If you’ve been looking into John Oszajca’s Music Marketing Insider Circle and wondering if it’s right for you – keep reading. I’ve been a member of the Insider Circle since late August of 2011 and will give you my assessment on whether it’s right for you or a waste of time and money.

However, there’s more to this than just John.

Check out John Oszajca’s Insider Circle video here.

I started this site several years ago with the idea of bands helping bands in order to further their own careers while helping build the music scene at the same time; this is where the name the Indie Band Alliance comes from.

Over the past few years I’ve attempted to share what I’ve learned as a musician performing cover songs as well as writing and performing original music; later followed by business and marketing tips I’ve also discovered along the way. I’ve published and shared a few different reports – first the Indie Band Insights report and then the 1,000 Fan Formula not to mention a few others that have only been available as bonuses or to my list of subscribers.

After all this time I had a bit of a eureka moment where I was able to sum up exactly what it is I want to do and help others with. The tagline for this site at one time was “Earn a Living Making Music” – which was what I was trying to promote, but I finally was able to condense it to three simple words: self made musician.

So what is a self made musician exactly?

First of all, I liked the fact that it was simple and was reminiscent of the phrase ‘self-made millionaire’ – implying that if you’re a ‘self-made’ anything – you’re considered a success, which is never a bad thing. The other thing I like about it is the phrase ‘self-made’. This further implies that whatever success you currently enjoy is squarely due to your own efforts – not winning the coveted ‘rock star lottery’ or being chosen by some ‘music industry official’ that you’re worthy of having a career in the music business.

Self-made seems to imply all that without the somewhat grease-monkey aspect of the words “Do It Yourself”.

Meanwhile “Indie” or “Independent” has a lot of baggage with it as well. Some people think “indie” is only a particular style of music, not the fact that the band happens to not be signed to a record label – major or otherwise.

So I realized that I wanted to work with and foster a community of self-made musicians; these musicians in term would eventually form bands that could benefit from forming alliances – a.k.a. the Indie Band Alliance that I was originally envisioning when I started this site. So I’m course-correctly along the way and am now focusing on dealing with reaching out to and helping others (myself included) become self-made musicians.

Awesome – after more than four years I finally have my audience figured out.

The next step is that I want to help them with actionable content. There are whole slew of blogs out there that aim to help musicians online. Some offer the latest on the music industry, others offer vague bits of advice or strategies that may have worked for themselves or others, still others offer motivational type content that leaves you feeling good but no surer about your individual direction.

My goal is to offer valuable advice, insight and training that you can apply to create a sustainable career with your music while at the same time keeping it all as simple as possible. There is an overwhelming amount of ‘stuff to do’ for musicians these days in order to ‘make it’ and I know many musicians would rather just play their instrument or write music as opposed to being chained to their desk learning about social media, websites, email auto responders, Youtube, Twitter, Facebook and ll the rest.

Believe me, I hear you.

So while some sites out there want to impress you with their knowledge by offering to sell you multiple DVDs worth of valuable information, or by offering 12 week programs where you need to invest upwards of 5 hours a week – I’d rather not intimidate you with the overwhelming amount of stuff there is to learn to be able to succeed.

So I thought long and had about what are the fundamentals that a musician needs to embrace to become truly ‘self made’. I came up with four:

1. Creativity – The source of your music, talent and ultimately the products or services that you’ll sell.
2. Marketing – The people your music or performances are for and how you let them know that you exist.
3. Business – The means to which you plan to build a sustainable income from music so that you can create on your own terms.
4. Mindset – The ways of thinking that will ensure your success while boosting the other three main elements of creativity, marketing and business so that you can truly become a self made musician until the end of your days.

This is what I’m going to share with you under the name of the Self Made Musician – for starters on this site and we’ll see where it takes us. I feel that this is the evolution of all my previous work – specifically my Indie Band Insights report. I recorded a podcast that will explain how I came up with the four elements of C + M + B + M ,  drop me a line in the comments below if you agree or disagree with my ideas behind the self made musician.

Enjoy!

