I am zealously passionate about testing.

That’s one of the most amazing things with the internet that you just can’t reproduce in “real” life: testing. I can get results on whether a certain headline, colour, image, link, etc. etc. is good, bad, or great just about immediately. It appeals to the primeval savage in me that wants instant gratification, I think.

It also appeals to the savage in me that likes winning and making money. In this column I’m going to share some test results we’re seeing out there in the field, and I’m going to push you to test more.

Buttons are one of the most testing areas of internet marketing. They can take a sales or opt-in page from OK to perfect, just with the right button. So, the right combination of colour, text, size and shape and position, is crucial!

Thing is, oftentimes we take for granted that we need to use text links to ask people to do something. I’m guilty of it too at times, you forget or get in a hurry.

But to me, it’s really all about asking yourself, “I am I REALLY making the most of every opportunity, every element I can use here to maximise my results – to make sure my fans are made the most of, and get the best value for their time?”

Everything from Buy buttons to Download buttons should be equally irresistible – because you just want your fans to devour ever single ounce of content to ensure they’ll taste it, get hooked, and want to come back for more.

So, I really challenge you all to push yourselves and ask the tough questions. What could you test that could up your game?

If there’s something you’d like to know how to test, tell me, and I’ll walk you through it.

(By the way – an orange buy button that says “Add to Cart” is almost 18 times more likely than a green button that says “Order Now” to get clicked and to make sales in our tests – do you see how important this stuff is!?!)

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Comment below and let me know what you’re thinking / wondering about…

 

Usually that answer is, “um, none.” Which is fine – nobody needs you to get good at this stuff, except for you, we’re all doing fine. But why don’t we leave the house and go and actually build fanbases? Or get started building them online? I hear a lot about how:

“I’m not confident”
“I’m not funny naturally”
“I don’t know what to say”
“I’m so tired”
“I’m too depressed”
“It’s scary and I don’t know where to start”

I don’t judge anyone who uses these excuses. I understand why you do, and I understand that there’s probably a seed of truth in them too.

All I can say is “if you keep doing what you’ve always done, you’ll keep getting what you’ve always gotten.”

And if you’re asking those questions, you’re probably not altogether delighted with what you’ve always gotten.

Music is a “lifeskills sport”. It’s a lifeskill and it’ll change your life and it has the potential to radically improve your quality of living. But it’s also like a sport, if you think you can start at the top, you need to know you really can’t. You’re going to start at the bottom of the barrel in the 8th Division, and you’ve got to work your way up to the Premier League.

There’s a lot of blood, sweat and tears. But the journey is fun too – depression lifts when you have a goal and know you have a direction. You have a new burst of energy when you realise your life is coming together. It’s just incredible when you realise the things that you always thought were out of your grasp are actually so close you can clinch them – and when you actually get them. I’m not just talking about swarms of fans here, and having loads of media coverage (yes, you will have those if you work on this).

I’m talking about a NEW LIFE: this isn’t just about “what to say or do” — this is about becoming a person of value, a person fans love and want to be with, a person critics and industry folk respect and want to be. It’s about your job and career, it’s about your body, it’s about your relationship, it’s about your beliefs about life and people and how much you enjoy life and its simple things, and how little you’re able to worry. It’s about freedom.

You’ll never have those things until you begin.

When are you going to START? When are you going to go out and start marketing yourself? Taking the first step? When are you going to to decide what you want your life to be and start taking steps to actualise that?

Read the articles, listen to the courses, but then go and do something about it. Decide what you want, plan how to get it, go develop the skills, and go and grab it.

It’s not difficult – it’s easy. Problem is, nobody bothers to sit down and work out – and I mean REALLY WORK OUT – what they want, and how they’re going to get it. I strongly believe music, and this lifestyle is about being different. It’s about being the 2% who do go and do that, and who do suck it up and take the pain and who do go out and make things happen.

People who feel the fear and do it anyway. People who see the doubt and eat it up.

Stop settling for second best. Go and take action. Take action now.

Sign up for our free music marketing tips & tactics newsletter here. The journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. Just start.

But what I do want to call to your attention, right now, is this. Bing is getting into lyrics search – and it’s BIG business too. Apparently 10% of all searches are music and entertainment related, 3/4 people use search to find info on artists they love. But only 1/10 of them trust the sources giving them information. Bing wants to give a good “categorisation” of the best knowledge on each artist. Check this out for a sample Bing Entertainment Search

You can also browse for music in the entertainment section of the Bing engine here: www.Bing.com/Entertainment

Long story short folks – apart from the obvious question: “how do I get ranked on the new Bing search” (you don’t need to do anything they compile data from different sources and categorise it all, so nothing for you to do, except be visible!), I wonder where this means the search industry is going in regards to music?

