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The best thing you can do to manage your online presence is to make a YouTube video for each piece of music you're selling.
At a minimum you can use a still image with the audio playing in the background, but the ideal would be a score preview video that lets the customer see the music before they purchase.
There’s a couple of reasons for this:
- For starters, YouTube is the second biggest search engine in the world and it also happens to be owned by the largest search engine in the world. So why wouldn’t you take advantage of that.
- Secondly, YouTube way to share your music when it is available on multiple platforms. You’ll want to put links at the top of the description to every place your music is for sale. Then, when people ask, all you have to do is send them the link to the video and they not only get the preview, but they can look at all those links and decide where they want to buy it.
And finally, using a YouTube video for each of your products helps you when selling your music on the major self-publishing platforms, ArrangeMe, MusicNotes, and JW Pepper. All three of them integrate YouTube videos into their product pages, but not all of them allow you to preview the entirety of the song, so linking to the video helps get around that.
The best thing you can do to manage your online presence is to make a YouTube video for each piece of music you’re selling.
But, perhaps more importantly, your YouTube video provides the only way other than sales to track how your music is doing on those sites. Because you can go into the analytics for each YouTube video and see where your traffic sources are coming from. So it’s not an exact science, but let’s say you put a piece on JW Pepper and then you see your YouTube video is getting a lot of hits from Pepper. That’s a pretty good indication of how much your music is coming up in search results on the Pepper site. What can be even more useful is if you see you’re getting lots of hits on a particular song from Pepper but you don’t see that translating into sales. That shows you there’s interest in your piece but something is turning the buyer off, maybe it’s the price, maybe it’s the difficulty level, there’s really no way to tell for sure, but those YouTube analytics can serve as your first warning flag.
Garrett Breeze
Garrett Breeze, host of Selling Sheet Music, is a Nashville-based composer best known for his catalog of more than 1,500 choral arrangements of popular music, including more than 1,000 written for competitive show choir.
Visit garrettbreeze.com for more information or to book Garrett for a commission or other event.