Big post today to get you thinking about how to seriously make money from music.

Think it’s a sell out to push products under your artist brand, thinks it’s corny and fake and it’s not about the music? Well you can be poor and about the music. The way I work is that I’m in the music business and if I wasn’t making money I’d be somewhere else.

There’s no reason to be whining and complaining because your music business is failing. You need to get geared up with promotion strategies and music business models that are going to put money in your pocket so you can keep doing what you love.

Hi it’s Matt from Kurb here, I run a company that helps independent musicians promote their music and brands online and manage fan relationships to make money from music.

Our company is all about being affordable so if you’re realistic and realise it might take you a year or more to turn your great songs into a profitable business model, then you can afford to have us help you do that work until your independent music business is making money.

At the moment it’s still $US200 p/month - it will go up again soon - you get all the online music marketing services you need and eventuates to about 14 hours work p/month for that price.

Just email me, Matt at kurbpromo@gmail.com - we can talk. Just a warning though I hate phone calls and will only get on the phone with you if I know you’re not wasting my time.

I just sent this research I did on clickbank.com to another client and
I felt it was important everybody looked at this real examples as to
how sales of affiliate products through  newsletters, blogs and
possibly even social media and article marketing can be significantly
more profitable than relying on your primary content which in most of
your cases is your music.

Take a look at some of the offers below you could easily be promoting
through your blog/newsletter/social media/youtube/etc.

just got some clickbank stuff here for you

I just threw in a search term “relaxing” as I thought that would be a
good starting point for your demographic.

look at the prices and commissions and then compare that to the prices
and commissions you get off your actual music.

I’m a big fan of giving your music away free specifically to fans who
buy products - or creating a special preferential group for fans who
buy affiliate products who get special treatment and exclusive free
music.

That way rather than getting $10 out of a fan and they get your album,
you focus on getting up to $20-^0 out of the fan and not only have
they got the album but they’ve also got an additional product, for
which the sales pitch is already laid out.

lets look at what I dug up for you:

this offer is 75% commission on a $39 product that’s $29.75 for you

12 Binaural Beats Mp3 Audios - Motivation | Energy | Relaxation | Life.
Creativity | Learning | Less Stress | Sleep | Meditation | Exercise |
Weight & Fat Loss | Build Muscle = Affiliates 75% Commission - Very
High Converting Product (Up To 15.8%) - For Promotional Material Go To
- Http://www.MyMindShift.com/affiliates -.

there are 93 “green” products the most popular was this, again 75%
commissions on a $40 product = note conversions 1:15- 1:40 that means
for 40 fans who click through you shold get a sale. But of course,
your fans are motivated to buy because . . .

THEY KNOW MOST OF THE MONEY GOES TO YOU!

Free Energy Product - Huge Market - Unique Niche.
A Tweaked Sales Page Increased Conversions By 30%!! Up To 70$ Per Sale
With The New Backend Sale! Conversions From 1:15 - 1:40 , The High
Gravity Is A Proof! Magnetic Energy Product!
Http://www.magniwork.com/affiliates.html For Affiliate Resources!!!

So fans know you’re making most of the money. That’s okay. You’re
committed to making sure they get as much value as possible so they’re
happy to spend. What about this one, it’s $67 for you p/sale. What if
you prepared a special limited personalized release for 100 fans who
bought this product or one of similar value? That’s be a good way to
make $6700, once you’re in the 1000 fan range, this becomes possible.
Possibly even every month.

Convert Your Car Using Gas4Free Water-Fuel Conversion System.
Attention: New Diy Water Car Is Selling Like Crazy! Raising Gas Prices
Has Created Huge Demand! Few Refunds. Promote It Now Before It Becomes
Competitive! Some Affiliates Are Converting At 15% And You Receive An
Amazing $70.00+ Per Sale!

let’s look at the Arts and Entertainment section - there are 373 product offers.

the most popular is one of my favourtie examples - legal video
downloads. you get $25 on sales of legal movie downloads. the cheapest
package is 25 movies for $30. So throw your album in free and the deal
works, does it not? DOn’t you think your fans will be willing to
support you and the whole copyright issue by getting movies and music
legally and getting a great deal?

MoviesCapital.com - Real & Legal Unlimited Movie Downloads !!
Make A Killing Using The Only Legal & Real Unlimited Movie Downloads
SITE!We Are The Future. All MoviesCapital.com Movies Are Licensed And
Downloaded Directly From Our Servers. Coversions Sky Rocket! 75%
Commission!

