Building a fanbase from niche markets - part 2

This is a pretty dry and intense series on Music Dish, but it's worth persevering with as the message is excellent.

We looked at part 1 here, and now the author, Anne Freeman, has moved on to part 2.

I'm not going to add much as you need to read her piece, but I think she may lead you into confusion since she relates the art of understanding a niche to something outside of music and doesn't tie the two things together that well. (Tommy Silverman ties them together superbly in point 1 of this piece, so read that as well!).

That said, what she (and Tommy) is saying is very important and I'm with Tommy in thinking that almost every artist breaks out from a niche. If that is so, you need to begin in a niche and understand how to leverage from there.

Welcome back to the "How to Build a Fan Base from Niche Markets" series of articles. The goal of this series is to give indie artists some practical strategies to develop an effective niche-marketing plan for their music. In the previous article, we discussed how artists typically developed their fan base - or not. We also learned about marketing, and looked at what I called "Linear Progressions" that show the steps that indie artists typically take when attempting to build a fan base. If you have not read Part 1 of this series, you can do so by clicking on the following link:

We ended Part 1 with the following linear progression based upon the definition of marketing found in Part 1:

Linear Progression: Building Your Fan Base 301 (Marketing)
(1) Identify a potential audience for your music

(2) Design a marketing strategy to develop audience interest in your music

(3) Build a relationship with that audience

(4) Implement strategies that create value for that audience and to turn them into sales

(5) Make your music available to those fans in every possible way

(6)Implement strategies to keep those fans and expand your fan base

Read Part 2 of Niche Marketing here.