Hey John: 

I've been thinking about this lesson lately (as you might expect , and taking a close look at my squeeze page to see if I can't bump my conversion rate. 

Out of everything that I could change on the page, what stands out most to me is my less-than-compelling social proof. I've changed this up a bit on the current radionowheremusic.com page, but I still don't necessarily have killer references/reviews there. 

I know the best way to get great quotes is to make great music and hustle to get people to notice, but also wondered if you have any thoughts on what else works here. Other than legit connections to major rock stars, or 5-star reviews from Rolling Stone, are there other kinds of social proof that resonate with squeeze page visitors and psych them up to hand over their email addresses?

Thanks! ~ Mike

Regarding the source for our testimonials, my whole sense is that, in the case of independent artists like us who are still establishing ourselves, the sentiment of the person's comment is more important than the celebrity of that person.

For example, if a local fan says, "Your music really touches my soul and stops me in my tracks.  I could listen to it for hours."... That's a rad testimonial to me, and it says that the music is touching that person... if it can move one person, it can move a lot of people.  While it would be nice to have great testimonials from famous people, I think we got a lot to work with if we just get really nice personal testimonials from the people around us who are listening to our music.

Just a thought re: getting reviews. I've seen other "mastermind" groups online where like-minded people get together and review each other's stuff - I don't see why we couldn't do the same thing with the Insider Circle.

With the amount of members here - if even 10% of us reviewed the other musicians, that would be a serious post for all of us and everyone would win.

It doesn't have to be contrived and/or artificial either - just block out five minutes to listen to a song from someone on the forum - if you like it, leave a legit review. If you don't, I suppose that's five minutes you won't get back...but if other people extend the same courtesy back to you, you'll end up with potential reviews as well.

Could this work? I suppose people who'd want to participate should figure out where the best place is to have people leave a review (Amazon? iTunes? Website? Bandcamp?) and we could start a thread somewhere to attempt to manage the process.

We do have the introduce yourself part of the forum - might be a good place to do that? Or the networking area?

Something to consider...

This is good stuff john. I want to post the results of my last campaign. I wanted to experiment with a small amount. I'm thinking about going big with a few hundred next month. ( big in my mind at least) But I want to get things right on a small scale first.