We already know that Google’s embroiled in the great copyright discussion – will they side with the labels and produce a “Google Music” where you can find and download your favourite tunes, and prioritise that on the search rankings? Or will they keep it free and fair without favouring those partners? A part of me thinks they want to keep it free and fair, but it’s going to be difficult to. Not to mention the kind of flak they’re receiving from that industry’s legal teams (though they did win a major victory against Viacom recently regarding Youtube copyright)

Anyway, let me know what you’re thinking, let’s see how this puzzle comes together…

This, my friends, is the cutting edge of social media marketing. Nobody’s ever dared to do this before. At least no big brand has anyway.

(UPDATE: Over the past three months, sales jumped 55 percent and in the past month, they rose 107 percent, also per Nielsen. )

Here’s how Old Spice got millions of views on their videos and commercials (that’s the really astonishing part) in just one day… (and let me know how you think you could use this as a musician in the comments).

Old Spice got a team together of creatives and social media people, and they started filming early in the morning. By that evening, they’d made 87 videos. Each ±7 mins. They made more the next day — and reports were, the team couldn’t get enough of it, it was such a thrill!

Instead of just filming bland old commercials (how tired are deodorant commercials – seriously!?), they decided to engage their audience and be relevant and funny. Their target audience was the eccentric, quirky types over on Reddit.com and similar sites (redditors are – and this is a sweeping generalisation – nerdy, quirky, mildly hostile, liberal, and highly opinionated). If they love you, they’ll tell their friends about you, if they hate you, you’ll know about it real quick.

Their character, the Old Spice man, is the manliest man about (watch the video below and feel in awe of his tremendous manliness…).

To get the redditors – and other influential social media types (like Perez Hilton, Alyssa Milano and Kevin Rose) loving, and not hating them, they interacted with them directly. They made “commercials” for individuals!

Sure, they weren’t the same quality as TV commercials. But we’ve been saying that for ages – when it comes to social media, the quality doesn’t have to be insane – it’s about the connection and the content! But what really helped them kill it was that ordinary viewers felt like they “knew” the characters. There was this constant dialogue, back and forth, that was evolving in real time as people sent in questions and opinions and the Old Spice team made videos to answer them.

What made what they were doing so powerful was that this was a rare time that (1) a big brand had spoken to the public one on one, especially on social media like this, and (2) it was a LIVE, ongoing conversation – it happened in real time, with real people’s questions. Then their social media experts obviously just posted the message out there, got in touch with the relevant people and told them to take a look, and got others commenting.

It all took just a few days, it was intense, but they got millions of views – and there were dozens of comments from guys saying “I will never wear anything other than Old Spice again!” – they really, really loved it! In fact, a bunch of them got together, on their own, and set up an Old Spice Man Voicemail site where you can get your own voicemail with the character’s voice.

It’s amazing what you can do when you target the right social media networks and users, talk to them by name, and commit to having a dialogue with them.

Tell me, how could you use this for your marketing and to build a dialogue with your fans?

You’ve gotta work at them. And that, means building relationships.

It all starts out with something small. Little efforts – which lead a long way.

You’re at a gig, they’re listening to your music, think its pretty cool, sipping a beer.

But instead of packing up and leaving after the gig, you use your superior insight, your charm and charisma, and your general guile – and turn them from a casual listener into a lifelong fan…

Fairy dust has lost its effectiveness in recent years in fanbase building...

YOU APPROACH THEM, and offer them something cool and free in exchange for putting their email address on your clipboard / laptop / blackberry / forehead.

That’s literally all it takes folks. Ok, it’s not all it takes – there’s a lot to running a great mailing list (don’t just mail me when you want something from me like to come to your gig or buy something!). But that’s where it all starts. If you don’t get that contact information, you have LITERALLY wasted your time there – you’ve gotten nothing from that non-buyer, and you never will.

But if you get them on your mailing list, you can have a relationship for years, you can grow with them, connect with them, get them to refer their friends.

Same goes with your blog, facebook, twitter, et cetera. If you’re not getting them from there onto your mailing list, you’re kind of wasting your time, and you put yourself at the mercy of the fickle and capricious gods of CyberSpace. Facebook routinely closes accounts, Twitter is down more often than not and OFTEN loses followers and ruthlessly closes accounts. The only time those relationships are safe is on your mailing list.

There is literally nothing more important than getting your listeners and fans on your mailing list so you can build relationships, give them cool stuff, and (sometimes) sell to them.

If you want to know a couple of good tools to do that with – and you’d be ASTONISHED how easy it is to set up too – here we are:

• AWeber – The “Google” of email marketing – the gold standard. It’s the same tool I use to run all my mailing lists. Excellent delivery rates. ALSO – it is incredibly easy to set up and use, making beautiful forms and emails.
• MailChimp – similar to AWeber, also great – different billing model, charging for mails sent instead of a monthly flat-rate.
• GetResponse – pretty good, I prefer Aweber, but if they’re not your flavour, these guys are just as good.

