NEW FEATURE: LM Growth Update

[peter]

As we’re a new community that only recently came out of beta, we have a clear mission ahead of us, to grow our community.

I thought I’d start providing everyone with insights into our community so you know how we’re doing and have ideas for helping us grow. Feel free to ask any questions that come to mind or provide feedback. This community is about all of us.

OUR MEMBERS’ AVERAGE 13 VISITS PER MONTH
Now this stat is mostly from prior to our email service being operational. I would expect that next month may be even higher.

WE’RE GEOGRAPHICALLY DIVERSE

We’re spread out all over the world: 36% US, 5.4% UK, 4.7% Germany, 3.6% Japan, 49.8% Elsewhere

WE’RE HIGHLY ENGAGED 
Our direct visitors — around 73% of our total visitors — are very highly engaged. The avg. lenth of a visit has ranged from 4 min. and 2 seconds to nearly 5 minutes for 2025.

THE MOST POPULAR PAGES
Unsurprisingly, the most popular pages, consistently the top 4 to 5 most popular pages on the site are all deal forum pages.   The most popular non-deal page Is consistently the free Kontakt instruments list.

WE’RE GROWING, BUT SLOWLY
We are seeing growth, but it’s slow. A community like this depends on its members to tell others in order to grow. There’s no other path that will get us to decent growth. Growth leads us to a more vibrant community. More activity, more knowledge, more resources for everyone. It also attracts more developers to participate and help our community. It also is necessary to hit the goal of this site being able to support its costs. More members, means a greater ability to find ways to fund this site so that it won’t always be dependent on my funding it.

QUICK SUGGESTIONS ON HOW YOU CAN HELP THE COMMUNITY GROW

• Talk about the free Kontakt and other sample library lists.
• Talk about – Talk about how the community is really strong about not allowing toxic posts.
• Talk about how the community doesn’t censor honest, civil reporting of good and bad opinions and experiences with developers; how you can give honest opinions and share your experience without having to worry about being censored or bad behavior from others.
• Talk about how friendly and helpful the community is- Talk about the great deals and freebies you’ve found at LM- Talk about the excitement of a non-developer owned, musician/producer-centric community that advocates for musicians and producers, and doesn’t permit shilling or developers sabotaging other developers or members attacking other members

LinkedMusicians Founder. Your friend who keeps the beat.

Check out my music. 

51

[peter]

Another thing everyone can do to help the site grow in addition to telling others is POSTING! Yes, commenting, even commenting in the deals forum that you own a plugin or sample library and giving some brief thoughts — positive or negative about it based on your experience. Or just weighing in to say you think something seems cool, it really helps make the site look more lively. Right now, a challenge we face is that while people are returning very regularly, they’re not posting. So while several of us are posting deals, a very low percentage of the folks who pop in are commenting. I’m not looking at the stats right now, but it’s an easy guess to say that more than 90% of the registered visitors to the site are NOT commenting.

So we want to hear from you!!! Your voice matters. It makes the site more enjoyable, more valuable, and it also conveys to people considering whether or not to join what the character of our community is — and that it’s not just a handle of people posting.

I welcome a discussion on making the site more engaging. If there are things you would like — please share it in this thread. Would you like more fun and engaging polls? Would you like more content of some type beyond deals? Let’s hear it. We have the technology, we have built it (“Six Million Dollar Man,” anybody??? That’s a paraphrase, of course). I know that we have a great group of people. I realize that surroundings are different than the place most of us came from. So, as the host of the party, I am happy to be the first on what you guys want. Just let me know — and don’t be shy about expressing your thoughts. I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t value them.

– Peter

LinkedMusicians Founder. Your friend who keeps the beat.

Check out my music. 

3

[peter]

LINKEDMUSICIANS SEARCH RANKINGS AND AI BRAND MENTIONS AND HOW YOU CAN HELP THEM IMPROVE. 

The two extensive Cakewalk Forums threads I created with curated lists of free sample libraries that I started in 2022 achieved top 5 rankings at Google for US searches for free sample libraries, free sample instruments, free kontakt libraries, free kontakt instruments and similar searches (I removed both lists from Cakewalk Forums before my departure to move them to this site). But it can easily take a couple of years before Google bothers to crawl and index a new website, especially if Google thinks the site isn’t very unique. I really didn’t have high hopes that Google would rank this site very high during its first year. I was expected it to take as long as 2, or even 3 years before the site really started to rank well. Unfortunately, there’s really no easy way to let Google know that you’re the same guy who created top rated content one another site unless it knows you as the exact same author, which is not really possible on a forum like Cakewalk Forum. If this site featured my writing on marketing and branding strategy under my full real name (I use my pseudonym from my musician days on this site), it would help the rankings, but as I don’t have credibility as an author on the topic of music, it wouldn’t mean more than Google can discern that I am a credible author.

So I did some things to try to single to Google that the lists on this site were done by the same guy that did them at Cakewalk Forums, and I think the message was received. The list made it to page 4 in a short time on the above-mentioned searches, and is presently on page 2. This is due to many factors, some of which include incoming links from related websites Google finds credible, and links and mentions in related social media groups and forums. Consequently, when you share links to the page in other music-related forums and sites or in social media groups on the big social media vehciles (Facebook, X, Instagram, BlueSky, etc.), it conveys to Google that this site’s content is valuable to people and the rank can rise. Now, Google has used AI and is savvy enough to recognize that people try to game the system, so any search engine optimization experts reading can tell you that there are many more factos, but those incoming links from credible, related sites really help out a great deal.

I also did some things to help LinkedMusicians get mentioned in AI, and they also turned out much better than I expected.

From my search engine ranking reports:

Keyword Position

“free kontakt libraries”
CURRENT POSITION: 11
PRIOR POSITION: 24

“free kontakt instruments”
CURRENT POSITION: 14
PRIOR POSITION: 18

*This comes from a report for the US only.

LinkedMusicians Founder. Your friend who keeps the beat.

Check out my music. 

2

[peter]

I want to be transparent about everything I do on the site. As everyone knows, we’re using affiliate links to help with the costs of the site. I also created the merch store to have branded LinkedMusicians merchandise that would be fun and help raise funds to go towards the cost of the site.  Now, I realized with the small community that we have that it wouldn’t come anywhere close to covering costs. For example, I’ve spent a few thousand on the site and the exact gross the site has made from Plugin Boutique for the entire year is £15.61 — which, of course, doesn’t come anywhere close to covering the costs of operating the site, but will likely improve as the site’s community grows. We’ll also be adding a PayPal contribution link, so our members can contribute to the cost of the site.

If anyone has any questions about any of this, don’t be afraid to ask. I want to be transparent about how all of this works.

LinkedMusicians Founder. Your friend who keeps the beat.

Check out my music. 

3

[Author]

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