<br/>Trent Reznor recently wrote about <a href=”http://forum.nin.com/bb/read.php?30,767183″>what to do as a new/unkownn artist</a>. The same concepts apply to having your own business online (and even musicians should think of themselves as a business, but often don’t).

Here are my comments:

This is great advice. I’d like to take it a bit further re: specifically how to do this technically. Musicians tend to depend on 3rd party sites to do everything but they lack the control and don’t have their own ‘home base’. Many of these sites bite the dust every week.

Build your own website. I use wordpress (free), which makes it easy to make changes and you can find a nice theme or have someone tweak it for fairly cheap (post a small project on elance.com for example). You can host wordpress on hosts like godaddy and hostgator, and they provide basically 1 click installs of the software.

Get an email autoresponder service. I use getresponse.com. You put a form on your webpages to collect emails. This allows you to set up a series of automatic follow up emails (an email per week for example) or broadcast (send email whenever you want). Don’t rely on regular email as you will amass hundreds or thousands of email addresses and you want to avoid getting blocked by spam agents.

Sell digital goods – you can do this manually by using paypal (free but they take a small transaction fee) and sending people the link to the download. But over time you may want to get a shopping cart to handle payments and digital delivery. I use 1shoppingcart.com. When someone buys they also get added to an email list so I can build a ‘list of buyers’ which are much more valuable financially than freebie seekers. Your funnel is moving people from a free signup (to get your mp3 for example) then to a list of buyers, then larger upsells over time.

Sell things related to the music (or the core content that you might give away for free). I sell guitar lessons via a membership site (7 video courses with live Q&A streaming video sessions each month), downloadable courses, webcam guitar lessons and email guitar lessons. Don’t just focus on gigs and merchandise for making money.

Affiliate products – you can offer related products to your list (and get a piece of each sale), as long as they are helpful and you don’t abuse this too much. You could even test gear like guitar pedals, guitars, drums, etc and provide a link to sites like musiciansfriend/zzsounds that will give you a cut of the sale (tracked via the URL you provide to your list).

Adsense – While I’m not a huge fan of advertising, once google bought youtube and allowed me to do ‘revenue sharing’ with my videos, I now make $100 every month or two with only 32 videos (my vids have about 500,000 views at this point).

Finally, these are not very technical tasks. Much of it is simple cut and paste jobs (email form, shopping cart button, etc). You can easily outsource this to a techie for dirt cheap if you want.

My 2 cents.
Will Kriski

To set up an inexpensive website that you can easily maintain yourself, as well as building email lists, shopping carts or membership sites, please see our internet consulting services.

I’ve been doing online marketing for years now and thought I would share a few things I’ve learned along the way:

• Determine your main niche keywords – for years I just typed whatever I wanted without giving it much thought. Once I determined which keywords I wanted to dominate I made sure I had those keywords in my youtube video titles, blog posts, pages, links, etc. I quickly started to dominate those keywords. Move from general keywords to more specific ‘long tail’ keywords
• Determine why people should buy from you instead of your competition and make this clear on your web pages. I went from offering ‘guitar lessons’ to ‘learn online with a guitar teacher’. This is the unique selling proposition. A well known concept but rarely implemented with clarity on the web pages.
• Create separate pages for different keywords. For years I just sent all links to the home page. We all know what to do but we often don’t do it.
• Stay consistent – do regular blog posts and emails. At various times, I’ve stopped posting or communicating with my customers.
• Use an email autoresponder – build a following of customers/fans. You can then communicate with them as often and for as long as you’d like.
• Track your visitors – use google analytics to see where customers are going, what keywords they use to find you, what is converting, etc.
• Video is huge – find relevant sites in your niche that will bring loads of traffic. Eg. I found youtube and ultimate-guitar.tv bringing in most of my traffic for a guitar lesson site (via google analytics).
• Offer something of value to get people to give you their email address. For years I said ‘Join my fan club’, or ‘Sign up for a free newsletter’. Make your free offering something of great value. Once I started offering guitar tab to my lessons, I started getting tons of subscribers each week
• Use tags on your posts. Google search finds these!
• Get involved in the conversation around your niche subjects – other blogs, forums, twitter, etc but be careful not to get into pissing matches with other marketers. And don’t waste all day surfing these sites!

To set up an inexpensive website that you can easily maintain yourself, as well as building email lists, shopping carts or membership sites, please see our internet consulting services.