One of the fatal mistakes that most of us make (and I did for years) is to do a lot of hit and miss attempts, without any plan or consistency. We give up on blog posts,don’t send emails to our list consistently, don’t market consistently, etc. But the biggest issue is not having an overall plan, where each action is part of a larger system.

Here’s a simple business model that you can try:

I actually noticed that from only 32 YouTube videos in one niche I am getting about $65/month in advertising revenue. I signed up for the ‘revenue sharing’ plan where Google puts ads on the videos. While I’ve never big a big fan of advertising you can’t deny it when you get actual results (ie. money)!

Back End Product(s)

Let’s start with the back end product. Let’s say we have a DVD course (or equivalent online information product) that we want to sell. We create a sales page for this product.

Sandwich Page

Then we create two pages that will lead to this sales page. One is an email capture page (a sandwich page) that offers something of value related to our back end product. For example it could be a video with a text field for people to enter their email address. After they submit it (and we capture via our email autoresponder) we take them right to the valuable content.

Free Content Page

On this second page, we give them the content we promised along with a ‘Click here to continue’ button. This button/link takes them to the sales page which has our product – it’s critical that the free content is related to the product and is ‘useful but incomplete’. We want to provide them great content but that leaves them wanting more.

YouTube Videos

To drive people to our sandwich page we can of course use Google Adwords. But from a free/SEO perspective you will want to take the video that you had on the sandwich page and broadcast it to all the video sites (I use TubeMogul for this). But specifically for ad revenue, let’s talk about YouTube. Put the video there and request to have it ‘revenue shared’. This will put ads on the video. As I mentioned I get $65/month from 32 videos and I plan to add hundreds more videos soon. If that scales then it could be $1000-2000 month in revenues. You may not want to sign up for revenue sharing and keep it ad free. That is fine to test as well.

Email Followup

Don’t forget the email component. You can then send them useful content over time as you create or find it. And also send affiliate offers of truly useful related products your customers might need. You can also send them your offers as you create new, higher priced back-end products.

You can use other SEO tactics as well (articles, blog posts, etc) once things are rolling.

If you don’t make money from the ads, you will at least have a ton of great content leading to your website, which is also great for SEO.

For the past few months I’ve been able to focus on one niche day and night and I’m definitely seeing traction as the consistent action within an overall plan starts to pay off.

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.

<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.