Nothing is more important than contact (with your music fans)

By: Chris Cox Date Posted: July 20, 2010

Just like the real world, online relationships don’t appear with a sprinkle of fairy dust.

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…

There's more to marketing your music than fairy dust to get fans...

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.

Connecting with your music fans using the internet and emailI’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?):

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