The other day I set up a little test on my free newsletter offer, and rather than being all shady like an evil spirit in the shadows I thought it would be cool to show you what I did so that you can use the concept to build your own fan mailing list faster.
Basically my side bar rotates and shows two different versions of my free offer to each person who visits the site, so I can see what appeals to my people the most.
You could do exactly the same on your own website, and a really simple example of this would be to offer your visitors 2 free tracks or 7 free tracks and see which offer gets the most interest.
I would guess that 7 free tracks would win that little battle, but unless you test it you will never know. Once we have a winner we need to try and beat it, so your next test might be to offer a whole album or something.
If you want to work out if a musician is really switched on to this marketing stuff ask them what their website “conversion rate” is?
Most musicians will look at you stony faced when you pose this little teaser, but all this means is the percentage of people who visit your site each day compared with the number of people who join your list.
Your first target should be a solid 20% conversion rate.
As far as I’m concerned success for a DIY musician can be boiled down to four things.
- An hour a day working on your tunes, until you create the genius illusion.
- How much traffic you get to your site each day.
- How many of those people join your list.
- How many of the people on your list buy your music or join your fan club.
If you just focus all your energy on those four little factors you have a recipe for guaranteed music success at some point in the future.
So this all brings me back around to the most important word in music marketing, can you remember it?
ALL TOGETHER NOW!
Testing, testing, testing!
The reason testing is so important is because it means you can get more results with less effort, think about it like this…
- Lets say Band A get 100 people per day to their website…
- 1% of those people join the mailing list.
- 1% of the mailing list buy the album for $10.
- So Band A will sell an album every 100 days.
Not really a way to set the world on fire 
But now let’s look at clever little Band B…I love those Band B guys!
- They also get 100 hits per day.
- But they have tweaked their email sign up offer so that 20% of their visitors join the mailing list.
- They get 20 people on their list each day.
- After working on the email follow up 30% of fans eventually buy the $10 album.
- In five days Band B get 100 people on their list and sell 30 albums making $300.
Not bad considering that Band B spent the whole of last week playing with purple fairies after finding a stash of magical mushrooms.
So How Can You Test Like “The Rockett”
Trying to do this manually is a bitch so I use a tool which comes as part of my Aweber account. It will automatically rotate your stuff and then give you stats on which one is the winner.
In the video below I’ll show you how I do it…
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Final Thoughts
So there you have it, simple split-testing to optimize your music career. You can use this split-testing concept all over the place and I even made a couple of videos the other day that show you how to split test your web pages. Pretty cool stuff!
Test everything and you can take a small amount of fans and turn them into a big bunch of record sales.
Talk soon,
- Chris
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