 Aw, what's up everybody? Once again, it's Brand Man, Shawn, and I'm back with episode number seven of Ask Brand Man, where every single Wednesday, I answer your questions from the comments section below, so make sure you ask those questions and always remember the golden rule that the quality of the answers you get are dictated by the questions that you asked. Now, let's go ahead and get into this thing. It's the mat work. Question number one, are DJs still essential in music? I think so. That's where Erskine Wheeler said, I hope I said that right, are DJs essential? Yes, in music in general? Yes, their core to the culture, maybe not every single part of the culture, but you have to think that when people go to the club, who's playing the music? When people go to certain parties, who's playing the music? Yeah, some parties, you might just have a streaming, somebody playing off of Apple or their Spotify or something, but especially when we talk about the club scene and people who are relevant there, who is playing the music? That's the DJ. Right now, if you're talking about particular for you as an artist, does the DJ matter? Yes, right? If you are an artist, that actually can benefit from those realms where DJs matter. So I can't answer wholly for everybody, it might not be essential, but let's just say you're a street artist and you wanna go, your music belongs in certain clubs or strip clubs or even some fist-pumping clubs somewhere on Jersey Shore or something, you can't tell me that you're not gonna get benefit from that. A lot of times people mess up because they're thinking about marketing in these sexy, non-essential ways, what's new, then what's the new lipstick? Oh, Facebook ads, oh, TikTok ads, oh, all these new things, it just sounds new. Oh, now I can do a pre-save campaign, now I can do an email campaign through X, Y, and Z. All that stuff is great, but only thing that matters is the principles, right? That's how I figure out certain things quicker, right? By breaking things down to the principles because at the end of the day, right? If you're talking about a DJ, so are you telling me, right? You need awareness, so if a DJ plays music in a club and it gets awareness for your song, does that part not matter? No, it still matters, okay, that always matters. Cool, yes, that's essential, or that's relevant, right? Now, is there something, too, people experiencing the same song together, together as a unit and moving to it physically, right? That still matters, right? There's something to that, right? When people experience things together or even see other people experience things in a certain way, it influences how they perceive the song, right? I remember being young, my sister come back from college and she's explained me the whole picture of everything that's going on while this song plays and it instantly makes me think of the song better than I probably would if I just heard it by itself because now I have this entire image. It's like, man, I wish I was there. That's what they do to this song, right? Music does that and then you talk about working well in a club environment, you get just that and DJs are the heart of that. DJs are direct to the people, so it's a ground level and still a trusted, more organic source than running an ad on Facebook or being on the radio. It's one of the most organic exchanges still that actually still requires a taste maker of some sort where people accept it from that DJ, right? So, yes, DJs are not going out of style. They might not be the hype of the town anymore but DJs are irrelevant. There's a lot of relevancy and I can break that down for a long time but I'm gonna go into number two, all right? Harry Williams says, what are the four basic steps that a hip-hop artist can use to draw traffic to a YouTube video, all right? So, number one, a YouTube ad. And you said four basic steps. I'm just gonna say four ways that you can get traffic to your stuff on YouTube. Number one, a YouTube ad. Point blank is simple. Number two, you can get posted on somebody else's page. Number three, you can become an intro or outro, right? Where you have an aggregate page that might post your entire video but you can also become somebody's intro and outro. Hey, I wanna just reach out and I think my music matches your demographic. Do you mind using my song for the intro or outro, have a little credit somewhere? That can work as well, all right? You also have something that's very, very, very underutilized and that's the community tab. But seeing amazing results come from the community tab and people don't necessarily value their community tab properly because a lot of people don't ask for it, all right? So, you can get a lot of great results from larger pages if you use their community tab. That's another thing. Even getting in somebody's video, I don't know what you call it, it's a card of some type on YouTube. So, this is a bonus, I'll give you a number five. There is a card that pops up in your YouTube video. I might try to put one as I talk about this, right? Pop up in your video and it'll tell you the next video that you could watch, not the end card but in the middle of the video or it could lead over to another website. You can ask somebody to put your video as that and promote your video as a pop up during another video or maybe a service you have. I don't necessarily say just that for artists heavily but that's just another route and something that you could use if you think about it, right? But community tab, definitely underutilized, intro-outro, works, done it and seen great results from it, posts on aggregate page, that works, YouTube ads, of course they work as they are. But if I had to choose two that I say just have great results and are underutilized still that would be an intro-outro, crazy results. I've gotten from that and then the community tab. Those two things right there, all right? Now, appreciate the question, Harry Williams. I'm also going to check out Lapid Stone. Lapid Stone said, hey, brand man, I have a question. How do I monetize my profile account reach on Instagram to