Okay I’ve been thinking about this rebranding thing a lot.

Why are we talking about rebranding?

Because artists, creative people and entrepreneurs are coming into this online space using online tools, building websites, social networking, blogging, putting out free high value content, building email lists and developing new high value propositions.

They’re doing all the online marketing I’ve been doing for the last few years, because they see people like me and know that it is possible, they’re looking to join the dots to create digital music revenue, and so they’re throwing everything into making a new model work.

And then suddenly after years of building content, using solid online promotion methods, struggling and providing users and fans alike with value and leveraging online audiences and environments  . . . what happens when the new model does work?

You reach the point that I have. That you’re doin’ alright. That you’ve made it work, you’ve made something of this mad digital music realm, and you’ve established yourself and you could continue to do well in your own little way.

And you might reach the same conclusion that I have. It’s great to have got somewhere struggling to do this and put it together, to forge a jagged new path . . . but what if we actually started doing this properly?

What if I started taking this stuff seriously? You might find yourself in same position I am that you say okay it’s great that we can earn a living and that people appreciate what we do, but now that we’ve put food on the table isn’t it time to start thinking about the bigger picture?

Rebranding isn’t a revenue strategy.

It’s probably going to cost to have better looking videos, a more professional website and blog design. To have a professional standard of art and video and offer functionality, features and usability that are fresh. To build strong stories with powerful writing and video making.

I’ve talked about the content crisis - “a survival of the fittest” in digital content, raising your standard and attempting to give your user base more is a long term strategy to connect authentically with an ever narrower niche who are particularly responsive to your message: Your Tribe.

You built your music to a this point based on a brand, based on a message in your content. Now it’s time to start refining that message into a powerful story, a story that will resonate and motivate members of your tribe.

A tribe is a group you belong to with which you share common values. You can connect, participate and/or lead. This is what rebranding is about. It’s not about being like Madonna and reinventing yourself, although it could be for some artists; It’s about a response to the these converging trends in digital culture.

When I’m talking about rebranding I’m not just talking about a makeover. I’m talking about showing leadership pertaining to the values shared amongst your target niche, that engage them and motivate them, that connect and bond them to you.

It’s not about change for the sake of it, it’s about refining and developing your brand, your message, in a modern way with the new technology you have available to do so.

Marketing and branding is a deeper part of the value an artist provides than ever before. Marketing stories are now narratives, artists are protagonists, our heroes, are characters playing out stories and messages that represent what ever more complex networks of fragmented fanbases value.

See the whole rebranding thing for me is about embracing social media and web 2.0 maturely and intelligently.

We’ve had myspace. We’ve had the photoshopping and the messed up custom profiles. We have youtube sitting there ubiquitous in the online video space, the mammoth in the room that won’t go away.

We learnt how to engage with users/fans/audience.

We learnt that people are looking for connection, for gratification, that have choices and they want to engage in a way that’s personally meaningful, they want to participate.

We now have the guru’s, the experts telling you how new marketing and branding should be done, information is free and it’s everywhere, it’s now time for artists and entrepreneurs alike to make sense of this environment, make sense of this information and make sense of the role their content plays.

That is rebranding, using the digital means now available to anyone who’s reading this to create a more powerful message.

I’m going to talk more about specifics in some future posts, but we’re obviously talking about video and youtube . . .  websites, blogs - we’ve been talking about using this technology to build revenue for awhile now. Technology is only as good as the purpose it’s used for, so now we’re talking about this technology helping us to really articulate to our fans and audience . . . to lead your tribe, to be an “ideas leader” and bring fans and audiences and uses along with you.

Building a brand and articulating it is often about refining to make sure the message is getting through to your audience. Obviously I don’t know how much longer and can go on without breaking down some examples.

I’m an entrepreneur, I’m a musician, I’m a writer.

I want to be successful in business, I want to connect with people and be afforded approval and recognition, and I also want to achieve creative connectivity.

So in the next post hopefully I’ll getting stuck into how I want to re-articulate my brand so that the messages I want to connect with my audience are authentic and meaningful.

Starting to do really nicely with the outsourcing stuff right now.

Right now I’ve just kicked of a blog promotion campaign for this blog which is going to create cumulative search authority and probably start bringing in a fair few curious readers.

There are just so many basic jobs required in online promotion and marketing that are really just scaling up basic repetitive tasks which can get boring for a creative REAL fast.

I first need to point out that a practical part of building online promotions is the “nesting” - getting settled in your spot with your website and your blog. You don’t want to really swing into full scale internet marketing if you haven’t made the necessary preparations.

Ultimately you want to have a .com domain for your website and your blog hanging off that site at www.yoursite.com/blog. This helps the work you do writing on your blog add to the search authority of your website which is the business end.

It doesn’t matter if you’re on a wordpress site or you’ve got a .info or a local site like .co.nz for new zealand, the work you put in building up blog post content can be shifted and preserved when you move your blog to a .com, but if you’ve put all this work into promoting the www.yourband.info and then you switch over to www.yourband.com . . .

Which is what I did when I moved from

http://kurbpromotion.wordpress.com

to

http://musicmarketingmanagement.com

You’re gonna waste all that effort.

The reality is staying within the wordpress network does get you more traffic short term, but I needed the freedom to develop my blog, and I lost out on a lot of the effort I put into promoting the kurb promotion blog on wordpress, and that blog still brings me more business than this one does. For now.

