11 Ways To Increase Your Website Traffic

This is the six figure home studio podcast, episode 81

[inaudible] to the sixth finger home studio podcast, the number one resource for running a profitable home recording studio. Now your host, Brian Hood and Chris Graham. Welcome back to another episode of

the six figure home studio podcast. I am your host Brian Hood, and I'm here with my amazing Balden. Beautiful but not purple shirt. He's actually gray sweatshirt it. It's under the sweatshirt. Okay. I'm still wearing a purple shirt. Okay. He's a gray sweatshirt with a purple shirt under it. Chris Graham high noon day. Chris,

I'm fantastic, man. I'm really good. It's beautiful in Ohio. The weather is wonderful. I've had an incredible week. How the heck are you, man? I mean you always talk about the weather as if anyone gives a damn. I live in Ohio. Okay. This is important here. It's very rarely nice. I also am a jeep owner and it's not a good day unless the roof is off. The doors are off and I get to drive around a little bit. That's so exciting, man.

That's the most incredible thing I've ever heard. I haven't been outside yet. I had an interesting week. My air conditioner was out the whole like half the week and it was like 85 90 degrees outside, 85 degrees inside and I tried to avoid my house so I just worked from coffee shops, but it's been good because we've been working on file past. That's been like my obsession the last for a while now actually and things are coming along nice. I'm excited about some features we just released this week. I'm not going to talk about it, but I will say that file pass is going to be entering the early access stage to a much larger number of people. We've let some people in recently, we're about to open up applications for even more people to join early access, so if you're interested in that quick plug a file past.com if you're confused on what I'm talking about.

Long story short. This is a software similar to Dropbox where you upload your songs, you send them a link to their songs, they can listen to their songs and they can add timestamp provisions to the songs without having to login or do any of that crap. So it's like really frictionless for your clients and you can also put the songs behind a paywall so that they can't download until they pay you. That's my favorite part. Yeah, that's the quick and dirty part. There's a lot more to it, so if you want more info on that, go to file past.com request early access and then you'll get a notification as soon as we open up more spots for early access.

Here's what's amazing about that Brian, is I think that file path is going to become like an industry standard and what's cool about it is as it becomes an industry standard and clients get used to the fact that they have to pay in full before everything is done. That solves so many problems in our industry to be able to say like, yeah, you can continue to ask for revisions, but until you have paid in full, you can't download the mics off of the website. That's cool.

Yeah. And just to note about half our users don't even use our payment while because they already get paid in advance. So that's an optional because

a lot of people are already getting paid before they even send any songs to people. So that's the ideal world genius. Not everyone's at that point, Chris, I plugged file paths in our pre show banter, which is the first time I think I've ever plugged anything of mine in the pre show banter. And so I felt obligated to ask you how bounce Butler's doing. Well, okay, so here's the story of a for you guys that aren't aware, I have been working my buns off on home studio lessons trying to get 2.0 rolled out within a couple of weeks ago. I like mentioned in passing on the podcast that in 2011 I created an app called Bounce Butler and would bounce. Butler does is if you're using pro tools or logic, you know, especially as a mix engineer and you've got say 10 2050 a hundred bounces, you need to do bounce butler, we'll do all of those balances for you and text you when you're done.

And that's even better for people who are still in like pro tools 10 where you just have real time online bouncing and you literally have to sit through the entire song. I wish I'd had this back when I had that cause like I could've just set like a 10 song album to bounce and then it would just be like, all right, I'm done. Yeah, you can go home. It texts you and it can bounce right to say something like, Dropbox, I want to plug your video because your video on our Facebook community who was absolutely incredible. I was like, you would explain it to me, but until I saw it I was like, Holy Shit. I had no idea. So check out bounce butler. Thank you Brian. That really made my day. James, my assistant Helen bed, the video, if it's embeddable, he'll embedded to our show notes page oh sick.

Go to the six figure home studio.com/eight one that's slash 81 that will show you all the show notes from this episode. All the links from this episode, and we'll have the video for bounce Butler embedded there. But yeah, we're working on some cool stuff, man. We still do studio stuff. Don't get us wrong. I know it sounds like we don't ever do anything like that, but this podcast is about having a home studio and we very much work on that. But we also, since Chris and I had this unique perspective of seeing so many perspectives from so many listeners and readers and community members that we are all about making tools that make everyone's life easier too. So that's why we can off in tangents like this sometimes. Yeah, the bounce Butler thing has been crazy. So I'd mentioned that a bunch of people reached out and were like, what did you say?