Fast Forward To Fame's creator: Cari Cole

There’s a launch going on currently for a 12 week coaching program called Fast Forward to Fame by Cari Cole that I thought I’d share with any readers who haven’t already heard about it. I’m a little late in sharing the details, as a week back or so Cari had a bunch of prelaunch videos and downloads that appear to have gone offline as I write this.

Cari is yet another person out there that is looking to help musicians today make the most of their music career via music business coaching, and one of the things that I love about her prelaunch material I checked out last week is that she talks frankly about money and how important it is for musicians to wrap their head around how to make it and how to get the roadblocks out of their way to attracting more money into their lives.

I also love how she’s upfront that you need to have a handle on the business end of things if you want to make a go of it as an independent artist today.

Having said that – I’m not overly keep on the word ‘fame’, but that’s just me. I think there is a substantial amount of people who think they want fame and use music as only a vehicle to get it.

However, since Cari is upfront with what her program is about (everything from the business, productivity and motivation to making your website work for you) I can forgive the fact that there’s the word “fame” in the name of her coaching program.

Anyway, her program is open but there are only a few spots. I think it’s worth checking out her Fast Forward to Fame site to see the video she made that shares some great advice while revealing more details on what her program is about.

Here’s the (non-affiliate) link:

http://www.fastforwardtofame.com/signup/

From what I can gather, Cari started out as a vocal coach and has broadened her horizons to go far beyond that. She’s also an artist herself – but you can find out more at her site.

Now, she’s not giving away her expertise for nothing, it’s definitely not cheap. I also question her math when it comes to what a newbie artist gets paid per gig ($500?) which certainly isn’t true in my experience – and may not be true for you – but could be the standard in New York City where Cari operates her business.

I’m not promoting her as an affiliate because I know nothing about her and have only just checked out her launch material. However, I think she’s sharing some great free content so you have little to lose to check it out and see if it works for you.

Lastly, before you invest money in any training – do a gut check and ask yourself a few tough questions. Are you going to dedicate the time to focus on the program and give it your all? Cari Cole mentioned in her online question and answer session that her students should expect to spend 4 to 5 hours a week on the material. That’s a pretty small price to pay to invest in yourself and build a sustainable music career – but many will still end up drawn to watch the TV instead.

Which one are you?

The program starts November 15th, 2011. So depending on what you have going on in your life – now might not be the right time. Also, this coaching is recommended for artists that already have their own music and are looking for guidance on how to get it out there; if you’ve never written a single song or never performed in front of a live audience – this training is probably a few levels over your head.

Check it out and share what you think – is Fast Forward to Fame by Cari Cole for real?

If you’re a student of online music marketing and follow what people like John Oszajca, Greg Rollett and many others teach – you need a squeeze page setup to begin building a list and taking control of your music career.

The thing is, this is often easier said than done – especially with WordPress.

Now don’t get me wrong, I love WordPress (the self-hosted .org version). It’s easy to use, powerful as hell and there’s a plugin that you can find to handle just about anything you can dream of using a website for.

But one thing that WordPress can’t do very well out of the box is create a squeeze page.

Sure, there are themes out there that you can buy like Optimize Press or the Profit Theme, but the problem is these will cost you $97 or so and will change the entire look of your website. If you’ve already customized a WordPress site to look the way that you want, using a theme-based solution will mean you’ll have to give it up just to have easy squeeze page capabilities.

So what can you do about this?

Well, if you don’t mind putting in a little elbow grease and have some time to spare, you can FTP an html squeeze page to your hosting account and send traffic there. If memory serves, both John Oszajca and Greg Rollett have offered free squeeze page templates in the past that you can modify and use for your own purposes.

But that won’t help you very much if you want to run everything out of WordPress.

One thing I’ve tried that has worked with limited results is to open an html-based squeeze page inside a free html editor like Komposer and then paste it into the html tab inside WordPress.

From there, if you’re using a WordPress theme like 2010 – you can also choose a 1 column post page to eliminate all the distracting widgets and links along the right hand side of your page .

Squeeze pages need to be clean and completely focused on giving your prospect the chance to opt in or leave for maximum conversions.

