TechMuze Ep-31 The Artist Promotion Blueprint – Part 2 & 3

“TechMuze episode – 31”
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Welcome back to another episode of the techmuze podcast. This is part 2 in a short series that we’ve been doing on the artistpromotion blueprint which is some of you know is the most recent techmuze academy program. It is available to be look at now at artistpromotionblueprint.com You’ll also find it through the TechmuzeAcademy classroom, if you pop into the classroom while your visiting the site. So, basically we’ve been talking about the first module of the course which focuses on the theory as to what the blueprint is designed for. What are we trying to build from this blueprint? What its  purpose. Ofcourse, just to quickly recap. Really what we’re trying to do…is we are trying to create an automated music marketing machine essentially surounding your website and your social network and all of these things that we tried to wrap into the machine in an automated fashion to help take the work load off of you and your marketing and promotion efforts so that you can focus primarily on what it is that you really love to do which is to create great music and great content and to put it out there for all to enjoy. We want the marketing process for the most part to happen on autopilot so we can stay focus on the good stuff. So, that’s what the machine is designed to do.

These first few I guess excerpts are basically focusing on the theory. So, what are we trying..what do we need to build in this machine to make this successful. Last week, we spoke about or in the last episode we spoke about the idea of creating luck and how if you want to be lucky then its simple. You just have to be everywhere, all the time with great content and eventually those fortunate circumstances will present themselves to you. So, a little philosophical but I want to get into the next part of the conversation today which is about being prolific. And we’ll get started with that right now.

Okay, in this video I want to talk little bit about one of the main aspects of this marketing machine that we’re going to build. And that is we’re going build in this ability to be prolific. What do I mean by prolific? I mean as the image kind a implies being everywhere, everywhere that your potential fans, your potential audience might be.  And to be there as often consistently possible with a high quality product and as we kind a mentioned in the previous video. Okay so there’s a couple of steps to making this work correctly for you and the first one is you want to really sit down and consider your brand. Okay and you may not have thought of this before. But a lot of artists they do what they do and because it naturally resonates from them. It’s the natural tendency for them to create the music that they create or any other type of art that you might be into. Ofcourse most of you watching this today are musicians I’m assuming.  Although this information could be relevant to many, many other types of artist or types of product owners I supposed you could say. But you really want to stop and consider your brand and you want to be consistent. And so, if you’re a solo artist this is something you could sit down and do for yourself. If your a band, in a band you’re going to want to sit down with the members of your band. And you’re going to want to determine this and really, really set it in stone so to speak. There’s nothing with a little bit of evolution as you progress down the path of your career. But you do want to have a consistent presentation so people who have discovered you and like what they saw can trust that they’re going to consistently get that same sort of branded flavor of high quality content from you. Okay!

So, somethings to consider are you know the…for example if you’re in a death metal band, then you may have a bit of an image that sourrounds that.  You may have a bit of an attitude that sourrounds that. That might be easy to relate to by somebody who’s also interested in that kind of music. If you’re a hip hop artist, you might again, you might consider what is this brand consistency you know. What is my demeanor? Am I a humorous guy? Am I a serious guy? Am I a sort of a bit of a ghetto gangster kind of guy? And this and that and another. Okay! These are things to think about. If you’re in a blues band you know, what’s the brand  that represents you? Who are you talking to? And that’s really the next thing to consider to help you to determnine how you should brand yourself. And that is to define your target audience and discover where they hangout and we’ll talk about that in a second. But you really do want to define your target audience. The person who is going to most appreciate what you do. Who are they? What are they into? What sort of fashions do they wear? What age demographic are they? Are they students? Are they you know career minded folks? And really sort of plan out what’s oftentimes in marketing refered to as your customer avatar. Design your ideal fan, your ideal quote, unquote customer. Okay!

And once you have come to the conclusion as to who the absolute ideal target audience is and then you craft your brand to present to that person what it is that they most easily relate to. Okay! So, you want to define your target audience and craft your brand.  And then, you want to discover where your target audience hangs out online. Ah are there forums, particular forums where people are discussing music and/or even just simply topics that you might be writing about that contain people that might be interested in the types of things that you do. Is Facebook a big hangout for people of the demographic that you are trying to target. Twitter, Google+, all these different types of things. Youtube, other people that are looking for what you do on Youtube. Now, as an artist or musician most of these channels are a no brainer. You’re going to want to be on Youtube. You’re going to want to have a Facebook presence. You’re going to want a Twitter audience and so on so forth. So, these are the things we want to do, no matter what.
But there are if  you can think of it, probably certain areas online that your ideal target audience hangsout. I’m talking Forums, maybe Facebook groups, maybe LinkIn groups, things like this. And you want to discover those things. Make a list of them and eventually you want to create your own presence in every single one of these relevant places. Okay!