I was like, wait, what you guys want that? You have seen some big names talking to you in our Facebook committee. I'm not gonna mention names. Yeah, it's been weird. Yeah. I'd be like, oh my gosh, you've been doing this since I was a baby. Yeah. Cool. But yeah, so it's been kind of interesting. So we are doing a Beta release here pretty soon, so we're looking for people to apply to be part of the Beta program. So very similar to file paths. It's like, yeah, exactly. You got to apply to get in because we're looking for the right people. Yeah, it makes sense. Yeah. So, and then the hope there is people will watch the video apply to the Beta program. I will send them a version of bounce butler, and then eventually it'll leave Beta and go into Alpha and I'll charge some money for it or something.

Just a quick tangent because I like to correct Chris Graham on the podcast when he says something that's technically wrong. Alpha comes before Beta. So Beta is actually a more done version than alpha. So you'd actually be regressing the version to go to Alpha. I'm in Alpha right now then. Yeah, you are. You're an alpha. Right. Okay. I didn't know that. See that's okay. Bu these are all new things to me. We can cut that out if you want. Actually. No, that's totally fine. Okay, good. I want people to know that I am, uh, developing a piece of software. The APP is great. It is incredibly effective. And especially, I remember the first time I used it a long time ago, or I like went up and I had dinner with my wife and our son who was a baby at the time and I was like, Oh my God, my studio is working for me and I'm not there.

Yeah. I'm going to go check these masters later. This is awesome. Yeah, it was crazy. So yeah, bounce butler.com for more information. Show notes, all that stuff. Yeah. So let's talk about, we're going to actually talk about it. There's an actual topic today, I promise. So today is kind of a sister episode to last week's episode last week we talk about how to get more clients through your website. So it's all about how to build a website that will actually convert a visitor to a customer and all the issues that can keep that from happening. All the friction points, and if you haven't listened to that and go back and listen to that, but even if you haven't listened to that yet, this is probably a better episode to listen to first because yeah, I think we did this backwards, but it was fine. We came up with this episode's idea today.

Most people really struggle with the first part of this equation, which is how do you get traffic to your website? So did you get actual people to come to your site so that you can then see if it's even effective in the first place. So this episode we're going to talk about just a bunch of different ways, both paid and free that you can get people to come to your website and ultimately learn about your studio. This is about creating awareness for your studio. Yeah, well, let me start us with a story from my own life. I love your stories, Chris, and this is why you're on the podcast because you tell stories. I just tell people what they should do and stories are way more effective. Chris Graham, the story man. So yeah, when I was in college, I started mastering. I actually just right after college and my mentor was like, Dude, you're good at this.

You can do this for a living. And I was like, no, I couldn't. And a few years passed and I had an idea for the before after player that's on my website and it occurred to me, oh my gosh, if I could get strangers who don't understand mastering, but who know they need it on my website, I think they might hire me to master for them if I could demonstrate what mastering is and an easy and fun way. So as I've mentioned on previous episodes, I read a book, Perry Marshall's ultimate guide to Google adwords. It destroyed my face and changed my life. I began running ads and I will never forget the first time a stranger came on my website and ended up booking a phone call with me over email. And we had a phone call and I was like nervous as heck because I was like, oh my gosh, stranger is considering hiring me. So I picked up on my cell phone and I walked out on, we've like this really kind of awesome grotto patio outdoor thing by my studio. I'm walking out there and like pacing,

like talking to this guy and I'm like, yeah, yeah, I could totally to your project. Oh yeah. I turned songs. Oh yeah, for money. Yeah, absolutely. Uh, pay by check. Sure. Here's my address. And he sent me a check and I was like, Oh, I'll never forget getting this check. And it was the first stranger money I'd ever gotten and I was like, oh my gosh, there's probably more of them out there. I can't have a business. It was this crazy moment where I was like, whoa. I advertise on Google adwords to get them to come to my website. That turned into a relationship which turned into a project. And Yo, his name was Greg. Greg, if you're out there listening, thank you, sir. Back in. This would be 2008 2007 something like that. 2007

I think the moral of that story is most people are, are gonna be able to find a customer from their friends and their immediate circles. But in order to build a business, you have to have strangers that are willing to hire you. People that have never talked to you, never met you, and may not even have friends in common with you. Yup. And for this to happen, you have to have website traffic. So I want to actually start this off with one caveat. We actually have a few caveats for this episode. Caveat number one is that traffic website visitors should ideally come from word of mouth. This should come from your past work. People that have already heard of you through other work you've done or people telling other people about your studio. And in most cases this is, you want this to be as organic as possible, but your organic traffic is a really, really good indication of your word of mouth advertisement that's out there, all the work you've done in the past.