Now, when I’ve tried this in the past I’ve ended up with an okay squeeze page.

The biggest problem is that WordPress doesn’t handle tables very well and most html squeeze pages (that I’ve come across anyway) have invisible table columns as ‘spacers’ to center the squeeze page properly and allow for elements like a video on one side directly beside an opt in on the the other.

Getting these tables to work, especially for someone like myself who isn’t a ‘code monkey’ is a challenge.

I couldn’t make it work with Komposer for whatever reason. I think I found a tip online to create the graphic using Google Docs and cut and paste it into the WordPress html tab in the editor and it did work better.

That’s just an example of some of the hoops that you’ll have to jump through to get a basic squeeze page online and working in WordPress. If you can manage that – hats off to you.

However, if you want another option and a serious shortcut to this whole process that is 100% WordPress friendly I want to share this cool resource I discovered.

It’s called WP Squeeze Pro and it’s from a highly respected internet marketer (and former rapper) by the name of Jason Fladlien and his business partner Wilson Mattos.

What it does is create a squeeze page for you in WordPress in seconds flat. You won’t have to worry about messing around with tables or trying to convert an html squeeze page into one that works (just barely) with WordPress.

What’s more is it comes with 24 squeeze page templates that have been tried and tested by Jason in his own business. You can easily test each squeeze page type against each other until you find one that trumps them all to give you the best possible conversion.

Jason’s had over 100,000 people sign up to his list and has garnered conversions as high as 72.6% with these squeeze pages. Why not borrow some of his effort and expertise to start building your list sooner as opposed to later?

We’re talking awesome looking squeeze pages that you can set up in minutes instead of hours that will work with any theme so that you can keep the current look of your site intact.

So what’s the catch?

Well, WP Squeeze Pro costs $97 which isn’t cheap.

Also, it currently only works with 3 different Auto-responder services: Aweber, Get Response and Inmica mail. However, when you factor in the following:

• 24 proven templates to choose from – plus you can customize you own
• Works with any theme (because it’s a plugin)
• Can use on as many as 20 different instances (unlimited squeeze pages per instance)
• Have your squeeze page up in minutes instead of hours
• 30 day guarantee

As far as building a squeeze page in WordPress goes – it just doesn’t get any easier than this as far as I’m concerned. I wish WP Squeeze Pro was around before I wasted all of my time trying to get my first squeeze page to work in WordPress!

And heck, Jason Fladlien is a former musician turned marketer – so you can feel good about buying from him.

Just think about how good it will feel to finally have your squeeze page set up and converting visitors to your list.

Think about how easy it will be to change and test your squeeze page for maximum conversions using and testing each of the 24 different templates.

Imagine what it will be like to see your online audience growing bit by bit every day as you focus on promoting your music instead of getting lost and wasting time with the techie stuff.

• Learn more about WP Squeeze Pro

Have you ever heard of the phrase permission marketing? if not, read on.

I recently had a few people assume that I wanted to be on their mailing list and guess what – it’s not cool.

Not only that, but it’s technically illegal because it violates CANSPAM laws. Here’s the clincher, the people who have added me to their list are also people that I know or have met in person:

• One is an amateur concert promoter whose kids go to the same school as mine.

• One is a musician I worked with at a charity concert to benefit the same school.

In both cases, each person assumed that since I’ve emailed them personally about other business in the past and since I happen to be involved in music that I would LIKE to be on their mailing list. So they just added me without even asking.

Which I repeat is not cool.

Now I have to look like the bad guy and ask to be taken off their list, whenever I did nothing wrong and never wanted to be on their list in the first place.

Am I going to be a jack-ass and report them to the internet police or something? Of course not, but the fact that they didn’t take the small amount of effort to consult me prior to adding me to their list has closed a door rather than open one.

So just think, if you do this for people you don’t even know or haven’t met – how much worse can this be for you? Perhaps those people you don’t know who you harmlessly add to you mailing list will flag you as a spammer to the internet cops…

Sign up for an email auto responder service and take an hour or so to get it ready. This will involve setting up a welcome email or two, configuring the look of your email template and creating an optin area online where they can volunteer to receive your information.

