B3-CH33 – Your Income Sources, Your Music and Some Examples

As an artist the first thing that probably comes to mind when someone asks you about your “product” is “my music.” If you’ve been around the block a few times, you may also add to that “my merchandise.”

But, as I explained earlier and as I think you well understand by now, selling UNKNOWN music isn’t exactly easy. It is almost certainly not enough for an unknown indie to count on job-replacing incomes from just record sales. Definitely not in the beginning.

So what do you sell?

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I have given you a chart of possible income sources earlier in this course. One or more of them may be the thing you’ll want to focus on first. As a rule of thumb, when selling something on the Internet, you should aim for products or services which are scalable. So, if you’re selling something for $25 but can only sell 1000 of those (e.g. tickets to your gig or music lessons, etc) you will be up against a rising promotional cost versus a fixed maximum income. And that’s not a good idea. You can promote things like that to your pre-existing list, where promotions cost you nothing.

When you invest in broad web promotions, you really have only two viable models that work. Either you’re NOT selling but rather are investing in a targeted list – or you’re selling something which can be scaled up with no real ceiling.

So, for example, you may discover a popular product that goes nicely with your image and which is in high demand both within your niche and outside of it, and where you earn, say, $25 per sale. Investing a portion of your precious time and resources into a promotion like that might be just the ticket and a way to ensure a constant stream of incomes to support your musical career.

In reality, however, finding one such product is difficult. For this reason people set up multiple products and types of offers so that while each of them individually may yield only a few hundred bucks per month – all of them put together suddenly add up to a tidy sum. But – this requires more work.

This said, once that work is done, you’ll free up a ton of time and will be able to re-focus on your music once again.

The other promotional model is not to sell, but rather to build a list. In this situation you do not try to get them to pay you for anything but rather quite the contrary – you offer something for free. It can be a copy of your album, a free report which you have created – or whatever you can think of that people will value enough to give you their email address in exchange for receiving.

The freebie that you offer automatically qualifies your members – your list – so you know that you can periodically email them not only with interesting information and follow-ups but also with offers to purchase something.

There is also a third way: you do both of the above. So, you either offer something for free and then forward them to a sales page, or you send them to a sales page which, just before they buy, asks them to sign up to your list (and get a free bonus if they do so).

There are many ways to set something like this up.

Case Study #1

Here’s one wickedly simple and brilliant idea an indie artist I know has tried with good results. He promoted a popular mainstream artist’s latest album and merchandise and offered his own album as a free bonus to people who bought through his affiliate link, thus his list of contacts was pretty much identical with the list of people who actually bought that famous album. His own album, on the other hand, was highly compatible with the famous artist’s album – some would say even better. Having collected over 2,000 list signups (and sales) within just a few weeks, here’s roughly how he monetized this:

• 2000 list members with a future value which we’ll look at in a moment
• 2,000 mainstream album sales with a commission of $0.20 per sale = $400 profit on album sales.
• Conversion of 5% in month-1, selling music-related gear, books, merch and other things, averaging about $4 per sale. That’s 100 sales at $4 each, i.e. another $400.
• Conversion of 5% also in month-1, selling other loosely-related products with an average commission of about $20 per sale. That’s 100 sales at $20 each, i.e. another $2,000.
• Conversion of 2% also in month-1, selling his own eBook with videos and bonus music, with a clean profit of $35. That’s 40 sales times $35 = $1,400.
• So in month-1, he netted $400 + $400 + $2,000 + $1,400 = $4,200!
• In month-2 he repeated roughly the same result. In subsequent months the sales started dropping off, but since he no longer PAID for his promotions but rather just marketed to his existing list, whatever he made has 100% profit. After a year he earned over $35,000 on JUST that ONE promotion where he made those original 2,000 sales and which “only” made him a lousy $400!
• He had half a dozen other similar promotions and while some didn’t yield anything meaningful at least two others did, bringing his annual PASSIVE income to just over $150,000. Would something like that be satisfactory for YOUR band or artistic project?

His total cost for that campaign was under $1000 with about half spent on testing, outsourced graphics and other minor costs. He combined at least 4 different traffic sources, Google AdWords, Facebook, and two second-tier networks. His follow-up campaign (direct emails to HIS list) which cost him exactly zero consisted of 2-4 monthly emails over the entire year. Only one email in a month contained direct pitches, the others were fun, games, entertainment, gossip, news, reports – all very cool and valuable stuff.

Case Study #2

Another artist, actually a band, did something similar but using three separate income streams. One of them was a separate AdSense-based site with music gossip which one of the guys in the band kept up to date. Another was also a separate site, also with a general entertainment profile but aimed more at gamers and featuring lots of great CPA offers (that’s the kind of offers where you get paid for each signup through your link, and people often get free stuff including physical samples from the promoters – usually well-known brand names). The third income stream was from their own band site where they had a paid membership model with a monthly re-bill of $5.

• Their AdSense site cost them between $500 and $1000 per month in traffic costs and generated between $3000 and $4000 net profit each month.
• Their CPA site cost them about $500 in content generation and outsourcing and another $500-or-so in traffic generation. It too yielded between $4000 and $5000 net profit each month.
• Their own site initially only brought in about $300-$400 per month, but each month they grew their membership by about 20% so after a year their membership site yielded about $2,500 per month.
• Their average monthly income was about $8,000 over the entire year, i.e. nearly $100,000 in year one! Again, an amount which is easily sufficient for most artists to comfortably continue creating and producing music and not having to worry about a JOB!

