Get your music professionally mastered. You can do this yourself, using mastering software, but it's a highly specialized skill that usually best left to the experts. Mastering will add expense to your promotional efforts, but in order to compete, the audio quality of your music needs to as professional as possible. Mastering will add a final sparkle and polish to your recording, making it money well spent.
Hire a graphic designer to create attractive artwork for your music release. Having a professional and eye-catching design is essential if you want your music to be taken seriously. Shoddy and amateurish artwork puts your music at a serious disadvantage, whether the CD is in a rack in a bricks-and-mortar record store or on the Web pages of an online retail catalog.
Sign up at social networking sites that cater to independent musicians. Reverbnation is one of the leading examples in the field, and signup is free (see Resources). Such sites allow you to post photos, add blog posts and gig announcements, and most importantly, they supply you with code for a simple music player that you can then upload music to. Casual visitors to the site can hear your music and are free to copy the HTML code and paste it into their own blogs and social networking pages, which is valuable cross-promotion for your music.
Create a basic website focused entirely on your music. Feature your CD artwork prominently on the home page, along with your music player of choice, which begins playing as soon as someone lands on the homepage. If Web hosting fees aren't in your budget, sign up for a free blog with Blogger or Word Press. Their templates are attractive and intuitive to use, and you can paste in the music player code on the home page template just as you would on a full website.
Search out artists in your genre and ask them to link to your website and social networking pages. Take the time to listen to their online music players and leave comments complimenting them on their music. If they reciprocate, you'll both benefit by sharing feedback on each other's music as well as sharing each other's audience.
Submit your music to online radio stations. Consult an online directory of stations to find ones in your genre (see Resources). These stations may not have the huge audiences of mainstream FM radio, but competition for airplay is less intense. These radio stations tend to focus more on niche programming, which means that listeners are searching for specialized content, increasing your chances of finding your target audience.
Upload MP3 versions of your music to a podcasting directory (see Resources). When you do this, you add your music to a library where Podcasters can obtain royalty-free music to broadcast on their shows. These shows tend to be specialized in format, and audiences vary in size, depending upon the niche, but most podcasts have their own websites and usually list the songs they play, along with a link to the artists' respective websites. There may be no royalties in this kind of airplay, but chances are that these audiences would never have been made aware of you otherwise, so consider it free exposure.
Offer free downloads of your songs to those who sign up for your website mailing list. People are more likely to give your music a chance if they're getting it for free. In return, you'll get email addresses for your mailing list, increasing your listening audience and helping you stay connected with your fans.