To really cover you butt – ensure your autoresponder has double optin capabilities (most do) – so that after they’ve given you their name and email they’ll receive another email asking them to click on a link to confirm that they want to receive your information.

This my friends is known as Permission Marketing, which basically means that rather than ASSUME people want to learn more about your band that you ASK them first. This is generally considered in social circles as being nice instead of being an ass; consider it permission marketing for musicians.

If you want to be a rock and roll rebel and go the ‘ass’ route (by not asking permission) just realize that you’re closing way more doors than will ever open for you…so good luck with that.

One question that repeatedly comes up is how do bands find their audience? So I thought I’d share a neat tip that allows you to start finding fans with Amazon.com today.

One of the concepts I teach in the 1K Fan Formula is to find SSBs (similar sounding bands) to yours and build up your audience by marketing to the fans of these bands. It’s a pretty simple concept that others talk about as well, but some people get hung up on who they sound like or how they can go about doing this.

This tip allows you to tap into the resources of the biggest ecommerce site online to find out for certain (rather than by guessing) the bands that are most often purchased together. People are actually paying for the music, so you’re getting some great insight here.

Check out the video below I made for you.

How to find fans for your band:

1. Come up with just one band that you think your band sounds like or served as an inspiration to the sound of your band.
2. Search for the band in Amazon.
3. Pick an album (ideally the one you sound the most like or were inspired by the most) and then scroll through the ‘People who bought this also bought’ section at the bottom of the page.
4. Choose 3 to 5 bands that you think are a good match for your sound.
5. Google the name of the band with the word forums like “Metallica forums” (just don’t use quotation marks).
6. Visit each forum, looking for lots of activity (lots of members, frequent posts and members online are good stats to check – you’ll want hundreds or thousands of members ideally. Make sure the forum allows you to create a signature file with a link back to your band website/squeeze page).
7. Join the forum, read up on the rules and become a part of the community by asking and answering questions. Don’t spam people about your band or you’ll be wasting your time – this is forum marketing for bands 101.

This isn’t a short term tactic; to make it work you have to commit to the long haul. Ideally you’d have each member of the band sign up for one or two forums and spend 5 to 10 minutes at least a few days a week commenting and asking questions.

Abandon any forums that aren’t converting for you. You can find out which ones are sending you traffic if you have Google Analytics, Stat Counter or the Jetpack plugin (if you use WordPress) with the WordPress.com stats feature enabled.

Try it and let me know how works for you. Leave your questions and comments about finding fans with Amazon.com below!

Last time out in part one of What Your Band Needs to Succeed Online, I mentioned the top four things that are required to help your band succeed. Naturally success will mean something different to just about anyone reading this post…

In my mind, success equals anything that takes you closer to your goals – even if that means you fall flat on your face from time to time. Failure is one of the best ways to learn and if you don’t risk failing you’re not playing ‘to win’ you’re just playing ‘not to lose’ which means you’re playing it too safe and guess what – safe is the enemy.

Here are the three must-haves that need to be in place before you can truly meet with success.

Marketing - Yeah, marketing is a bit of a dirty word to many musicians but it shouldn’t be because (drum roll) Marketing Adds Meaning. Without marketing you won’t be able to figure out who your audience is, where they are or how to reach them – pretty much the problem 99.9% of bands have out there. Once you have that part figured out you still need to give your audience a reason to want to buy your stuff.

Without a basic understanding of marketing, you’ll play to nobody and sell copies only to your friends and family members and some strangers – if you’re lucky.

A Plan – This ties in with marketing and is absolutely necessary; without a master plan, all you have is a series of tactics which more often than not will not work. In order to succeed you need to know where you are, where you’re going and have a plan in place with how to get there.

The plan doesn’t need to be perfect, it just has to exist so that you can gauge your success and chart the progress you are or aren’t making against it. The saying goes, “Fail to plan, plan to fail.”

