Back in 1965 when people were using mainframe computers they would leave an email in another user’s directory (these computers would have about 100 users) and so when someone else logged in they would see the email left by the previous user. No personal inbox but it still got the message across to the other people.

These mainframe computers were not set up as a network so the email was only viewable by other users of the same computer. No need for your buddy’s email address here. It was basically just leaving an electronic note… enote, rather than email really.

As computers began networking with each other this email thing started to get a little more complicated. You needed an actual address so the email would end up at the right computer.

The actual beginning of email marketing was in 1972 when a guy named Ray Tomlinson decided to use the @ sign would send the email to a particular destination across computer networks and so is the very beginning of email marketing.

So there it is, today’s email history lesson.

We all have more going for us than we sometimes realize. We’re really blessed and yet so few of us are actually doing something to take advantage of the situation.

You wanna make more money, sell more cd’s and grow your audience?

Of course you do, who doesn’t. You have to expand, create multiple streams of income. I’ll hit on many different ways in future articles but today we’re talkin’ about 2 you should have and how to grow them.

Think of your live performances as one stream of income that you have going for yourself. Let’s talk about the next best, if not even better, 2nd stream of income. If you have a cd recorded thats great cause you can use that as your 2nd stream.

You can and should be selling as many as possible at your live performances but you could be multiplying yor cd sales by selling them online as well. You can be doing this with or without your own website. As a full-time or wanna-be full time musician you’ve got to have your own website.

Sign up with CD Baby.com

Get your cd’s to them right away weather you’re selling them on your website or not. There’s 2 main reasons for doing this;
1 - a lot of online buyers won’t by from you if they don’t know and trust you, no matter how good your music samples sound. This is not something to take personally, it’s just a confidence thing to do with money and possibly getting ripped off in some way.

Setting up shop at CD Baby.com you automatically have your buyers confidence because cd baby is a reputable online music distributor and you’re not.

The 2nd reason is traffic. CD Baby as a website presence gets a lot of quality, highly targeted traffic of people looking for good independant artists they can discover for themselves.

Who Are You?

I would say that about half the cd sales I get are from customers just browsing thru the website. What happens is they are looking for something in a particular style or genre and your music will get on that list because upon signing up your cd to cd baby you had to come up with several keywords of sound-a-like bands or singers or whatever.

So, you need to sit down and come up with comparables. Who do you sound closest to? If you really don’t know ask some friends cause they’ll be able to tell you. Also, you can just say who your biggest influences are. Bottom line is you must put down on words some descriptive phrases so a web visitor gets some idea of your sound by the words they read. The better you do this the more clicks you’ll get, it’s that simple!

Now I know some artists dont like to do this, we sound like so and so because they think they’re too unique or original for comparison… don’t have that mentality cause it’s BS. Even the top selling acts in the world emulated or were influenced by somebody else, all of them! … getting the right list of comparative descriptions and keywords will get you more cd’s sold because you’ll turn up on more people’s searches. Simple as that.

Now I’m not an affiliate of cd baby so I won’t recommend them over some of the other independant online distributors because you may find one that’s as good or even better, I don’t know. But the point is to get your music up there worth one of them. CD Baby will take a few bucks as their commission and they take care of the order, shipping etc and send you the money into a Paypal account.

You Selling Digital Downloads Yet?

Another thing they do is distribute your music around the net digitaly as well. Sites like iTunes, where people just download an mp3 and not your actual physical product. This is popular because they pay a little bit less for a full cd or can just pick a few tunes from it.

Personally I’ve never signed up with the many sites that people are downloading my songs from because CD Baby is on the case.

Hey, if you’re an artist/musician of any kind you most likely have a website loaded with samples of your stuff like music, photos, hopefully a video or 2.

Here’s where most people screw up:

Most people leave out the most important thing… an opt-in box. If people are on your site because they are seriously into the kind of music you do then they’ll want to get on your email list. The best thing you can do is grow that list as big as you can get it.

Imagine if you had a list of say, 10,000 serious fans and you just finished a new recording।

You send out the news to your list and a few of them buy your new cd, let’s be modest and say only 20% buy. By writing a tiny email and pressing the send button you just sold 2500 cd’s! What did you sell them for? Let’s say the price was $15. You just made $37,500.

Not bad. Now imagine working even harder at building that email list and getting 50,000 subscribers, 100,000 subscribers and do the math again. Are you with me? I thought so. You won’t be looking to call any record companies, they’ll be calling you! But now you don’t need them anymore.

So how do I build this list thing and what’s it all about?

Seriously, if you had a list of fans/customers that big you would have your own cd distribution channel. You could also alert these fans on upcoming events and promote whatever else you think might interest them. Some of these things could even be recommending anther product that could earn you money as well if you were an affiliate of that product.

This is the easy way for you to create multiple streams of income and make about as much money as you care to.

So, to break it down we all need 3 things to make a lot of money online:

1. A good product
2. Lots of targeted traffic to see your website
3. Build a great big email list of fans

Thats how I do it and there are fool proof methods and tactics that will get you going the right way.
Without having to buy a thing I’ll show you 3 free videos, one on each of these 3 topics I just mentioned. Sign up for these in the box on the side and away you go. Get started.