As a music artist, your success entirely depends on the impression you make. Today, you have more channels than you need to reach the global stage, to present your talent and build a global fan base without having to buy your own private jet. When you don’t have enough people listening to your music on YouTube, know that there is something you are not doing right. Here are a couple of things you should do to turn things around and find success on YouTube.

i) Blog your tour diary on YouTube: YouTube is not just a channel to present your music, you can use your channel to interact with your fans and in the process give updates from the road and tell them when you will be next. You don’t even need to hire a PR agent, just get a laptop with a webcam and record your videos. When you are connected to the internet, you will get to broadcast to your listeners, update them about previous gigs and talk about your favorite moments. You can even go a step further and live broadcast backstage action to build a loyal audience without paying for ads.

ii) Brand yourself and your videos: The best and most preferred way to popularize your upcoming mixtape is to use its cover. You will build a brand just by getting a professional mixtape cover and using it as your fan page’s cover on Facebook, Twitter and other social sites. Since people typically identify with what they see, branding yourself and your music with colors, symbols and even feelings is more important than trying to get people to just listen and love you. The important point here is to get professional advice on the use of colors, symbols, taglines, images and tones and to get the actual mixtape cover makers done by a professional.

iii) Use your other talents to build an audience: Most of us have more than one talents or skills they wouldn’t mind ‘wowing’ people with, you should too. If you are an MC and a DJ, why not upload videos of you on the table and attract those who love you for that? If you love to surf, record videos of you navigating the waves and you will be surprised how your audience will grow. Even if you do charity work, play football, love to climb cliffs or just love to cook, be proud of the talent and share your best and relevant moment with the people who look up to you. You do not need to create separate YouTube accounts for your different skills, make use of what you have.

iv) Upload surprise videos showing the real you: Have you ever wondered why even international artistes get into scandals a lot, especially after they have been off the radar for a while? Most of those scandals, exposes and incidents are publicity stunts meant to create chatter about them and for them to create a bond with the fans by exposing their lives off-stage. You do not need to get into trouble though; you can just record and upload a video of you in your day job or with family or show off your studio and your mixing skills. You need to figure out a way to make your music great, and it will take many trial and errors before you get it right. Getting the best mixtape cover designer gets you as far as ‘seen’, it’s a lot harder to get ‘heard’.

v) There is no shame in asking for help: You are obviously not the baddest lyrics writer on the planet, which means whatever lyrics you come up with, there will always be room for improvement. Something different you can do is outsource small writing tasks to your fans, it doesn’t have to be an entire stanza but trust me, you can ask your fans for a simple word you are missing to rhyme a critical word and you might get suggestions that will blow your mind. The dilemma can be something else, like which is the best mixtape cover design to go with between two options.

These are the 5 simple ways a budding artist can build an audience and even find success on YouTube. Try it!

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