Music lessons and language lessons can be very lucrative.

Jamorama Guitar - New Changes! Big Commissions! Low Refunds!
Best Selling High Quality Guitar Course In CB! Earn 75% On Our $49.95
Standard Edition! Earn 75% On Our $99.95 Deluxe Edition!! Earn 25% On
Our $149.95 Hardcopy Edition!!! Jamorama Is A Pro Affiliate Program.

Tattoo sites another popular deal for promotions. have your fans even
thought about getting movies, tattoo designs etc, off the web? This
one pays $20 p/sale. The idea over time is to build themes into your
newsletters that make sales appear natural. So you choose something
like tattoos, talk about what you think about tattoos post some tattoo
art, do a youtube video with one of your songs and some tattoos and
then tie in the product at the end.

try this:

“You can get a tattoo design online for just $27, there’s thousands to
choose from, and what’s more $20 of the money goes to me so I don’t
starve. And hey, if you actually end up getting the tattoo I will give
you a copy of my album free, how about that?”

Chopper-Tattoo - Top Tattoo Offer !
The #1 Tattoo Gallery On The Web. Converting Like Crazy! Pays 75%,
Affiliates Must See. Free Music Downloads With Membership Allows
Creative Marketing. New Affiliate Tracking In Email, Exit Ad, & Google
Upon Request: Chopper-tattoo.com/affiliates/

Our company is all about being affordable so if you’re realistic and realise it might take you a year or more to turn your great songs into a profitable business model, then you can afford to have us help you do that work until your independent music business is making money.

At the moment it’s still $US200 p/month - it will go up again very soon - you get all the online music marketing services you need and eventuates to about 14 hours work p/month for that price.

Just email me, Matt at kurbpromo@gmail.com - we can talk. Just a warning though I hate phone calls and will only get on the phone with you if I know you’re not wasting my time.

Hi Matt from Kurb here talking about what I’m talking with clients
everyday in dealing with online music marketing strategies and online
music management for revenue and making money in the music business.
Don’t hesitate to look us up at kurb promotions or the music marketing
management dot com blog for more information and music business
advice.

When you have one of the better designed sites around you’re starting
with an advantage – sure, it looks good, appears quite functional but
what I’m seeing when I look at your site is the sales and marketing
stuff I often talk about.

Fans have to be directed and told what to do, obviously they have to
be compelled, but at the same time it must be made completely clear,
so it’s with stuff like making that mailing list button bigger and a
more the focus of the whole page, or at least a “landing page” which
is a muster point for new fans to really push the email sign up,
that’s where we include the free giveaway etc.

So as long as you have the design covered, then I’m free to really
analyse what works in terms of sales, and then proceeding to testing
that.

The day to day stuff, a business like ours, kurb promotions – which
you can find on the music marketing management blog - do your myspace
promo for you, but really, content is the key to music marketing.
Written content, and online video content. This is what I call
secondary content, it’s simply bait to hook them into the mailing
list, into the primary content which is the EP.

I don’t know if your “news” section will work as well for google as a
wordpress blog attached to your site, great for SEO, that’s what I
recommend.

What email platform are you using for fan management and interaction?
It’s pretty much essential to use an autoresponder if you’re planning
on doing serious music business in future. We’ll set up your
newsletter for you, big picture, we basically work like this:

So at least 1 artist blog a week, 1 music video or artist video blog a
month, then we wrap the blogs and video up into the newsletter and we
promote the EP of course and anything else we can add in later.

We then use the written blog content to post to your myspace/facebook
and also I do my SEO backlinking with it also.

So with a blog going out each week and a newsletter and a video going
out each month, that’s basically an opportunity to sell something on
top of continuing to promote your releases to fans as well as building
the music marketing relationship - that’s where we’re going.

With the online video production, you can get help if you need it from
my staff, just by uploading the footage to them to work with if you
need help putting stuff together to meet the regular deadline set.

All I would be focused at the moment is: A video introducing
yourselves to the fans and inviting them to sign up for email. Make a
connection through video. Also, youtube is a jukebox, all your songs
should be up there even if the video is just something my guys put
together in an hour.

So when you’re set up with your music marketing platform that’s when
we get stuck into the google adwords online advertising, you swant the
best - and most - ideas and strategies available. If you can start a
new account with google I can secure you some free credit.