But the problem is this takes a long time to build up. Yep. You can't just go out there and say, all right, I'm going to go get word of mouth traffic. This is just something that naturally builds over years and years and years after lots and lots of past projects that you've done, so that's one caveat is the goal isn't to run your business forever off paid ads. You can supplement it. Chris, you do a lot of supplementation of your business with Facebook ads. I used to, I do a little bit less now. Right. You do a lot less now, but even if you were to cut off all paid advertising all together, you would still have a lot of traffic coming to your site. Yeah. I just want to add that caveat. The goal is to not always have to do these methods to get traffic to your site.

That's caveat number one. I would say this. The idea here is a snowball rolling downhill. Yeah. This is hopefully going to help start you off with a bigger snowball at the beginning so that you get to a large snowball faster than you would if you were with a tiny, tiny seed at the beginning. Bingo. So caveat number two though is that we can talk about different forms of getting traffic to your website, both paid and free sources, but all the traffic in the world does not matter if you were bad at what you do. And Chris, you've actually, we were talking before the episode, just tell me the story about the biceps. So let's say

that you are a gym rat, that you'd like to go lift weights and that you are one of these weird gym rats. That's like pretty much all I do with the June is I'll do bicep curls. You do like 417 bicep curls every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday. I take Sunday off where I only do 416 bicep curls on Sunday. So if you're one of these

guys that goes to the gym and only does one exercise, as I used to do, I was a bench press guy would like, I'll go bench press and then I'll go home. I didn't know that it makes my boobs spacing. That's all I wanted. That's like a 19 year old. Okay,

so if you're one of these guys were, all you're doing is one exercise and you're getting really strong at something. That's not what we're looking for here. You're going to look weird

and in this case, if you have a lot of traffic to your site, but you're bad at what you do or you have a lot of other inefficiencies or deficiencies in your business, you're going to look like the guy that has massive arms and skips leg day every day and has tiny little legs. Everybody's seen that guy at the gym. And so I've been like, I've mentioned this on the podcast before, I have a membership at a yoga gym now and I've been going, gosh, it'll probably end up being like 20 times a month that I'm going to yoga class. Fun Story. My wife started going and she was having a really tough time her first time in yoga because it's very difficult as anyone who's done yoga knows and her motto in her head, the thing she kept telling herself was, if Chris grants can do this, I can do that. [inaudible] you'll give her a big hug. Yeah.

Tell you a secret that you can forward to her. She was proud.

We'll be doing like a vinyasa class or something like that. I do. She was doing okay. Yeah. I don't do Vinyasa. I do Hanukkah and I do restorative. I do Hoffa plus meditation. Yeah. This is all [inaudible] to me. I don't want any of this crap. Okay. Okay. That's great. Path is a lot more chill. VINYASA's like will whoop your ass. Oh, okay. So I'm not going to tell her that because I want her to just think that she's doing the exact same thing as you. So Shell has motivation that if Chris Graham can do it, she can do it. There you go. Yeah.

So here's the thing. One of the things that makes yoga incredible is you get what I would call functional strength from it. You get a lot of core strength, so pretty much no matter what you're going to be doing in your life, you're stronger by doing yoga. If you're doing only curls or if you're doing only bench press, you don't get a lot of functional strength. It's only useful when you're doing one specific type of motion. Whereas with something like yoga or rock climbing or you know, Jujitsu, even swimming, this is much more functional strength where you're going to be stronger 100% of the time and with your business you need functional strength. If you're like, I spent 17 hours of everyday mixing stems that I downloaded from some website, great, but you need functional strength, which is the ability to talk to a customer, to close a sale, to get a final version of that mix or that master, you know, without like 17 million revisions, you need a much broader and wider set of experience to build all that functional strength.