So this is why we won’t get into outsourcing promotion work on a website or a blog that hasn’t reached it’s final incarnation.  Much like I don’t want to push to far into social media campaigns with bands when their design is unprofessional - that’s where I’m outsourcing designers - but today I’m talking more about outsourcing more mundane stuff that doesn’t require skills such as design work, but is just too boring for most to cope with, and it’s precisely for that reason that these techniques are so successful.

That other band you see yourself as being capable of being like in a years time?

Do you think they or their management spend hours upon hours building links? You think they’re paying someone else to do it - is their management really that smart? Probably not. So give yourself the edge and give me an email. I do online music marketing for bands kurbpromo@gmail.com

I’ve got this blog promotion campaign going now that’s costing me next to nothing. I paid them yesterday, they started work an 2 hours ago, look at them go!

They’re doing 60 for me. 60 high quality backlinks from top blog directories where users are searching for blogs in their niche I’m definitely running this campaign for all clients who have their final blog set up configured.

So once you have your blog and website set up where you intend it to stay for years to come, and you’ve had someone like me do some basic on page optimisation, and as an artist you’re committed to producing posts, then you can begin promoting your sites. By building links.

Links is the most important thing that Google uses to rank your sites for certain terms.

Masses of links is what you want. I’ve talked about how we build links:

- commenting blogs, particularly “do follow” blogs that pass on link juice. In the http://newmusicmarketing.com forum I provide several extansive lists of do follow blogs that pass on search authority.  Hours if not days of work.

- submitting your site to search engines. Google is the big mama boss search engine that matters. But google also “crawls” all the 1000’s of other little baby search engines and though you’re probably already indexed by Google, being indexed by all these other search engines shows Google you have authority. with 5000+ search engines out there, even cutting and pasting to the top 200 would take again, hours and hours.

- syndicating articles. Using your blog posts and submitting them as free articles that webmasters may publish as long as they use your attributive link is one of themost powerful search based website promotion techniques available. Reposting stuff to wordpress, blogspot, myspace, facebook is one thing.

Also at this point we’re swapping over from promotional tactics that are search based to those that are social based - that is, submitting to article directories and also blog directories as I described in the campaign above, is great for improving search authority but at the same time, a high quality article or blog directory submission is going to add to the search benefits with actual readers who are going to come through the sites where you articles and blogs are being listed and syndicated.

Then you can go one further than I have at this point and submit your RSS feed to RSS directories, which is totally going to maximize the potential to syndicate your content and get links and traffic coming back through that.

So there are powerful and proven strategies to market your website and your blog content but they will bore the life out of you. I just cannot spend hours doing these repetitive submissions.

But outsourcing these jobs to companies who specialise in it, you can get a massive edge on other entertainment brands that just aren’t utilising strong leverage of the digital music environment.

I really need to practice writing shorter posts. It’s harder to keep people’s attention these days and often, you just want to hit them with the sharp end of an idea.

Right now, I’m posting about my membership site and artist community New Music Marketing it’s really getting over run by spammers and I don’t even have much foundation content there.

So the outcome is a forum needs a lot more maintenance than a blog.

But I really feel I need to get active there.

I don’t care about controlling the content. What I’m motivated by is creating a “tribal” environment. I don’t claim to be an expert, but there is clearly a methodology I’m developing and I’m happy to discuss this on my blog in kind of broad theoretical terms, but I’m desperate to ensure my actual clients are the first to benefit from my knowledge and I like the idea that inside the forum, discussing practical techniques as they apply to specific artists, as well as being completely open about what is available in terms of scripts, bots, automation, outsourcing, etc. - this is stuff I’m not keen to discuss on my by public blog, because I generally tend to charge for it, that’s my living!

The idea for the forum originally came from all the value I was putting into 1-on-1 email consultations and wanting other clients to benefit from what I was saying.

A lot of my clients, I have to accept, are not very advanced in web 2.0 and often this is precisely why they’ve come to me. They don’t read my blog and for a lot of them the pieces of the puzzle are only slowly coming together.

The forum can become an interactive environment which could provide controlled access to content and 3rd parties - outsourced staff such as graphic deigners, web designers - who could work directly with artists. So all I need to do is focus on bringing my clients together there.

I see this as being efficient without even thinking about the main point of such forums - you’re leveraging your user base for content and feedback. When you can control your tribe within such an environment which is perceived to be somewhat insular, we can talk freely about the issues and what blind spots might be coming up for artists in the process - I can respond directly to their actual needs, rather than waffling on my blog.

It’s just a bit of a mess in there right now! I had plans. But those plans have been on hold. These holidays hopefully I’m able to rally and move forward with this platform. It’s something new, I see benefits, I see scale, I just have to tackle the challenge of maintaining it to a point I can dedicate outsourced staff to it’s upkeep.

Or at least stop the spam!

Matt and his team from kurb does online music promotion, youtube video promotion and small business marketing. He blogs on music promotion at Music. Marketing. Management.

I’ve been talking a bit about “fan management” recently on this blog.

Because maybe you don’t need to find a band manager for your music, you need to find a fan manager.

This is the new model. You might still need a traditional manager figure who goes into bat for the artist to bust balls and make sure they’re being looked after. But now that the music industry has changed to enable musicians to engage fans directly, we start talking about a “fan manager”.

This describes the changing role of band and music management to incorporate tasks that face the reality of  creating revenue from music because increasingly now, you’ve got to go directly to the fan.

And you’ve got to understand the complexities of how fans are engaged online.