Conviction - It doesn’t matter what road you travel in life, but you need to be committed to it if you’re going to succeed…and this is especially true for musicians as well. Expect people to criticize you – they won’t like your music, your genre or they might and you just might not be fast ‘enough’, slow ‘enough’, heavy ‘enough’ or good ‘enough’.

You need to have an unwavering belief in what you’re doing or else nobody will believe you or ‘buy’ into what you’re ‘selling’. Expect that your friends or family won’t get what you’re doing and suggest that you ‘get a real’ job, expect that it’s going to be hard and just do it anyway’ Keep doing it if this is what you’ve chosen to do in your life (the keywords being ‘what YOU’VE chosen’ – not somebody else).

Conviction means that you’re going to do what you need to do despite whether it’s easy or the popular decision among your friends and family. There’s a powerful quote that I read in a John Assaraf book that really brings it home for me:

“If you’re merely interested in something – you’ll do what’s convenient. If you’re committed in doing something – you’ll do whatever it takes.”

So those are the three crucial elements that when combined with the things I mentioned in What your band needs to succeed part one  – will take you to the promised land.

www.indiebandalliance.com/go/mmanifesto2.0/

John Oszajca:singer, songwriter, music marketer and just might be a giant.

I recently had the opportunity to chat with John Oszajca of the Music Marketing Manifesto.com; John’s a singer/songwriter/musician who’s been signed to a major deal, went independent and embraced marketing to carve out a successful career for himself today.

He now splits his time between LA and New Zealand and makes music on his own terms. John shares what he learns by teaching direct response marketing for musicians with the Music Marketing Manifesto 2.0 training and consulting services.

We dug deep into how he got to where he is today and John revealed a lot of tips that will be useful to anyone looking to ‘make it’ in the music business. John doesn’t hold back and reveals the other side of the music business that most of us never see.

About halfway through he states that Marketing is Power which I think is a great concept for musicians to embrace so that they can succeed as well.

“As an artist all I want is an audience. Whether that audience is 200 strong or 200,000 strong – it’s secondary to the fact that you do have an audience and that’s what I’m teaching people how to do.”
- John Oszajca

Want more interviews like this? Leave me a comment below and let me know what you think.

Out of the blue I was inspired to write a post called Why Your Band Sucks; however I did some research and read a bunch of other stuff out there about the topic. It threw me off so this is what you’re getting instead – What Your Band Needs To Succeed Online.

Keep It Simple Stupid

I don’t know about you, but there are times when I make things WAY more difficult than they need to be. Having said that – there is so much information out there that it’s easy to get overwhelmed by what you need to do and what you need to watch out for. This post is an attempt to keep it simple, so let’s do this.

#1) Your Own Website

Are you sick of hearing this one yet? I’m getting tired of saying it, but I’m going to keep saying it until everyone is doing it. If you don’t have your own domain name registered with a website setup yet – what are you waiting for? There are sites out there like Bandzoogle and Hostbaby that offer lost of help for bands looking to get a site at an affordable price.

However, if you’re not keen on spending $15 to $20/month on your band website – I put together my own training manual that reveals where to get hosting for as little as $3 a month. At that cheap, nobody has any excuses for not having their own website! I offer a DIY Band Website training course that spills the beans on this and a lot more – check it out.

As for where to get your domain names, right now I recommend Name Cheap. Not only do they offer great prices, they let you pay with Paypal without having a credit card on file. This is one reason why I don’t like Godaddy (that and the fact that they upsell you to death when you go to make a purchase).

Do I really need to tell you WHY you need your own website? How about ownership, autonomy and leverage for starters? To me, having your own website is like having your own place to head home to after socializing at the clubs; it’s where you invite people so you can get to know each other better without the noise and distraction at the club. WordPress makes it easy to have a site up in minutes.

2) Optin Page, Autoresponder, Enticing Freebie

Okay – this is technically three different things but they are dependent upon each other to succeed. Creating an optin page is probably the trickiest part – especially if you use WordPress. I’ve attempted to build a page using an html editor and tables to layout the page properly but had mixed results at best. There are themes like Optimize Press that do this easily with sweet graphics, but it’ll cost you $100 or so and will change the entire look of your site – which might be a negative for you if you’ve already customized your website the way you like it. If it’s not perfect – who cares. A somewhat lame looking optin page is better than no optin page at all in my books.

