Promoting Yourself as an Artist

by John Eberhard

Back in the 1980s I made a living working as a musician, playing in nightclubs around New England.

I didn’t know much about marketing back then, but a fellow musician had told me the formula for getting work in nightclubs. He said you needed to have a good quality demo tape of the band, about 4-8 songs, not whole songs but snippets, an 8x10” glossy photo of the band, and a song list. He said you make up a package with all that in it, locate agents who book the clubs where you want to play, and call them and send them that package.

That formula turned out to be pretty good, as I was able to book bands pretty steadily using it. That was just for booking a cover band working in nightclubs. The formula for getting a band a recording contract would of course be more extensive and more complex.

But the point is this: to be successful in any sector of the arts requires that you not only have your act together artistically, but that you find out what the successful formula is marketing-wise for getting where you want to go. And then market yourself aggressively using that formula.

Back in the day I think I had the idea that if I just was really good at what I did as a musician, then things would work out alright. I didn’t have the idea that I had to aggressively market myself. And certainly I was never taught to market myself, even at Berklee College of Music.

I think that with too many artistic schools today, they place all the emphasis on teaching the artistic technique, and completely forget to include teaching students that to be successful as an artist you have to promote yourself, and have a feel for how the business works. An artist is essentially an entrepreneur. Because let’s not forget, that if you don’t eventually start making money with your art, it will of necessity be relegated to the status of a hobby after a time. Because as you get older, your monetary needs will increase.

Making Money with Art

First of all, realize that your goals need to include getting paid for doing your art. This sometimes requires a reality shift, because so often, musicians, actors, dancers, and other artists are expected and asked to perform their art for free. Artists have to fight this expectation, because it is inherently unfair. So finding ways of getting paid has to be part of your thought process, not only for down the road, but also for right now.

Next, figure out what your eventual goal is, and find other successful artists who have achieved that goal. Ask them what the formula is for promoting yourself as an artist to achieve that goal. Sometimes successful artists will jealously guard the secret of their formula, being afraid of competition. But often, especially in Los Angeles, artists of various types will give seminars on succeeding in the business, or you can find books giving this type of information. Be aware also that that formula will change from time to time, so make sure you have up to date information.

Using the Internet

Regardless of the specific formula needed to achieve your specific goal in your artistic field, there are some universal opportunities afforded by the Internet today for online marketing, and all artists can make use of these.

• Facebook: Set up a personal profile and a fan page on Facebook, then get lots of friends on the personal profile and get lots of people to “like” your fan page. Then start posting status updates regularly (to both), just saying what you are doing as an artist. Don’t just use text, but include photos, links to videos, links to music clips, links to articles, etc. That gives it more impact.
• Blogs: Start a blog, and start posting material to it on a regular basis. This can be similar to what you would post on Facebook, but more extensive. Write articles, write updates on what you are doing as an artist. Post pictures, videos, music clips, etc., whatever is appropriate for your field to show your work. Make sure you send a notification to the blog search engines every time you post something. You can use www.pingomatic.com, or Wordpress blogs do this automatically.
• Twitter: Start an account on Twitter and start following lots of people and get them to follow you back. Try to target people who would potentially be a consumer for your artistic product. With Twitter you can target people in a certain geographical area, you can target people who have certain words or phrases in their bio, or target people who write certain words or phrases in their tweets.
• Ping.fm: This site allows you to start an account, then hook up all your other social media accounts to it. Then you can post status updates from Ping.fm, and they will automatically go out to all your social media accounts and all your friends/followers will see them.
• YouTube: Get some videos made of your work or performances, and post them to YouTube. Then promote the video on all other online media, such as through your blog, Facebook and Twitter, etc.

LinkedIn is generally considered to be a business networking site, so that may or may not be useful to you as an artist. MySpace used to be THE social media site, but has declined severely over the last couple years. Bands still use it.

