Today we’ll talk about the first 5 of 10 big mistakes I see musicians + other creatives making all the time when trying to build a presence online.

I’m mostly referring to social media when I say online, but we’ll leave it open because some of this will apply to other related things you’re doing too.

And although I’ll use musician—related examples, pretty much all of the points I’ll be making will apply to other creatives too.

I’ve tried not to be too generic here; everyone knows you have to be consistent. Everyone knows you have to ‘add value’, etc.

So I’m going to try and give you other stuff that’s helpful and not too generic…

…but some (potentially generic) things I just can’t avoid talking about, because despite them being known to a lot of creatives, they’re still being made every day.

These mistakes are things I’ve discovered from direct experience working with creatives and working as a creative over roughly the last 10 years.

You may have had different experiences, and you may also not be getting the results you want for reasons I don’t mention today.

So with that stuff in mind, let’s dive into these mistakes.

Mistake #1: Trying to fill a hole that doesn’t exist.

What does this mean?

Basically, it means you feel like things aren’t working the way they’re “supposed to” and so you get caught up trying to find a solution to a problem that doesn’t necessarily exist…or just isn’t available to you right now.

An example of this would be a musician who’s showing up on social media trying to build their presence.

They’re posting stuff regularly, doing their best to pay attention, and they’re getting some movement (followers, listeners, engagement, whatever)…

But their progress doesn’t feel as good or as ‘smooth’ as—they think—it should.

It’s bumpy; it doesn’t always work well, it sometimes feels too slow, and the musicians have this lingering feeling they’re missing a big piece of the puzzle, and that’s why things aren’t as fast or smooth as they ‘should’ be.

If you’ve ever had the feeling that you know what to do—say to build your online presence as a musician—and you’re doing it…

…but you also feel like you’re missing something, and if you only had that final piece of the puzzle everything would just ‘click’… you’re who I’m talking to right now.

And maybe you are missing a piece of the puzzle.

It’s possible you’re in a situation where you make awesome music, you’re posting a lot of content and you think it’s great, but you’re not really growing.

Either that or you are growing but it doesn’t feel like you’re connecting with anyone properly.

In these cases, the problem might be that you’re relying on posting content as your only source of traffic—which is not always the best idea because it’s so unreliable…

…or maybe you’re too disconnected from the people who are seeing your stuff because there’s not enough human—ness in your presence.

This can happen quite easily if you’re posting and bailing, or if you’re not really engaged with what you’re doing…

So it is possible you’re missing something and you could radically level up your progress with a few tweaks.

But it also could be that you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be, and this frustration is just part of what progress feels like for where you’re at.

This is much more common from what I’ve seen.

It could be that for the quality of work you’re putting out, or just for where you’re at in terms of being on the artist path in whatever way, the progress you’re making is justified, and you actually shouldn’t be making any more right now than what you are.

Maybe instead of there being some secret you don’t know that’s holding you back, you just need to get your reps in.

There are only so many moves you can make, only so many tricks and techniques and strategies you can try to level up your online presence before it just becomes a matter of reps.

Just making more and better stuff over the long term.

There isn’t always a way for you, specifically, to get ‘more views’ or ‘more engagement’ than you currently are, other than just putting out more stuff, and levelling up as an artist.

Again, sometimes there is, for sure.

And I think there are a lot of musicians who could benefit from learning a bit more about content and social media in general if they’re interested in benefitting from it.

But not everyone deserves the same amount of attention just because they do the same thing.

If John Petrucci, the Dream Theater guitarist, was to start building an online presence from scratch at the exact same time as you (who in this case let’s say is a great guitarist but not at John’s level)..

…and you both used the exact same techniques and showed up the exact same amount over 6 months… who’s going end up with a bigger following?

Obviously John, right?

It would be unreasonable to expect to get the same result just because you took the same approach to building your presence.

This is my point:

Sometimes slow or ‘bumpy’ progress doesn’t mean you’re doing something wrong, it just means this is what progress looks like for where you’re at.

I rarely hear creatives say: “Yeah things are moving along slowly, but that seems about right based on my skills and experience with building a presence”.

It’s more often something like: “Things are working, but I feel like something’s missing, it should be faster”…

Should it? Why?

I have to tell myself this all the time: Don’t try to fill the hole that doesn’t exist.

Just because I think things should be smoother, or faster, or better or whatever, doesn’t mean they actually should.

It’s not a given that just because I think I could be getting better results, I actually could.

Usually I end up going back to the conclusion that—although I’m sure there’s more I could learn—reps are a big part of it.

If you’re giving it a proper go, and you make great music, you post great stuff, you’re technically doing everything right, but you feel like things aren’t going as well as you want them to… consider the possibility that that’s just how it is at the moment.

And instead of using all your energy trying to find a strategy or trick or some knowledge that will help you move forward faster, put that energy into just getting more stuff out there and improving as an artist.

Maybe that’s how you’ll move forward faster.

Again, maybe that bumpy progress that feels kind of right but also kind of not is just… what progress looks like.

I’m not trying to gaslight you and say “no, you don’t have any problems, there’s nothing you could do to get better results.”

Maybe you’re someone who does deserve more attention, and you just haven’t built the social media muscle yet, so your progress is slower than what it could be.

But what I see often is musicians caught up in this idea that they should be getting more something: More engagement, streams, etc. and until they’re getting that, nothing is working.

This includes even if things are actually working, which they often are.

Maybe they’re showing up and gaining a few new followers every day, or their listeners are slowly going up… but it’s just slow, and they’re not satisfied with that.

And these musicians may also not understand just how important those small wins are.

You shouldn’t see them as failures, because they’re not. That’s progress.

If you want 10,000 fans, don’t get disheartened when they start to trickle in just because it’s not happening the way you wish it would—which is potentially unrealistic anyway.

Recognise that when people are willingly coming into your world to support you—even if it’s just a few at a time—that is the beginning of your journey to 10,000 fans.

Again, these musicians are trying to fill a hole that doesn’t exist.

They think they should be getting fans by the boatload every day or month, and when that doesn’t happen they see it as a problem.

But who said that was ever even on the cards for them?

No one—it’s a made up problem.

And maybe this comes from seeing others’ progress on these platforms, then making judgements about how fast they should be making progress.

This is totally understandable—they see some other artists doing super well, they think “well they’ve grown fast, so I guess I’m supposed to grow fast”.

And this is probably made a lot worse by how much we tend to underestimate other people’s struggles.

It’s really easy for us to look at some other artist who’s growing steadily and make the assumption that it’s been easy for them.

But we’re usually blind to how hard they’re actually working, and what they’ve gone through to get to where they’re at.

All we see is the external result and we only know a tiny bit of the story.

On top of that, we’re also probably overestimating our own abilities, so the gap between us and them feels even more unfair (I do this all the time).

If you’re an exceptional musician, you’re consistently putting out truly fantastic music and social media content, you’ve learned a bit about how social media works and you’re giving it a real go, but things are moving super slowly…

…maybe something’s a bit wrong there.