Luckily, getting an auto responder isn’t that tough these days. $20/month gets you started with industry leading companies like Aweber and Constant Contact – however if you’re just getting started and are tight on cash, again I have an alternative for you: Mail Chimp.

I’ve been using Mail Chimp for over a year now and have nothing but good experiences so far, it also doesn’t hurt that they’ve gone from allowing you to collected first 500, then 1000 and now 2000 email addresses 100% for free! Not only that – but they have a free optin widget that you can install on the sidebar of your WordPress site (not as good as a dedicated optin page, but definitely better than nothing).

There are some limitations with Mail Chimp; you can collect 2000 email addresses, but that is the max and you can only mail out 2000 messages in a month. That means you have this limitation:

• Mail a list of 2000 x 1 per month
• Mail a list of 1000 x 2 per month
• Mail a list of 500 x 4 per month
• Mail a list of 250 x 8 per month

If you’re just starting out, this is more than decent for free. I’d imagine that by the time you start wanting to go beyond 2000 names on your list – you’ll be able to afford to start paying Mail Chimp or start up a list with Aweber that you can switch your database over to.

The enticing freebie will be up to you to figure out what you’re comfortable with, a single MP3 might not be enough, an EP or full Album will garner more interest. Make sure to play up the word “FREE” whenever you can since everybody likes freebies.

#3) Compelling Content

Okay, so what exactly is compelling content anyway? Well in this case I’m referring to anything that offers value to your potential fans whether it’s online or off. If you’re a band – compelling content will be the music and lyrics that you write, the videos that you post on Youtube, the blog posts and status updates that you share online.

Done right, compelling content wins you fans. They get a taste for your personality and want more (hopefully) and eventually start paying for your music and merch. Compelling content adds value and helps to build traffic on your site.

To me this is all about creation – this is the work of the artist and guess what – you’ll never stop working until the day that you die! You need to produce new content and material to stay relevant and let your audience know that you’re still make it happen.

Some of your content will be free to attract people to sign up to your list and so that they can find out what you’re about. However, you’ll also need to make some money if you want to keep your band afloat, so commercial product is necessary as well…which brings us to:

#4) Shopping Cart

You’ll need a way to collect money for the products that you sell; this doesn’t have to be an expensive piece of software that requires a team of IT people to operate – it can be as simple as adding a Paypal button to a particular page, post or email to your list.

Are there problems with using Paypal? Sure there are – but don’t sweat the small stuff, just get started and get some sales happening. Once the money is rolling in – again you may want to look into getting a dedicated merchant account or more sophisticated software that allows for affiliate tracking and all the rest.

The beauty of Paypal is that it’s a low cost and low tech solution for bands that want to start selling their stuff online today. Keep it simple…remember?

So there you have it – four relatively simple and cost effective items you need to cross off your list to increase your odds of becoming a success online with you band. Of course talent, good looks and superb songwriting abilities also couldn’t hurt you.

However, I purposely omitted three things that you’ll need to truly succeed. Can you guess what they are? Leave you best guesses in the comments below and I’ll follow up with my response soon!

Hey everyone,

I recently listened to some advice from a couple of music industry professionals that spoke about how important it is to have a ‘professional’ website for your band. While they were quick to point out how important it is to make a good impression on your fans with the appearance of your site and that it was worth waiting until you had $500 or more to spend on a band website – they never actually spelled out what a professional website is!

So after thinking about it for a few minutes, I decided to put together a list of the core elements that help to define a professional band website.

Most usually point out that it’s the graphics or look of the site that makes it ‘professional’ or not, but it goes much deeper than that.

I put together a short video about this – check it out below.

In my opinion, you can have a pro band website without having to hire a designer or drop $500+ to make it happen; if you’re willing to learn a little and put in some time.

Click here to find out more about DIY Band Websites.