I’m only talking about this now because I turned up on the http://www.fanmanager.net site and they also have a blog at http://fanmanager.wordpress.com- which was how I found them, their was a trackback on their link to a Lefsetz post.

It’s funny that they refer to themselves as “fan managers” because that’s a term I’d begun using that recognises where the most important work is going on in the music industry now, and that’s enabling artists and enabling fans, not making backroom deals with high rolling music industry dons.

Now Fan Manager the business intrigued me and I thought was worth a mention because they are obviously dealing with a higher level of client than I do and most likely charge accordingly. But they run a very comprehensive service. It’s inspired me to start thinking how I can bring my service levels up in the way these guys have because they’re projecting a powerful solution to cover the great many varying needs of artists building a brand and interacting with fans in a digital era.

Here’s what they were offering in their service packages. Yes, I know many many shonky music service websites promise so much - I’ve just about seen them all - but I saw a lot of evidence on the site that these guys were actually doing this stuff, not just providing a big long list to impress people!

Even if they don’t deliver half of what they say they do or they’re being a little ambivalent, that sure is a solid list of services that a modern marketing or fan managing company or service provider should be aiming to provide for musicians and other clients.

I’m not sure how these guys run their operation but with my work, I need to be paying one on one attention to my clients whenever possible because when you’re carrying out this work, so much is required to personalise and customize services to the specific act in order to make marketing communications and fan management authentic and successfil, as well as research involved to develop methods of qualifying and targeting high quality contacts and cultivating a growing group of connected and enabled fans.

And also it’s something for me to aim for because if I could do a decent job of all that I could definitely start charging more but as it is I’m still affordable!

I notice there’s a few things that they don’t mention that I do, such as SEO, PPC and ad supported revenue - I guess this is more hardened internet marketing stuff and they are, afterall, “fan managers”.

So maybe, given the needs of the large clients they serve who already have established fan bases that need maintenance, this suggests interacting with fans becomes a core revenue operation.

One you reach that “1000 true fans” point, then you bring on your “fan manager” who helps you facilitate an authentic relationship.

Especially if you’re paying in US$. How about this - the coupon code is “fan manager” if you mention that you want a “fan manager” I’ll take 10% off my service in US$. That’s $500 down to $450 - $150 US per month for comprehensive online music marketing management.

In a new model I see, musicans and entertainers require the assistance of a trinity of support parties to create revenue.

The first is the producer or the musicians musical mentor that aid the musician bringing their musical product to the most professional standard possible. This might also include someone who takes responsibility for ensuring the “talent’s” video content is also of a high standard.

The second is an agent. An agent takes a commission based on bookings and placements.

And the last is the fan manager.

Before I’ve said that the last was the online guru but I think just taking the attitude that some geek can fix your problems with technology isn’t going to be enough.

That’s why this term “fan manager” is so important. Rather than a band manager who used to organise your relationship with your label and with your agent if they didn’t already act as your agent, out of economic necessity your manager now must be proficient in organising and monetizing your relationship with thousands of fans to make it authentic and valuable for them so that the experience they get motivates them to make purchases - and of course the fan manager will facilitate such commercial operations online.

So last thing I want to say is how are you engaging fans and is their someone in your team dedicated to this?

Have you “got it” yet that the digital music revolution now is all about engaging fans?

They can have your music for free. But earn their respect as Lefsetz said, and they’ll pay for it anyway.

Gerd Leonhard compared them to puppies. Feed them free content and they’ll be loyal to you for life.

Writing shorter posts is one thing, but if I’m going to ride the next digital wave I’d better smarten my act up around here. Putting a bit more effort into my posts, y’know small things, like finishing sentences.

Writing the post and then saving it and coming back to it when I’m ready to edit it seriously.

Posting at a smart time, like a weekday morning or afternoon, not in the dark hours of sunday morning.

As I said, I’m doing okay, but if I want to lift my game and get up there having these muddled posts is no good, you’ve got to make a commitment to value for your audience.

It’s lower value, lower quality if you’re not making the effort to be presentable.

It’s easy to say oh y’know it’s just my blog, i’m just gonna throw some words up to keep it fresh with my SEO and such but if you really want to engage and go from hundreds to thousands of daily visitors, you’re going to have to present a “professional” image.

You need to look as if you’re serious.

Spelling mistakes and unfinished paragraphs with concepts that go all over the place is not going to be taking me to the next level. I’ll get leads sure. You’ll pick up some fans here and there. But not that many.

Gerd Leonhard made a great metaphor while he was drifting down the digital content stream in his little boat in a recent talk, he compared your audience to puppies. Feed them content and they’ll be the ones waiting for you to come home, who’ll follow you everywhere.

You can’t ask a puppy for $1 on Itunes. All you can do is give it love.

Ariel Hyatt has an amazing post over at Music Think Tank.

It’s sad the decaying structures of the traditional music industry model are still held in place. This is indicative of our general global situation here, vested interests have too much too lose to progress.

This is what a recession looks like to me. It’s when a lot of accepted practices that no longer provide value are removed from the production chain out of necessity.

It’s a correction for most. Except for those who were right all along.

The digital music realm is only going to thrive in these conditions.

I’m not saying 2009 will be all candy. But if you can survive it, it’s just going to get easier.

Traffic is visitors to your site. Potential fans, sales, revenue.

Google IS traffic, and SEO is the strategy of getting the most traffic from Google searches.

At the end of the day, ranking highly in Google for niche keyword terms is the most potentially successful strategy but it’s also one of the most difficult. Also, musicians have found it hard to monetize their traffic, the random search visitors.

