How To Make More Money With Beathive!

Greetings all, Alex PXR8 here.

In this ***monster*** blog post I am going to "open up the war chest" and give you a huge stack of "thinking out of the box" ideas for how you can make more money from Beathive. The ideas I am going to post in this blog are so useful and powerful that, if implemented correctly, they could dramatically increase the amount of money you earn from Beathive. We'll talk about my slice later ok.... ;)

This post is of course addressed towards people who have, or are making, their own original loop content: Those who already have their own loop shop, and those who are thinking of constructing one.

Marketing Strategy

Now - many musicians are completely disinterested in marketing, until they realize a fundamental truth: that good marketing massively increases your chances of financial success. And then with financial success, you can put more energy into your art. Yea!

Some of you may have thought "Well all I have to do is stick my loops up on Beathive and sit back and I'll make the money, right?"

You'll make some money, of course.

But did you know that producers who actively market their loop shop can hugely increase the amount of money they make from their shop?

So my first question to you is this: Do you have a marketing strategy for your Beathive loop shop? A "marketing strategy" is a system that you have designed and implemented in order to make more money from your sounds.

Don't worry if you don't. We are going to build one.

The "Three Essentials" Of Internet Success

On the internet, you can pretty much break success down into three essentials: and if you have strength in all these three areas, you are likely to succeed. These areas are:

1. Targeted Traffic - the art of getting visitors who are interested in what you have.

2. High Quality Content - in this case, your amazing loops.

3. Effective Monetization - a convenient and functional shopping system (or other way to profit from your web page i.e. through advertising).

Now the good news for you, is that those kind folks at Beathive have entirely handled the monetization part for you! You upload the sounds to your shop, and the shopping cart system and automated payments are taken care of. A fully operational monetization system is in effect. Sweet!

The content part, obviously, you have taken care of - with the construction of a killa loop shop full of amazing beats and sounds. You will of course need a good amount of high quality content in order to succeed.

That leaves one more part: Targeted traffic.

Now of course, Beathive itself gets a solid amount of traffic - utilizing various techniques - and naturally some of this traffic will flow to your loops, resulting in a certain number of sales.

But did you know that the producers who take active steps to drive traffic to their loop shop, are the ones seeing the highest sales volume?

The Gas Station In The Desert

You've probably heard the old saying - "If you build it they will come."

That doesn't apply to the internet.

Building a web site is like opening a gas station on a one-way dirt road in the desert.

You might get a handful of accidental, lost visitors, but not much in the way of real traffic - unless you do something to drive them there. i.e. Go to where the traffic is, and put up signposts.

You want to know where the traffic is? Go to http://www.alexa.com and take a look at their list of the most popular web sites. These are the eight-lane information superhighways. You want to put some big signposts up here - and most of the big web sites can be utilized one way or another to divert some of their traffic to you. (Look at all the people trying desperately to game Myspace and you'll see what I mean!)

You know what some of the best signposts say? They say "Free Stuff This Way!"

Targeted vs. untargeted traffic

This little sub-section is a little philosophical.... kind of an aside note... anyway....

You want lots of traffic - but as I once learned the hard way, not all traffic is of the same calibre. Not all traffic results in sales.

What is targeted traffic?

Targeted traffic is, essentially, visitors to your web site who fit into your sales demographic. They are the kind of visitors who are likely to buy, as opposed to those who are mostly just browsing.

There are really two ways to advertise - or to put up signposts, if you will. One is the blunderbuss approach, and the other one is the rifle approach.

The blunderbuss shoots out a thousand pieces of shot over a wide angle. Due to the volume of the charge, you might hit something.

The rifle pinpoints exactly what it wants to hit and aims for the bullseye.

It is very important to get targeted traffic if possible: because these will be your customers. But blunderbuss methods can often be cheaper and so can sometimes work out better in the long run.

The amount of difference to "conversions" (i.e. what percentage of your visitors are "converted" into buyers) that targeting makes is amazing. You can very often make more money with a thousand targeted visitors than you can with a million untargeted ones.

You have to learn how to attract the kind of people who are looking for what you have to sell, and not waste time and money on the ones who are just surfing around randomly.

Ways to get more traffic to your Beathive page

Ok you've made it through the theoretical part! Thanks for hanging in there. Now here comes the good part - the action steps. There are a thousand and one ways to get more traffic to your Beathive sound shop. Here are some.

1. This is the most important one, and much of the rest will follow on far more easily if you do this: Create your own web site, or a page on your existing web site if you already have one - and dedicate this page to your Beathive sound shop. Write some text explaining how cool Beathive is and why people should go buy your sounds. Put a link to your Beathive shop on your site. And then - importantly - put some free sounds up on this web page... different from the ones that are actually in the Beathive shop. The point is, you now have a web page with free stuff on it, that you can then promote to everyone. "Free stuff this way!"

2. It's a good idea to have *a lot* of good free stuff on your web site. You'll make friends - and friends tell their friends about their discoveries. Having free stuff is the no. 1 way to get people to go visit a web site. But you still need to put up the signposts to tell people about the free stuff. There are many ways to do this:

3. "Offline promotions". Promote your web page by adding it to your business card with a mention of the "free stuff" that's on your web site. Or you could make a low-cost flyer advertising your free sound giveaway and give this to any music producers and musicians you meet. It also gives you a good opener in conversation, having an offer of something free is always an excellent way to bring something up in a conversation. An effective networker is always networking... yet you don't want people to tire of your promotional efforts. Having something of high value which is free, to give people with no obligation, is an excellent way to be "always networking" without making people feel they are under "sales pressure".