So with music marketing services like ours, basically you receive 10
hours a month from my staff that will be split between web design,
social media and myspace promotion, seo and online video production as
appropriate. My 4 hours will basically go toward your blog and
newsletter though some weeks we might focus on adwords instead.

Your job is to make sure that blogs and newsletters and videos go out
on the relevant platforms to complete the distribution of this
content fo rmusic management.

In future when we look at facebook promotion and twitter marketing and
we can see what’s happening, it might be more suitable for one of my
staff to do that job, those are things we would look at if you feel
you need more comprehensive services which is likely in 6-12months
when the fanbase is growing and those fans are active and purchasing
and need to be continually stimulated.

This is my approach we prepare now for when you have 1000+ fans who
are waiting for the monthly news and are willing to buy the things
you’re offering because they’ve watched all the videos, kept up with
all the news and they want to support the band. That’s when you’re
band has turned into a business that has got to be kept running.

So basically if you’re looking for music marketing services to get
started straight away we can fire up the myspace promotions
immediately and start getting our ideas together for blogs/videos
while developing the platform with a few of those improvements. Once
we’re set up we can get started on the ads.

Alright more of a personal post today as I’m looking to work out what I need to do with my own artist websites. It’s that time of year where you actually get to put in some groundwork on the foundations of your online platform because once 2010 kicks in, often you’re just too busy to deal with improving the standard of essential parts of your music marketing platform.

An artists website is in constant development, ideally, if you want to create a hub for engaging fans then you’ve got to bring a dynamic level of interaction and appeal to your site, but obviously if you’re short on resources you’ve got to face the fact that other than blogging and streaming various content, updating the feel and functionality of your site maybe something you can only do every so often so you’ve got to be practical about it.

If your website is going to look a certain way and do a certain thing for 6 months you had better make sure it’s looking and working as appropriately as possible over that period.

Often making decisions about what it is that your website actually does is one of the most important parts of marketing and website design.

The purpose of your marketing as a musician is to increase sales and build relationships, and website design meets these purposes in two main ways:

Design (Branding): Your website LOOKS awesome and sends an instant message to fans that you are a true professional musician as possibly even a phenomenon. Professional design sets you apart from other wannabe’s and amateurs competing for audience attention. But good design is expensive and is useless if it’s not functional and fails to retain the fans interest

Functionality (Sales): Ultimately most musicians need to envision their website as increasingly less about mere promotion and information but a centre of commerce where propositions are actually being pushed to the fans.

A lot of artist have great looking sites, but there’s no business component to them.

- Fans are not being explicitly directed towards propositions

- Propositions are no good. “Get the new album for just $9!” well . . . no. I don’t want to spend $9. Here’s an old sales technique chestnut. Get the customer saying “yes!” if customers are not saying yes to your proposition then your simply not being competitive enough. If you don’t want to be competitive then you may as well go home.

- Fans are not being compelled. Sign up to email and get a free song? Sure it’s very common these days and to me it’s a good starting point. A lot of artists would say this devalues the music, giving it away free. Well it certainly does if you’re not working it!

“Free song” doesn’t sound that compelling does it? Why don’t you tell us exactly why the free song is so good, so that fans feel compelled to

Why not arouse their curiousity with a number different strategies that will make fans curious to hear the song and so why not sign up for email when it’s free?

Is the some interesting angle you can add that will draw fans in and make them curious? Because “Free Song” is just a throwaway, that’s what it feels like if you’re not making the effort to really sell the content of the proposition.

There’s no need to be hyperbolic and outrageous, just use a bit of colour and flourish rather than just “Sign up for a free song.”

As you can see, it’s useful to have someone with basic sales and marketing experience on your team if you’re looking for music marketing services

SO feel free to email us at kurbpromo@gmail.com to discuss how we can help you with web design and any other part of your music marketing and music promotion campaign in the music business.

It can’t stay at $200 p/month for 14 hours, it’s too cheap, it MUST go up to $250 soon.

EMAIL KURBPROMO@GMAIL.COM

When it comes to music marketing campaigns and artist management, development of new music business models, music marketing strategies, most artists understand that the need to look good in the eyes of the fan and often hiring a designer, photographer etc. to really give you a solid look is a good idea - as long as it’s not the last money you’ve got.