But if that’s not you, and you’re frustrated by ‘bumpy’ progress, or progress that feels like it’s dragging a bit… chances are that’s exactly what progress is supposed to look like for you.

I’ll say it a final time: I’m not saying by default you can’t do things to get better results.

Most musicians could probably improve their results with a bit of work. But being able to get better results right now is not a given for everyone. Consider that.

Ok, that’s enough on that—let’s move on to mistake #2, which is…

Mistake #2: Focusing too much on either the system side of marketing or the creative side of marketing, and not paying enough attention to the other side.

In my work with musicians I see a lot of different beliefs and perspectives around marketing and social media—a lot of different ways people see them and think they need to be approached.

But after looking at all these beliefs and perspectives enough, I’ve realised you can kind of lump people into one of two camps as it relates to how they look at marketing and social media.

And this is rough, but I think it has some merit:

There’s Camp System and there’s Camp Creative.

At least a lot of the musicians I’ve spoken to or worked with seem to lean a lot more into one of these than the other.

The system people are more concerned with getting a system set up for their marketing or building an online presence.

They’re more likely to look at it analytically, and assume that a good solid system will take care of all their marketing problems.

I’m kind of making blanket statements here, but these people will be more focused on things like:

• A posting schedule
• Analysing data
• Automation and organisation
• That kind of thing.

These people are more likely to think “how many posts can I get out there each month?” instead of “what is the content of what I’m actually posting?”

To them, not having a system in place is the reason things aren’t working.

And they’re not totally wrong; Those things do help, they are important.

But now let’s look at the other side, Camp Creative.

These people are more concerned with—you guessed it—the creative side of marketing and social media.

They’re more likely to care about what they’re putting out there, and assume that if what they’re putting out there is good enough and it connects with the right people, their marketing will be sorted.

So these people will be asking “how can I make really great stuff that aligns with my identity?” and are less likely to think analytically about it.

Their way of thinking is “if it’s good enough, it will find people.”

And they’re also not wrong; this stuff matters a whole lot.

Neither camp is wrong here.

And just to be very clear, that’s not to say that the system people aren’t creative, or that the creative people can’t think analytically, or anything like that.

It’s just that their focus seems to be on one more than the other in terms of how they see marketing, and that influences the way they approach it.

The reason I’m talking about this is because, for the vast majority of musicians and creatives out there who are trying to build an audience, they’re going to need a healthy balance of both the system stuff and the creative stuff.

If you’re currently not getting the results you want, even though you’re engaged with the process and really making an effort…

…there’s a good chance you’re too focused on one side of this and not enough on the other.

So we can think of it like this:

A system is like a machine, or an engine, that runs our marketing stuff.

When that system or engine is turned on, posts are going out, ads are running, things are happening.

The system is cold and unfeeling.

All it’s worried about is making sure things are running.

And this is important; you need things to be running.

The creative is the juice or oil (or whatever you want to call it) that goes into this system, or engine.

If your system is designed to help you make 30 posts each month and get them out there, the creative is the actual content of those posts—the substance.

A system or engine without good creative juice is not going to run very well.

It doesn’t matter if you can get 30 posts out a month if none of them are good.

That won’t do anything for you except waste your time.

You need good quality creative to put into the system, so when it runs, it’s actually working properly.

And on the other side of this, in most cases, if you make great creative stuff but you don’t have a good system to run it through, there’s a high chance you still won’t get the results you want.

You’ll be putting stuff out—and it’ll be fantastic—but no one will see it.

Or not enough people will see it.

So focusing only on the system side and ignoring the creative side won’t work, because the system doesn’t have good oil/juice to run through it.

And focusing only on the creative side without the system is less likely to work too because you don’t have a working machine to distribute your beautiful work or get results consistently.

Sure, you can make a great video and post it on social media, but that’s only one part of how social medias works.

You could post something on social media that’s awesome and no one sees it.

That happens all the time.

And it’s because social media is super unreliable.

It doesn’t guarantee reach just because you make something good, and there are all kinds of things that will stop a post from getting the attention it might deserve.

So the answer—for most—is to have both in a good place.

And I keep saying ‘for most’ or ‘in most cases’ because there are some artists out there who are mostly just concerned with the creative side, and they’re doing fine.

They don’t necessarily have a system or structure in place—they just kind of make something really cool and put it out there, and it sustains them until they can do the next thing.

But as amazing as this sounds, and as much as you might want this to be you if you’re more Camp Creative than Camp System…

…I’d say these people are the exception to the rule.

It is generally not a good idea to automatically assume that this will work for you, because it most likely won’t.

So, again, in most cases, great creative plus a great system is going to be how you’re able to build an audience.

You need to be able to make really cool stuff that resonates with people and accurately represents you as an artist.

And you need to have some kind of structure or system that allows you to get lots of stuff out there and make sure it reaches people (and keeps people hooked).

So what do you do with this information? How do you use this to get better results?

Well, this can help you identify parts of your marketing process that may not be working properly, or that you’re missing entirely.

If you’re someone who’s been focusing on creating a system and it’s running but you’re not getting results, maybe it’s the creative that’s the problem.

Or if you’re someone who’s been making stuff you think is really cool and you’re putting it out there but no one is really seeing it…

…or you’re not able to generate consistent results…

…you probably need a system, or a better system.

The idea here is that by understanding these two major sides to marketing and social media, you’re more easily able to identify problem areas and then fix them.

You don’t want to be trying to do stuff without any idea of what you’re doing or whether or not you’re even going in the right direction.

If you have no idea how to create a system in this context, you can start with this, which I often link in these letters because everything always seems to come back to this idea.

(And I do actually have a little mini course on coming out soon which will take you through the whole process of building a growth system for social media.)

As a little primer, a good growth system for social media consists of:

• A steady output of high quality material
• At least one method of consistent traffic
• And at least one method of sustaining connection with your audience.

If you’re new here or this means next to nothing to you right now, read the post and you’ll get it 🙂

And as for the creative side: What’s ‘good’ is subjective of course, but this may help.

I think it’s really useful, and what I talk about in it has really helped me level up the creative side of my marketing.

So this is mistake #2: Focusing too much on either the system or creative side, and not enough on the other.

Chances are if you’re really giving it a go and things aren’t working, one (or maybe both) of these sides need work.

But at least with this you have a good solid place to work from to get things happening.

Ok, let’s move onto mistake #3.

Mistake #3: The “but they did it this way” fixation.

If I had to name one thing that has held me back from making more progress over the years, it would be comparison to others.

I’ve wasted literally years of my life on comparing myself, my progress, or my work to other people’s.

It’s been so bad at times that I’ve been completely derailed for long periods of time.

And one of the things that I used to get really caught up on was this idea that ‘x person’ did something this way, therefore I should be able to do it that way too…

…and all the other ways of doing it are invalid because I want to do it this way.

And I will say before I go into this: There’s a good side to this.

