Get The Most From ReverbNation – Widgets & Fan Exclusives

by Mary Shaw | March 16, 2009 | Add Comment

photo by Oracio Alvarado

Here’s another guest article from Brian Speronello, a blogger and member of the band, Divergence. Check them out at divergencemusic.blogspot.com. This is the second article in a two-part series on ReverbNation. Brian also wrote about ReverbNation in a two-part piece on his band’s blog, “10 Reasons We Love ReverbNation” (Part 1 & Part 2)

If you missed the first part of “Get The Most From ReverbNation” you can find it here.

Now that you’ve got your profile lookin’ sexy and you have your mailing list set up, it’s time to use some of the other features ReverbNation offers to give your mailing list a few steroid shots, and help some of your other online promotional activities as well.

Remember when I said ReverbNation was like the web-genius best friend you never had hooking you up with free help? Well part of having a profile on RN means you’re just three clicks away from having free customizable widgets for everything from music players, to tour calendars, to mailing list registration widgets. They are a great way for you to put your band’s stamp around the web, the further they spread the more people you will be exposed to.

When you log into your RN account and are taken to your control room you’ll see that there is an icon for “Widgets” in the row of links across the top. Click on that (that’s click #1). The next page lets you choose between widgets for a few different social networks (which we’ll look at later), banners, and html widgets. Click on “Widgets” (click #2). Now you’ll be confronted with a vast list of different widgets along with pictures of each, find the one you want to use and click “Get This Widget” (click #3). A new window will pop up and let you customize the colors of the widget and whatever other parameters are available for editing on the particular widget you’ve selected. Once you’ve set up the widget how you want copy and paste the html into your web page and you’re done!

Here’s a list of some of the widgets they offer, most come in a variety of sizes, from micro size to fit into the sidebar of a blog or website, to full-size video and music players.

Tune Widget – This is the big momma of their widgets, it’s got all of your content in one widget including music, videos, pictures, a way to join the mailing list, and a tour schedule with a map.

Grab Box – If widgets are viral this is what spreads the infection. The Grab Box shows the list of your available widgets (again with pictures) so other people can grab them too and put them on their own pages, spreading the word about your band in the process.

Music/Video Widgets – There are a bunch of different sized music and video player widgets so you can embed your music and/or videos into your other web sites with ease.

Tour Schedule Widgets – There are also a couple of different sized show schedule widgets. One includes a map of the U.S. and draws a line that connects the dots between the venues your playing, pretty cool.

“Fan Collector” Widgets – The “Fan Collector” is their name for a mailing list subscription widget. They come in different sizes and allow people to type their e-mail address into a text box that adds them to your mailing list. Like I noted before, there’s one of these included in the Tune Widget.

So the widgets are really cool, they help spread the word about your band across the internet and let all kinds of different people find out about you. Hopefully some of these people really like you and want to join your “tribe” – you want to make it super easy for these people to get involved, and for a first step it doesn’t get much easier than typing your e-mail address into a little box to get added to a mailing list. However, unless you’re using “Fan Reach” you’re on your own to come up with a widget that does this for you. Think about it, with the Fan Collector widget you can turn any website you’re featured on into a mailing list recruitment location. I’m going to do this now, I even changed the colors to match this site:

If you’ve got a Facebook or Bebo account you can go back to the “Widgets” tab from your control room and get widgets specifically for those social networks too, which also include Fan Collectors that spread the reach of your e-mail subscriptions even further.

Great! Now you’ve got the ability to take your band all across the internet and more people will be coming in contact with your music than ever before. But what happens if someone is on the fence, and needs a little encouragement to get on? If you reward your fans for their participation it can only do good things for your career.

ReverbNation offers a feature called “Fan-Exclusives”, which mean that only members of your mailing list and your fans on ReverbNation have access to this content. There are a lot of ways to use this to your advantage, for us it means that our promo CD is available to download for free, and if people join the mailing list we’ll give them two more free tracks. Once our album comes out we’ll be offering a bonus track and maybe a demo song or two exclusively to our registered fans.

There’s an ongoing debate about whether or not free music is a good thing for bands, let me point out this is not free music. Sure you’re not getting paid for the fan-exclusive songs people download, at least not yet, but you are getting something in return – their e-mail address. If someone comes to your next show that, without the lure of free music, would not have joined your mailing list and therefore never found out about the show, then you’ve just made your money back on the free songs from the ticket you sold. If they buy a tee shirt, and then they buy your next album when it comes out, all of a sudden some free music has made you a good chunk of money and more than paid for itself. If you’re still opposed to giving your music away for free though, you can make any of your songs, fan-exclusive and not, available for streaming only and not for download.

Now that your mailing list is filling up with people, at some point you’re going to want to contact them. Here’s a few tips that should help speed up the time it takes you to send message on “Fan-Reach,” since there’s a little more to it than writing a regular e-mail.

Once you’ve set up your filters and have only the people you want to message selected in the “Manage Contacts” part of your Fan Reach page, click “Create Mail” to open the e-mail composition section. At the top you’ll see a bunch of options, make sure you click the box that says “I agree to the Fan Reach Terms of Service” or you won’t be able to send your e-mail. You can play around with the other options they have, like including links to featured artists, Facebook, and your show schedule. Use “Send Sample” (after you click to preview your message) to send a draft of the e-mail your writing to whatever e-mail account you have registered your ReverbNation profile with.

If you’re like me you want all of your e-mails to have a common look and feel to them, so rather than having to go back in and set up your color scheme and layout every time you write a new e-mail it makes sense to set up a template to work from. First set up your e-mail the way you want, some of the stuff we like include below the body of the message, separated by horizontal lines, is links to our latest YouTube videos, upcoming shows, and our blog in case people want to get more frequent updates from us that way. Just before you send your message click on the “source” link in the upper-left hand corner of the e-mail composition box to see the source code, copy and paste all of it into a word or other text document. Now you can easily copy and paste it back when you go to write your next e-mail. This way whenever you go to write a new message all you will have to do is write a new body to the message, change any of the links if you want to point people to new content or add a show to the list of gigs you have, and hit “Preview”.

In order to send your e-mail you first have to click “Preview” to see what it’s going to look like. Here is where you can change the options for the color of the header and the body of the message. Whatever colors you choose make sure to write them down in the template word doc somewhere outside of the source code so you’ll be able to remember what they are next time you go to send a message. When you’ve got your colors right hit send, and you’ll be done!

I hope that this article has helped you see what a powerful tool ReverbNation is for musicians. There are still a ton of features I haven’t even mentioned, but we’d be here all day if I went into detail about every little feature. If you’re still curious you can find more information on the features section of the ReverbNation website. To see what I’ve written about some of those other features check out “Why We Love ReverbNation” Part 1 & Part 2 on the Divergence (my band’s) blog.

Thanks for being part of the conversation at Serve The Song. We have a simple comment policy (with thanks to Tim Ferriss) - critical is fine, but if you’re rude we'll delete your stuff. ’Nuff said.

promotion