There is a very famous (and powerful) book called “Rich Dad, Poor Dad”, by Robert Kiyosaki. In the book, Kiyosaki explains that “poor parents” will recommend buying your home and “investing” $2,000 a month in your equity, instead of throwing it away on rent. “Rich parents”, on the other hand, would encourage you to find a property that you can buy for $2,000 per month, and rent to someone for $2,500.
The “poor kid” would build equity over time and would stop “wasting” $2k on rent every month. The “rich kid”, however, would build equity at the same pace, while bringing in $500 in extra cash to pay their own rent with or, better yet, make another investment with. If they properly rinse and repeat they can have four tenants building their equity four times faster, and their own rent would be paid for by the extra $2k they’re bringing in every month.
This is the strategy of smart, rich people, and it turns out that this strategy applies very much to marketing your music. The difference is that the investment you make marketing your music is usually even more precious, because it’s your time.
Read the rest after the jump! –Music Think Tank
Push Marketing vs. Pull Marketing
To break down music marketing into its two simplest forms, there is Push Marketing and Pull Marketing.
Push marketing requires that you actively distribute your message. Fliers, “friending” people on social networks, asking fans to re-tweet about you. Anything that has you running around talking about yourself is push marketing and it requires an investment every single time you want to do it. If you stop doing it, the effects wear off. More importantly, while you’re doing these things you are unable to invest your time in more important matters, like making good music!
Pull marketing or, as Brian Hazard likes to call it, passive promotion are things that you can setup one time and then continuously reap the benefits of. Investing your time into passive promotion is making the “rich dad” investment. Rinse and repeat with these types of services and efforts, and soon you have dozens of marketing initiatives working for you while you make more investments elsewhere.
The Power of Pull Marketing and Passive PromotionAnybody who understands compounding interest will get this right away, but few people realize that the power of compounding can build your music career over time. Here’s how…
Let’s say you were going to spend 30 minutes every day marketing your music, and let’s say that the newest push marketing tool at your disposal will generate 5 new fans every day that you use it. At the end of two years, you would have 3,650 new fans.
Instead, what if you dedicated 60 minutes each week to passive promotion? You would spend 40 minutes finding one good promotional opportunity, and 20 minutes getting it setup. What if these opportunities generated only one new fan each week?
After two years, spending only one hour per week building passive promotion that generates one fan every week after that, how many fans would you have? 5,46.
How many hours would you have saved yourself? 260!
The compounding effects of investing in passive promotion only become more apparent over time. After four years, push marketing for 30 minutes every day would generate only 7,300 fans, exactly double what two years did. Four years of passive promotion, on the other hand, generates 21,736 with just a fraction of the effort.
What if you decided not to cut your hours and you invested the same 3.5 hours per week, finding 3.5 opportunities that would generate 1 fan every week? At the end of two years, you would have 19,110 fans. At the end of four years you would have 76,076.
Obviously, the numbers above are crude, and finding new passive promotion opportunities every week is not necessarily a simple task. However, even if it takes you the full 3.5 hours per week finding just one good passive opportunity, it will produce significantly better results in the long run than the same time spent hammering a push marketing tool.
Rich Band, Poor Band
We’ve pretty clearly demonstrated that investing your time in finding passive promotional opportunities will prove far more effective eventually. The same is true for how you spend your limited marketing money. With all things being equal, any time or money you spend on pull marketing leaves you free to invest time elsewhere. If you spend $50 per month on a tool that requires you to also spend 20 hours using it, that’s 20 hours you’re not spending on your music or on finding passive promotion elsewhere.
Even spending $100 for a passive marketing tool that generates the same number of fans as a $50 push marketing tool makes incredible sense. That 20 hours could be spent doing other forms of promotion, or working at a job that generates more income than the extra $50 you spent.
That is, unless your time is worth less than $2.50 an hour, and then there are other, more important things you should be worrying about.
Joey Flores is Co-founder and CEO of Earbits, an online radio platform designed to help artists, labels and concert promoters market their music and live events. Submit Music to Internet Radio on Earbits
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