If you want to become a successful artist- being signed up, publicity, or make money- which ever you consider to be successful, you need repeat visitors and you need a legion of fans.

Let me explain.

I am only going to refer to this band once, as they are continually being used as an example. The Arctic Monkeys only got to where they are because some of their fans built a MySpace page and then promoted it. No clever million pound budgets or a vast advertising team. No, just some fans.

Ok, so you have the fans, or you have people downloading your tracks- this is a huge bonus- they like your work! You need to keep in touch with them (once downloaded, and off your site, they are gone).

This is by the far the best reason for how commercial and non-commercial artists have become successful. By keeping in touch with their fans an artists can give out tracks to people who have already demonstrated that they like your style. The ultimate prize- the targeted audience.

The only real, tried and tested, will work all the time methods are Email, and the Blog. I would even say email is the only one, because when you send an email you are sending it directly to a targeted person. A blog is more continuous, you need a weekly stream of information to make a blog effective. An email newsletter can be sent monthly, twice monthly is the limit of acceptability.

As a side note, if you are successful and are sending out a blog weekly, why don’t you start a membership site? All you need is about $20-30/ year membership fee…100 fans…$3000/year…get a forum up and going and the fans will write their own information and a community will establish and people will continue with their yearly fee.

Anyway, I digress.

However, email is just not about sending out tracks to your audience. No, it is about giving them information and motivation to open future emails down the time line. That is what a large amount of people forget.

For example. I received emails from one sample CD company- all they did was send me a paragraph of poor information, and then the rest of the email was cluttered with advertisements for their work. I unsubscribed and haven’t been back. I can not remember the name of the company now. Out of sight, out of mind.

So what are you supposed to do?

Well, people subscribed to get to know you, to be the first to listen to your songs, to get discounts, to get insider info, to get tickets, to see where you are going to gig…and loads more ontop of that.

Putting this information into a monthly email will keep you intouch with fans. If you make an album and then offer it continually at a “discounted price for subscribers only”, this will have the added benefit of increasing subscribers. Also, find a free ebook to give away…tempt them even more to subscribe.

As long as you offer quality information, with a touch of self promotion then you could be earning alot of cash.

Proof? Ok, this is taken from the Internet Marketing people. When they say they made $4000 in one day, the email system is how they did it. They have got a large subscriber base, via opt in subscriber lists etc, and then they write a piece of art. Out of all those targeted subscribers, between 1-5% will buy. If you have a list of say 5000 people, and offer something for $20 the lowest figure of 1% will buy. 50 people buying $20 = $1000. In this example, if you increase the % of people buying, you increase your profit by 100%. 2% = 100 people buying $20 = $2000

If you are consistently giving (there is widely interpreted word…and it means FREE) quality information and music, you build up additional trust, to people who already like what you do. If you do it right and not jump in with promotional info all the time, then you will greatly increase that 1-5% to 20%. Then these people will buy off you continually, and you will have the start of a very lucrative business.

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