4. Forums and social networks etc. There are many "hubs" where musicians and sound producers gather. Find these places. Many of them allow links to be embedded in forum posts - you don't want to go crazy of course - but you could find some groups or threads dedicated to music production etc and get involved. It's good to add something of value to the forum in addition to being in sell mode. And again, it really helps either to have your own free content - or you could also point people towards the bank of free loops that Beathive has - this won't do any harm! Also, I once did a google search on "free loops" and found many pages where people had posted links to free loop content... you could add your link to these.

5. Email. A simple way to increase visits to your web site is to add a "signature" - or add a line to an existing signature - mentioning your free samples with a link to your web site. You see yet how useful a sales tool having something free to give away is? Not everyone who collects your free sounds will go on to Beathive.com from there. But you will get way more traffic to your site by promoting free giveaways than you will just trying to get people to go and buy something, it's really worth it.

6. Link building. This one's a little more complex - but worthwhile. Some good links on some popular web pages are highly desirable and can result in a lot of traffic. Note - there are certain link building methods which are considered "bad" by google and these can harm your search engine rankings. The best links are ones created by "enthusiasm". "Reciprocal linking", once seen as a good way to go, is not so highly regarded by google nowadays and not recommended.

7. Search Engine Optimization. This is a really complex subject, but can be worthwhile looking into. If your site starts to "rank" and get organic search engine traffic, you will be getting just about the best form of free advertising - and targeted traffic - on earth. Google for example ranks a site on the quality of its content and on the number of "quality links" to that site from other sites. In other words, if your site has good, useful, non-duplicated text and is linked to by other high quality sites, Google's complex algorithms will more likely view your site as an important site and push you up the search engine rankings accordingly. SEO is definitely complex - I recommend www.seobook.com for a great source of further free info on the subject.

8. Viral video. This is probably the most powerful promotional tool on earth right now. Welcome to the ADD future folks, it's here! Channel surfing on steroids! People LOVE watching Youtube videos - and these get tons of traffic. Here's what I recommend - it's a bit of work but if you do this well, you will literally see your web traffic explode: Create one or more "tutorial videos" explaining some cool aspect of music production. It could be how to do some trick on the Akai MPC, how to get a certain cool sound on a drum machine or synth, it could be a music video you and your friends made, set to your phat beats... anything. Create a youtube account with your producer name, and give the videos a snappy title. (tip: include the word "naked" if you want to get 100,000 views and annoy a lot of people.... I dunno, if you really want to get rich you could actually make a video of yourself programming the MPC naked... I mean, only show them what's decent... actually, forget I said any of this.) Sorry yes, where were we... give the videos a snappy title... and DONT FORGET to include the link to your site in the "about this video" section, telling them about the free sounds.

9. Viral PDF. Not quite as good as video - but can still be incredibly effective if done right. These things will flow around the 'net like water molecules flow around the world, and will be getting you a little traffic for evermore.....: Create PDF-format tutorials explaining some really cool aspects of music production that everyone wants to know. It could be anything. MAKE SURE you give them juicy, irresistible titles such as "12 amazing secret music production techniques used by the pros" or something like this. People love to click links that say "6 top tips for..." or "ten things you never knew about..." or etc. In your PDF(s), include the link to your site with your offer of free sounds. Then, find ways to give these PDFs away. There are tons of upload / download sites where you can post them for people to help themselves. You can put links to the PDFs in many places too: they are more juicy free content that you can promote with abandon! Of course, you'll have to learn how to make a PDF... there are tutorials online. If you are a Mac OSX.4 user you can do this from the "print" menu.
Some clever marketers sell their PDFs on eBay for 99 cents each. You can of course sell multiple instances in one auction - anyway I only recommend this if you have some experience of eBay.

10. Include an "add this" link on your web page: http://www.addthis.com This will enable people to "bookmark" and link to your page from other big social network sites - and this will lead to more traffic. Works great if you have a ton of free stuff you are giving away!

11. Pay-per-click. This is where you "buy traffic" from various search engines and other places. You create a small text ad and pay a fixed price for every visitor. Google's "adwords" is the best known of these programs - but personally I dislike Adwords... there are so many complex rules, plus the clicks are really expensive! I have had good results with www.searchfeed.com and have driven many one-cent clicks to my web sites. Pay-per-click is complex and needs to be done right if it is going to be profitable... however there are many free tutorials and resources available online to learn about it that you can find by searching.

There's sooo much more..... but I have given you a ton of valuable ideas to start you off. The creative marketers amongst you will already be thinking of spins on these ideas... in fact the really creative ones are on the beach sipping pina coladas - having done this stuff already! :)

Promotional work is endless - as most musicians already know. Take what appeals to you from this list.... I recommend doing a little every day, staying consistent and gradually building a stronger web presence over time. I also highly recommend getting educated on the whole subject of online marketing and promotion. There's a ton of free resources out there - and I learned much of this stuff through reading free articles online.

One thing I will recommend: take immediate action! Immediate action is very powerful. Let's get some results!

Well I hope there's something here that's of value to you! Leave me a comment and let me know.... :)

Peace out,

PXR8

PS. I am available for PR consultation... we'll start the bidding at $250 per hour.... ;);)