Now someone who knows about optimising your web pages can do your meta tags and such in half an hour. You need to be responsible for producing new content that keeps your site looking fresh for google, this is why blogs are very advantageous because they allow for easy publishing of fresh content.

The most important part of SEO is link building. Now we’ve discussed before two of the most popular methods of building links

- commenting on “do follow” blogs with high “PR” (pagerank)

- syndicating content or “article marketing”

That’s what we’re doing today. I discussed also earlier how we could syndicate our digital content such as blogs by posting them to myspace and facebook and wordpress and blogger and how this would be effective sndication or distribution as long as each one linked back to your home base - either your website or your main blog, your main platformwhere you engage fans.

Now I’m talking about using article directories, submitting some content as an “article” to be published by other webmasters with permission as long as they include your link, which by spreading your link around in this way, will build you quality one way links back to your site.

Now article submission does have some guidelines. You’re attempting to be informative and provide value, so the better your article the more likely it will be picked up by other webmasters. You will also be strictly limited on the amount of links you may use, often just one or two linking back to your sites in a author’s footer that is included when and wherever the article is published.

But to get maximum exposure and benefit from this, I’ll have this article submitted to between 100-300 article directories by an outsourced worker.  That’s 100-300 high quality backlinks to your site. That would take most people days, and these are the benefits

I’m happy to provide this service for you as part of a package is you contact me at kurbpromo@gmail.com

Otherwise the best place to start your article submission as a SEO marketing strategy is probably

This article directory site in particular seems to carry a LOT of google juice, coming up very high on some pretty common searches. It’s a good place to learn about the do’s and don’ts of article submissions.

Just remember your author’s box with your links back to your site are the most important thing - that’s why you’re doing this to get those backlinks with the nice juicy keywords in the anchor text.

So article directory submissions as a marketing strategy is one of the leading tactics for SEO right now because the links will build themselves of your content is relevant and valuable, while submissions alwaysgenerate high quality backlinks from authoritative article directory sites.

MY ARTICLE FOR SUBMISSION

Here’s an article I’ve produced to promote a range of my clients working in similar genres.

I’ve attempted to frame the article as an introduction to new artists making chill out music but also added quite a bit of information about the genre so the article comes across as more informative as and less.

With article marketing we don’t depend on the article being picked up and read to any significant level, it’s about the backlinks, but if we can get organic click through traffic, all the better.

You’ll notice I provide also an extensive list of relevant artists and labels. I always encourage this kind of detailing because of the authority this bestows on a range of long tail niche keywords.

Now take note:

I’ve added the links because it’s a blog post, and a few backlinks aren’t going to hurt,  when it’s an article for submission there’ll be no links within the body, there’ll be room for your links in the authors box.

Looking for new chill out and downbeat or downtempo music? There are some amazing new downbeat producers and DJ’s producing new downbeat music.

Here are some of my suggestions:

www.Ganga.dk – Denmark Chill Out Downbeat producer Ganga, hailing from Copenhagen describes himself as a musical chameleon. The classically trained musician and producer entered the world of electronic music with his debut album entitled ‘I Dream About Trees’ which was released on Music For Dreams. It was an album inspired by trees, which he professes a general fondness for. The album created quite a stir in the downbeat/chillout/lounge genre, and numerous tracks from the album are compiled again and again on the biggest chillout compilations, Buddha Bar, Real Ibiza, Cafe Mambo, Hed Kandi Serve Chilled, No Stress to name but a few.

Budding young DJ, producer and songwriter from Auckland, New Zealand, jr kong began his life long musical pursuit at the age of five. From playing in school bands to church choirs to then scoring music for short movies; jr kong’s musical interests are wide and varied. His influences and production styles include, electronica, hip hop, rock and folk. And he if often blurring the lines between musical styles and conventions. A sound that might easily fit between DJ Shadow and some real geeky guy. Jr kong’s debut album is 12 Inch Biscuit Press, an electronic mix of urban styles with a distinct kiwi vibe.

“Oceanic Chill” is a new compilation CD of chill out, downbeat, dub, trip hop, ambient and all round mellow grooves featuring 23 fresh artists brought together as proof that the underground is alive, well, and very relaxed about the whole thing. A sumptuous selection is presented from artists all hailing from Pacific nations to create a rich aural repository lovingly compiled by DJ Romantech head of ..bass, the Auckland, NZ based DJ/Producer collective. And from the sheer depth and capacity of sites such as myspace, the Oceanic release feeds the best elements accessible together into a potent brew of soothing rhythms and melodic beats. DJ Romantech is an Auckland, New Zealand Liquid Funk DJ.

Chill out music takes it’s name from the slang term to relax and is applied as a term to cover many styles of mellow, slower paced music made by modern producers with beats and samples in the electronic music scene.

“Downtempo” or “Downbeat” music is described as a laidback form of electronic music similar to ambient music but with a beat or a groove.

Another related genre is Trip hop, though Downtempo usually uses a slower tempo than Trip-hop. The relaxing and often sensual or romantic feel of most downtempo music, along with the absence or minimal use of lyrics or vocals, it is a popular form of background music in ‘chill out rooms’ of dance parties, many alternative cafes, and is often marketed as being good music for lovemaking.

The genres associated with chill-out are mostly Ambient, Trip-hop, Nu jazz, Ambient House, Ambient Trance, New Age and other sub-genres of Downtempo - a major branch of electronic music. Sometimes the Easy Listening sub-genre Lounge is considered to belong to the chill-out collection as well.