I don’t think it’s bad at all to look at someone who’s been able to achieve something really cool and say: “Fuck yeah, I can do that too.”

That’s been really helpful for me in life.

I’ve tried to have this attitude of “well, someone has been able to achieve x, therefore it’s possible, therefore I can do it too, because why wouldn’t I be able to?”

And I’d say for the most part, that attitude has helped show me that I’m more capable than I think at some stuff.

When this is bad—I think—is when it becomes a fixation, or you decide it’s the only way, or you become a little too delusional about what’s possible for you at the moment—and it actually hurts your progress.

So a really common example of this for musicians would be, “x artist didn’t have to use social media like this to build a successful career, and so i shouldn’t have to do it either. I should be able to do it how they did it.”

And this particular topic is a tricky one because I believe there are all kinds of ways you can successfully get yourself out there.

I definitely don’t think the narrow range of options that are often presented are the only ways it can work.

But this kind of thinking can easily go from a positive ‘anything is possible’ to a negative and narrow ‘this is the only way I’m willing to do this or able to do this’.

And again, this is tricky, because I do think there is some good in having a strong belief in your ability to do certain things.

But you can’t let it blind you and hold you back, and that seems to happen a lot.

Continuing on with the social media example, often I’ll talk to artists who are looking to build an audience and they have this idea of how they want to show up.

And in lots of these cases, they got this idea from an artist or personality they admire who’s doing a similar thing and doing it successfully.

That’s not a bad thing at all. They’ve got a starting point—awesome.

Where it goes wrong is when this approach to social media becomes the way it has to happen.

It goes from “this is an approach I’d like to try” to “the rules this artist or personality played by to get to where they are also apply to me and my situation.”

That’s a problem.

You don’t know what those rules actually are. You just think you do.

All you know is what you can see, or what you’ve heard.

But you haven’t actually experienced what this artist or personality has experienced, and so really you’re just making assumptions based on very limited information.

This happens so often with musicians.

Maybe you’re looking at artists who have a big following, you’re looking at their content, and you think “well all I’ve gotta do is what they do and then I’ll have a big following.”

Does not automatically work like that.

Unless that artist has explicitly stated exactly what they do and the circumstances under which they do it or have done it, you don’t fully know, right?

You can only guess based on what you see.

And you also might not be anywhere near as appealing to a big audience as they are—which is an important factor to consider.

And this problem applies both in a ‘this is what I should do’ way, and also a ‘this is what I shouldn’t have to do’ way.

So, examples:

Maybe you look at your favourite artist who’s got a huge following and all they post is photos of them looking good.

Or you follow someone who’s been able to build a big following primarily by sharing short videos of thoughts they have.

So you think, “Ok, i’ll do that, and now I expect to get the same result as them.”

Or maybe you look at your favourite artist who doesn’t reply to their comments and then you think “I guess that’s not important and I don’t have to do that either”.

It’s good to be observant—I don’t want to discourage that.

It’s good to get inspiration and learn from people who are doing well—I don’t want to discourage that.

And I really don’t want to discourage getting excited about potential paths to build an audience, because it matters that you’re able to show up regularly and do it, ideally in a way that you love.

But you have to understand that you are not, by default, in the same game as them—and so the exact same rules don’t, by default, apply to you.

• What if it worked for them that way because they came up in a different time? It was a lot easier to grow on Instagram 5 years ago than it is today.
• What if they have a totally different personality that’s helped skyrocket their audience growth? Maybe it’s that instead of the specific type of stuff they’re posting that’s helped them so much.
• What if they have a team behind the scenes helping them in all of these ways you don’t know about?
• What if all their traffic is actually coming from outside the platform, and their content isn’t actually performing all that well?
• What if they’ve started from a totally different place than you?
• Or they have different resources?
• Or what if you look at their profile and they’ve only posted 20 posts and blown up, but really they’ve deleted the 800 posts they made before that, so your perception of how they did it is warped?

There are just too many factors for you to rely on simply copying what they do and expecting a good result.

If you’re overly focused on what they did or what they do as the way to succeed, you’re shutting yourself off from all the other ways you can succeed that might be way better options for you and your situation.

Their rules are not your rules by default. Don’t get stuck going down this path.

I’ve been there heaps, especially with actually making music: “Oh well this producer works into a limiter, so that must be why they’re able to get that sound.”

No, maybe they’re way better at sound design and you’re closing yourself off to that because you’re too focused on this other thing, Alex.

And on this, another one of the dangers of going down this path of assuming their rules are your rules, is that you can start to overvalue the rules you think you can see, and undervalue the skill or appeal or work ethic of the actual person.

You can start to convince yourself that it’s just about the specific path they took, and not how good of a job they’ve done at walking it.

So you become too focused on just following their process, when actually you should be focused on becoming better.

Going back to the previous mistake, you start to mistakenly think that it’s only the system that matters (the process) and not the creative stuff that fills it, right?

Don’t think you’re above doing the work to become really good at something.

Following a path that has been shown to work will only get you somewhere if you’re worthy of walking it.

Ok, so if it’s a mistake to blindly make the assumption that whatever someone else did is automatically going to work for you, what should you do instead?

Get your own direct experience.

That should be number one.

It’s really the only way I think you can do this successfully for a long time.

You can and absolutely should look at what other people are doing or have done to give you inspiration, to guide you, and to learn whatever you can…

But you must be flexible and be open to things working differently for you than it does or did for them.

The way you’ll find your little advantages, your edge, is by experimenting and creating your own path, not blindly following someone else’s.

And if you can’t see what that looks like for you right now, of course you can’t—you’re not going to see it until you start experimenting.

So learn enough to start trying some stuff out, and do a bunch of tests with different things you’re interested in.

Let curiosity lead you and pay attention to what happens when you do or don’t do certain things.

If you’re too stubborn, or you’re too closed off to doing things differently to how you initially wanted to, you will most likely not get where you want.

If you expect to not have to make any major sacrifices along this path, you’re mistaken.

All of us have to accept struggle and compromise as part of the deal. There’s no way around that.

Be open, embrace the challenge, learn what you can, and pay attention, and you’ll find your way 🙂

Ok, let’s leave this one here and move onto mistake #4.

Mistake #4: Not understanding your selling point(s) or your audience.

You have undoubtedly heard that you need to know your audience if you want to build an audience.

And you’ve also almost definitely heard that you need to know why you’re so great and worth paying attention to, because you’ll stand a much better chance of marketing effectively.

If you know who you’re talking to, you can say the right things and present yourself in a way that is more likely to resonate with those people.

And if you know why you’re worth paying attention to, you can emphasise that in how you present yourself so, again, you’re more likely to resonate with people.

Almost everyone knows this, but not nearly as many people seem to actually work on the answers, or at least they don’t put too much effort into finding them.

For some artists, this might be a quick exercise.

You might be like “oh yeah I make anti—establishment metalcore for young rebels” and then put yourself out there and things just work.

That happens.

Or you might have a really good understanding of what makes you worth paying attention to, and you might not even be able to explain it all that well, but you can still put yourself out there and it works well.

