Black Friday is the day after Thanks giving (November 27th). Stores have insane sales, open their doors in the wee hours of the morning, resulting with people lining up and going crazy.

Why should your band miss out? You can participate as well. Send an email out to your fans stating that if they buy one CD, they get one free (for a friend), etc. You pick the sale. It could be buy a CD, get a T-shirt free (or vice versa). Make it a ONE DAY only sale (to add a sense of urgency).  If you are use CDBaby to sell your music, you can easily adjust the price of your items.

People are in the mood to buy on this day so take advantage of it. However, it is right around the corner, so start promoting this “Special” deal.

I wish this video had audio, but it doesn’t. None the less Reverbnation continues to add more useful functionality to your music marketing arsenal. The great thing is you can add these tools to your website and the customer never knows its coming from Reverbnation. When Reverbnation came out I thought, “These are great tools to get your music in front of people, but there were no tools to allow them to buy it once they heard it.” Now you will be able to sell everything from downloads, CDs, merch, ringtones, etc.

It is slotted to be released in October.

Reverb Store Walkthrough from Ferol Vernon on Vimeo.

Many moons ago I had Nick Daugherty on the podcast as he was going to take 365 days to get a record deal.

Well it took a little longer than 365 days, and I don’t think he got a record deal but Nick has used his time wisely.  He has taken time to make relationships with people. More importantly podcasters. Nick has taken time to chime in on my podcast (here at the Musicians Cooler) and also on my Weekly Web Tools podcast. All that time while he was saving his pennies for time in the studio, writing songs, finding a producer, he was making connections on the Internet.  Someone who doesn’t see the plan, doesn’t see the big picture, they wouldn’t have taken time to make those connections. Nick did, and now has has “Fertile soil” to harvest some promotion for his new CD (coming out this weekend, but you can order an autographed copy during his pre-release at www.nicksjourney.com )

Here is what you can learn from Nick:

1. Never give up. Yes this CD took longer than expected, but he never gave up.

2. He took the extra time to learn, research and get the best tools ready so that when the CD was done, he would be more than ready to go.

I just found out about a new tool called Corner Stay Ads.  This tool can sit in any corner of your website. You have access to tons of images to get people’s attention. Then when people put their mouse on that image you can do ANYTHING. Anything? Yes Anything. So here are some ideas I thought of.

Buy My CD Button or a link to your CDBaby page.

Audio Player

Sign up form form for your newsletter

Special promotion for your next gig

ANYTHING you are promoting for your band (your myspace, your facebook, your reverb nation page, your OurStage page).

The best thing is it’s only $37 bucks and it’s super easy to install on your website.

I was curious as to why it s was so cheap and yet so powerful. I found out why. When you buy the software they try to get you to sign up for some 4 minute money making membership site.  Well you can do what I did and take the Corner Stay Ads script and pass on the membership site.

Joe Bonamassa who I interviewed back in the day when it was just an “Audio Newsletter”, has come up with a new marketing trick. He using affiliate marketing to push his new album “Live from Nowhere in Particular.”

Joe is using the affiliate program called idevaffiliate and you can pick up for $99 bucks (one time fee), and it runs on your server.  If you want to put out a little more cash, you can get more toosl to boost the basic version (but those are optional).

How this works is people sign up to promote your CD.  The software creates a unique link for each affiliate. Now if a visitor clicks on that links and buys your CD, the affiliate gets a commission. Joe is giving $2 per CD.

He’s even using the affilaite script in a contest.  The person that sells the most gets a $6000 limited edition Gibson guitar.This is a great example of Joe knowing his target market (guitar players) who will go nuts promoting his album to win a $6000 guitar.

He has also added a sense of urgency by using the system from July 24th through September 30th. (although who knows he may keep it depending on the outcome, we’ll see).

Another bonus is he is encouraging people to sign up as an affilaite, and then use their own link to buy the CD (thus get the $2 commision for selling it to yourself).

The best part about an affiliate software is once you past the initial money to buy the script, the only money you pay is out is when YOU sell something. Your affialites only make money when you make money.

If you want to check out idevaffiliate software go to idevaffiliate.com to check out Joe’s new CD click here for more information if you are interested in more affiliate scripts I have a list over at Weekly Web Tools

Today we get a great idea about getting the most exposure from free downloads on your site.