The term “Chill out music”, as well as the genre itself, originated in chill rooms that were set up by DJs around the club dance floors to give patrons a chance to get away from the hectic dance music vibe and mellow out with this style of chilled music. Chill out as a musical genre is synonymous with the more recently popularized terms such as “smooth electronica” and “soft techno” and is a loose genre of music blurring into several other very distinct styles of electronic and lo-fi music.

Artists include Air, Fila Brazillia, Portishead, Afterlife, Massive Attack, Chris Coco, Zero 7, Enigma, Kruder & Dorfmeister, Thievery Corporation, Lemongrass, Tosca, Monte La Rue, Nightmares on Wax, The Dining Rooms, Bluetech, Sounds from the Ground, Jens Buchert, A Man Called Adam, Electric Skychurch, Mystical Sun, Single Cell Orchestra, Alex Cortiz, Boards of Canada, William Orbit, Groove Armada, Leftfield, Lenny Ibizarre, Timonkey, Banco de Gaia, and Lemon Jelly. Some of the labels with the most important recording rosters of downbeat and chill out artists and largest catalogs of releases and compilations are: Life Enhancing Audio, ESL Music, Instinct Records, Café del Mar, United Recordings, Water Music, Pork Recordings, Muti Music, Ninja Tune, Mole Listening Pearls, Six Degrees Records, Waveform, Compost Records, Interchill, Cyberset Music, Liquid Sound Design, and Ultimae.

Bonus Recommended New Zealand Chill Out

Bluevibe Studio
Stray Theories

I’ve only been in this business for a little under two years, which is quite a bit when you consider how new online music marketing services are, and how fresh the digital music industry still is.

I don’t claim to know everything about online music marketing, I began with a range of techniques that I knew were successful. Distributing content through out channels and platforms and automating promotion on sites such as myspace was initially quite effective.

When I was forced to reevaluate the value of myspace promotion for bands, I quickly got an idea of how quickly the roles of a fan manager or online revenue facilitator or web guru or whatever you want to call it would have to be continually expanding to meet the needs of artists in a rapidly changing industry.

I moved from thinking what software, what tricks and insider secrets would I be able to provide for clients to give them an edge online, to how to create a full and complete service for musicians so that their online marketing and management requirements are met.

Not just the quick fix of instant gratification, but lasting success in engaging and monetizing loyal fans.

That’s why I’ve added so much to my service. Sure we do Myspace and Youtube promotions with automation but that’s not even really a major part.

Professional musicians need professional platforms and to use technology in a professional, brand conscious way. You can’t be a professional musician without this any more.

All through the middle of this year I had to learn about administering websites with my own domains and my own hosting. I new a little about web design but I really had to bring myself up to speed with website administration so I could continue to progress toward the goal of creating a complete online music marketing and management solutions.

There’s no point me doing all my fancy scripts and bots and SEO tricks etc. just to have web designers and graphic designers charging you the earth for stuff that’s pretty straight forward. The digital environment is like that, there’s always experts waiting to overcharge you.

Musicans, especially up and comers need affordable services but they also need them to be solid in order to benefit in the long run. A friends list of 10,000 on mysapce is nothing if you don’t engage them. But when you’re a musician developing and marketing an online brand - especially if you’re not established - this is a lot of work that requires professional attention if you’re to take your music career to the next level.

I had to bring on web designers, graphic designers, people ready to carry out the excruciatingly boring SEO tasks that are required to make a broad impact on the net. These things need to be in place and to be affordable or you just won’t get the result, even after months of work.

My focus, as I’ve refined my brand is simply solid strategies for revenue based on my success and the rudiments of online marketing. As I’ve said before, if you want to make money from a digital model, it’s best to start looking at people who are already successful making money online and learning what you can - which is what I do, and probably the reason I’ve become successful in such a short time despite - as is the point of this article - I charge about 2-3 times less what others do in this niche.

I don’t provide a service for this cost that will do everything. I don’t work with a lot of established artists who have the budget for that which is about US$500-$2000 p/month.

That’s what you can expect to pay once you have reached the “1000 true fans” model.

If you haven’t got a 1000 true fans then you’re probably best to stick with someone like me who charges $US200-400 p/month.

For that price, I can’t wave a magic wand and make you famous. This service is designed to make it affordable for unestablished and up and coming new musicians to start growing toward a break even point, growing towards making the “1000 true fans” model work. It doesn’t happen overnight, and it usually won’t happen in 3 months either.

We’re on a digital timeline now. Things take time, and that’s not just waiting, but working as well.

Overtime, my earnings have increased because I’ve been committed to the strategies I espouse and deliver for our clients. Without commitment to the work being done, artist can’t expect to move forward.

Let’s look and compare some basic online music marketing and management services - these are based on real examples of reputable service providers.

Publicity focuses on servicing your content - whether music or traditional PR that solicits for media mentions and attention- to media organisations, from radio and other music organisations to

Usually when I’m working with an artist I won’t suggest publicity until you’re ready to start spending this kind of money, you’ve already established a track record with digital earnings.

Sure, it’s like Andrew Dubber says - first, fans must HEAR the music before they BUY it.

But what’s the point in firing up your audience if you haven’t got a proven system to make money? What’s the point in engaging fans if you have no proven way of maintaining a profitable relationship with them?

Publicity is also very much based on the old model that is currently being uprooted. Firing out a blast of music to the world is great and worked when radio stations still mattered. But the world is becoming more niche, more long tail, how do you identify and engage your core?