I notice a lot of music artists have a high standard of presentation, but as is common with artists, they’ve got a good start in building up the brand, but they’re not being aggressive enough in pushing fans towards outcomes that lead to sales long term.

You notice I say long term because obviously buy! buy! buy! is not the marketing angle thats going to endear you to modern and savvy fans online. Blast them with your amazing brand, draw them in with your irresistable proposition, and then just continue to wow them with carefully measured and staggered content that makes them want more. THEN sell them something.

A lot of the nature of this promotion is simply to keep returning fans attention to the fact that you have another set of propositons available for fans to purchase and support the band. Gradually stimulate their interests slowly, and have a variety of propositions available for different consumers.

I just would not buy a CD disc or an album. I wouldn’t. I don’t care who. I’m not buying your CD. I mainly spend money on stuff that impresses women. Have you got anything that might impress girls? Cos y’know I’d probably buy that.

THE BASIS OF ONLINE MUSIC MARKETING CAMPAIGN STRATEGY

Generally I suggest forming an email list and making this the basis of your strategy, pushing your email as an authrotive point of information and news, this way you can push the email sign up with perhaps a free download as your primary proposition in a situation where pushing for sales is going to be hard initially.

In creating material for your newsletter we can farm it out to engage fans on your blog, on social networks, etc. - this is my formula - 1 blog post a week, one video blog post a month, then we sit down at the end of the month with all that contnent and news and whatever else and we just make it a sharp little summary that will really make you look colourful and active, alluring - each month so fans don’t forget.

So establising a solid core of fans and a network to distribute content to them and beyond is the basis of your online promotion.

- Once your platform is established (email management, blog, sites and social network profiles more focused on outcomes)

- And your promotion is established (work we do promoting through social media, online advertising, search ranking results)

- And your fanbase is established (engaged fans on email list, facebook fanpage, REAL myspace/youtube/twitter fans not just empty numbers)

THEN – and this could easily be 6 months away – having discussed in detail, then we examine what you have on the table and how we can create business models that will that will tap the work you’ve done developing your fanbase for regular income.

To me, selling recorded music is limited in the new music industry environment. It’s something we face, but in terms of our long term strategy we’re looking at alternative business models that can create revenue and I’m working on them with different clients everyday.

Selling songs for $1 is simply not the most lucrative way forward in this business any more, especially for artists still establishing a fanbase.

So while we’re doing that, and developing your email list, and demonstrating how an email list can be used to develop automatic propositions to established fans that bring profit back to you.

Now in terms of costs the situation is this. When I charge $200 p/month that covers basic online promotion and set up but you are going to need a lot of content.

That is mainly writing and video, a regular stream of it.

That budget  of $200 leaves us availaable to do SOME writing and video services for you but not as much as you’re likely to need. Just making you aware of that, whereas we offer promotion and additional content services (writing and video content) and branding for $350 p/month so you can consider that as we progress, because otherwise at some point within 3 months it will be up to you to provide this otherwise to maintain momentum.

So the deal at the moment is $400 upfront and in 3 months we review, if you’re happy you pay $200  and we keep going, if not you’re under no obligation to make the second payment.

The $200 a month represents 4 hours from me and 10 hours from my staff who assist in social media, search ranking, design and development, and video services.

So I’ve given you some outline of where I feel we could best help you, but you need to tell me what outcomes you’re looking for, if it’s particular content you want to promote or a particular angle you have in mind, then we can integrate that into our all over strategy.

It WILL increase from $200 to $250 p/month for our services at any time soon as enquiries are coming in thick and fast - so don’t delay your chance to get professional support for developing your music business and a great price of $200 for 14 hours work over a month.

KURBPROMO@GMAIL.COM

Alright we’re getting well and truly stuck into 2010 and since I’m getting stuck into music marketing campaigns for artists now, I’m going to kick off with a blog post because it’s a great way to get ideas turning over.

I always use my blog as a “think tank” where I can process and evaluate ideas and their application in online music marketing. It’s just no good going off getting your teeth stuck into an idea only to think wow . . . gosh if only I’d thought ahead.

It’s important that artists create good fan newsletters. So what? Well if you have an awesome newsletter and your promotions are definitely effective then you’ll have no trouble advancing propositions to your established fans each month and racking up sales.

Some clients have been with me for awhile and their now moving into the intricate details of email marketing. They have a small fan base building on a professional platform such as aweber.

