How to Promote Unsigned Band|Indie Band Promotion Tips

1. The very first thing you have to do with your band is publish it everywhere online to help your music spread virally in the long run. Set up your band's profiles on Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, Reverbnation.
Once you have set up the profiles, make sure you link them to each other (place Twitter, Myspace, Blogger, Reverbnation widgets on your Facebook page, and vice versa). You will see soon how it helps you when you get visits to all of the profiles by advertising just one or two of them.

2. If you have some promotional money, create a website under your own domain, which is the best place to advertise yourself. It usually costs to get website artists who would make a nicely looking website, but if you have friends dealing with website development, you can always ask them if they would be interested; you can always offer your friends a barter deal if you have no money to pay them.

3. Distribute your first recording(s) for free via internet. Offer some of your songs to be downloaded for free on all the profiles/forums you are registered at. Use mp3 format with medium quality bitrate (like 128-192 kbps), with the most important info about your band encoded in the file, and mention that listeners wishing to support the band can purchase better quality mp3, wav files from online music store (by the way, Reverbnation offers artists a free store to sell music and other merchandise). The idea of distributing your music for free may look frustrating in the beginning, but it is the best way to get people to know you, simply because they like to get free stuff. New listeners are more likely to remember you for giving them a couple of free songs than for trying to sell them everything you have ever recorded.

4. Participate in online music forums, both local and international ones, by discussing things related to your genre of music. Do not forget to link to your band's pages in your forum signature. As your reputation grows on a forum, people become more interested in you and check your posts and links more eagerly.

5. Write articles about the style of music your band belongs to, post them on various article directories and make sure you link to your band's website or social network profile. Some article directories may not allow links in their articles, but naming your band together with other similar bands is always a good promotion if your article shows up in search engines. Writing articles may seem to be a difficult job, but it really helps your band's name to go viral all over the internet in the long run.

6. If you do not have any money to make your first music video (some music videos can be done cheap but still there is work to do if you want your video to look cool) then you can always ask a friend or a fan to record your performances and post them on Vimeo or Youtube. By the way, they both allow users to post links in video description field, which is another great way to start selling your music.

Make business cards for your band with nice logo and contact information on them. Give them away to anywone who enquires about your music. After awhile there will be thousands of people walking upon this Earth with your business card in their wallets :-)
Collect some little money to produce a few dozen cheap promotional copies of you records and just like with mp3, give them away for free to people who might be helpful in the future. It is also a good idea to give them away to several fans as free prizes during concerts. Also, send some of them to your local radio stations; some of them may like your music and will want to broadcast it or maybe even invite you to an interview... Well, once you have the CDs in your hands, think creatively and you will come up with lots of similar ways to distribute them wisely.
If you are just starting out, then consider an option of being your own street team - do not just rely on somebody else's advertisements, but go out into the streets with a few dozen advertisements of your band's performance in your town, and put them anywhere you think they should be - on posts in a public area, beside bars, entertainment clubs, shopping centers etc. However, do not over do it: mind the law by putting your flyers in the streets and in public places.
Even if you are not an active bar-goer, it is nevertheless a good idea to make a list of bars with live music that could fit your style; start going there and making friends with the owners and performing artists. Some day when they become open enough you can introduce your band to them and ask for performance.

Placing advertisements on vehicles has become one of the major advertisement means in any industry nowadays. There are lots of services that offer sticky car graphics for reasonable prices: just stick them to your car's rear window, bumper or wherever you want and drive around showing the logo and contact details/ web address of your band to everybody. People are curious even when busy driving, so your logo will be noticed in traffic jams, in the streets, at parking lots, anywhere...and the more attractive your logo or slogan is, the more chances you have.