Your fans are the ones that make you your money - how is it done?

Sure your fans must hear music before they want to buy it, but you’ve got to remember people are buying less and less music - at least “copies” of music anyway.

How can publicity help you directly monetize your music at that crucial stage where you must create cashflow from sales, fees and other revenue to recoup, reinvest, and continue to progress?

So with publicity you could easily spend $US2000 and have your song playing on dozens or maybe hundreds of internet radio stations etc. but are really able to leverage the attention you get from those sources to earn of fans long term?

We talked about fan management recently. We’ve talked about why this is so important - because your fans are your core revenue.

If anyone is going to buy copies of your music, it will be a fan. If anyone is going to buy merch,

Fan management means creating the platforms and  the professional branding touches that show that you’re a serious artist to your fans.

It’s about your websites and your social network remaining active and engaged, it’s about facilitating the artists content within the digital space to keep fans interested and contributing to the musician.

But the issue with fan management is that it illustrates that maintaining a fan base is a task in itself.

This kind of fan management is designed for bands and musicians, acts that already have at least 1000 true fans who are committed to them.  These are acts and artists who already have the following, now they just need to continue the interactions so that when new products and value propositions are presented, there is high engagement from established users and so income streams - whether from traditional music copies or otherwise - remain solid.

The fan management model, although essential for established professional musicians, doesn’t help artists to establish more and new fans and create revenue in the most creative and innovative ways.

Now of course one of the main reasons I charge less is that I come from New Zealand. It’s nowhere near a third world country but our currency has taken an absolute hammering over the last few months, so I can afford to charge half as much as my competitors and still do well for myself.

But when it comes down to technique, I’m all about transferring what I see working in internet marketing over to musicians. So when I’m working with musicians in marketing and management, the first priority is to create platforms that have the potential to become revenue sources in the future.

Now I’ve taken it one step further - my track record speaks for itself - I’ve learnt to earn a 6 figure income online, I know how and what works, it’s just a matter of transfering my successful strategies to my artists and for artists to get real:

US$500 over 3 months is not going to get you to where I am after having spent 3-4 years building this business and if you would be happy with a 6 figure annual income, then you should respect that.

Let’s look at some points why I believe the internet marketing approach is the most effective for music marketing and management online:

- It comes down, as I said, to proven strategies. Internet Marketers are experienced in creating income online - sure, their bread and butter tends to be weight loss, dating sites, credit cards and pharmaceuticals but these guys only do stuff that works, and they don’t bother with anything else. If you’re in this seriously, then you realise you’re in business.

- SEO and Google. Google was made to find things, and it’s success at that has made it one of the biggest brands on the planet. Being found on Google is the most straightforward, easy and possibly cheapest way an ordinary person can get a lot of exposure and make a lot of money.

- Innovation: The selling of copies of music is an old model and old ways of thinking are not going to engage or excite people. We need to look to internet marketers to see the techniques that even excitable young teenagers who consider themselves internet marketers use to engage their audience and get traction, because they work. Marketers know understand the power of value, and leveraging the knowledge that they cannot control their content in the digital environment.

They must rely on activity that is conveyed as strong, powerful marketing, branding and sales propositions.

I’m talking about techniques that online marketers use - list building, membership sites, sales funnels with cross selling and  upselling, niche tapping, scaling vertically and horizontally, outsourcing as much as possible, building backlinks, building blogs, building landing pages, running ppc campaigns on landing pages, affiliate marketing offers, leveraging income from free sign ups, using competitions and free content to build subscribers, leveraging networks, launching joint ventures, leveraging other media for promotional purposes such as customized software and building you own apps . . .

All the way round to building and launching a product. Which is what a band used to do when it released an album and the labels used to be good at it.

But the old school mass media model is over and now if you a want to be successful you’re going to need some real modern marketing nous

And that is what I charge for starting at US$500 for 3 months.

To contact me email kurbpromo@gmail.com. The price will be going up, it always has. When I started I was charging NZ$100 p/month.

So basically, in music marketing, you can engage and should engage media and influencers with publicity. You should have a fan manager who interacts and monetizes fan loyalty, once this becomes a seriously viable long term strategy, and judging that point could be critical.

But the cheapest and most essential thing I offer my clients is the power of technology.

The power of benefitting from a digital environment now. Benefitting with savings and affordability as well as leveraging tools and tricks that will not only expose you to more people and engage your targets, but provide techniques to advance these people from the casually interested to followers and fans who will become an asset that creates significant recurring income.

I have just started clearing the spam at my artist community www.newmusicmarketing.com and it was even worse than I thought, it’s going to take a bit of work.

Imagine starting a community around your artist brand and having fans logging i and signing up and seeing pages of dirty spam, a lot of it for viagra and plenty of porn.

I’m sure with the right advice I’ll be able to get on top of spam attacks in the future - while for now I’ll just have to stay vigilant and bring on some extra hands.

This is especially important now that I have a graphic designer on board for 20 hours a week now so that all artists on our packages will benefit from graphic design by organizing a system by which artists interact directly with staff through the forum.

There’ll be a graphic designer, a web designer and SEO person hopefully by new years ready to address the needs of artists while I continue to work one on one with them developing marketing, branding and sales strategy.

If musicians are in need of quick web graphics - banners, headers, panels, buttons, logos, the kind of designs artists need to furnish their profiles and web pages with a professional look, get in touch we can cover that for $50. This includes poster designs, flyer designs and CD and DVD packaging.