Or you might actually not know the answer to either of these questions, and you just put yourself out there in a way that feels right, and that works.

All of this can happen, and I will say I find that based on what I’ve seen, in these cases the artists seem to have a pretty good intuitive understanding of:

• Who they are
• Who they’re for
• And what makes them great..

…and that’s why they’re able to make it work without diving deep into target audience work.

And if this is you, you probably don’t need to worry about it.

If people are loving your stuff and things are working the way you want them to in this respect, you’re good.

But it’s when things aren’t working, or you have no idea how to show up, or you just feel like you’ve been going around in circles…

…that you need to pay a lot more attention to this.

You can’t get away with low or no—effort answers here because these answers will literally provide you direction you currently don’t have.

You cannot just say “my music is for everyone” and you cannot just say “I’m worth paying attention because I have a unique sound”.

That gets you nowhere.

How do you have a unique sound?

What about it, specifically, is unique?

And even if your music can appeal to lots of different types of people—which may be totally true—what kind of people, specifically, are most likely to absolutely love it?

The cost of not figuring out the answers to ‘what makes you great?’ and ‘who is your target audience?’ is potentially years of going round in circles.

Sounds dramatic, but I mean it.

Unless you already know, how are you supposed to know what kind of stuff to put out there?

How are you supposed to know where to go to find the right kinds of people to enjoy your stuff?

Unless your whole plan is to just post some stuff and hope for the best (which is an unreliable strategy for most musicians), you’re going to need to know this stuff.

So let’s break this down into two separate sections: target audience and your selling point (the thing or things that make you so great).

And we’ll start with audience.

Audience.

Who is your target audience?

Isn’t it just you? Like other versions of you?

It might be, but not necessarily.

You and your audience are going to share common ground in at least one important way.

Maybe that’s simply musical taste, or maybe it’s values, or how you dress, your behaviour in some way, or something else.

But that doesn’t mean they are exactly you every time.

• I’m currently working with two artists who are both millennials but whose music appeals more to people in the generation before them because they’re old souls.
• Last year I worked with another artist who’s over 40 but whose music resonates strongly with 16 year old girls.
• There are death metal bands I love made up of 40+ year olds who have a primarily younger audience.
• And there are artists who appeal to the mainstream who don’t look like they do.

This is why I don’t think it’s a good idea to automatically assume your target audience is just you.

And while we’re on this, unless it’s super clear—cut, I don’t think you should automatically assume anything about your target audience is 100% right without actually seeing some proof of it.

So how do you actually go about figuring out your target audience if you don’t know who they are?

There are multiple ways you can do it, and if you want to be really accurate I recommend you combine the methods I’m about to mention, because I don’t think they’re always reliable on their own.

One thing you can do is create a ‘fan profile’.

You might also know this as a fan avatar or buyer persona or something.

Basically, you’re creating a profile of your ideal fan—your most die—hard fan.

On this profile you’ll include things like their age, gender, maybe location, interests, values, maybe income level, and a bunch of other stuff.

It’s really easy to find templates for these. If you just google ‘buyer persona’ or ‘fan avatar’ you’ll find a template or something you can use to get started.

Doing one of these fan profiles can be a good way to start thinking more strategically about your target audience… but I don’t like them on their own.

The main reason for this is because you might make up a person you believe to be your ideal fan… but it’s not actually right.

You can easily go deep into who this person is and all the little things they love and their secret desires and everything…

…but then you end up creating a profile of someone who you just want to be your target audience, but who isn’t.

You don’t fully know who your ideal fans are until you see evidence of it, so for this reason I don’t recommend you rely only on this fan profile.

Definitely still do it—I think it’s a great exercise and still super helpful.

Just, in my opinion, don’t rely on it by itself.

So what else can you do?

A solid way to get you moving in the right direction is stalking similar artists’ fans.

This can be incredibly helpful.

So first you can find a bunch of artists you could be compared to.

You’re not going to be exactly the same as them but there will be artists you can look at whose fans are probably pretty close to who yours would be.

This is a good way to get some reasonably reliable detailed information about the people who are most likely to love your stuff.

Once you find these artists, you can go to their socials or anywhere where you can see what their fans are like.

Social media is a good way to do it because you can learn so much from looking at people’s profiles and how they interact on the platforms.

You want to look at who’s following these similar artists and who’s engaging with or commenting on their posts.

You can look for things like how they talk, what they look like, what they say.

You can also go to their profiles and look at their bios and their posts.

You can learn heaps from doing this.

When I was finding examples for the Awaken Your Fan Base On Social Media course (opening again very soon), I went looking through some pop artists’ followings and some metal bands followings so I could highlight the contrast between different types of people.

Broadly speaking, the pop artists’ fans:

• Were younger, mostly younger girls
• Dressed like you would expect young people in the mainstream to dress
• Used currently popular language
• And seemed more concerned with the artists’ looks, vibe, and the general vibe of the songs, rather than any specifics about the music itself.

When I looked at the metal bands’ fans I already knew exactly what they would be like because I’m one of them, but the contrast was really obvious.

The metal bands’ fans:

• Were generally dressed darker
• Had lots had dyed hair or long hair
• Some were using pentagrams for their profile picture
• Said things like “fuckin sick riff!”
• And were generally more interested in ‘what guitar are you using?’ or ‘what tuning is this?’ or the technical proficiency of the drummer.

I’d say metalheads are generally closer to the actual music and are more likely musicians themselves than the average pop music fan.

I’m speaking broadly here, but hopefully you get what I mean.

Metalheads are more likely to enjoy content of the band or musician just playing through their songs or talking more about the music itself.

Whereas fans of pop artists are less likely to be interested in the intricate details of the music and more likely to be interested in lifestyle, vibe, mood, personality, etc.

Again, I’m generalising—fans of pop music can obsess over musical details, and metalheads can love artist’s personalities, etc.

But your fans—or the people likely to be fans of you—will have preferences in terms of what they like to watch and what they’re interested in.

These are just two examples, but you can see how this can help, right?

If your target audience is most likely going to be interested in what guitar you’re using and seeing you play through your tunes, you’ll probably get a better result on social media if you show up like that.

You’ll likely not get a great result by trying to do trends that metalheads don’t care about.

Whereas as a pop artist, maybe trending or generally popular stuff is a better option for you.

So what I recommend you do is do a bunch of ‘stalking’: read comments, check out people’s profiles, get as much information as you can.

And then look for patterns.

Recently I went to the comments under a YouTube video from an aussie metal band and within 30 seconds I found multiple comments from people like ‘what guitar is that?’ ‘that’s a mad riff!’ etc.

Seriously, this can teach you a lot, so it’s worth doing the research.

Ok, another thing you can do is look at your own data.

If you have reliable data from Spotify For Artists, or your social media profiles, that’s extremely valuable information.

On Spotify, if you’ve been getting streams from legitimate sources, that’s going to give you a great idea of the big picture stuff, like how old your listeners are, gender, and location.

