SoundCloud has become an essential platform for any artist to gain exposure for their music and brand. Here are a few simple ways to maximise your follower count.

Tip 1: Use Download Gates

Download gates are the hottest thing in and amongst the SoundCloud community at the moment. The concept is simple; if a fan wants to download your music, they must first follow you. Websites like toneden.io and The Artist Union are incredibly useful tools that can help you gate your audience.

You can also make them repost, comment and like your track apart from just following you.

Tip 2: Use Facebook and Instagram to Promote Yourself

Facebook pages have become saturated and it’s an artist’s nightmare to drive engagement here. However, if you have a couple of bucks to spare, try using Facebook ads. Create an attractive post with a link to one of your tracks on SoundCloud and target the advertisement to your potential audience. Choose between promoting to an entirely new audience based on age/sex/location/interests, promoting to people who already like your page and my personal favourite; promoting to people who already like your page and their friends. Depending upon the effectiveness of your ad, you should see traffic coming through to your SoundCloud page.

Instagram is where you can show off your life through pictures and gain a loyal fanbase. There are several resources on how to use Instagram to market yourself or product, find some reliable ones and apply them! A very effective strategy that is being used by numerous artists at the moment is using video to promote their songs. Now that Instagram changed its video length limit from 15 seconds to a minute, you have a lot of room to share your music effectively. Preview your new single on Instagram and ask your followers to check out the full track on SoundCloud.

Get down the basics of using relevant hashtags, upload frequently and talk to your audience. Remember, “Your followers don’t follow you, you follow your followers.”

Follow tip number one for even better results.

Tip 3: Build Your Visual Appeal

Unfortunately, it’s not all just about the music anymore. You are a business and therefore strong branding is essential. Good visual appeal through album artwork, profile pictures and banners can help boost your fan conversion rate. Simply having good artwork is going to set you apart from thousands of other SoundCloud users. Take a look at this SoundCloud profile. Notice the integration between the song artwork, display picture and banner.

If you haven’t got a clue on how to make your own artwork, there are ridiculously cheap services that can help you. Check out Fiverr, a freelancer website where you can get your logos and artwork done for dirt cheap rates (typically 5 dollars). Alternatively, it may be a good idea to find aspiring graphic designers and ask them to do it for you. You can pay them in the form of credit on your SoundCloud profile or track descriptions. In this way, you also build meaningful relationships that can help advance your career.

Tip 4: Use Promotional Networks

SoundCloud users aren’t just individual music artists or bands. There are 1000s of promotion networks and blogs out there. Start finding the blogs that share music of your genre and build a list. Contact them and ask them to upload your music or simply just give you a repost! This will give you exposure on a whole new scale.

Some blogs require a payment to promote your music whilst others do not. You can always try to negotiate your way out of this; perhaps give them a spot on your download gate to get them to share your music? It is important to provide value to these networks. Nothing is free in life.

Using promotional networks along with download gates is the number one strategy being used to grow fanbases at the moment.

Tip 5: Collaborate With People Around You

This includes musicians, graphic designers, blogs and networks. In this industry, networking and collaboration is your best bet to climb up the ladder.

All the previous tips would do 10x better in collaboration. For example, hook up with another artist on your next single. Let’s say you’re an indie singer. Go look around for producers to make an instrumental for you. You now expose your profile to a whole new audience. Or as mentioned earlier, if you’re looking for artwork; find aspiring graphic designers! The more creative you get, the better.

So there you go, 5 simple tips to grow your SoundCloud profile. Do implement these! They’re tried and tested. If you have any questions about these tips or simply want to talk about music/marketing/anything, feel free to email me.

-Abhinav

abhinav.jm@gmail.com