agree with them) for everyone they bring to your office who is interested in what you have to offer. So they understand perfectly well that you will not pay them for displaying your banner around town, but only when they bring someone who says s/he’s interested to know more about your offer.

So for you, you are killing 2 birds with one stone because as those young chaps go around town with your banners, they are doing publicity for your brand for free while you only get to pay them for the people they bring that are interested in what you are offering.

PPC ads work just the same way online; it allows you buy mindshare while you only pay when any visitor (from the sites your ads are displayed on) clicks on your ad based on interest.

So this is one cost effective way to constantly promote your music by displaying your ads on every page of thousands of websites for free; while paying only for interested fans or prospects who click on your ads. When your ads are clicked on, the user is directed to the website(for instance, Wavitude) where you uploaded your song for them to listen and download.

Remember that out of sight is out of mind; so you’ve got to constantly give your work the most exposure at every opportunity you get. Using PPC ads to promote your song is an effective way to advertise your music consistently and automatically on thousands of websites. I highly recommend this strategy in addition to others you will deploy.

4. How To Promote Your Music Using PPC (Pay Per Click) Advertising

To start promoting your music using PPC Advertising, do this:

a. Sign Up as an Advertiser on NG Adverts via this link – https://www.ngadverts.com/ng/register

b. After signing up and verifying your account, the next step is to fund your account. Visit our Knowledge Base to learn how to do this.

c. After funding your account, create your PPC ads by going to Ads > Create Ads.

d. Once your ad is approved, it will start running on all the websites on our network which are over five thousand in number.

5. What Is A Chatbot And Why You Should Promote Your Music Using Chatbots

According to Wikipedia:

“A chatbot (also known as a talkbot, chatterbot, Bot, IM bot, interactive agent, or Artificial Conversational Entity) is a computer program or an artificial intelligence which conducts a conversation via auditory or textual methods.

[1] Such programs are often designed to convincingly simulate how a human would behave as a conversational partner, thereby passing the Turing test. Chatbots are typically used in dialog systems for various practical purposes including customer service or information acquisition. Some chatterbots use sophisticated natural language processing systems, but many simpler systems scan for keywords within the input, then pull a reply with the most matching keywords, or the most similar wording pattern, from a database.”

As at the time of writing this article, chatbots (though not a new technology) are barely known by many people but its usage is gradually picking up. As an artiste, deploying a chatbot to your Facebook page will help you manage your fans and keep them engaged on a one-on-one basis.

With a chatbot, you can have your fans listen or download your song directly from their Facebook Messenger; that way, they can easily access it from anywhere irrespective of if the lose their device.

Using a chatbot to engage your fans will help make your music go viral as your fans can easily share your music with their friends directly from their Facebook Messenger inbox. Visit this link to see a demo of how your chatbot can function – https://m.me/242568196595428. You will need to have Facebook Messenger app to make the most of this or you can access the demo page without issues if you’re browsing from a laptop or desktop device.

6. How To Promote Your Music Through Facebook Messenger Chatbots

As at the time of writing this article, Facebook allows chatbots to be integrated only via pages and not groups; so the first step to creating a Facebook Messenger Chatbot is to create a page on Facebook.

There are different chatbots that are designed to carry out specific functions and so are there also different chatbot service providers like ManyChat, Chatfuel etc. Each of these chatbot platforms have their different associated costs; so you need to do a little research based on what you intend to achieve before settling for a chatbot platform.

However, irrespective of the platform you decide to go for, you need to ensure that your chatbot will allow you:

a. Upload your music for your fans to listen to via their messenger inbox

b. Provide a link where they can go download your song to their device

c. You can message all of your fans at the same time via broadcast

These 3 points are quite important to setup a successful chatbot for your page and to help you achieve your goal of promoting your music via on any of the top social media platforms.

In summary, the strategies I have outlined here will effectively help you get your music out there and ultimately help your online presence. However, most of these strategies can be time consuming and also technical to implement. If you don’t have the expertise or the time to learn how to deploy these strategies, it is better leaving it to the professionals to handle.

Promotion of any kind is not a hit and run; you must have a strategy, be deliberate about it and be in it for the long term if you want your efforts to bear fruit.

Free Music Promotion

In our bid to help artistes promote their music online, we have a created a free music plan where we will advertise their songs on our network for one month at no cost. We obviously cannot do this for everyone; so here are the terms of this offer:

1. Your song must be on Wavitude
2. Your song must have been played at least 50 times.
3. Your song must be family friendly; any song that promotes nudity, drugs, racism and the likes will not get our approval.
4. We reserve the exclusive right to not promote any song via this offer.

Once your song has gotten the minimum number of plays required on Wavitude, contact us via our Facebook page inbox and provide us:

• The link to your song
• Your music art work

We will process it and setup your free music promotion to run our network for a month. You will also be informed if your request is declined.

Premium Music Promotion

Would you want to focus on other aspects of your music career?

Would you want us deploy the strategies outlined in this post to promote your music?

Our unique music promotion service guarantees that your song is always displayed on every page of over 5000 top websites with over 50million monthly visitors around the world.

• You don’t have to worry about your song getting lost or pushed down into oblivion once new posts are added to these entertainment sites.
• You will get thousands of downloads and streaming of your music audio or video.
• Our promotion strategy will allow you build your fan base both locally and globally and the best of this all is that you can have your music promoted simultaneously on all these top sites in the next 30 minutes.

Visit our Online Music Promotion page for more details.

Is there any other strategy you believe should be on this list? Share it in the comments section below and I will update this post with due credit to you.

Have you tried out any of the strategies I have shared here? I’d love to hear how it’s worked out for you. Leave me a comment below.