That means once a fan has signed up, we can set up aweber to automatically mail fans at regular intervals with a new message. And if the new message feels authentic and has persuasive, engaging material then there’s no reason why that fan won’t consider the types of sales propositions you’ll be including in each newsletter, but it’s crucial to keep the newsletter lively or else you’ll get people unsubscribing.

1 free song is a good start but what about a reward for staying on the list for a year? Motivate, persuade, compell, encourage the fans but do it creatively, create the conditions with an artistic approach to present your propositions in your newsletter so they don’t FEEL like a hard sell.

1: NO TIME SPECIFIC REFERENCES

Time specific references must be eliminated unless we’re doing a specific one-off mail out.

No merry christmas, no happy new year.

This is all about mastering the art of the autoresponder - once we are getting to the rinse and repeat stage with this we’re adding a newsletter that each fan will receive each month after they sign up so once you get fans signing up, everything else just kind of does itself.

The email management sends out the designated newsletter with the offer of the month enclosed, you just watch for what sells and what doesn’t to decide where you’ll take your next set of propositions.

But what baout stuff that’s inevitably time sensitive like announcing gigs? Well then you could either do a one off mail out OR I recommend you have a link in each newsletter encouragig fans to quickly check out what

Perhaps in future it will not be hard to embed scripts into the newsletter that display upcoming dates!

You see how this newsletter stuff becomes so powerful? Fans are being engaged and interacting, you’re not even doing anything, with a email newsletter we set up to go out to fans with this stuff 6 months ago, nothing to it!

2: DON’T APOLOGIZE

Don’t apologize! It’s not your fault youre a busy musician but also . . . remember we’re playing with the perceptions of the audience - the whole idea of this autoresponder is to eliminate those painful gaps where you drop off the radar for 3 months and your fans get distracted and engaged elsewhere.

No need to say sorry or imply your absence. The autorepsonder is here to ensure you’re never more than 1 mont h from their minds.

3: PERSUASIVE, COMPELLING, ENCOURAGING, ENGAGING CONTENT

So it’s all wrapped up in a feeling. Your newsletter has to be a work of art as much as anything else. Exciting, dramatic, detailed. You want to get people excited and wanting more. So you need plenty of more detailed and persuasive information about what you’ve been doing that builds anticipation and I think it’s important to note you don’t want to launch into a sales proposition straight away.

That’s why I encourage musicians to post a blog a week then for the monthly newsletter, you’ve already got 4 ideas to deploy.Then you’re able to make some pithy or perhaps ponderous chit chat before ramping up for the propositon.

4: THE PROPOSITION

You need more compelling info about the proposition itself. A lot of artists I work with start by pushing little content package deals, 10 songs for $5 20 songs for $10 or so on. Obviously you may already have a CD but this varies it up.  It’s going to get old if every month you’re like . . . I’ve got a CD please buy it. What if they already bought it? huh? huh? What then? More products. More experiments to otry on your newsletter to find ot what works for your audience and what doesn’t.

5: MORE SALES TECHNIQUES FOR MORE SALES

Employ a few basic sales techniques. So the audience wants to know in exhaustive detail all the benefits of what they’re getting. Don’t hold back. Then, underneath that main proposition and your sign off, you can have a number of the other propositions you’re pushing y’know - you’re using the newsletter as a vehicle for the range of propositions you offer your fans. Which of course yes, includes your CD.

At Kurb we do Music Marketing Campaigns! Online Advertising, Social Media, Search Engines, Video promotion and production, Websites and Design - and of course you’ve got me, I know all about branding and online business models so you can work out the best way to get some money out of what you’re doing.

Email: KURBPROMO@GMAIL.COM

Well it’s 2010 and I’m getting started with music marketing campaigns for my artists signed up to our music marketing services.

When we’re talking about music marketing campaign strategies for 2010 you may know some of the strategies we use to drive fans toward music:

Google and Search Rankings:

If you have at least a year or two to build your blog like I have plus you use our search engine optimisation and particularly link building strategies then you’ll get hundreds of visitors a day, and they’ll see all the stuff on your site, if you’re always talking about interesting stuff then they’ll email you and sign up to your newsletter, you’ll interact with them as pretty much an equal.

And they will become open to the idea of buying your stuff.