Poster designs can be included as part of our $100 gig promotion packages - get a poster/e flyer designed plus an online advertising campaign directed specifically at your city for only US$100 - this offer is open to musicians and performers everywhere!

email me, Matt: kurbpromo@gmail.com to talk about it.

I’ve been thinking aloud on twitter in regard to my forthcoming “brand rejuvenation”, and I recently reflected I really do have a lot more in common with MMO brats than I do with your typical digital music industry bloggers.

This, I reasoned, goes a long way to explaining why many of my recent comments were removed from Music Think Tank. What I considered as natural online behaviour, they considered spam.

I mean I do a lot of thinking, and it’s great, but I weighed up the points made and decided I’d rather make money.

Making money isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but often with musicians and in my experience as a musician in the past, just a little bit of extra money can go a long way toward not having to have a proper job, and that’s why I often see making money - which I’m starting to find relatively easy to do - as so important for musicians.

I also did have a job once, about 8 years ago and it was awful. Working all day doing boring, horrible menial tasks and talked down to. I wouldn’t recommend it at all.

If you don’t know what MMO stands for, it means “make money online’.

“Make money online” is the most searched keyword phrase for people looking to get rich on the internet and so MMO has become shorthand for a genre of blogs that has been avidly taken to by the under-25 set.

Some of the big boys of MMO are www.shoemoney.com and www.johnchow.com who would both be well past 30, but they don’t really account for the surge of MMO style blogs being run by young guys who are excited that they have a vague idea of how to make money online the way Shoemoney and John Chow do - by teaching other people how to make money online on their blog . . . despite the fact that they may not know too much about what exactly is involved.

So we have a lot of blogs out there with some fairly obvious thematic similarities all run by young guys who are trying to make money teaching people internet marketing though they don’t necassarily know that much about it.

Of course they tend to pick up some clues here and there, but the most hilarious thing though is that most are not even making enough to leave their jobs, which is kind of a contradiction, and of course spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stale, unoriginal posts are de rigeur.

But just because these young guys don’t tend to be that smart it doesn’t mean they haven’t got some good ideas that we can use - I mean afterall they do spend their days hanging on the every words of internet marketers who are millionaires.

If you want to check out some truly useful online marketing advice I would check out Yaro Starak or Naomi Dunford or if you’re looking for a MMO brat who does provide value, check out The University Kid.

When I have followed Shoemoney or John Chow, their blogs just seem to be endless announcements of competitions, cross promotions, marketing conference attendences, offers for readers to become affiliates on some new offer, there doesn’t seem to be much of real value that anyone could take away and start learning practical internet marketing  skills with.

So that’s what you get with MMO brats. Kids who know how to build a great blog, but not make much money. Often on these kids blogs I will see methods of making money such as forum posting and freelance writing which are just simply . . . minimum wage by stealth.

I mean technically you ARE making money online but . . . well you’re actually haveing to work just as hard as you would otherwise!

It’s quite similar to musicians really, they do have some talents, but not in areas that convert easily to revenue. And the MMO brats have one advantage - time. A blog tends to take 6 months - 2 years before it starts getting any traction, and by that I mean 100+ visitors a day, about $1 worth of attention.

It’s quite the opposite of me. I have no problem scratching for coin, but my blog sure aint the prettiest and there’s plenty of room for improvement both in writing, presentation and functionality.

A lot of musicians are the same. Posting to their blog every week is a struggle, and we haven’t even got started with building a readership!

So I’m talking about where I’m at, that I’ve reached the 100+ visitors a day mark again, and I’m needing to step it up to build traction.

Giving away a digital product free such as an ebook - in most MMO kids cases - or an mp3 as a good example for a musician, is classic way bloggers build their subscribers list. In fact the most active and effective of the little MMO brats will be busy as beavers running competitions, commenting other blogs, developing joint ventures with other bloggers to build their subscriber list.

When you’re in the MMO brat niche it’s amazing the frenzy that can be created over a $50 cash prize.

Now I’m just sitting here - and I hope you’re taking in these ideas for building subscribers to your blog - thinking how I can leverage those kids to promote my blog and even go one better and get them selling my services for me.

Let me tell you about how a blog competition might work. Often, because everyone reading the blog also has their own little MMO blog, the rules of the competitionare that you must post a review with a link back to the site running the competition - this gets the blog lots of backlinks, and whats more, all the subscribers from that kids MMO blog also find out about the competition and subscribe and even enter by posting their own review. Viral spreadification!

What’s perverse is often the prize is - if they’re particularly cheap - a “free paid review”. Haha

So - any way that you can create a competition thats going to generate lots of backlinks as entries is a winner.

I could offer a “free paid review” on this site and posted to half a dozen of my junk blogs as a competition prize, but I’ve still got some work to do before I start seriously building this blog.

But this is exactly the types of techniques boy MMO bloggers are using to build their subscriber lists from the barely significant 100 to the “pretty much making it” 1000 .

Thought I’d do a quick post on Twitter, it just didn’t turn out to be that quick.

I’m talking about two twitter tools - “qwitter” and “twollow” and using these two tools as examples of “enablers” - tools that can allow you to indulge in poor branding habits. And poor branding does not build tribes of active followers for which you can provide value for in a digital environment.

So I’ve been using Twitter more actively over the last few months.

Initially I began using it because of my belief - especially after my facebook fail - that you should always start participating in communities where a buzz is going on, and the buzz around twitter has become sustained to the point that it may just start going more mainstream.

