Invest in self-promotion

One of the biggest dilemmas of independent musicians is the ability to promote their craft on a larger scale. Perhaps, a larger problem is finding the resources (a.k.a. money) to create a big promotional bang that produces measurable results.

However, an issue that is raised is the old adage, "you need to spend money to make money." Now, the music business, or your craft in particular, should not only focus on or be all about the money, but if you're a professional musician earning an income from your craft it is something that you'll have to deal with some time or another.

What I'm really talking about is that independent musicians are all too often not willing to spend much, if any, money on promoting their craft. For example, many musicians will spend a healthy amount of money on a new guitar or some other piece of gear, but he/she won't spend $50.00 on music promotion. It's great if you have that awesome piece of gear that you just had to have, but who cares if you don't have any fans at your shows because you're too cheap to pay for an email service to regularly email your fans about upcoming events.

The point is, if you're going to spend money developing your music career put the lion's share of your budget into marketing and promotion...no matter how big your budget is.

Here are some reasonably priced, yet high impact things you can do to help your promotion...

• Get a good email service to regularly stay connected to the fans on your email list. There are several out there that offer reasonable rates. FanBridge offers some of the lowest I've seen, and they have great service designed specifically for musicians.
   
• You need the free social media sites as part of your web presence these days, but do get a hosted web site that has a web address that is just your band or name. It's helpful to have an online "homebase" for fans to find you, or to work outward from--list the social networking sites you can be found on from your main site.
   
• If you're home recordings of your band's music just don't sound the way you want then pool money from each member of the band and get to a studio or a friend who knows how to record better than you and get at least 3 songs recorded well and to your liking...I guarantee you if it doesn't sound right to you, it won't sound right to others.
   
• Designing a band logo, flyers and posters...if you don't have a friend who is good with design software and you're not very good at it yourself, again pool some of your money together from the band and hire a designer, even a design student, to put together a nice logo for your band so others can easily identify your band when they see it. Also have a designer put together a design that could be used for posters, flyers, and maybe even T-shirts.

The point is, the music is the easy part, it's much harder to share that music with a larger audience.  To find that larger audience, and help them find you, you have to invest in some things that will help further your cause. The alternative is spinning your wheels and wondering why you're not getting where you want to go.

Nick Venturella's sites: music site and business blog site

Check out Nick Venturella's archived Examiner.com articles