Online Advertising

The most important point about online advertising in fact the whole point of this post. You can spend the money on getting the fans to your page but whats going to happen once they get there?

They’re NOT just going to be overcome by your genius and shell out $10 for your album and trot off again. This is subtle relationship marketing stuff. You’ve got their intention, now get them involved in a way that doesn’t insult there intelligence. Then, you’ve got a basis on which to sell them stuff.

Social Media Promotion

Social Media is easy to understand, but it’s hard work if you don’t find a groove you can work. We can get in their with our tools, but whether you can use tools or you’re reliant on organic strategies like you are on facebook, if there’s nothing for people to see and gain some concept of what you’re pushing then it’s not going to seem real, it’s going seem like it’s your hobby on the weekend that’s not what fans want to buy into they want the real deal.

It all leads to one thing.

And the main thing I find myself talking to clients about is them asking about all these online promotion strategies and when are people going to start arriving in their droves to check out this new artist.

Well I’ve been doing these campaigns for years now and most often the artist wants results but they’re not prepared for results.

Picture yourself with 1000 crazed fans around the world. Does your websote look like a website 1000 people want to visit twice a week? Is there new stuff to check out twice a week? Do you just like, throw down a video or a blog and post it online when you’ve got a spare hour during the week?

Is there a big newsletter each month packed with everything that’s been happening in your wonderful world?

Do you answer 10 emails a day from fans who write some of the craziest, annoying, awkward, bizarre emails everyday . . .

Are you prepared for the kind of occupational lifestyle of a modern online professional musician?

Or . . . in 2010 don’t go spending all your money to get people coming to your websote and myspace just to hear your fancy new song, when your website or your myspace, facebook whatever, doesn’t look like the sort of place fans want to go and find out about something that will blow their mind.

If you don’t have the brand, and you don’t have the content then your visitors will see an amateur and then it’s over.

I’m happy. This will keep me working for years because if your website looks like it was made in 2006, and it probably does because it was, then it probably looks old and useless and people will probably wonder if you’re even still alive.

Sophisticated surfers know what they’re looking at.

This is music man, this is culture, get with it. But then it’s still going to take you 2 years to get your site humming with organic traffic! That’s why all my sites look so bad. They don’t look so hot but people visit them, and then they email me with money to give me.

Which of course is the whole idea. Sell to your fans like I do. Email them. Get that connection going and use technology to manage it’s growth, That’s where you need us because at that point if you don’t have hte tools and the strategies you’re going to get buried, when you’ll it’s even more important that each month you can still produce great music, great videos, a great concept that people understand and are compelled to support.

As for other goals for kurb in 2010 and beyond - beside developing an authoritative information product describing exactly the what and how as well the who of what I do . . .

I am looking into developing music publishing opportunities also as I am assessing parts of the market that I can address. The scheme sort of goes like this. Musicians allow me to use songs on my Royalty Free album in exchange for marketing services, and I collect the proceeds from the sales of the album to parties looking to use recordings for commercial purposes.

This is not just using your music for synching to content and advertising but also commercial spaces such as restaurants, malls, cruise ships which need permission to play licensed music. These albums are sold with such licenses offered to the purchaser exclusively.

So what you see is the example of a modern music business model. I offer my marketing skills in exchange for music from musicians who probably don’t have the resources and appreciate the music marketing services in exchange, whereas I’ve already prepared a market for a high value proposition including those songs.

Always full of crafty online music business ideas, me!

Otherwise, the struggle goes on to develop a perfectly rounded staff with skills in all necessary departments to cope with whatever demand we face this year. Outsourcing is not easy, but it’s necessary and it’ll be a big part of our new music marketing product.

I desperately hope 2010 is the year we finally get the makeover we’ve planned and we leave behind the “street” vibe inherited from our humble beginnings in 2004.

But really, that’s just a smaller part of the whole branding thing I’ve been wanting to develop, you may have noticed I’ve become increasingly frank and I guess this is part of my brand development. Not everybody is going to like what I have to say about music marketing but

I also notice a lot of other music marketing guys slowly inching their way towards business models I’ve used which precludes another strong aspect of my brand. I’m not exactly getting rich off what I know but I maintain a pretty rewarding lifestyle, and I’m still picking up speed. It’s probably cheesy as hell that I should have a picture of my sweet black BMW or against the sweet view over the city from my apartment with me all in my suit being the hardnosed businessmen but if that tells people I’m confident and assured in the work I do and it’s been a long time since I was that guy in mom’s basement charging bands to spam myspace. Which could easily be some other faceless guy you might give your money to because he claims he does this and that.

