A few tips of my own.
1. Don’t give up.
I’ve introduced a lot of friends to AJ and the licensing scene, many with some great tracks that would be very useful to the marketplace, but after uploading a couple tracks and seeing no sales, they gave up saying it wasn’t working.
It’s not going to work if you don’t work at it. Keep uploading, keep aggressively being active, keep trying new ideas and getting ahead. As your portfolio grows and your variety increases you’ll snag more and more searchers, your name will be spread around more. Like everything in life, nothing is instant. Keep at it! My first month in September I had a grand total of 3 sales, 11 the net, 12 the month after, now i’m doing not so bad with 17-19 the past two months and with a constantly growing portfolio, I intend to increase those numbers.
Which brings me to my next point.
2. Presentation is half the battle.
Yes you may have awesome work, and should people find those tracks they’ll oogle all over it and buy it, but that’s the thing. They have to find you AND feel that it’s coming from a professional source.
The MySpace attitude won’t fly here. Give the buyer EVERYTHING they need to know. What’s in the song, what the song’s primarily about, suggest a few things it could be used for (people love it when you tell them your product will work for something they need it for, simply because then they can go “so they DID think about my needs while making this piece”, even if you didn’t but know that it can be used for that particular purpose.
That doesn’t mean list every conceivable use, but you get the idea.
Tell them of any offers you might have for that song (is it in a pack?), use proper english and grammar!.
This is a place of business, so put on your business suit. You are representing YOURSELF with every song you upload, and if there are two songs of similar style and quality, the purchaser will go for the one better presented simply because it feels safer to buy from that person.
My first month and partially the second I didn’t have keywords or much of anything, hoping that after I uploaded the song, it would be found by people who wanted it. Would you dig through category after category to find your track? Especially as it ages and is buried deeper and deeper in the list?
3. Use keywords that don’t suck or are too ambiguous.
Keywords are key (lulz). With that said, it’s tempting to bleed the entire thesaurus onto your page and make sure if somebody is using the English language, they’ll find you.
WRONG.
Using keywords that truly speak from the heart of your song will snag more sincere buyers. If you try to invade in other peoples space by using keywords that would trigger when it’s not warranted, you’ll start looking desperate and unfair. And I assure you people will start getting annoyed at your blatant tactics and begin intentionally ignoring your account even if you have something they could use. Sure you’ll snag a few customers still, but I personally think the cons far out weigh the pros.
Also try not to use too ambiguous or specific words. Words like happy and joy are too broad (but still useful, use them), but words like appreciative or likable are too… strange. What does appreciative sound like (why just listen to my song you’d say), but those keywords are not keywords that come to mind often. So you’ll not get many hits from them.
What I like to do is sit down with AJ and search songs myself. I pretend I need to find a specific type of song, so what do I want to put in to find it. It’s much harder then it looks and as authors who make the keywords we often forget that.
Some thoughts to consider.
