The Building Blocks Of Your First Street Team

It’s important to think of atypical ways to get your message out.

Having a street team that promotes your music and helps you grow is a great way to do this, and can be an asset to any act.

The downside is that organized street teams are time consuming and can require a team just to engage the team properly.

However, for smaller acts, you can set up the building blocks of a street team by dedicating a small portion of your website to encourage your fans to help promote your music, any way that they can.

Begin by adding a new menu to your website’s navigation called “Street Team” (you can name this anything you like). This is going to be the home-base for all of your fans who really want to spread the word about your music.

Start filling up this section of the site with anything you can think of that enables your fans to promote your music. Make sure to give clear and instructions and have identifiable links to all downloads.

Here are a few ideas to get you started:

Tour Posters

These high resolution tour posters can be printed out by fans and postered around each city that you are playing in next. Make sure to keep them updated with all the relevant info needed about each gig on the tour.

Mp3′s

If you don’t have free music available already (which you should). Pick your best songs and have them available here for download. Have your street team send these songs to whomever they think will enjoy your music.

HTML Banners

For promotional purposes (upcoming gigs, or album releases), these can posted around the internet on blogs that your fans run, or message boards that they frequent.

Social Networking Skins Create eye-catching skins for Twitter, Myspace etc., and give your fans the opportunity to promote your music on the backgrounds of their favourite social networking sites. Be sure to know your audience and what sites they are most likely to frequent so you know exactly what sites to design skins for.

Avatars

To get your logo seen by a wide and varied audience, create avatars for any application that you can think of (for use in forums, MSN messenger, AIM, Google Talk etc.).

Download & Promo cards

Design download and promo cards that your street team can hand out at festivals and other music events to encourage more people to listen to your music. As a bonus, print these cards out yourself and mail a few dozen to any fan that asks for them.

No one knows your audience like you do, so remember to keep your promotional ideas in line with your fan’s interests.

After this is set up, send an email to your mailing list letting them know that the new “Street Team” is launched and that any help would be appreciated.

Make sure to monitor the success of your “Street Team” area. Are people downloading the templates? Are you seeing any growth in your fan-base?

If you’d like, encourage fans to send in pictures of themselves postering or handing out promo cards at events. Post these pictures onto your site, to encourage other fans to get involved too!

While you might be thinking that this isn’t the kind of street team you had in mind, I’d recommend any act just starting out to connect with their audience by trying this method out.

See what works and what doesn’t.

It’s simple really, if you don’t have the budget of a major label act, try to think of innovative ways to do what they are doing without the price tag.

Once you become more established, then you can try your hand at a more traditional street team. In the meantime, start thinking atypical thoughts.

Have you started your own street team to help promote your music? What tips can you share?

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Image by: Artful Magpie