When you see my face you know I have a reputation to protect. And that all may be cheesy as hell, but it communicates strong messages that connect, and my work from there is to embellish the sentiment with more subtlety, and well, understatement.

But yeah I talked a lot about branding this time last year but failed to launch, because it’s a serious business, you’re trying to smack people in the head within half a second with a concept that they can believe in.

As I say, they don’t have to believe I’m a nice guy and I’m kind to animals and small children. All they need to know is that I do a good job, and if they give me their money they will get there moneys worth.

That’s what branding is all about and I hope that helps you to understand how important it is to your long term success as a working artist.

What next for thenew Kurb Music Marketing Digital Product?

It’s always good to have a plan. I like to have a plan which is going to be good short term, and long term too. That’s what makes a good plan.

Sure a $47 music marketing product isn’t going to be easy to create in a hurry. But to me I think the value can be laid bare with a very simple outline.

I think once you’ve got your head around outsourcing and having guys overseas do all the promotion for you, that’s pretty much half of it. But you want to know which sites I use where I do everything and how I do it so it all works out. Once you know that stuff, well you’ve already got the edge over the guy who is completely DIY.

Now you just need to work out how to make money. I can’t promise anything there but I can give you plenty of ideas and some of them work for me, I’m sure one or two will work for you. You just have to be ready for it take a couple of years. That’s life.

So initially it will go up for sale as a very simple kind of thing perhaps with 2 free updates, that way every few months when I make improvements to keep it fresh and relevant, buyers still get more.

Then as I said, I can use it to demonstrate what kind of particular services artist might need from us and why, and also inevitably . . . let me put it like this practically:

If it’s going to take 2 years, then come and buy the book, take it away for a year and see if you can’t make some money, because you’re not going to make a significant amount in that period by paying us $200 p/month. But if you come to us and you’ve already opened up income streams and your promotions are already gaining momentum THEN you call us so you’re not the one dealing with all these indian and south east asian dudes and having to come up with ideas to entertain them and sell them stuff.

You bring us in to run and develop the business machine, you just worry about making your next big project a real smasher.

As for my next project, well inevitably there’s a path for me to follow in staying in music marketing just like any other rising star opportunities will find me, but I’ll still sell my little book of tricks and keep it updated.

The reality is that if you manage an act that grosses over a million a year, or even if one of our acts grows to that size market, they’re going to need to facilitate some serious online business and that’s where I’ll come in, and I’ll be charging appropriately and concerning myself with the appropriate suitability of a commercial interest in the act.

So as for the information product, maybe just the one that I’ll update, maybe I’ll do another if I think I can provide suitable value, or perhaps an upsell at a cheaper price because ultimately

My main plan for the year is to finally get on with releasing my first “information product” - that is an ebook and downloadable content such as video which contains all sorts of good information

As usual with everything I do is that certain principals of online marketing are being engaged and these matter for you as an artist. You can always learn from business stuff I do online and apply it to what you do.

In this case it’s about developing a downloadable product that is really valuable, yes, it is kind of like an album, but then you wouldn’t be getting it, because what I’m putting in my product will be stuff that’s like “wow!”. Is your stuff like “Wow!”?

When you get my stuff you’ll be impressed with what you’ve got. Detailed explainations. Simple explainations, videos that explain stuff, and also that explain what to avoid, how much stuff should cost and who you can trust to pay.

Outsourcing will be a huge part of the product because hiring dudes in other countries to do stuff for you is pretty much a nightmare but if you want the edge then you’ll never do it until you understand what exactly no one else but you can do to make what you do effective and then pay someone else to do everything else.

I mean seriously how do you think I make my money? Why do think my prices are so cheap? Because dudes in other countries do all the work, I just tell them what to do because I’ve tried so many things that I know how and why they work. And all this will be in the information product, which will inevitably be $47.

It’s not just a how to, because I’m not really into that mentality. Understanding branding is hard work, you need crafty marketing bastards like me with you on that. What artists need is to begin to define the rudiments of online business, and you’ll sure understand that when I tell you how it works, then I tell you where to go, who to hire, and how much to pay them.

