Are you a music producer? Do you make beats in your spare time and dream of one day making a living from it? If so, this blog post is for you! In this post, we'll discuss some tips on how to make money off your beats.
I get asked all the time how to make money off beats? Honestly its probably the 2nd most asked question in the world behind 'Who shot JFK?'.
The truth is to make money off beats isnt easy but it is simple. Selling beats becomes easy once you follow these main steps below. Let me show you - walk with me.
1. CREATE YOUR OWN WEBSITE STORE (NOT JUST BEATSTARS PLAYER)
Shopify is hands down the BEST store to build a beat selling website with. Most producers just create a beatstars store (which we'll speak about later) but that sucks and wont help you sell beats.
You need your OWN store, your OWN enviroment, your OWN website. The problem with guiding people to your beatstars player is:
A. They have a choice of thousands of other producers to buy from.
B. They dont get the FULL 'customer experience'.
C. Your not building a long term brand
(your basically saying to your customer: "I'd love if you bought from me today, but never again in the future")
This is not how you build a business. This is not how you make money off beats. You've gotta think both short time (sales today) and long term (sales tomorrow)
The whole point of a beat selling business is to:
- Get customer first time
- Get same customer to buy second time
- Get same customer to buy third time
- Get same customer to refer a friend
- Repeat steps 1-4
This is the fomula to a profitable and success online business wether it be beats selling to selling iPhones. It dont matter
So back to shopify, once you sign up for your shopify store (free 14 day trial), you'll need to build your webite. Now dont worry if your not a pro designer like me.
Choose a theme template and simply drag-and-drop all your images, pages and text into place. Shopify make it SUPER easy to do this which is why I believe they are the best ecommerce platform around.
I use a cool template called booster theme, its sick and hands down the reason I been able to help thousands of music creators sound better and become more.
Its basically designed by 3 nerds who want to create a template design that could turn EVERY website visitor who lands on your page into a customer as fast as possible. Check it out for your store here
If your dont have the time to design your website yourself and have between $250-$500 budget. I highly recommend hiring a website designer from Fiverr. I've seen some great work done by these guys so its well worth checking out for beat selling website.
2. OK, CUE BEATSTARS!
Now is when you need, beatstars.
Simply create your beatstars account (either free or paid version). Then once you upload your beats, simply copy and paste your beat stars player code onto your shopify home page.
This is how you effectively use beatstars. Now when every website visitor hits your store up for beats, guess who the only person they can buy from is? yep you guessed it, YOU.
- Not WIZKOP
- Not SANDMAN PRODUCTIONS
- Not IHAVENOIDEAWHATIMDOING BEATS
This puts you in a place of power and demand. Exactly where you should be.
3. NOW YOU NEED SOME TRAFFIC
I like to break down my traffic into 2 ways: FREE TRAFFIC, PAID TRAFFIC.
FREE TRAFFIC
Things like google search, YouTube, social media and referels are all free. Things like blog posts, videos, and status updates are all ways of driving traffic to your store. Instagram is personally my favourite social to make money off beats because of its easy direct messaging.
I wrote an entire article which went viral called 'how to sell beats on instagram'. Ahh who doesnt love FREE! the problem with FREE is that FREE is unpredicatable (unlike my predicatable use of the word FREE!) and unpredictability is a business owners worst nightmare.
Which is why at some point you have to join the big boys of the world and use PAID traffic
PAID TRAFFIC
Paid is basically you putting money into a gumball machine and each time you do, it gives you 3 gumballs back. Not 2, not 6, just 3. That kind of consistency is the kind that makes you RICH.
So what does gumballs have to do with traffic? Well each time you pay an advertiser like facebook, instagram or google ads to promote your beats: you'll recieve a certain amount of website visitors consistently each time.
Now if your website has:
- Good design
- Good beats
- Good value for price
Then you should get on average 3 customers out of every 100 visitors. This is called a 3% conversion rate which is the standard conversion rate across the entire web.
Kerep tweaking your design, your beats and your price untill you get 3 customers out of every 100 visitors.
4. THE REAL SECRET TO MAKING MONEY OFF BEATS
Wanna know the real secret to making money off beats?: Emails
Email marketing is hands down the BEST way to communicate with your customers and get them to buy even more beats from you and refer friends to come and buy. WHY? because email is an enviroment where people are just conditioned to buy. Dont ask why, there just are.
The best time to send emails to your exisiting customers are:
- End of the month (payday!)
- Straight after they already bought (send them 10% discount code)
- After the purchase more than 3 times (They love you! ask for a referel)
And to top it all off? Email can be automated which means you dont have to send each email everytime you want them to buy.
You can set up automations which send emails out automatically:
- 30th of every month
- 2 hours after 1st purchase
- After their 4rd purchase
Automations are like tiny little sales people selling beats for you in the dark of the night.
Whilst your sleeping, they're selling.
Whilst your having sex, they're selling.
Whilst your on a beach sipping vodka martinis - yep you guessed it
they're asking to join you on vacation. Oops no sorry, I meant - selling. ;)
Conclusion:
As I said many lines ago, making money off beats is NOT easy but it can be simple only when you have the right systems in place. I hope ive given you good insight into what you need to do to make money off you beats.
If you want more to learn more about how to make money off beats, Check out my entire walkthrough beat selling training guide 'The Wealthy Producer'.
