One of the most common questions when it comes to selling beats online, is whether you can make money selling beats. The answer is simple, yes you can.
The general idea is that you should give away free beats to get people interested in your music and engage them, although the answer and the purpose of doing so is a bit more complicated. Let us find out why.
How to make money selling beats
1 – Introduce yourself
You should start giving them for free because it is the best chance for a listener to get a better idea of your work. Not all people spend countless hours surfing on the internet. Some of your potential customer may want to download a certain amount of your beats on their personal computer and listen to them when they have time.
Giving beats for free is often the best way to introduce yourself to people. Especially for beginners, it is a way to attract the attention of artists who are on a budget and do not have the convenience to spend large amounts of money, to download their beats and practice on them.
2 – Help artists practice
The second reason you want to give away free beats is to help people. When artists their careers in music, they are on a tight budget, similar to music producers.
Free beats help artists practice their verses and hooks on them and maybe record a demo song, and on the same time, they help producers spread the word about their work. This way both sides benefit and get inspired to keep improving.
Remember that a good business manages to generate revenue, but a great business is able to generate revenue and help its customers improve in their field.
3 – Stand out from the competition
There are many great music producers and beatmakers trying to make their way up in the music industry. You have to be ready to compete with all those talented musician and distinguish yourself by providing to the people products and services that other producers do not provide.
You need attention for your business and acquire customers that will always come back for more. Giving away free beats is the best way to make your name known and get people to recognize your brand.
4 – Provide value
When you give away free beats, you need to make sure that they are high-quality beats. Focus on them just like you would do with your most expensive ones. Free beats advertise your brand name, and people that download them will appreciate it if you provide them with beats that sound great.
Furthermore, when the quality of your free beats is high, people that download and listen to them will think that the ones for sale will be have even higher quality standards, and will be curious to listen to them so they will visit your website and check out your work.
5 – Lead people back to your website
Free beats is a very successful marketing technique. The purpose of the giveaway of your beats is to persuade your listeners to visit your website and eventually buy the beats you have available for sale.
Make sure that you include the address of your website in the file that includes the free beats, to remind people where they downloaded them and where they can come and find more.
Adding voice tags to your beats is also a great idea. This serves as an insurance that people will not use your beats without buying a license for the first, but it usually is a nice way to remind people of your brand name or your website’s address.
6 – Persuade artists to work with you
It is a common truth that rappers, lyricists or artists in general already have maybe one or two producers that they work with. To persuade these artists to listen to your beats, you must offer them something that will grab their attention, in this case your free beats.
Nobody can say no to free beats and it will only take a few minutes of their time to check them out. If you have high-quality beats like we advised earlier in this article, you should be able to get their attention and maybe make them want to work with you.
7 – Keep your customers loyal
When it comes to selling beats to your customers, you do not want them to purchase a beat and then disappear. You want to keep them loyal, provide them with new product often, and work with them in a constant basis so that you can keep selling beats.
If you have people that purchase beats more often than your usual customer does, you should treat them in a special way in order to keep them engaged. Every now and then, you should offer them free beats to show your appreciation and this way offer an outstanding user experience.
8 – Free beat deals
Instead of giving away free beats in exchange for people’s e-mail address or to introduce yourself to your listeners, you can offer free beats in the form of discount deals. For example, you can offer one free beat for every two or three purchases, or even one free beat for every purchase.
This way, you raise the value of the purchase in the eyes of your customers, and have the opportunity to sell greater amounts of beats.
Remember that beats are digital products, so there are no costs involved once you upload them and make them available for sale. So you profit even if you sell two beats in the price of one.
What you should be careful of
One thing you should take into serious consideration, is to maintain a certain balance when you provide free beats to the people that visit your website.
That means that it is ok to try to help artists out or promote your brand, but make sure that you give for free only a small portion of your beats, about 5 or 10 beats for example.
If you offer large amounts of beats for free, then people will stop appreciating your work and will come to your website only to acquire the free beats you have to offer. You have to maintain the right balance by providing only a few beats and keep the rest available for sale.
When you use free beats as discount deals, you should never overdo it. For instance, do not offer ten or even five free beats for every single beat they purchase. This will lower both your beats and your brand’s name value in the eyes of your customers.