The above case studies are, predictably, the “good ones” – the ones that worked really well and can be used as positive examples. As such, they’re not all that common, but to be sure they’re NOT UNCOMMON either.

Still, in the interest of fairness and transparency, let’s have a look at another case which I know will illustrate the most common stumbling blocks encountered by those who are nevertheless well prepared, but who just happen to have some growing pains.

Case Study #3

Once this band learned of many of the techniques and methods you are now learning from this course, they embarked on creating a site and researching ways to generate multiple income streams. It took them about 2 months before they finally settled on a viable strategy and their site was up and running. As it happened, they didn’t have many gigs at the time and their efforts to rally fans to sign up to their list largely fell flat on their face. After another 2 months their mailing list had fewer than 100 signups. Their SEO campaign failed to rank them on any of their targeted keywords and the one paid campaign they tried for an affiliate product didn’t yield any sales whatsoever.

Their music was hot and lots of people said they loved it. Yet very few bought their merchandise and practically nobody bought anything through their links. Six months into it, they have spent over $5,000 on their business and earned about $200 on minor commissions and other initiatives. They were now demoralized and demotivated, not believing that it was even possible to make a viable business online.

But then in a last-ditch effort, they spent a few hundred bucks on getting some advice from a well-known online marketer based in Singapore (the band themselves were based in the US). He quickly isolated the problem areas and suggested various fixes. The band were now broke, or rather unwilling to risk any more of their hard-earned money, but they resolved to implement these fixes themselves.

The issues they needed to focus affected many levels. Their designs were ineffective, too confusing and lacked strong calls to action. There were no attempts to “sell the sizzle not the steak” (copywriting problems). The products they promoted were old hat and have long ago lost their hot markets, i.e. any further promotions were doomed from the start. Their promotional music was presented in an uninspiring way. Their newsletter was boring. Their photos and images were sub-standard. Their daily posts were confusing, unintelligible and, yes, boring as hell. Their SEO was focused on all the most difficult keywords and no wonder that it failed. Their email campaigns were spam-like in quality. And so the list went on.

Unsurprisingly, as the fixes rolled in, one by one, things started looking up. 3 months later their list grew to over 1000 members and a further 3 months down the line their monthly sales averaged around $500. Meanwhile, they had almost no running costs other than the usual ones.

It took them a further few months before they managed to regularly earn around $4,000 per month – purely from their website. At that time their gigging schedule also improved greatly and they each managed to pull over $2,500 per month from that time on. To the best of my knowledge they’re still going strong and are earning now more in the area of $4k per month – each. And it’s a 4-piece band.

So now, in the interest of total transparency, here’s one last case study which did NOT succeed. This is by far the most common scenario and I know many such people. I will thus create a kind of a composite for you to illustrate the many things that have gone wrong – but should have.

Composite Case Study #4

• One band couldn’t agree on the look of their site or whether they should pay someone to do it or if they should do it themselves. After 3 months, they created something that looked boring and corporate.
• Another band created a superficially beautiful site but one which was dead slow to load, and where it was near-impossible to figure out what’s going on. Are they selling something? Giving something away? What’s going on. After many months, the site proved to only be a burden and a time-waster and it didn’t yield any fans or signups – anything.
• Another artist spent months trying to figure all this out and wound up with a huge information overload, which he compounded by buying more and more internet marketing courses, each of which told him something different – or something incomplete – confusing him further still. Many months later, his site was barely operational, confusing and unappealing. And nothing happened.
• Another artist got off to a good start and promptly proceeded to spend money on paid ads, promoting products nobody’s ever heard of – but which offered fantastic commissions. A few hundred dollars later, he switched to another scheme. And then another. Each of his initiatives cost him a lot of money and each failed miserably.
• Throughout all that time these artists’ creative outputs suffered and they were worse off after trying to start an online business than before!

Some people choose to be overwhelmed by the prospect of “all that work”. Others get stuck on even the smallest expenses. Others still, believe they can “do it all” and get bogged down with trivial, time-consuming and energy-draining activities. Most suffer from information overload. Few ever take a step back, analyze, ask the right questions and proceed to fix things.

So let’s get this straight. Yes, there IS quite a lot to learn. Yes, there are some costs involved, especially if you decide to outsource some work and if you decide to acquire paid traffic. Yes, it’s possible to miscalculate and lose money, time and energy. But you can’t learn if you don’t fall occasionally. And you can’t succeed if you don’t have a clear plan and are consistent about its execution.

The objective of this course is to SHOW you as much as possible of the things you need to know. But the objective is NOT to teach you how to do everything by yourself. Rather, the idea is for you to understand how everything works and then decide which things should be done and by whom. And also to give you the tools which will help you monitor and understand everything that’s going on.

You can be sure that setting up a viable online business is not merely “possible” – it’s being done every day by literally thousands of people – musicians and artists included. What sets them apart from the failures is clarity of mind, knowledge of their tools, and ability to delegate. And, no, luck doesn’t really have all that much to do with it!

OK. Let’s get back now.

One of the things you’ll deal with at one point in your website’s development and as you keep adding potential income streams to it, is “product selection”. The next few chapters will deal with just that.

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Book 3 – Chapter 32Test & Scale	Course Overview	Book 3 – Chapter 34Product Selection

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