sell albums and merch or get brand deals slash collabs? All right, how do you monetize? I don't know if you're saying how do I turn on a monetization feature in some way or are you just saying how do I get more sponsorships and things of that nature? Now, let's just go with the latter, all right? If you're talking about how do I get more sponsorships? How do I position myself as a brand that people care about and want to be a part of? A lot of that comes from that aesthetic that you built out, all right? Just point blank, do you look like something that's interesting, something that's cohesive? It doesn't have to be professional, high quality. It needs to have a cohesive feel that a certain demographic can relate to it, all right? So, because me as a company, I have a message that I need to get out to a certain demographic, all right? And if you match that demographic, beautiful, all right? Your aesthetic, you know, my demographic might require super, super high quality visuals. My demographic might actually require a lower quality look, right? A more organic feel and actually hate super high quality. So first you need to figure out who you are, what you're trying to do and accomplish. And once you do that, then you can think about companies and sponsors that want to match with that. And if you need any help with that, actually when I'm thinking about it, this is the perfect timing. So at our agency Contragram, we actually just launched a small, you know, we're testing it, the ability for artists to reach out to us and do an audit. So we're going to audit people's entire web presence and profiles and do a diagnostics where we can show you exactly what you need to do to improve all your profiles and better yourself for brand sponsorships, companies to partner with higher conversion in general. Just getting an entire thing into a cohesive brand narrative story and something that's actually going to be something that not only, like I said, gets you better conversion, but a brand sponsorship capability, all right? But I'm not going to go into that deeply. If you want to check that out, www.contrabrand, like brand man, contrabrand.agency, check that out, understand that if you want to position yourself for growth, right? It's all about understanding what you have going on. Artists, too many artists want too much without even knowing who they are, right? Without having a strong enough identity to be attracted to other people. So if your identity isn't strong, you don't know what direction you should go. Why should somebody else just see you and then choose a direction for you? There are some people or people like, man, I know exactly what to do with that guy. He doesn't even know what to do with himself yet, but most people, you really have to mean something to them and already exhibit something, even if I don't know, or even if I don't think that you're for me, I should be able to say, yo, you need to meet my friend X, Y, and Z though, right? Or he would be better off if he met this guy, even if I don't know him, but I should be able to know where you belong, all right? If you don't know where you belong, don't expect other people to know that either, all right? Laborstone, good question, man. Shannon YouTube, no, Shahan YouTube asks, you can send that teaser traffic to Presave which does help the DSP algorithm though, no? Okay, so what Shahan was referring to is, I did a video basically telling people, stop doing all this promo before your actual project release when you don't really have any fans or it's your first song ever, right? It still applies here. Why are you running an ad to hype up a track that's never been released when you have no fan base? Yes, you can run a Presave campaign, you know? Good alternative, I see where you're going with it, but no, it's not a realistic alternative, right? It's only a good alternative if you already have a fan base because you're gonna still expect a lower conversion, right? From people who don't already like you to now just sit and wait for a song to come out, save a song, right? That I don't even know if I really like the whole thing, I don't even know who this artist is. There's a deeper level of relationship with saving something, right? Well, even if it's not going anywhere on my private playlist or on my purchasing site and it's not being like taking into my home, saving something, that's a slight deeper relationship than connecting, then just, yo, let me click and listen, okay? So you have to understand, it's about not wasting, not wasting any time, not wasting any attention. Every ounce that you have, you wanna squeeze it. So if you're in a position where there's ever any question on whether I'm gonna get value out of presaving more than I would get value from just waiting and running the campaign without a shadow of a doubt, do not presave, you're overthinking and you should, if you can't even get like 100, 200 presaves off of just dropping it, right? Dropping the promo, no advertisement, it's coming from a current fan base. If you can't do that, there's no reason you should be doing a presave campaign, all right? Like that's where you should be coming from. That's where you're gonna get the value out of a presave because yes, it does help the algorithm, but you have to have enough people and why spend enough money? It's why I spend that much money because you can, let's say this, all right? I could spend 10 times as more that it would cost to get the algorithm triggered than it would if I had the right level of fan base, all right? Or I could just wait till the song was dropped, market it then and when they see it, they say they like it in that moment, they can check it out. Trust me, I'm not gonna pull up any stats, right? But just know that the stats play out where it's better for you to just wait. You don't have that fan base to watch, that's already paying attention to you organically. You're not gonna see the impact. In most cases, there has been a couple of cases where it's been the opposite, but those tracks had other novelties about them, all right? So that's it, appreciate