What is more, you should not offer beat very often. When people receive free stuff very often from a certain brand, they stop appreciating their products. You should give away free beats to thank your customers for their support, but be careful not to lower your products’ value.
When people work hard and pay for the stuff they acquire they tend to appreciate and respect them more.
You should consider you giveaways as a way to inform your potential customers about your products and let them get a taste of what you are capable of in exchange for their support.
How to make money from free beats
The short answer is by using e-mail marketing. E-mail marketing is the most direct way to promote your beats and products to your subscribers. If used correctly, it can be extremely personal and user friendly and your subscribers can be very easily updated about your new products and services.
Online communication via e-mail has proved to be one of the most stable ways over the years. Gaining subscriber for your e-mail lists means that you are aiming for a long-term connection with your customers.
There are many useful tools available you can use to handle your e-mail lists, two of which are Aweber and Mailchimp.
Through these software tools, you can create sign-up forms to get peoples’ e-mails when you offer your beats for free. Once they enter their e-mail to the sign-up form, their e-mail is added to one of your lists and an e-mail with your free beats offer is sent to them automatically.
After this procedure, it is very is for you to start sending daily, weekly or monthly e-mails to your subscribers. You can inform them about your new beats or products or keep them up to date with new articles so that they can visit your website and read them.
You can test different kind of e-mails and find out which ones attract the most people from your lists. Even better, you can see what kind of e-mails convert the readers into buyers and increase your sales.
Furthermore, you can automate this process by setting up an Autoresponder. This way, you can schedule a series of e-mails that can be sent to the subscribers of your list. You can provide some e-mails that offer valuable information to your readers in order to engage them, and eventually promote your products or services.
Provide the free beats
1 – To begin providing free beats to your website visitor and collect their e-mail addresses, you need to sign up to an e-mail service first. Some of the best e-mail services available are:
- Aweber
- Mailchimp
- Getresponse
Sign up to one of these three services by clicking on the sign up button. Enter your information and create your account. Remember that all three e-mail services use different pricing models, so you have to check them out carefully and sign up to the one that suits you best.
2 – After you create your account, you need to confirm your e-mail address using the link that was sent to your inbox. After the confirmation, enter your personal information and when you finish hit save.
3 – Next step is to create your first list to add your subscribers. You can add the specific details of the list and name it. Remember that list names appear to your subscribers, so make sure that you give it a name that makes sense. For example “Your website’s name” Newsletter.
4 – At this point, if you have already acquired some e-mails of people that are interested in your beats, you can import them to your list by uploading a .CSV or a .TXT file.
5 – Now you have to create a sign-up form to capture the e-mails of your customers and provide them your free beats. In order to do this, you have to create a welcome e-mail that will be sent to the subscribers after the confirmation of their e-mail address.
Select “Welcome e-mail” and edit it. You can put a very simple message like “Download Free Beats” but it is strongly advised that you make the message more personal.
You can call your customers with their first name, welcome them to your e-mail list and your website, give specific instructions on how to download the free beats and finally include some information about you and your brand so they can start getting familiar with you.
6 – After you finish your welcome mail and save it, it is time to upload your free beats. Make sure that you upload the beats in a ZIP file format and remember to include all license contract in the file.
7 – Once you finish setting up the sign up form, you need to add it to your website. You can add it to multiple position in your website. The most common ones are the header, the sidebar, between or at the end of the posts.
8 – That’s it! You are now ready to start acquiring new subscribers while you provide them your free beats. Feel free to test and experiment with the e-mails you send.
Change the fonts and colors of your e-mails and add images to attract your subscribers’ attention. Organize and create series of e-mail blasts in order to start engaging your subscribers.
Conclusion
Make sure that you include value to your e-mails so that the promotions of your products are better accepted. Do not be afraid to ask questions. People love to share their opinion and this a great opportunity for you to improve your e-mail updates, display information that your subscribers want to see and take the user experience to the next level.
Using e-mail marketing and helping your website visitor by giving away free beats is a great way to increase your revenue while you provide useful content.
Make sure that you implement those methods effectively and make them a vital part of your marketing strategy.