Summary

In order for you to be successful long term as an artist, you have to exchange your work with the public, and they have to pay you money. Unfortunately our society is not very good about rewarding artists, so you not only have to be good, but you have to market yourself aggressively. And part of that has to include finding the correct formula of promoting yourself to reach the so-called big time.

Good luck with promoting your artistic endeavors.

Posted via email from Real Web Marketing's Posterous

Use of Autoresponders

By John Eberhard

An autoresponder is a system that can be set up that sends a person a series of emails. There are a number of useful and important uses for autoresponders.

There are a number of email services available online that include autoresponders, including Aweber, iContact, and Mailchimp, where you pay a monthly fee for the service.

Drip Emails

One of the first ways to use an autoresponder is to create a series of emails that will be sent to someone after they fill out a more-information form on a web site. This is often referred to as a series of “drip emails,” so called because it’s like dripping water on the person’s head, each drip being a communication. Usually these are HTML emails, meaning they can have graphics and links in them like a web page.

Let’s say you have a contact form on your web site for someone who wants more information on your products or services. What I often do is create a series of 3-4 HTML emails. The first one goes out to the person as soon as he hits submit, and will say basically “Thanks for filling out our form, we will get back to you right away or you can call us at ____.”

Then I set it up so the second email goes out say 4 days later after the person filled out the form. This is more of a sales letter and sells the person on the services or products, and urges him to call in. This assumes that he hasn’t been reached yet. But even if he has, no harm done. He has just received more sales text.

Now the third email can go out say 4 days after the second email, or 8 days after the person filled out the form. This can be anything from a longer article about the products or services, to a listing of testimonials, to a link to a video. And depending on what content you have to send, you could also send out a 4th, 5th and 6th email.

Basically the purpose of setting up a drip email system like for sending to people who fill out a form on site, is that you are sending them sales oriented communication. And it can help in cases where you call but fail to reach the person or he doesn’t call you back.

In all cases, when someone fills out a form and it starts the whole drip email system like this, I also add him to the general email list for the company and he will receive all other email communication, such as an email newsletter or other sales oriented emails. If you use one of the online services like Aweber, Mailchimp or iContact, the service will automatically add a link at the bottom for people to opt out of the list. I usually tell the recipient in the first email that he is being added to our general email list and he can opt out at any time.

Offering Free Reports

A very effective technique in terms of collecting names and email addresses is to create some kind of free information property such as a free report or “white paper” (a fancy name for a free report), on a topic related to your products or services. Then you offer that on your web site for free, but the person has to fill in the form and give you his name and email address to get it.

So with this scenario, you create a series of drip emails just like above, but the first one gives a link where the person can download the free report you are offering. You put the report in PDF format, put it online, then link to that in the first email. Then the person clicks on it and the PDF opens in their web browser, and they can save it to their hard disk. In this way you don’t have to be bothered with manually receiving the emails and emailing them the free report, which is especially important if you get a high volume of responses.

In this type of situation I would still create a series of emails, not just the one sending them the link to the free report, as that gives you an opportunity to send them sales oriented material about your products or services.

Pre-Written Articles or Newsletters

I have one client who has written a year’s worth of articles and has his autoresponder set up so that when a person fills in one of his online forms, that starts a series of over 50 articles that are sent to the person. This is a really good idea, especially if you have a lot of content that you’ve already written.

For myself, I write an article and send out a newsletter every week, so people who contact me about services, or who request one of my free reports, all get added to that list and receive my email newsletters. In my case I haven’t written a ton of them in advance but the people just receive the new ones I write every week.

Top of Mind Awareness

The goal with all of this is to get the person to buy something from you right away. But if that doesn’t happen - and some people aren’t ready to buy right away but still could buy later – then you will be creating top of mind awareness. That means that when the person thinks of your product or service category, he will tend to think of you, because you are reminding him of your company on a regular basis.

And don’t forget that any autoresponder email you send out should include your phone number, your physical address (that’s a US law), and links to your web site. The whole point is that you’re trying to make it easy for someone to contact you and buy from you.

Good luck with your email marketing.

Posted via email from Real Web Marketing's Posterous