When an online community gets a buzz around it, that is, it gets seriously adopted by a critical mass of high profile users, it’s important to get in there and grab your branded url. Also if it’s an easy sign up like twitter, why not also take advantage of a nice high quality link back to your site.

If you’re just gonna sign up, at least get your backlink! Sheesh.

So I just took the advice any Social Media expert would give you and just got in there.

I started with a massive branding fail by selecting my twitter handle as “MattNZ”. as in, A guy called Matthew who’s key brand association on twitter was that I come from New Zealand.

Not really creating much of a powerful branding message there.

I just figured Twitter was a place where I didn’t know exactly who I’d be interacting with yet.

Other internet marketing people? Other digital music industry people? Musicians and Clients? People who I was connected to through my own personal music interests? Happy reunions from the Myspace days?

Well it turned out to be all of the above, but my experiences on Twitter - oh and also being censored for “spamming” music think tank - have been events that triggered my recent interest in developing my brand.

I first started using twitter more actively for fun. I haven’t got any hot dates on twitter - yet - but I reasoned . . . I was sure getting a lot more done these days than the myspace/facebook timesuck.

And so despite my (un)clever “MattNZ” branding strategy, it turned out through the connections I was making that twitter became mainly a place where I could network with other New Zealanders who were working in and around similar fields - marketing, music, internet and social media.

Not really network in the sense of “work”, mainly more community, and “listening” and picking up the vibe “out there” amongst my contemporaries, what was happening, and adding my own tweets reflecting on some of what I was experiencing in a professional capacity, plus the odd announcements related to my own creative stuff.

Being me I tend to be pretty irreverent sometimes. But I was having fun, so it was all fine and dandy. Until I got my first unfollow.

I remember when I used to notice my friend count on myspace go down.

What’d I do? What’d I say? Who doesn’t like me? Why can’t we be friends?

That’s when I first heard about Qwitter, a twitter tool that tells you who unfollowed you and after which of your last “tweets”. And I very almost jumped straight on it, as I always obsessed whenever I saw my follow list go down. But I was able to recognise that.

At first I blamed twitter, felt that I’d got too involved in it. Felt that there was a homogenous atmosphere of ideas and attitudes that perhaps I didn’t fit into.

That’s when I started getting serious with where I was at with my brand. In the same way I was haranguing my clients to bring more clarity to their brand to engage with their targets, and I had already recognised the the trends that were blurring the professional and the personal; It was time for me to embrace the true character of the value I provide and the goals I aspire to and wear it with pride, to better cut through the noise and connect with those who will value it most.

And if there are people on Twitter or on Music Think Tank or anywhere else that doesn’t like that, then good!

In massive, hyper connected online communities, attempting to get everyone to like you is a branding fail!

I don’t want to be connected to people for whom I don’t provide value. I only want to engage people who are ready and understand my message, and for that to be possible I need to be fully articulating that brand.

I’m still a little hesitant understandably. I don’t want to alienate and offend people, but without strong branding messages, how else am I going to stand out and become a champion to those who believe in my message, how do I grow my tribe?

Not by worrying about who I’m going to upset, and accepting that I am going to upset and alienate a portion of people I come into contact with, and not everyone who follows me on twitter is going to be interested in what I’m doing. But in a modern marketing and branding environment where I choose my clients and my customers as much as they choose me, what outrages, offends and bores one group will enlight and inspire another, as long as I committed to providing value and not sailing off on a big ego trip.

Qwitter, I should mention does have a useful function if you’re trying to learn what you could possibly be doing wrong, but is it really worth the analytical effortand attitude adjustment for one person or wouldn’t you rather be yourself?

Because afterall, my brand is about no frills monetisation. Put time and effort in, get money out. And getting money is about doing numbers, and when you’re talking about “doing the numbers” the opinions of one or two people who disagree with you don’t really matter in the greater scheme of the world wide web.

Twollow is another twitter tool which has a spammy side to it in that if you enter certain keywords or keyphrases into the app, it will have you follow any user who tweets that term.

Now everyone knows I’m no angel when it comes to spam. But I am always an advocate of using automated tools in a smart way.

The problem is I end up being “twollowed” by all these idiot internet marketers from all around the world who twollow stupid terms like “marketing” for example so they end up following everyone on twitter who uses the word “marketing”.

Do I want to be connected and networking with whole a lot of dumb ass internet marketers from overseas with less of a clue than me and whom I have very little in common?

No, I want to be known as a guy in online music marketing who’s unapologetically successful because he helps bands to stay in the black. I create succesful digital businesses and online marketing campaigns to promote them, some of them belong to me, some to others, many to musicians and other content providers.

That fact that I have a lot of clients who are childrens entertainers for example, makes no difference.

Children’s entertainers have got to eat too. Everyone knows what moneyspinners acts such as The Wiggles, australias highest grossing act are, why do you think I’m working on so many kids projects? I’m not the one up there singing the songs!

I may be more Donald Trump than Bob Dylan.

And if the brand and the message I create is a clear one that reaches an audience who are looking for that message, for customers who feel that their problems are articulated as financial, then you don’t want Bob Dylan telling you the answer’s blowing in the wind.  They’ll be looking for someone who knows how to get results online.

And I’ll be looking for clients who understand in most cases that takes longer than 6 months.

Not everyone has to like what I do and the way I do it. But everyone’s got something to learn because from where I am, what I do looks like it works.

Follow me at

http://www.twitter.com/mattnz