How to Market Your Music, Part 3
Dear Passengers,

Building your e-mail list is critical in this day and age. You should be collecting e-mail addresses at every gig and harvesting them from your website.

Over time, and with persistence, your list will grow large enough to begin to reap some cool rewards.

While selling your music to the people on your list might be the most obvious way to bring home the bacon, there are other ways that you might not have thought of yet.

For the sake of argument, let's say that you make Americana music. Let's also assume that you have built a list with 10,000 fans on it over the last couple of years. Obviously, those people are most likely fans of all Americana music, not just yours.

How about selling them books on the history of Americana music? How about selling them CDs from other artists as well as you own?

You can do this!

Set yourself up as an Amazon.com affiliate. You can build a "store" on your website and make commissions on what the people on your list buy from your store. You can also do the same thing with CDBaby, I believe.

If you're on top of your game, you'll be sending out e-mails to the fans on your list telling them about your gigs, and whatever else is going on in your musical life. In those e-mails, you can include a link to an item at your store.

If just 2% of your 10,000 fans buy a book that chronicles the history of Roots and Americana music that sells for $25, and you make a 9% commission, you'll generate 200 sales at $25 each, grossing $5,000 in sales. If you make 9% on that $5,000, that's $450 in your pocket!

If you could do that once a month (selling different and/or many other items), you'd make yourself $5,400 per year. You won't be able to retire on that income, but it's $5,400 that you wouldn't have otherwise had made.

Soon, you'll be able to make a list of all the people who have bought something from your site, and send them special offers on other products. They are defined by self-selection, as your most active buying audience.

And don't worry about being perceived as a "salesman." You're really just turning them on to opportunities to buy what they really want when they want it.

I can't FORCE people to buy TAXI memberships. They buy when they're ready to move forward in their pursuit of a career making money with their music.

The people who buy TAXI memberships have already asked themselves questions like these before they buy:

Do I want to make money with my music?

Have I truly done anything about that desire?

How many other opportunities have landed on my doorstep in the last week/month/year, that would enable me to make money with my music?

How else could I make the connections necessary to create opportunities like TAXI brings to me every month?

And so on . . .

People "sell" themselves when they realize they want or need what you have. But you've got to identify who those potential buyers are, and then put the products under their nose to make it easy for them to make the purchase.

I've been so busy telling you guys how to succeed for the last few months that I've missed the opportunity to put what many of you might need or want under YOUR noses!

Are you ready to get focused and serious about making money with your music?

Truthfully, you can do everything TAXI does for you, yourself! But, over time, I've come to realize that you probably don't have the time it takes to make the connections necessary to bring those 100 opportunities per month to your doorstep. It's a full-time job, which makes it pretty hard to do if you already HAVE a job.

Going on the road, and playing lots of gigs is a better way to get yourself signed by a label than joining TAXI, but you probably can't just up and leave your life to get 'er done.

Living somewhere other than New York, LA, or Nashville makes it nearly impossible to do the face-to-face networking that it takes to create the relationships you need. But you COULD move to one of those music cities, and do it yourself.

And finally, how else could you build a network of industry pros who will help figure out which of your songs are the best, what you can do to improve the songs that aren't quite there yet, or give you the "thumbs up" necessary to get the attention of A&R people, publishers, and music supervisors doing film and TV projects?

See . . . it's not "selling" if you're just helping people find what they really need or want.

Do you need a TAXI membership yet? Click here to join if you're ready.

http://www.taxi.com/join3.html

And last but not least, here's a tip that will help you sell LOTS more CDs. Offer a money-back guarantee! TAXI does, and it goes a long way in letting people know that they can't get burned doing business with you.

I know it sounds crazy, but it works. And the reason it works is that it takes all the risk off the shoulders of the person buying your CD, and puts the burden squarely on you to deliver some great music.

Think about it. How many more CDs of other artists would you buy if you knew that you could return them if you didn't like them? We've all bought CDs and bummed out when we realized that we just paid for twelve songs, and only got two that were great.

Put a sticker on your CD (and advertise it on your website) that you'll give a full refund to anybody who buys your music, but regrets it later. You'd be surprised by how many people are HONEST, and won't rip you off.

If you're looking to differentiate yourself from all the other Indie artists with CDs to sell, offering a money-back guarantee is certainly a novel way to do that! It's buzz-worthy, in and of itself.

Get busy!

Talk to you soon,

Michael