Creators' Freedom Project

echolox:

Why you should bitlify your links

One key part of growing your audience as an artist/band is finding out where your current audience came from, because most likely you will find a lot more fans where there is already a bit of buzz going. The problem is: Not every platform you or your band uses on the internet gives you all the statistics you need.

Take SoundCloud for instance, what you get (for free) is

• How many plays a song gets
• How often a song is downloaded
• Who comments on your track?

But if you’re like me, you don’t want to dish out 29€/year to see who played it (if they are even logged in) or let alone 79€/year to get any geographical knowledge of your audience. YouTube does this way better; they give you statistics en masse, simply because they want you to be successful as it drives profit to them as well.

The tip I’m going to give you will not work for all occasions, but it can be used everytime you link to a song, video, download etc. from another page, say posting a SoundCloud song on Twitter. Before I go further into this, I’ll tell you how I learned this lesson “the hard way” (not that much was lost, but it was annoying none the less). If you just want to know what to do to get more statistics out of your links, just go ahead and skip the following chapter.

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Matt Duncan writes about lessons learned by his band The Astray & strategic use of bitly links to track & measure audience response