These days it is pretty cheap and simple to quickly get your independently produced CD published to look just like a professionally made shop bought one. There are a whole bunch of companies that will cheaply print up CDs, T-shirts, mugs, keyrings and posters amongst other items with your logo or photo on. So cheap in fact that it is possible to look upon these items as promotional items by giving them away in giveaways and gaining new listeners for the small upfront cost of the product. Let me explain this concept that some promotion companies have used for a long time now and how you can use it to get effective blog posts (adverts) about your music and ultimately new listeners and fans...

Firstly from a quick scout around the internet I can see that it is quite easy to get CD production at around the $2 mark per disk for a quality reproduction and it isn't that bad for other promotional items either, at this sort of price you could giveaway a small amount of these items in the name of promotion. So with promotional products bought that you want to give away now comes the hard work.

Now you could just giveaway these products through your official site or through your MySpace by running a competition. This unfortunately isn't going to do you much good apart from make you look generous. So next step is to think about where your future fans might be hanging out online, what sort of site and blog could they be reading? Once figured out, the next step is to email the owners of these sites and blogs and get them to post about your music. Unfortunately these bloggers aren't going to just post everything that lands in their email account and usually look over you unless you're paying or well known already. But by offering to giveaway some prizes to their readers in a giveaway, you will suddenly find that they would be more than happy to post a unique contest on their site for you as the chance of running a contest is beneficial to them in that it gives something back to the sites readers.

By doing this you can get some great free blog posts about your music on some high profile sites in your genre. Here are some more tips that I believe can help perfect this possible promotion method.

• Use a newly setup free email account to receive entries, it saves spam getting into your normal email address.
• Make sure you factor in the cost of postage, posting items around the world can get costly. If items are bulky/expensive to post make sure you limit the giveaway to a specific country.
• Send a preview track, picture and even some intro text to make it easier on the website owner to quickly and more likely to posts it up.
• Ask a entry question that involves listening to your music, for example - "What is the first word of the second verse?" or "What is the time on the player when you hear the first breakdown?". Ask anything that gets them having to listen to your music.

I believe this a method of promotion that promotion companies use that is sometimes overlooked by independent musicians. Not expensive and by choosing the right prizes, right websites and right question could prove quite beneficial. It is tried and tested method of advertising, most of the contests you see in magazines work this way to promote their products. I believe it will work for independent musicians too because 1. Lots of blog owners will jump at the chance to give something away for free to their reader with no cost to them. 2. People will enter just to win stuff and have to listen to your music to enter.

If you need to get CDs produced cheaply try this place out... Mixonic Short Run CD/DVD Duplication

If any readers try this method of promotion, do send us in how well you think it did and whether it worked or failed. I'll be trying this soon with an album release and will post the results of this as well as some other little promotion tricks I have thought of.