I know that’s a crazy title but the crazy part is you really could market and promote your music while you’re sleeping. To make a short story short, all musicians, especially indie musicians need to be promoting their music 24/7. You’re only one person (or group) and you only have so many hours in a day to dedicate to marketing and promoting yourself. I know the deal. Trust me, I know how it is. You also might not have enough money to hire someone to market your music for you. Again, I know how it is. There are some free tools and resources online that you can use that will help you leverage your time. When set up right, these tools and resources will market and promote your music for you while you’re off doing something else. Here they are…

• Gremln – This will help you maintain all of your social network accounts. Gremln helps you keep track of all of your accounts. It allows you to schedule posts/tweets, keep an eye on your online reputation in regards to the content you post, and take a look at the response(s) to your content. You can add your Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts and you can add as many accounts as you would like depending on how many you have. There’s a free plan and there are paid plans. If you’re solo and just starting off, then the free plan is fine. The paid plan is for musicians who don’t have a problem paying for more capabilities. The layout is very simple and easy to get used to. TweetDeck, Fanbridge, and Hootesuite all have the same capabilities as Gremln. They all have a free plan and a paid plan. These tools are VERY helpful because you can set up automated posts on any day, week, or month that you want and have your automated posts post as many times as you want. Once these automated posts are set up and in place, you won’t have to manually post things about your music anymore. Whether it has something to do with new music, a new album, an upcoming show, an upcoming tour, or anything else involving your music, these things will be posted to your social network accounts without you having to keep doing it repeatedly yourself.

• FanBridge – This is a tool that will help you stay connected with your fans while attracting new ones.  FanBridge is well-known for its email and mobile fan-list management services. You can set up sign-up forms to put on your website or your Facebook and Myspace account. Once the sign-up forms are set up on your websites, this will make it easy for your fans to sign up for your mailing list so they can receive news and updates from you.  You can set up scheduled emails to be sent to your fans on autopilot also.  FanBridge also has automated post capabilities like Gremln, TweetDeck, and Hootesuite.  There is a free plan and a paid plan.  The free plan gives you basic capabilities and is limited as far as how many messages you can send, but the paid plans give you more options and allows you to do much more.  Another great mailing list tool is Aweber; they’re one of the top email marketing and mailing list tools online, but FanBridge is more tailor-made for musicians and bands.

• WordPress Plugins that bring more traffic to your website through social networks – These plugins are very important to have if you have your own website, which you should have, especially if you’re a musician or band who wants to be taken seriously.  WordPress plugins like Digg Digg, Socialize, ShareThis, AddThis, Sharebar, and Twitter Follow button and Facebook Subscribe button are plugins that make your posts/blogs on WordPress to easy for your fans to repost and share on their own social networks for their friends and family to see.  Once these plugins are installed, your posts/blogs will have buttons placed on them for your fans to see.  This is a good thing because with these plugins in place, anything in regards to your music will be exposed to a broader audience once your fans click on them.  These plugins allow your fans/readers to leverage your time for you by reposting and sharing your news, updates, music, etc.  This not only brings more traffic to your website but it creates great potential to gain new fans/readers.

• OnlyWire – This is another tool that allows you to update all of your social networks all in one spot.  This is a little bit different from the rest because if you download an OnlyWire for WordPress plugin and install it on your WordPress website, your blog posts will automatically be sent to OnlyWire and OnlyWire will be in a position to post all of your posts on all of your social network sites.  This is an invaluable tool because once you post your blog up for your fans/readers to see, it will also be promoted on all of your social networks simultaneously.