And at this stage of the game I’m talking about just to create a presence there. Create an account. So, if its Facebook setup a Facebook fan page. If its a Twitter create a custom Twitter account for your band or you as an artist. Google+ these type of things. Create a specific email account that you can use to manage these things as well. And we’ll talk more about that when we get to the implementation stage of this training. So, you want to define your audience. You want to discover where they hangout. You want use that target audience definition to sort of craft and mold your brand. Your public persona so to speak and you want to make sure that thats is agree on by every one in the the band if its not just you and you want to keep that consistent. You want to create a presence in every relevant place online that you possibly can. Once you’ve created a presence. Again, I’m just saying create an account. Create these actual accounts. There’s nothing to do after that yet. We’ll get into that in a minute but  create those accounts and then the next thing to do and this is going to be discuss in great detail in the implementation stage is to connect all of these locations to your main home online which ofcourse would be your website. Okay!

So, you want to establish your content pipeline out to these places. And so ideally what we want to be able to do is to be able to create whatever content that you already are creating and maybe we’ll come up with some fresh and useful ideas that you can add into your content creation that we publish on our websites and so forth and we want to establish our pipeline. So, that whenever we create something new it’s automatically broadcast out across the entire web to all of these relevant locations. And that’s like I say…that’s what I refer to as the content pipeline. Okay!

The other thing that’s kind a important in this topic of being prolific is to look for coat tail opportunities. Okay! What I mean by that is to look for opportunities that you can take advantage of channels that already have a great audience. For example, lets say you are you know…you’re in a band and you play whatever type of music that you play and you see on Youtube that there’s another band or artist out there that has a real similar sort of branded profile to you then you might want to do your best to get infront of that artist’s audience. You can do things like leaving video responses on people’s Youtube videos. That’s a great way. There’s all kind of little techniques that we can use to look for some of these coattail opportunities. And a good example of a coattail opportunity is the age old tried and true idea of opening, being an opening act on a tour for a bigger band. So, if you’re a metal band and Metalica is going out on tour and you’re opening for them all across the country, that is what we call…what I like to refer to as an ideal coattail opportunity because you’re going to get infront of their audience. And as long as your presentation is great, your quality is high then there’s a good chance you’re going to automatically acquire a bunch of new fans. And then what you do with them ofcourse is up to you from that point onwards. We’re going to talk in great detail about how to collect fans and then what to do with them once you’ve collected them. Okay!

So, again just to recap you want to be as prolific as possible. You want to make sure that you stay consistent in your presentation with you know…allowing room for evolution. You’re allowed to evolve as an artist. But you do want to have a very consistent presentation. You want to define your ideal target fan, your target audience. And you want to find out all the places, the unique places especially where those people hangout. You want to create accounts on all of the social profiles, on all of the forums and all of the locations online where you believe that your target audience associates, where they hangout. And you want to then link all of those profiles into this machine that we’re going to build and so that when you produce a piece of content, one piece of content that it goes, it get syndicated all over the web, infront of as many people as possible targeted that might be interested in what it is that you do as an artist. Okay!

So, the next video I want to talk a little bit about how we can do this without it being a full time job by leveraging systems and I’ll see  you there.

Okay! So, we’ve talked about creating luck. The way that’s done and how important that is nowadays. Not just nowadays but especially so. We’ve talked about the idea of being prolific, being seen everywhere is a great way to sort of build authority and to build some social proof and what not and these are things that we’re going to talk about, the sort of mind games, the psychological  tricks of the trade that we’re also going to build into our system by being prolific and creating luck are two important things.

The next thing I want to get into with you is the idea of leveraging systems. Now, this really is the beauty of this elegant machine that we are in the process of discribing that we will ofcourse we will learn how to create and drive in the next module. But the power of the internet nowadays is that you can automate a great deal of things that would have not that long ago required either you know manual labor on your own behalf or hiring somebody else to do it for you. And so, we want to really harness that and take full advantage of what is possible nowadays through automation. Okay! Now, software automation is like I said definitely very powerful and its one huge component of this machine that we’re going to be developing.