But for this to be truly helpful, the data has to be good data.

If you’ve paid for some playlist placements or something and the company has just thrown you on playlists that aren’t really that suited to your music, it’s not gonna be that accurate, right?

It’ll say you’ve got a bunch of listeners who are 25—34 and in Germany, but that could just be because that’s where the people listening to the playlist are.

If you’ve got Spotify listener data from things like targeted ads, maybe algorithmic playlists that are more accurate, listeners directly from social media, and maybe shows…

…that’s gonna be better data.

And if that’s you, use that to help refine your understanding of who your ideal audience is.

Same with your social media data.

If you look at your analytics or insights and you can see clear patterns (and it’s not just data from your family and friends), that’s valuable and you should use it.

You can also look at your own comments and see who those people are too—stalk them.

I know it sounds weird, but it’s a good way to learn stuff.

You might not have any reliable data yet on socials or Spotify, but eventually you will, and once you do I highly recommend you pay attention to who’s engaging.

There’s some other stuff you can do as well to find out more about your target audience, but these are a great start and will generally give you a lot of info so you can come up with a good strategy.

• Doing the fan profile helps you think in more detail.
• Looking at similar artists’ fans helps you actually get more detail.
• And your analytics and Spotify For Artists data gives you the bigger picture stuff (like age and location and gender) and also helps to reinforce your data.

I want to move on from this now but I highly recommend you combine these approaches to figuring out your target audience to give you a better and more accurate idea of who they really are.

And as you get more and more info over time, you can refine your understanding and make more targeted content or market with more precision, however you’re doing it.

So that’s target audience.

What about your selling point or points? And we’re talking about brand strategy here.

Selling point(s).

It’s an easy question for some and a super difficult one for others: How do people derive value from you and your music, specifically?

Doing the target audience exercises—specifically the social stalking—is going to help you with you this, because you’ll see how different types of people get value from different things.

And that might do it for you; maybe the answer is simple.

Maybe you make nostalgic music, you just lean into that as a content strategy and it works without you ever having to figure out anything else about how you’re so special.

Maybe it’s easy for people to connect to your personal style or taste or personality, and you stand out to people enough just by showing up and doing your thing.

But you might also have to go beyond that, and ask not only how people get value from your kind of thing (like nostalgic music), but also “why am I worth paying attention to over all the other artists in my scene?”

I find it hard to talk about this because everyone is so different.

Some people have an intuitive understanding of how they stand out from others and so they can pull it off without overthinking it.

Or some people just naturally get a response when they show up in front of people, and they also don’t have to stress about this.

But there are other artists who don’t know how to highlight their strengths and unique qualities, both in terms of the music and them as people, and it keeps them stuck.

So if you’re one of these artists, you’ve gotta get real with yourself and ask ‘why me? Really, why me?’

This can be a bit painful because you might not be able to come up with anything right away, and you can start feeling like maybe you’re not all that special.

And just to be fully real: There’s a chance that what you do and what you’re putting out just isn’t really that stand—out or appealing to others right now.

It might be that your music isn’t all that unique (at least not in an obvious way that people understand) and it might be that there’s nothing people can really grab onto in terms of personality or presence.

We should all be willing to accept that maybe the little attention we’re currently getting is reasonable considering the game we’re playing.

I think it’s important not to shut that out and delude ourselves into thinking we deserve tons and tons of attention just because we show up.

But—and this is a big but—I’d say that the majority of creatives I talk to who aren’t getting what they want out of their marketing, just don’t know how to communicate their value and uniqueness, and that’s in no small part why they’re so disappointed with their results.

Because you and your art are unique.

You do have value, and your creative contribution to the world does matter.

Even if it’s in a small way, it can help shape people’s understanding of the world, and it could make their lives significantly better in ways you wouldn’t even think of.

Your uniqueness and value can ‘do well’ in a marketing way.

In most cases, you’ve just gotta get a bit clearer on what specifically stands out about you and your stuff in a way that translates to marketing… and then practise executing that.

It’s most likely accessible to you—but it’s just hard.

It can also be difficult to ‘teach’ this right up to the point where your brand or artist identity strategy is fully realised and bringing you exceptional results.

I find a lot of the time that, to some extent, intuition is important here.

There’s really great work you can do to guide you towards figuring out how to stand out and getting a really solid strategy in place, and that’s the first thing I take you through in the course, in the branding / artist identity section.

But I think it’s near impossible to really make a mark in any sustainable way if you can’t take that info and then somewhat intuitively mould it to work properly for you over time.

The artists I’ve worked on brand strategy with who have been able to successfully turn that into actual content that works are artists who—after doing the initial work and arriving at a good place—took it into their own hands and experimented a lot and continued to learn about themselves.

So assuming you’re one of these people who’s willing to do that, and you need to figure out your selling point or points… what steps can you take to do that?

The way I go about it is by looking at all the major ways someone can connect with or be valuable to others (things that will typically make up a good brand strategy)…

…then going through each to either find some stuff that jumps out for you, or just maximise the appeal of each of them to paint you in an accurate but intentional and appealing light.

Either is a good strategy in my opinion.

So some things that can highlight your uniqueness are:

• Your music, of course.
• Your personality; this can come out in lots of different ways, not just you getting in people’s faces on camera.
• Thing like your values—what you care about, how you see the world.
• The way you look and/or your aesthetic preferences.
• Your experiences and personal story.
• And really anything that you would consider a noteworthy part of who you are.

You can go through these individually and try to identify strengths of yours in each section:

• Are there things about your music that stand out?
• Or your personality?
• Or values? And so on.

To help myself and artists with this process, I have a bunch of exercises and questions to go through.

But if you’re doing this by yourself, I would start by just looking at each section (music, personality, values, etc) and asking yourself some questions about different parts of each.

Eg. What are the different parts of your music that are worth exploring?

Your vocals, are they unique? How?

What about your production style, or your lyrical themes?

Hopefully you can see where I’m going with this.

And you can do this for everything I mentioned above.

You might find there’s great stuff in all of the sections, or you might find that your clear selling point is a unique feature of your music that you can highlight in your content, and maybe certain parts of your personality you can accentuate.

As an example, it took me a while to figure out that the part of me that loves to encourage people and try to help them feel expansive was a major selling point for my specific audience.

And I know that doesn’t sound very unique, but I tried to make it more unique by combining other parts of me so the experience was different to what you get from others.

That’s what I’m going for anyway, and that’s only one part of my strategy—but it’s an important part.

And this might be how you go about it too.

You might end up creating a great strategy for standing out by combining multiple strengths of yours instead of looking for your ‘one thing’ that’s different from everyone else—because maybe that’s not how it works for you.

