Biz Booster Hot Tip!

It's not how many, but who are your fans? Do you know them? How often have you been asked, "How many fans do you have on your mailing list?" Sometimes a venue booker might want to know that number to consider whether you will have a decent turn out before they book you. You may consider having a huge list as being a great accomplishment that has taken you many years to develop. And I'd say congrats on being so diligent and keeping at it each live performance and through your efforts on your website and social media sites. Having the numbers in each market is certainly going to help…

Gigs you should be playing are the ones where the whole community comes out for a local event. Some events will have entertainment. Are you playing at any of these events? If not, then we need to talk. What’s so great about playing at community events or celebrations on special holidays? Well for one thing, you would be seen by your entire community, perhaps, some will be seeing you for the first time. An event like this could introduce you to some new fans. So if you are not playing any of these events, let’s plan on researching these types of events for the rest of the year. Think about…

Do you operate in distraction reaction mode. Having a productive day can be challenging and perhaps even a novelty. If you allow your life to be directed by other people's agendas, you may be living a life driven by distractions. Oh yes, I am talking about emails, twitter and Facebook interruptions throwing your personal agenda into turmoil. I hear you cry, "but how can I live, without my twitter fix, or how will I survive without checking my email every other minute. Won't I miss some huge opportunity or news from friends or colleagues?" I am not suggestion cold turkey here, just apply a bit of distraction reaction management. After…

  The emergency notification alarm screamed out from each of our cell phones. Tornadoes were nearby, get to your safe room. For me, that was the laundry room in my cousin's house. A small but cozy inner room with no windows or outside walls. I set it up with a chair, Ripley's blanket, water, my battery operated weather radio and lantern. throughout the 6 hours of relentless winds, tornado warnings kept sounding one after another. Local channels were pin pointing each radar blip throughout Palm Beach County, so it was easy to know when to emerge from or take shelter in the safe rooms. My room was fairly quiet except…

How well do you know your fans? OK-you put out your mailing list sign-up form or cards and collected a bunch of new email addresses. Your website email capture form is humming along and fans are signing up for your newsletter every day. Your Facebook friend count is getting larger by the hour and you’ve got new twitter followers hanging on your every tweet. So who are all these fans, friends and followers? How well do you know them and how are you getting to know them? Do you ever stop to think, that if you have 1000, 5000, 10,000 on your lists, how many of those people can you…

Hiring an assistant to help move your career may be the next best thing to do even before getting an agent. I feel that this addition to your team, even if you are a solo performer, may be the perfect solution to allowing you to concentrate on the most essential things you can do to grow your touring career-like book gigs. Once again, using our template to drill down and look at what results we are after when considering adding this expense to the business, ask yourself the following questions and make a list: What income producing activities should I be doing? What non-income producing activities can someone else do?…

Hiring a CD Radio Promotions Company is  the 2nd part of this multi-part series. I’d like to share the result-based decision process you may use when hiring a CD radio promotions company to promote a new CD. This is a common expenditure among many musicians who desire the widest exposure for their music. It may be a decision you have grappled with or have even made to promote past or upcoming CD releases. A radio promotions campaign is not cheap. It could cost as much or more than the manufacturing of 1000 CDs for an 8-12 week campaign. So this is not a decision to be made lightly or to…

This week, let’s examine the process of hiring a publicist. So often I hear artists talk about hiring a publicist as being the next move in their career. Perhaps you are at that place right now and think this is exactly the right move for your career. Using our template to think through this result-based career decision process, let’s examine this expense in relation to the results you might be after. First, keep in mind that there are a variety of types of publicity campaigns you might launch—a national campaign; a regional campaign; a very local campaign and an ongoing campaign that focuses on each tour date throughout the year.…

This week I’ll begin a multi-part series to help you make result-based career decisions. So often we make decisions just because we see others engaging in some particular activity. We think they’ve discovered something that works so we better get on board and do it as well. It must be the right thing to do, right? But how do you know it’s the right thing for you? How do you know it will produce the results you need? So over the next few Biz Boosters I’d like to offer some new ways to think about how to decide to engage in some very specific activities that may come up during…