Tip 7 – Set up your Music Career on the Internet
 (Part III) Marketing Basics
You have pressed some CDs and hopefully you now have them on sale from your own website, Amazon.com and several other major online and offline outlets.
In order to sell your product in any quantity, basic marketing techniques are essential.
All time-honoured retail research shows that you may have to get something in front of most people at least seven times before they will buy it, so don't be disheartened if not everybody at your gigs buys a CD.
One of the most important things you can do at gigs, for the future, is try to get everybody's email address. Let them know they will get a monthly newsletter and offer a prize at the end of the night on a free draw on all the email addresses put in the bucket you have conveniently placed next to the stage.
Try to make the prize valuable to them. Make it exclusive but cheap to produce – for example burn some unreleased tracks to a CD or give an autographed shirt or poster.
Once you have all your fans' email addresses, you can constantly market to them via a regular newsletter sent at no cost to you via email every month, or every couple of weeks.
NOTE:UkBands.net now have a feature that will allow you to market effectively to all UK fans using the "gig newsletter" this is invaluable, make good use of this service.
At this early stage, you should get your site registered with the search engines. We will talk about keywords and keyword searches in later tips, but in the meantime, for some free help in registering your site with the search engines visit:
A book that we thoroughly recommend for advice on all aspects of marketing your CDs is:The Guerilla Music Marketing Handbook. Check it out by clicking on the book's title.
Next week – More marketing info!
 Published by UKB Office on Wednesday, March 24, 11:07 AM |
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