There are also specific differentiation strategies you can use too, things like:

• Going up against a ‘competitor’—you analyse other artists’ strategies and look for gaps they haven’t filled. If filling that gap would make sense for you and be desirable to an audience it’s a great move.
• You can also get super niche—super specific about what you do and who your audience is. This is not for everyone and it’s definitely not something you have to do, but for some it’s the perfect move.
• One thing I love to think about is being the “something—est”: the loudest, weirdest, biggest, first, nicest, etc. That’s a fun exercise to do and it can force you to find strong personality traits in yourself, which is super beneficial.
• There’s other stuff too, like being shocking or controversial, aligning yourself with certain words or feelings, and that kind of thing.

So I’ll leave this here because there’s plenty there to get you started.

But as a kind of TL;DR for this bit:

It’s important you understand your target audience and why you’re worth paying attention to.

This might be easy for you to figure out, but not necessarily, and if you’re not getting the results you want it’s worth going deep into this stuff to try and figure it out.

As a starting point for defining your target audience, you want to try things like:

• Creating a fan profile, but not relying only on that.
• Also stalking similar artists’ fans.
• And looking at analytics, insights, and Spotify data.

And to help you come up with a strategy to stand out—to define your selling point or points:

Go through the individual elements of a good brand strategy and see if you can pull out some gold by asking yourself a bunch of questions and giving honest (and sometimes painful) answers.

This is something not nearly enough musicians do properly.

And like I said before, it can potentially cost you a lot of wasted time and effort.

So if you’ve never done this and you’re struggling, now’s the time to give it a proper go.

Ok, let’s move on.

Mistake #5: Uninformed overanalysing.

Ok, the final mistake we’ll talk about today we’ll call “uninformed overanalysing”.

This just means overthinking and drawing conclusions about your marketing efforts without knowing much—or anything—about the things you’re doing.

There are multiple ways I see this happen with musicians:

One is they overanalyse the performance of individual social media posts at the wrong time.

They get fixated on why this specific post got ‘x’ views and this other one didn’t, and they spend a lot of time and energy on trying to understand it.

This can also apply to things like running ads, where an artist might overanalyse the targeting options, the creative, or the initial results—but we’re mostly going to be focusing on social media for this last bit.

Another way is overthinking marketing material before they’ve even tested it when they have next to no knowledge of what’s likely or not likely to work.

They constantly ask themselves (or me sometimes) “how can I improve this? how can I make this perform better?”

And those aren’t bad questions… you’ve just gotta know when to ask them.

And another way I see this happen is musicians making assumptions based on results when they don’t have much—or any—information on what those results mean because they don’t understand the context.

A simple and common example of this would be your post getting low views and assuming people hate it.

These are all massive and in my coaching I probably spend like 50+% of my time trying to help artists understand why overanalysing in these situations isn’t helping.

Even if you don’t think you do this, I recommend you stick around anyway, because you might realise that you do do this—or you might still get some context that will help your marketing in some way.

So just like most things, there are two sides to this.

It’s good to pay attention to stuff.

Something I basically live by is “do stuff, pay attention to what happens, learn from it and make adjustments based on what you learn.”

And at the risk of sounding like I’m going against my own point here, I’d say a lot of musicians could pay much more attention to what they’re doing in general when it comes to marketing.

The problem of blindly posting or pouring time or money or energy into something without ever learning from it is just as big as paying attention to the wrong stuff at the wrong time.

But it’s important to know when to do this.

This is not a small thing.

When you zoom in and focus on details vs when you zoom out and look at the big picture can have a huge impact on not only how you approach marketing, but also the outcomes you get from it.

So if you want to understand how to make better decisions about your own marketing, we first need to make sure we’re on the same page about something.

And let’s keep it social media related for the rest of this section, because this is where I think it’s most relevant for most artists:

Social media is extremely unreliable and unpredictable.

It is not so simple as you post something and if it’s good it’ll do well.

It is not, by default, the better the post, the better it’ll perform.

That’s part of it for sure, but if you’re operating on social media under the assumption that any result you get is determined purely by how good or bad the thing you put out is, or what people think of it…

…you’re missing context, and you’re most likely going to end up in a spiral of overthinking and pulling your hair out.

You might have heard people talk about replacing the word algorithm with audience, or people.

The idea with this is that instead of you trying to please the algorithm so you can grow your audience, you want to focus on pleasing people.

Because ultimately the way the algorithm behaves for you is based on how people respond to what you put out.

This is generally fantastic advice. Definitely listen to it.

But you have to understand that that’s not the whole picture.

And it’s especially important to know this when you’re in the early stages of building your presence (or if you’ve been stuck for ages in roughly the same place).

Sometimes things just don’t work how they “should”.

Sometimes posts that get heaps of engagement early on and are showing signs of blowing up, just stop. They just hit a wall and stop performing.

Sometimes these platforms seem to boost certain content formats or features and pull other things back.

Sometimes you’ll post something and it’ll get a million views, and when you repost it two months later it’ll get 1000.

Sometimes a terrible video will get 10,000 views for no apparent reason, and a really awesome video will get 100 when you usually get 5000.

Sometimes the performance of posts is heavily affected by who’s posting it, how relevant it is, or any number of other things.

This inconsistency is a built—in part of social media. Massive fluctuations in views and engagement are normal.

Radically different results from artist to artist is normal. So normal.

Things are not always what they seem.

On social media, things being all over the place is the standard.

You have to understand this.

It will save you so much time and energy and effort.

And on top of this, you’ve also got to factor in the people—the consumers on social media.

You have no idea who most of the people seeing your stuff are.

You can’t see them.

• You have no idea what they’re doing at any given moment
• Or whether or not they’re paying attention when they scroll onto your post
• Or if they’re even seeing your stuff,
• Or what mood they’re in
• Or what their personal beliefs or views are on specific topics
• Or their social media literacy
• Or their general behaviour on social media, or anything.

You know next to nothing about them, and all of the things I just mentioned plus a whole lot more can radically impact the results you get on social media.

So if you’re someone who’s been caught up thinking about social media in this black and white way (like “high views good, low views bad”)…

…you need to know that you’re missing a ton of information that will help you make better decisions about what to do with your marketing.

Ok, so now that you understand that this game you’re playing has what’s essentially a built—in wildcard component where it will just constantly throw you curveballs, what does that actually mean for how you approach your marketing as a musician?

Let’s go through each of the three common ways musicians overanalyse that I mentioned before to provide more context.

Analysing individual posts too early on.

Let’s say you’ve just started on social media and you’ve put 5—10 posts out.

Or let’s say you’ve just started showing up consistently; you’ve been on it for a while but you’re only starting to get serious about it now.

So you’re looking at the 5—10 posts you’ve put out and the results either aren’t great, or you’ve got these really weird fluctuations in views.

One post has 1000 views and another one (which is basically identical) has 200.

Or maybe none of them have exceeded some low amount of views.

What now? How do you improve? Where did you go wrong?

What do you do with this information?

You don’t do anything. Not yet.

If you’ve only put out 5—10 posts, unless one of them has done really well and there’s clear evidence of it being a highly appealing post, and you’re getting tons of comments and followers and likes and whatever…

…you do nothing.

At least in terms of getting all analytical.

