As an artist building an online following, you'll want to use as many platforms as possible. Growing on platforms like YouTube can be made easier by cross-promoting across different social media platforms. For artists, a clear complement to a YouTube channel is SoundCloud. Those who have a decent SoundCloud following can use that to direct listeners to YouTube. The larger you get on YouTube, the faster you grow, and soon, you'll have tons of organic followers coming in from both outlets.

#1 Music Videos

Creating a video for your track is an age-old concept that still works today. If your song has lyrics, you can create a high-quality lyric video. Songs with no lyrics still work with some creativity. The easiest way to do this is to find someone online to create a visual effect video. It doesn't have to be anything spectacular, but the higher quality the better. At the least, you could pull together an HD image of your album cover or some sort of artwork.

The key here is to link back to the video in the description of your SoundCloud track. You should also include the same hashtags or keywords to make you more searchable. If you've got a music or lyric video, you can advertise it as so and get a better response. This can work for all genres. If you're promoting a full band, shoot a full-on live music video and use this.

#2 Free Downloads

Building off of the same concept, you can offer a free download via the YouTube video. Use both platforms to promote your music, and pull in fans from different places. For example, in the description of the SoundCloud track, offer a free download on YouTube with the link. This gets your music in front of more people, and gets those return fans to listen to your music on more than one platform.

Likewise, if you don't want to give away your track, you can just offer a download link to the paid download. Either way, you'll be squeezing out that extra view. Every play and every view have value!

#3 Special Perks

Another thing you can do is offer special tracks or other content on your YouTube channel. Mention this on your SoundCloud profile description or track descriptions. Your SoundCloud followers will then subscribe to your YouTube channel to gain access to more of your content. The more unique content you have on your YouTube channel, the better this will work. Depending on your situation you could do video footage, tutorials, interviews, and more.

Helping the process

You know that buying views helps on YouTube, and buying plays helps on SoundCloud. But when part of a cross-platform marketing strategy, these two things combined can have tremendous results. When people see your content and see you have a big following, they'll be interested. If you've got a popular YouTube channel to go along with a popular SoundCloud profile, that's compelling. You can appear to be an established artist, without legions of fans.

Most of the better vendors of these services offer them for a variety of platforms. Order thousands of views and likes on your YouTube video to coincide with SoundCloud plays and likes. Doing this works great along with the three methods to drive traffic between platforms. This is a lucrative marketing tactic that any up-and-coming artist can use to their advantage.

The more, the merrier

There are several ways to use one media platform to build another, and different tactics will work for different people. If you’re a musician, YouTube and SoundCloud are probably the smartest pairing, at least at the start. You can use these methods to build a following on Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms as well.

Remember to get as creative as you can with it, and always tweak the methods. Different niches will respond better to different techniques, so keep at it!

Date: February 6, 2016 / Categories: Marketing, Tips, / Author: Viv