The Musician’s Blueprint

All The Tools To Create An Online Music Business

The Musician’s Blueprint is to assist musicians who would like to take their musical talents online, to gain notoriety on the internet and to benefit monetarily from their fans.

The plan consists of

Creating your own successful website quickly and inexpensively
Creating great content in the form of Youtube videos
Driving quality traffic to the website using Social Media channels
Making money from that traffic through merchandising and affiliate marketing
Generating repeat customers through list building and email marketing.

All the steps are outlined below so it’s just up to you to get started.

Getting Organized – Your Stash and Keyword Research

The first step is to get organized to allow you to work faster and smarter so that you have more time for things you really care about – like your music. You need to keep pertinent information at the tips of your fingers. That’s where your Stash comes in.

Another part of the organization process is to perform Keyword Research - to find the words and phrases that potential visitors are typing into search engines that relate to your site. By finding the correct keywords, you can structure your site to best take advantage of these words and phrases. This is a large part of what Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is and it’s not difficult but will make a huge difference in the number of visitors who will visit your website.

Your Own Website

Once you have done your keyword research, you will have a better idea of what your website will be about and who it will target. So the next step is to get started creating your own website. Again, this isn’t difficult as I show each of the steps involved which include:

Domain Name Registration – finding and purchasing your website’s domain name – the actual name of your website. Eg. ebusk.com. Use www.GoDaddy.com for registering your domain, and it will only cost you about $12/year.
Webhosting – Website hosting, or webhosting, is a service provided by a company that stores all of your files, images, videos, settings, and more for your website on their servers to allow your website to be displayed on the internet. Use HostGator and it will cost as little as $4/month.
WordPress Setup – WordPress is amazing, free, content management software that will be used to manage your website. It’s easy to install, infinitely customizable and makes publishing your website content simple. There are also thousands of free templates especially designed for WordPress that can be uploaded to your website to instantly add color and style. And all of this comes without having to write any code. Did I mention that it’s FREE.

Create Great Content

Once your website is created and laid out with best seo practices implemented, it’s time to generate content and drive traffic to your website. The best way that I know of to create traffic generating content is to create videos for Youtube which you embed in your website.

Why Youtube

Youtube is the second largest (most searched) search engine and happens to be owned by the largest, Google.
Youtube is currently, poorly optimized with keywords for the majority of videos.
Videos on Youtube are generally poor quality and don’t necessarily relate well to the keywords that are being used. In other words, the video is not satisfying what the visitor is looking for.

These points allow anyone who has done keyword research and is willing to put a little extra effort into the video creation process to dominate their particular niche. Again, I show you how it’s done as I take you from video creation and editing, through setting up your YouTube channel and uploading your videos.

Money Making Strategies

You can have great videos and a ton of viewers but if you can’t make money off that traffic, you’re still broke (unless you have some day job which is taking you away from what you really want to do). In this stage, I show you various ways you can add money generating strategies to your website.

Affiliate Marketing – Simply put, thousands of companies doing business on the internet, will pay you a commission for sales of products that you promote on your website. They may also pay for leads or clicks for the merchant’s website. I’ll show you how to find great affiliate marketing partners and products. By the way, this costs nothing.
Amazon Stores and Widgets - Using the power of Amazon provides another excellent way to add content, interest and money making abilities to your website. Amazon sells a huge amount of merchandise and you can basically promote anything Amazon sells and earn commissions on generated sales. Again, this is FREE.
Merchandising – Get your music up for sale on iTunes, Amazon.com, Rhapsody, eMusic and more.

Generate Traffic

Once the website is created and contains great content, it’s time to bring in the visitors and turn them into fans.

YouTube Videos – YouTube is still kind of like the wild west of search engines. It is the second largest search engine but most of the content is not well optimized, doesn’t serve the visitors needs and is of very poor quality. It does not take much to create superior video properly optimized that separates you from the crowd. You can build an awesome targeted community on YouTube and direct that community to your website.
Facebook and Twitter – Properly implementing social media can drive incredible amounts of traffic to your website.
Building Your Email List - If you were to ask successful internet entrepreneurs what they would change if they were to start again, most of them would say that they would start building their email list earlier. If you can build a large email list of engaged fans who are interested in what you do, the rest of your business could fall down around your ears and you would still be alright. That’s because you still have your list to market to. Building a list and marketing to that list may be your largest source of income (unless you don’t do this step).

So, that’s the view from 20,000 feet. What are you waiting for? All the info presented here is free and I’m available for questions. There are some costs involved in the process but they really are cheap when compared to setting up a real brick and mortar type business. Seriously, we’re only talking about a hundred bucks or so a year to start up your own music business which is open 24/7/365. Plus all the costs are tax deductible. In fact, by creating your own website and music business, all music related purchases you make are now tax deductible.
All the steps and strategies discussed are being used on my own site, http://www.georgegoodman.com. Check it out. And see you back here to get started building your own music empire.

Cheers, George