Getting the Most Out of Your Band’s Free Downloads

If you’re worried about giving your music fore free, I would agree. Typically most people require a enail address and name (so sign up for the newsletter to get a free song). Some people make free music available to those who purchase their CD (available as “bonus” material). But there are those that want to take the Chic Fil-A at the mall approach and give you a song for free in hopes that you buy the whole CD (where at the Mall the Chic Fil-A restaturant gives you a piece of chicken hoping you will buy a whole sandwich). But if these people take your music and like it, they may not know how to get more.

Well today Dave King from www.davekingmusic.com came up with a great idea. Why not put a “tag” to the end of the song saying “Hi This is (your name) and you just listened to (song name) for more music go to (your website). I LOVE THIS IDEA. But then I thought about it…

On CNN, and some Yahoo sites, when watching a video they make you sit through a SHORT commercial before  getting to the “feature presentataion.” So I ask is this is good idea? If so, is it better at the beginning or the end (or both). Click Here to take survey

You could even ste up a “Langing page” like www.mywebsite.com/cd so that you could track the return from giving away singles. You could do this for your songs you upload at the podsafe music network. We’d love your feedback on this idea Click Here to take survey 

Making “Gear Money” in Second Life

Raf from www.dabluezpreacer.com has been boosting sales internationally by playing gigs in Second Life (a viritual world with 9 million people from many different countries). We’ve heard of this before, but people were saying “it was better than making no money.” What is your experience? Have you played gigs in second life? Are you making decent money (or at least the same amount as if you played a club? ). Let us know on our comment line 888-563-3228 (or leave a comment on the blog).

Music Played On This Show

Dave King “These are the Good TImes” available at www.davekingmusic.com available at CDBaby.com
Ray “Da Bluez Preacher” Confer  ”No Black, No White, Just Blues” available at www.dabluezpreacher.com

Did You know that Craigslist gets more Traffic than Amazon.com? It’s the 9th most visited Internet site!

If you’re brand new to Cragslist and looking for a quick crash course in understanding this site, the rules, how to bend them to your advantage, and how you can get more exposure for you band using Cragislist, then check out this $7 ebook.. If you need more information check out www.musicianscooler.com/cragislist

I found some interesting news from hyperbot.com A new study by the Stern Business College in New York states that if you blog at 40 times before a CD release that your CD sales will be 3 or 4 more the average for an indie or major label release. If blog posts crossed 250, album sales rose to six times the average regardless of label.

However, major releases that got reviews (like in Rolling Stone) also got some push. This study provides some early clues for music marketers interested in assessing the relative importance of Web 2.0 sites and metrics and suggest that looking at cumalative online action appears to provide predictive value far beyond looking at each in isolation.

Read the Full Study

So your band has a paypal account to sell your CD for $12 bucks. That’s great. But what if you want to get into selling downloads for a buck? Well that means you get to keep about .70 of that dollar. (2.9% + .30)

As most people don’t deal with "little" transactions most people don’t know about Paypal’s micropayment system. Its acts the same but the fees are different.  Now the fees are much less (5%+ .05) So that download you just sold for a buck? You get to keep .90 That’s an increase of 20%.

Now you can use a micropayment paypal account just like any the "typical" paypal (and tie it into a system like Download Guard and sell downloads for more profit.

Here is how Paypal explains it on their site:

Each PayPal account is associated with only one merchant processing rate. That rate determines the fee that’s applied to funds received into that account (additional information on PayPal’s Standard Fees is available here). For example: if your Premier/Business account rate for receiving funds is 2.9% + $0.30, using PayPal’s 5% + $0.05 micropayments rate would reduce the total transaction fee charged to payments received below the value of $12 (per payment). However, if you accept payments that are greater than $12, you would pay a lower processing charge by accepting the payment into the account set with the 2.9% + $0.30 rate.

 Payloadz is a super easy way to sell downloads on your site. You can een use the service for free (and pay a small fee only when you sell a song). This works with your paypal account. Well I just got notified that you now have 1 GIG of space on the free accounts.

Thats enough for your whole CD and then some.

Check it out at payloadz.com