The Single Most Important Thing You Need To Know About Promoting Your Band
Your CD is pressed, your website is live, your band just had a bunch of great gigs, but your CD sales are less than impressive…
Been there, done that!
The hard truth is that selling albums is friggin’ HARD. In fact there are few things you could choose to do to make a living that are more difficult than becoming a professional musician. That being said, it doesn’t need to be as bleak as all that.
Selling enough CD’s to make a living IS possible but it does require a bit of a mind-set shift from the old, get out and perform and hope that someone discovers you, approach of the past.
You need to remember that there is a reason they call it the music BUSINESS.
In my opinion your best chances of success requires an intelligent business model, or more simply put, a “sales funnel”. Your sales funnel should really be no different than that of any multi million dollar company.
You need to:
1. Drive traffic.
2. Generate leads.
3. Cultivate a relationship (create value, proof, and incentive to buy).
4. Close the sale.
5. Offer your leads back end offers (this one is very important).
This is all pretty straight forward stuff which has been practiced by businesses since the beginning of time. And yet, almost ZERO musicians are doing it. You SHOULD be.
While each step of this process is important, I think the absolute most important step here is your opt-in form. IE, the incentive offer that ultimately entices people to join your mailing list.
If you do nothing else, set that up right away and shift your mind-set so that all of your shows, flyers, CD’s, bar room conversations, etc, are focused on sending people to that opt-in form.
Most people need to see an advertisement multiple times before they are comfortable enough to buy. Having a mailing list of potential fans, allows you to accomplish this. Additionally you are able to promote multiple products this way so that you can sell several albums (and even potentially additional products) to each fan rather than the usual one-off album sale.
The bottom line: If you build your mailing list and promote your album occasionally to your mailing list, YOU WILL SELL MORE CD’s. And yet, very few musicians are doing this. Why is that?
You can get a step-by-step blueprint for setting up your own opt-in form, and successfully promoting your music to your mailing list, in Music Marketing Manifesto.
Click here to get the details.
Thank you on your help!
Thanks for all the wonderful info. I have definitely implemented a lot of it on my site and learning more all the time. Thanks John, keep it coming…
Great article. Waiting for more.
Thanks Suzette. Getting Content together now. the posts will start coming soon 🙂
Hi, I’m very interested in becoming a manager for my friend’s band that he will be starting and have looked through your fantastic information and it is very helpful. I was just wondering if you would be able to send me more information without me having to buy the 67$ deal that would be very nice. I would really love to help the band make some money and as fast as possible, thanks in advance.
Hi Shane,
I completely appreciate where your coming from but consulting for free is simply too time consuming given my full plate at the moment. I’m happy to answer any questions you might have, but to get the full depth of what I’m trying to teach, you might consider my course: https://www.mmmanifesto.com/manifesto.html
Great information! I’ve been looking for something like this for a while now. Thanks!