the question Shahi on YouTube and we appreciate you questioning something I said in the video for clarity so I could clarify for everybody else. All right, now Micah Scale says, yo, I'm getting 400 conversions on Facebook ads, but only 140 streams in troublemaking. I'm messing this all up. Yo, I'm getting, I got 400 conversions on Facebook ads but only 140 streams in troubleshooting. What do you think the problem could be? All right, it's pretty simple. If they're clicking, they're actually clicking, right? Let's say you have a smart link and they're clicking that link and that's where the conversions are but they're not getting to that next stream place. You don't see them registering. A couple of things are happening. Number one, the low time of whatever page they may be going to might be too slow for some reason. Also, all right, something that could be, look, just real, Spotify, most of these platforms do not consider you to have a stream on it till you get 30, 40 seconds worth of listening before, you know, to consider the stream. So if you don't have somebody listening long enough, it's not a stream. So maybe in the first 30 seconds, they say, yo, I don't like this. It's not good. Click. So you had 400 people possibly listen but only 140 of them even thought it was good enough to listen past the threshold where it's consider a listen to the platform that you're using probably Spotify, right? That's it, right? At that point, if the people are clicking over and they actually convert it to the streaming platform, it's either the low time or something where something's being lost or maybe you have a crazy graphic or something that's turning people off but it's highly likely that they're listening to just enough of your song to think it's trash. It's a possibility, consider that. All right, now last but not least, I'm gonna go with a comment of the day from Drunk Beats. He said, shout out, he's keeping it real. Appreciate that. I tried. He said, the six, six, six days single release plan, some are advising and promoting might also just be a way for these people to gain a lot of watch time on their YouTube channels. I ain't never heard of that, bruh. I ain't know if people are doing stuff like that but yeah, yeah, yeah. People are definitely gonna do things to get attention, naming it something like that. Man, I get used to you so much, man. It's crazy, but yeah, I'll say this, man. When it comes to listening to advice on these pages, a platform like YouTube, it's all about watch time. So a lot of these people, there are a lot of people that I know who are giving advice opportunistically because they can get paid off of YouTube specifically and they're not actually doing this marketing stuff for real or they're not finding great success as an artist, so let me give a little information and say one thing that works, that I've done and hopefully get more views, right? That can make me more money off of my YouTube than I ever made off of my music. All right, there's a lot of motives because marketing is such a hot topic and it's easy to get people to listen at this time. It is, people wanna know how to grow, right? So everybody wants to become a marketer and give marketing advice because they can get views and try to get money off of those views or try to build a fan base off of those views. It's a very real thing. So understanding that it's an opportunistic moment in time in this space, particularly around the subject of marketing, know that, see what people are saying, checks out, see if they're doing it. Are they practitioners? Even an artist who does it themselves, like they're doing it for themselves, that can be meaningful, right? It means, okay, he at least did it for himself and worked for himself. However, just because somebody shows you inside a Facebook ad platform while they do it or a YouTube ad platform or something like that doesn't mean that they really know what they're doing. They might literally just know how to get here. I moved to a new city and I have to go to work just because I know how to go to work. Does that mean I know my way around the city yet? I might not, right? So don't even look at that as something that gives somebody authority in the space. Now, if it worked for them or they did one thing that worked, it means it could work for you, right? But it doesn't mean it will work for you. That's why this marketing thing is about finding your path, finding your journey, right? That's custom to you and building from there, right? And each path has its own levers to pull. Each path has things that have to happen in a certain sequence, right? So you mess around, take some advice from somebody else's path that might not be applying to your path at all or it might be step five instead of step two on your particular path. That's how artists run in circles or run in the brick walls and get frustrated and maybe lose money until the point that they don't have any money to invest, right? And they give up, right? I've seen it time and time again. So yes, pay a lot of attention. Preachers you saying that again, drunk beats, but pay a lot of attention to who you're getting to get some advice to, man, my girl's crying over there. Hopefully y'all can't hear it, but that's cool because this is the end of this video. I appreciate y'all for watching. If you wanna get some advice, some deep advice that connect with us and find out some information custom to you, try checking out brandmannetwork.com. It's more than just a host of courses that really are relevant to artists from people who actually do it every day. It's also a great space to get advice from those people who do it every day along with a lot of smart artists who are actually applying stuff versus just spectating and commenting on some videos, all right? So check that out as well, brandmannetwork.com. Other than that, hope you liked this video. Coming back with another episode of Ask Brandman. If you liked this video, go ahead and like button. If you like it, you might as well share it. And if you're not subscribed, you know what to do. Hit that subscribe button.