Until you have, I’d say a months’ worth of stuff out, you don’t really have reliable information.

It’s simply not worth getting all analytical about the posts because you just don’t have enough info to be able to find patterns that mean anything.

Putting out a couple of things on social media and then getting overly fixated on why they did or didn’t do well is basically a waste of time.

All it will do is lead you down the path of making tweaks you don’t even need to make, and focusing on details that don’t even matter.

Now of course you could put something out and it does really well and you can say “oh ok, this is clearly a good move” without really needing any more information.

In the case of a viral or even semi viral post, it’s worth looking at it in more detail.

But if you’re spending hours trying to understand why one video got 200 views and the other got 300, you will never find the answer and you’ll just end up getting stuck.

Those extra 100 views mean next to nothing in this context, and are mostly likely due to general social media inconsistency more than anything else.

So this is a big takeaway: If you don’t have enough information to look for clear patterns, don’t waste your time trying to overanalyse.

To some extent, success on social media is a volume game.

Quality matters a ton too, of course, but until you’ve been going strong for like a month all I would do is get more stuff out and keep experimenting.

That’s the simple, and I think right answer.

Plus you might find that a lot of your questions get answered along the way anyway.

Once you’ve got more info, then you can go in a bit deeper and try to figure out what’s helping you move forward more effectively, then make adjustments.

As an example…

I’ve got an artist in the course who’s been doing an amazing job of consistently getting herself out there.

She has plenty of good data because she’s posted so much, she’s had some great results from some of her stuff, and so she’s been able to recognise clear patterns to help her get better results in future.

In this case, she’s been doing a lot of those text—heavy introduction style posts that are focused on discovery.

This means that when strangers come across them, they’re super clear on the fact that they’ve “stumbled on an artist who’s from x and makes x kind of music and is into x things”.

These are posts designed for people who don’t yet know her, not people who already know and love her.

So because she’s been so consistent with this, she’s been able to identify certain things that help her posts perform better.

She’s found that if she references certain things in the text, she’s more likely to see increased engagement.

And what’s cool about this is that when she listed the things that are present in her higher performing posts, we were also able to make semi—educated guesses about the psychological impact of saying certain things, and then apply those ideas to other posts.

For example, things like novelty, appealing to her audience’s ‘support the underdog’ attitude and identity, and a few other things have helped this artist make better decisions about what she puts in her videos.

This is still an ongoing experiment; she’s still out there figuring stuff out.

But she’s making great progress so far, and if she continues to do this over time, she’ll only get more and more clued on to what works well and what doesn’t, and she can maximise the results she gets from her efforts.

So diving into details can be great and super useful… but don’t do it until you’ve got enough info to make it worth your time and energy.

Until you’ve been consistent for at least a month, or you’ve put out a lot of stuff in a shorter time, stop overthinking.

Stop analysing post performance and going around in circles over trivial differences in views or engagement. It’s a waste of your time, and your time is worth something 🙂

Overanalysing before things are even out there.

On overanalysing marketing material before you’ve even put it out there: Also a waste of time.

You’re not in a situation where you have to spend thousands of dollars on some high production music video, and it’s super important that you make good creative decisions or else you’ll miss your chance to get it right.

(If you are in that situation as a small artist, I would reconsider spending your money like that it unless it’s really something you want to do).

But my point here is that with social media, you get a bunch of chances to get things right.

You don’t need to spend so much energy trying to get these materials perfect before they go out; you can just get them out and then see what happens.

Then once you’ve got feedback on them, you can make smart decisions about what changes to make.

I get artists messaging me about whether or not these videos they’ve made are good enough, or what they can do to improve them before they’ve posted them.

They’re asking “will this work? Like, will this get people interested in me?”

But beyond the obvious stuff (some of which I’ll talk about in a moment), I have no idea.

No one does.

Who knows how people will respond? Depends on their tastes and a bunch of other stuff.

I like giving feedback where I can, and I encourage it when I’m working with someone.

But there’s only so far it can go before the answer is “just get it out there and see what happens”.

And I know heaps of artists who do this in private with themselves too; they’ll spend way too much time and energy overthinking posts that haven’t seen the light of day, then making all kinds of assumptions about them:

• Whether or not people will like them
• Maybe the hook isn’t worded perfectly
• Or they’re fretting over some small detail that most likely won’t matter at all.

You can afford to make plenty of mistakes on social media, and the fastest way you’ll learn what actually works for you is by putting a ton of stuff out there and watching what happens.

I’d say in most cases, you’ll find that like 80% of the stuff you were unsure about either goes completely unnoticed or makes no noticeable difference to the performance of the posts.

That’s why it’s so great to start early and just get things out there.

Your lowest effort stuff might do better than anything else, and then you’ve just saved yourself hours and hours each week on fancy editing that you thought you needed but actually didn’t.

I’m not suggesting you try and make stuff that sucks: You want it to be good, and to accurately represent you and your messaging and everything.

I’m just saying stop overthinking and stop trying to guess exactly what people will love, because you just don’t know, and you won’t until you put it out there.

But to give you an example of feedback I could and often do give when artists send me posts they haven’t put out yet, it would be really simple and broad stuff, like for one:

Making sure it’s really obvious—immediately obvious—what the posts are about, and this is especially important if you’re trying to get new people to discover you.

A specific example of this which I see all the time is a very basic, plain video of a musician with their instrument, and there’s no:

• Text, or
• Obvious opening line, or
• Anything that tells people specifically what they’re about to watch other than “oh this person is obviously a musician”.

And you might think “well if people are interested in music won’t it be obvious and won’t they stop for the post?” which is very fair.

And sometimes, yes—depending.

But what I’ve found happens a lot is people will only really stop in these situations where there’s no other context if they have a really good reason.

For example, something (or someone) really nice to look at, or if the musician can impress them in the first few seconds.

Basically, people need a reason upfront to stick around and pay attention.

And because there are millions of musicians on social media who show up in videos with an instrument, you need something to grab them.

This is where I’d typically recommend you add some kind of text to act as a hook.

It doesn’t even have to be “hooky” necessarily—sometimes it’s more about clarity.

Depends on the situation, but sometimes all you need is some basic text that would tell a stranger “oh this post is an original song from this artist” or something.

Maybe it’s even just the lyrics coming up in text on the screen.

Again depends, but that’s one example.

Another example of this would be if you’re doing a video where you’re talking to the camera and it takes you like 15 seconds to get to the point.

You’ll need to give people an immediate reason to stay around for that, which again you could do with text, or you quickly say something like “I’m going to tell you why x” at the start.

These things won’t magically turn an average video into a good one, but they may increase the likelihood people will give it a chance.

Another common bit of feedback I’ll give to artists is to cut fluff from their videos, which is needed in a lot of cases.

You don’t have to be ruthless with edits and make it all ridiculously short and snappy (although you can and it’s not the worst idea)…

…but if you can get the point of the video across in 30 seconds and you’ve got an extra minute and a half of you going off on a tangent, just cut all that out.