I’ll write more articles on the HOW’s of email marketing as we go along. There’s a lot of info on that in the member’s area too (in fact, a whole 2 week module on it!). But if you haven’t started, I’d say now the time – sooner rather than later.

Start growing your music fanbase, and building those relationships now.

(…And on that note, why don’t you join our mailing list, get to know each other, and take a look at how I’m doing things?):

…and most end their careers the exact same way…

Without making a dime, without ever truly realising their potential, without actually making a real go of their talents and their creative inputs, and their messages.

…all because we’re frightened of marketing. It’s the bain of most indie artists lives because it’s (1) boring (2) complex as a labyrinth.

My message is it doesn’t have to be like that!

I want to share how marketing your music can be FUN, and EASY. And how if just do a couple of easy and free things, you’ll be better than 99% of artists out there.

Guess what? If you actually like your fans, marketing is fun. Because you know what? It’s all about connecting with them and people like them.

People talk a lot of crap about how marketing is “so difficult” or “so technical”, etc. etc. etc. (ad nauseum).

Those guys are talking TRASH. That’s total crap. They either don’t know what they’re doing, or they have motives to keep you out of it (ie. they’re labels trying to justify what they’re doing for your money; other artists trying to justify their failure, etc.)

If you just know a couple of little principles – where to start and how to fit things together, what the biggest mistakes are to avoid, and a couple of sneaky tricks, you can absolutely kill it out there.

I’ll teach you a lot of that stuff for free, because I actually give a damn about your career and I’m tired of looking on sadly from the sidelines as talented artists give up because they just don’t know any better. Some things I’ll charge for, but my promise is I’ll always give insanely great value, and keep earning your attention. But we’ll get there as we go along…

You can involved and get my free training here:

(I keep all the best exclusive stuff for the guys who are serious and who get on that list.)

MakeYourBandFamous.com is all about marketing your music in fun, easy, & ethical ways!

I won’t promise it’ll take of itself. It’s still going to take creativity and talent, and that magical little ingredient called ‘hard work’. Nobody in the world can promise you a magic bullet in any industry, and especially not in the music industry.

But if you’re serious about your music career, and you can afford to spend a couple of minutes a day talking to your fans, posting pictures, doing other fun stuff — then you’re 50% of the way there. The other 50% is just knowing what to do.

That’s why I set this thing up. I hope you like it, and we have a lot of fun, a lot of laughs, and a lot of success together.

Catch ya soon.

Chris Cox

You know how a lot of sites have that little “Like” button on them? You might have seen that popping up a lot lately on bigger sites. That’s the obvious manifestation of this thing. It connects any page on the internet into Facebook and makes it a “Page” there.

That’s one benefit if you’re the content-provider, who owns that page – you’re getting exposed socially to everyone who is friends with the person who Likes your page. That gives you the potential to go viral.

But here’s the big thing that not a lot of people have really started to grasp yet — that’s not it for Facebook. This is just the beginning. Facebook is almost certainly going to launch a competing search engine – but instead of being based on links, like Google (essentially each site who links to your site counts as a vote to Google, so the top few are those with the most and best links), they’ll be ranking pages based on LIKES. A social search engine.

That’s powerful stuff. Especially if you get in on this stuff early, and you have a good fanbase to pump you up the charts. And if your content has the potential to go viral, it’s now that much more likely that it will because of that same social nature.

I don’t know how closely you follow what’s happening online with Facebook, Google, Bing, etc. But it gets me pretty excited, I’m not gonna lie to you.

Here’s why. Facebook is launching what amounts to a full-on-frontal on Google (ha ha I just said full-on-frontal…). They’re taking the fight to Google. The search behemoth has thus far failed in many of its important social media forays to threaten Facebook and Twitter. And now Facebook’s taking it to them.

First, there was Google Wave. To be fair Google really shouldn’t have marketed this as a social application for consumers. It’s not dead, but to people like you and me, it is – it’s a PR failure.

Then, there was Google Buzz. And for one reason or another which we can’t get into right now, it just didn’t gain traction. We just didn’t see why we should open another social account, what differentiated it, and why we should leave Twitter. So, we didn’t. Oops.

Add to both of those the fact that Google’s search stats are flatlining (actually DOWN 8%) which Bing is growing every month (UP 34%), and their deal, soon to come to fruition with Yahoo, is going to start posing a real menace.

Now, don’t get me wrong, Google’s still in an extremely strong position. They’re still the goliath on that stage, with 75% of the search market. But it’s obvious they’re under increasing attack. Now add to that this brand new Facebook threat and you can start to see a slightly more competitive and colourful digital media landscape

It’s an exciting time to be online. You’ve gotta be quick on your toes with what’s working now, and implementing, but if you are – it’s like the Wild West out there, big fortunes to be made if you can keep up. Stay tuned, gunslinger.