But the other thing that we’ll be considering is outsourcing as well. If you were to combine software automation with outsourcing that is indeed as the slide suggest a mighty combo. What do I mean by outsourcing? Outsourcing is basically taking some small tasks that need to be done but don’t necessarily need to be done by you. In other words tasks that you don’t directly add any extra value to and having somebody else do them. This is again when we’re considering the internet, another really  powerful sort of evolution or development that has taken place lately. And that is the fact that the internet ofcourse connects us together all over the planet. And where this becomes advantageous to us
here in our efforts to promote ourselves and to build a marketing machine is that it allows you to hire people to do things for you online that live-in places where the wage that they’re going to anticipate is for their labor is something that you can afford. Okay!

Places like India, places like the Philippines. There’s all kinds of skilled, talented people who are more than happy to do a couple of hours a week of work for you for something that is most definitely affordable. A couple of bucks an hour is pretty common to have a virtual assistant somewhere in say the Philippines for example to do somethings for you like you know maybe uploading your content to Youtube. Needs to be done but doesn’t necessarily need to be done by you. You don’t add any extra value if its you that uploaded the video to the the Youtube channel or anyone else under the sun. So, these are the types of things that you can have somebody do. And if you were to look at…actually I’ll give you a little tip here. There’s a site called Odesk. There’s another one that’s call Elance. And there’s a handful of others online right now. And there are places where you can go to find…to basically post a job listing and find somebody online in the planet anywhere to do it for you. For example, I’m looking for somebody to work you know 5 hours a week doing basic internet marketing tasks for a band or for a musician and I’m willing to pay x amount per hour. And almost guaranteed you will have people responding to that posting with an application. So, its really, really simple. Really, really affordable and extremely effective to have somebody doing some of these time intensive tasks that don’t need to be done by you, having someone do those for you.

So, if we combine that concept with software automation that we’re going to describe in detail in module 2, you get…you’re able to really leverage the systems and allow you to…again the whole point is to focus back on what it is that you love to do which is to create content, to create your music, to create your videos, to create whatever it is that you release to engage and entertain your audience. Okay!

So, the idea is we’d like the systems do the work for you so that you can stay focus on the fun parts and that’s really the goal with this machine. It takes a little bit of effort in the beginning just to set all the cogs in place and get everything connected together. But once it’s done, even without outsourcing if you’re not comfortable with that or you find that you have enough time to do some of these things yourself, just the automation software wise alone is going to save you loads and loads and loads of time. It’s going to basically be doing your content syndication, your social media engagement, all of these things are going to be rolled into this machine so that you can then turn your focus back to what it is that…the fun part as I call it. Okay! Next I want to talk a little about content marketing. We’ll see you on that video.

So, that was the next 2 installments of the Artist Promotion Blueprint. I figured they were somewhat short so I packed a couple of them in this episode. Once again I hope this is resonating with you and you kind a see what it is we’re working towards here. And if you are impatient and just want to dig in quicker right away, head on over to artistpromotionblueprint.com and you can get this entire module for free ofcourse over there as well and you can move through it at your own phase. There’s a little button underneath the video that allows you to continue directly to the next one. Okay!

Another thing I just wanted to mention real quickly before we wrap this episode up and that is if you havent check this out head on over to techmuzeacademy.com and click on the classroom in the menu or to take a class. It’s something I’m pretty proud of. I built a new wing on the academy and that is ofcourse the classroom where I’m featuring…I kept both academy courses, my own courses of course and also some of the high quality courses from colleques of mine online, instructors that produce great content and that are very worth the price whatever it is they charge for their courses. So, by all means check it out. It’s actualy classroom.techmuzeacademy.com. If you want to go straight there with your web browser.
Have a look. You’re also able to leave reviews on any courses you may have already taken. So, If you’ve ever taken a course from someone like for example John Cockren or Joe Gilder or Chris Rocker or any of these academy instructors that I feature in the classroom, I’d love it if you could take a moment and just leave a review of what you thought of the course. This will help other people make a more educated decision as to where they would want to invest their education budget.

So once again thats classroom.techmuzeacademy.com and we’ll see you in the next episode.