Right on Mark I'd like to hear/see that.

John is there any way to check out the old music ads workshop?  I know there are more current ads lessons in the IC, but just curious about the MAW because of some cool theory on some of the videos and phone discussions. Sometimes listening to something down the line makes a new lightbulb go off. No worries if its closed for good though.

Also I'm curious about why we don't have to separate out right column ads anymore?

Thanks John!

Hey John and Steve, hope you are both well.

I had some questions but I got them cleared up.

Thanks and Happy Holidays y'all!

Hey John,

No worries man I think we all took time off for the holidays. Speaking of I didn't get a chance to join the last coaching call, but I went back and listened. There's one thing in particular I want to thank you for...

One guy on the call asked how to write more effective blog posts, and you answered that there's no one size fits all answer to that question. But then you went on to say one of the best things I've yet heard on the subject of branding. I'm paraphrasing, but I think you said:

"There's some aspect of life that our fans want more of, that they do not have access to in their daily environment . We as rockstars live those very aspects of life, all the time. We face those issues head on, and therefore we sort of live life at the 'tip of the sword'. Our lives our exciting, and they want to experience that exciting life vicariously through us. Those exact parts of life that our fans want more of, are the things we rockstars experience 24/7. Those aspects of life are the "values of our tribe" that we need to write about in our blog posts."

I was paraphrasing, but I think it was something about the word "vicariously" that really drove the point home for me. Thanks for breaking it down in detail as you always do, really good coaching call.

My pleasure John. 

I've been late on posting some recent results I got from Christmas album sales, but I just wanted to keep you posted. I recently sold seven 10 dollar online albums and two 30 dollar upsells. Honestly, one upsell was a family member so its really 6 albums and 1 upsell. I spent 30 dollars on ads so I made more than I spent.

It felt good wake up in the morning to get a paypal notification of a purely digital sale, and get a positive ROI.

Beyond that it told me 3 things:

1. I have a little more than 500 subscribers, so my sales conversion rate is unacceptable. That being said I wouldn't really expect it to be better, since I haven't defined my brand and my tribe.

2. I'm looking forward to defining my brand and my tribe values, and doing more advertising. At which point (or maybe now), perhaps I should do that 5 email series list cleaning that there's an IC lesson about.

3. I need to work on my upsell.

All of this being said, its def. a kick in the ass, and feels like the way to live - waking up receiving sales notifications in your inbox 

Hey Steve, its been a while but thanks so much, and thanks for the suggestions on how to sure up the weak links in the chain of the funnel. I will keep you updated.

And John great MAW coaching call last week on the 8th. I just listened back and there was this one guy who asked "how do I make my ads and squeeze page more effective, and how do I make more sales after that?" It was an extremely broad and big question and I was wondering how you'd respond.

Again, you shed even more light on the core of what we are doing here. I like how you said were not trying to sell people we're getting them to see how they'd benefit from the experience we are proposing that we'll provide them if they take that leap and sign up. Then you said we're still not trying to get them to buy, just starting conversations and building our relationship with them buy telling them our story and getting them to invest in us. Something about that word invest hit me.

And then finally asking them for and couple pennies (relative to the huge wealth of experience we are providing them) along the way of this amazing journey we have layed out for them to follow and be invested in, fit with music good music along the way, is not such a big deal to ask and its not such a big deal for them to do. 

That really hit me. Thanks again for breaking it down obviously. Nothing new, just good to hear it spoken casually from you o a coaching call, thanks John.

Hell yeah Steve, I am a fan of the whole MMM model, and I equally appreciate the focus and interest you and John take in providing customer service.

John and I have talked a lot about my style, and its sort of Dave Matthews or Jack Johnson meets Les Claypool in terms of the bass playing. Pretty unique stuff. 

It dawned on me that I might benefit from targeting Dave Matthews Band, which has a broad audience of 2,400,000, but then narrow it down by including a bunch of famous bassist. I just went in the ads manager and did that to see what that would look like, and took a screen shot:

Its kinda hard to see but basically its Dave Matthews Band as the main target interest, which started out with an audience 2,400,000 as I'd mentioned, but then I included 8 different famous bassists, each of whom with a small 5 digit audience size. (A couple of them actually had almost 400,000 in the audience)

As a result of doing this, I ended up with an ultimate target audience of 99,000, which again consisted of Dave Matthews Band's audience narrowed down by the tiny audiences of 8 different famous bassists.

My question is, is this wise to do?

My second question is, would I do better choosing only 3 bassists to narrow the search with? Reason bein I can then directly mention each of the three bassists in the squeeze page like for example "in short, if you like virtuoso bassists like Les Claypool, Victor Wooten and Thundercat, as well as chill singer songwriters like Dave Matthews, then Brian Rogers is a must have for your collection).

Thanks y'all!

Hey John,

My pleasure man. One thing you mentioned in the call was a shout out to past calls, and that if anyone was a podcast junkie they might enjoy geeking out on them. I'm a total Marc Maron podcast junkie so I figured I'd branch out upon your advice - I checked out the 1st MMM podcast ever from 2011, and I checked out Feb. and March's call from 2014 because that's when I joined MMM. Fucking rad, coaching call's are totally the same as podcasts except they're helpful in addition to being entertaining. I found myself taking notes. Great stuff in there.

But yeah, like you said above, narrowing down can be good or bad but just depends how it does in the marketplace. I'll be getting on that soon.

And yeah man, the first money I ever made in music was jazz drumming 2-4 times a week, and ended up doing that for six years. All the while taking bass lessons from a fusion bass guitar prodigy in my town. Meanwhile my friends were listening to great songwriters like Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Greg Brown (a lesser known folk singer, one of the best), ect. So basically I love crazy technical bass and drums, but it generally means nothing to me unless theres a good song its all supporting.

So even though most of the money I've personally spent on music has been Beatles albums, Beatles anthology stuff, Dave Matthews Band albums and concert tickets, Bob Dylan documentaries and a couple albums, plus a ton of alt. rock and hip-hop back in the day (conscious hip-hop produces some of the best songwriters IMO), it still makes total sense that you'd see the jazz Fusion-esque thing being the dominant vibe in my own music. Check out this other artist I found along those lines:

He's a singer songwriter but he's totally jazz fusion-esque, he's got that scatty, highly technical, soulful style you mentioned. I was stoked to look him up in audience insights and in the ads manager, but he didn't pop up! Kinda weird because he's got 56,000 likes on his music page, but I'd need to find more traffic anyway so I'll get over it. Already got some more options that might make sense, maybe even Stevie Wonder if I can find a more narrowed down album option for him or something.

Thanks for you feedback John, its all about self awareness.