But at the same time it’s just one big sales brochure for what I do. Pay $47 and learn how to do it yourself, or once you understand the work involved in great detail, then decide whether you want to pay me $200 p/month to have it all done for you.

Or you can determine what you need an purchase individual services from us.

I also wanted to mention briefly the marketing strategy - very “anti-branding” - very counter intuitive. I’m not going to be pushing it in a superlative manner, I want to be completely honest about what it is and does, but more so, I want to imbue the whole sales process with a “service” like feel, as if I was selling my consultancy services, that is, you’re free to interact with me personally regarding the product and any personal concerns.

So think about it: Sure, just like an album, it’s gonna take a lot of work preparing that content, even more because all the videos and eveything is rolled up into one package. But not only does that make the product more valuable, but onselling of other aspects of what I do and services we provide is built into the product, it virtually doubles as a sales brochure for the complete online music marketing service we offer.

I talked about marketing it briefly, but it won’t be anything too different than concepts I often discuss about online advertising, landing pages, mailing lists etc. but I’d also like to discuss the long view of such a product - it’s business lifespan - coming up!

Just remember 2 things - if you want to try and sell something for $47 online, it’s got to be obviously a real big deal. A bunch of songs won’t cut it for even $9. And, get close to the customer. I created this product because I was getting too close to my customers and they had a habit of getting demanding, but that doesn’t mean you should sterilise the whole sales process. If I can help people who buy the product with free advice than I feel they’ve got their moneys worth, and as I said, everyone’s different. By spending 15 minutes looking at a band’s website and writing a quick email to make some suggestions, I feel I’ve delivered value.

Matt from Kurb does music marketing and stuff - and this is his music marketing blog.

Email: kurbpromo@gmail.com

Oh man. With this downtime over the holidays leading up and into 2010, again I attempt to beef up my branding, and substantiate it a bit more.

People know what a shonky DIY website looks like (it’s only marginally worse than this one), and a lot of people can read the signs of a hollow online brand, of which a big one is no content. No long tail. No evidence of a backstory or of having existed in anyway before their latest release.

However it’s a bit tedious getting into the details of building a thorough brand through content, uploading, organising, embedding, tagging, there’s a lot of work to do to build that foundation that states to visitors you’re real, and you have a real stake in what you’re doing.

You didn’t just throw a band together a website up yesterday, and you can prove it.

It’s not an easy thing to do, I had this big plan for 2009 about how I was really going to push my branding forward, but business kept grinding on so there wasn’t really the time.

A big one of course is getting this blog looking half decent, I’ve got to accept that there’s going to be a proportion of visitors who are not impressed with the standard of visual communication on a blog which does not look professional.

First impressions last and all that, am I communicating much professionalism with this blog? Are you? Colours and design and functionality are all very important, but also bold imagery or at least imagery that communicates, that’s tells stories.

That’s important for branding and imapact, but of course also music websites must have visual flow. If the most important thing you’re aiming for early on is to build up a critical mass of email sign ups, then the visual flow of the website and the page where that action really goes down needs to reflect that.

So once you have your website where design and functionality work in harmony, the predominant trend I see is for all else to really be patched in but staying organised with stuff.

This is the stuff your garden variety social media expert teaches and you should be able to run this stuff yourself, merely providing your website designer with the appropriate code so they can then put it together in a suitable way with your web design.

So it’s just a matter of using the tools and understanding what features are available to take advantage of, and how the tools will allow your audience to interact with the content in their own way, on the platform they prefer to use.

We got visual content we want to upload and present, so I’ll be checking out flickr.

I’ll be looking into bandcamp and soundcloud as well as possibly reverbnation, ilike, imeem, last.fm maybe one or two others to provide the music content for the sites.

And of course youtube provides the video content that can be embedded into

Aweber is the paid email management solution I use, to take addresses for regular email sign ups.

While a wordpress blog can deliver the all purpose platform for publishing non primary content.

It’s easy to see it all comes about spec’ing your site out with the right aps and widgets to help your fans get what they need, and you’re able to meet the requirements for depth of content which provides the substance to your brand.

We can’t be sure that every fan will be coming to your site looking for all the explicit details of your epic journey as an artist but I think it’s fair to assume that when people are intrigued enough by the music and are interested in finding out more are more likely to become those essential fans who are at your core, providing that secind layer od social proof - that you are at the level where some fans are deeply loyal.

That’s the beginning of a career brand that’s strong enough to last.