That kind of thing is ok in long form stuff.

But on social media, every second counts.

If you can make a 3 minute video for social media that’s super engaging—go for it.

But if only a quarter of it is actually interesting, cut the rest.

And just to give one more example (which is not a hard and fast rule at all but it just seems to help):

If you’re using hooks, like POV things, or anything written in that kind of style, one thing I’ll often suggest is to make sure the very first part of that hook is about the person watching.

So let’s say you’ve got a couple of lines of text like “Life is magical, embrace it. This song is for you if you need a reminder to live your best life.”

That’s not amazing anyway you spin it, but good for the sake of example.

What I would do is put that second line first so it prioritises calling out to the person watching: “This song is for you if… ”.

Then, “life is magical, embrace it” — if you don’t want to cut that second bit completely.

This is a small thing and it might sound kind of stupid, but it just makes it a little more likely that people will more quickly understand “oh this is for me”…

…and hopefully reduce the chances they’ll scroll off it right away.

You could apply that kind of thinking to other things as well, so it’s not a totally useless example.

So this is what I mean: This is broad feedback that we can safely assume is going to help, right?

Beyond this, as long as the idea is great and the video looks and sounds great, your best next move is to just get it out there and see how people respond.

Again, if you try too hard to guess what people will love, you will most likely make less progress than if you just actually find out.

Making assumptions without understanding context.

And the last thing I’ll mention about this mistake #5 is musicians making assumptions about outcomes or things that happen on social media without understanding the context.

I’ll try not to drag this out because I don’t want to be too repetitive, but here I’m talking about things like:

• “This person followed me and then a day later they unfollowed me, what the hell? Am I doing something wrong?”
• Or, “why does ‘x’ thing work for them but not me? I’m doing exactly the same thing, it should be working.”
• Or maybe “I’ve been consistent like everyone says but it’s not working—I must be shadowbanned or the game is rigged” or something.

All these things only seem weird or wrong because you don’t understand the context in which you’re experiencing them.

I think this is another huge reason why so many musicians don’t get where they want with social media.

If you’re looking at people’s behaviour on social media in the same you look at people’s behaviour in real life, you’re basically going to think everyone on social media is a psychopath.

They’ll say and do things to you that wouldn’t happen in real life, and you’ll feel like the world is upside down.

Some people are just weird on social media.

They have their own agenda, or they don’t see people as real people and so they treat you weird.

Or maybe they followed you and then unfollowed you because their Instagram glitched out.

Or maybe they’re just weird.

Again, you can’t see them—you don’t know.

But you need to understand that the way people act on social media is not the same as real life.

And this includes artists.

It is crazy to me that smaller artists will talk to me about how defeated they’re feeling by social media and how they’re struggling to build a fan base…

…but when they post their music and someone leaves a genuine comment talking about how they love it, the artist just ignores it.

They don’t even respond.

That is just insane to me.

Imagine that in real life—you’re showing someone your music and the other person is like “ah this is so cool, I love this!” and you just say nothing.

You don’t even acknowledge that they said anything to you.

People are weird. It is important you understand context here.

Weird stuff happens on social media.

You lose followers. I lose thousands of followers each month.

That is normal.

It’s the same with things hate comments.

People are keyboard warriors; they’re much more likely to troll you or be extra harsh online because they don’t have to suffer any real consequences, and because they’re less likely to see you as a real person.

It’s horrible, but how it is.

You’ve gotta understand this when you’re showing up.

And again, with you doing the same thing as someone else and not getting the same result, it’s context.

We’ve talked about this already, but assuming all you can see from another artist is all that’s going on is not going to serve you.

Putting aside the high likelihood that you—just like most of us, including me—aren’t as good or appealing as we think we are in a social media setting, and that’s why things aren’t working…

…it’s probably also because you’re missing huge pieces of the puzzle.

Just because we think we know how something works doesn’t mean we do.

We usually can’t see a lot of the answers until we get a lot more experience.

I remember talking to a musician on social media a while ago about performance videos.

I’d sent him a few examples of things that were doing well at the time and his response was like “I don’t see what the big deal is, they’re just playing their songs”.

Well on the one hand, yeah, they are just doing that—and it’s a good simple strategy.

But on the other hand, there was stuff in those videos he couldn’t see that were helping them perform better: things like the aesthetic, the colours, the way it was shot, the angle, and the messaging.

Once you’ve been on social media for a while and you’ve been paying attention, you realise that all the weird, crazy behaviour and inconsistencies are just a built—in part of the social media experience.

They’re not signs that you’re super messed up or things are horribly wrong.

And you start to see things that were in front of you the whole time but that you just couldn’t see.

A final thing on this is if you’ve been consistent like everyone says but you’re not seeing any real progress:

Again, this is probably because you’re expecting something to work a certain way because that’s how you understand it’s supposed to work… but that’s not how it works for you in this context.

I know people don’t like to hear this, but you’re probably not shadowbanned—this game is just hard and it’s hard to get people interested in you over millions of others.

Again, context.

I’ve already mentioned this, but if all you’re doing is showing up and posting content, that does not guarantee anything, and it’s highly likely you need a more robust growth system to make progress.

Ok, so to recap this mistake #5 very quickly:

Don’t waste time overanalysing individual posts and results yet.

If you haven’t already been putting a ton of stuff out consistently, do that first, try to pay attention, and there’s a very good chance your questions will get answered anyway.

If they don’t, once you’ve got a bunch of stuff out, then you can dive into the details and start looking for patterns.

Don’t waste time overanalysing marketing materials that you haven’t put out yet; you’ll learn what’s good and what’s not much faster by just putting stuff out there and seeing how it works in the field.

And don’t overanalyse behaviour or inconsistencies or any weird stuff that happens on social media—that’s just part of the deal.

You also don’t want to make too many assumptions about why things aren’t working, because you most likely just need more information.

As another reminder, I have plenty of information on all the important stuff. There’s free stuff and paid stuff you can dive into if interested.

Ok, let’s wrap this up. A very quick overview of the first big five mistakes:

#1: Trying to fill a hole that doesn’t exist—basically, trying to solve problems you don’t actually have.

#2: Focusing too much on either the system side of marketing or the creative side of marketing without giving enough love to the other side.

#3: The “But They Did It This Way” fixation. Just because they did it x way—or you think they did—doesn’t mean it’ll work for you.

#4: Not understanding your audience or your selling point, super important.

#5: Uninformed overanalysing. Basically overthinking when you don’t need to and making assumptions based on limited information, which sends you down the wrong path most of the time.

I hope this was helpful, insightful, thought—provoking, or at least semi—enjoyable to read.

I also hope you’ll now go and do something with this information, not just let it disappear into the back of your mind and stay stuck.

If you’d like to get ahead this year, I hope you’ll join me in this — it’s opening up again in the next couple of weeks 🙂

Ok, let’s call it. Come back next week for part 2 of this, the next 5 mistakes.

All the love, you’ve got this, and talk soon.

Alex