Yeah, and really that's all we need to say here. Like our entire podcast is helping you build out each of the other areas of your business, but if your biggest weakness is traffic to your website right now, which is a lot of people I know, I see people who are great at what they do. They're people persons. I don't know how to say that they're, they're great with people. They have social skills, they just don't have anyone who knows about them. And if this is the case, this episode will be very

helpful for you. Totally. So that's the second caveat. The third and final caveat for this episode is a lot of caveats in this episode, this entire thing, getting traffic to your website is infinitely more difficult in infinitely more expensive if you don't have a customer Avatar that you've thought through a person in your mind who you are specifically targeting, the more specific you get, the easier this gets, and we haven't surprisingly talked about this on the podcast before, so surprised. Next week we're going to talk about how to create a customer Avatar, the type of person that is your ideal customer so that you can target those specific types of people on. Some of the things we're gonna talk about today.

I know some of you are listening to that and you're like, Woo, Woo, customer Avatar. What the heck is that? An avatar is such an important concept to have, or if you're like, look, my ideal customer is a 23 year old college student with an Acoustic Guitar who likes to write songs and who listened to too much. Dave Matthews as a 13 year old, okay, that's your ideal customer. Here's the next question. Where do you find more of those? That's marketing. If you can figure out who your Avatar is, you can figure out where your Avatar is, which means you can start to market. If you don't know how to do that, if you don't know what your Avatar is and you're just like, hey, everyone, I do audio and that doesn't work super well because it's crazy expensive. If you have an Avatar and we'll talk much more about this next week, then all of a sudden you can start to target your ads and not spend a bunch of worthless money on paid advertising, which in my opinion is the biggest mistake people make.

So let's get into this. We have, I just counted them up. We have 12 different things on this list. So either going to cut some things or we're going to have to breeze through this list because there's just so many different ways that you can get traffic to your site. But we're just going to start from the top, work our way down and however much time we spend on the point is how much time we spend on a point. But we've got a lot of stuff to cover. So let's first cover the free methods of advertisement because most people, if they don't have traffic to the website than they don't have a lot of paid customers. If they don't have a lot of paid customers, they don't have a lot of money to reinvest into ads to get more traffic. So starting with the free methods of getting more traffic to their website.

So free as a deceptive term when it comes to marketing, a lot of people fixate on like, well, I only want to do free types of advertising. Oh. Because, uh, you know, it's good to save money, which is a really, really dumb blue collar way to look at stuff. I don't mean that in an offensive way. My whole Dad's side of the family, he's blue collar and it's a huge part of who I am. But there's a lot of like cultural blindness when it comes to marketing. I'll never forget when I first got into paid marketing, I printed out Perry Marshall's book at a local print shop and the guy who owned the print shop was like spoon and money on marketing. That'll never work. It was like fuel in my tank. I was like, Ahh, Ahh, here. Oh boy. So this idea of free marketing, and I want to bring this idea in here, there's no such thing as free marketing.

That's true. It always costs something. It might be your time, it might be. It might be that you need to learn a whole lot for you to be able to do this effectively. They might be that you need to try a lot of things, which inevitably wastes your time. And the thing I want to remind you guys up here, money is not as scarce resource, but time sure as hell is, we're all gonna die. We're all going to run at a time. Many of us will leave money in our will. Most of us will never absolutely run out of money. We're going to die with money in the bank. So you've got to keep in mind there's no such thing as free. So think about that. First and foremost, where do you want to invest your time? It's more valuable in many cases than your money.

Yeah, so let's start here with the first, and again, we use the word free loosely here because it's not really free. This first item on the list is

cold outreach. And

first of all, what I mean is if your final list of clients that you want to contact on the Internet, I have multiple resources where I walk people through this. One of them is my webinar. There's some youtube videos out there, but finding a list of your ideal clients and then reaching out to them on social media or through email. And this is a one to one thing. This is not very scalable, but this is a way for you to target people more directly. And the reason this is on this list of getting people to your website is because if you are ever sending a message to somebody or an email to somebody, you always need to make sure there is a link to your website, either in your email footer or in your profile of the social media. Because every single person, if they get an email from someone, the first thing they're thinking is who the hell is this guy?

And they're going to go look you up and they're gonna go to your website. And then now you have that person as a website visitor. And I can guarantee you if you send out a hundred cold emails are a hundred messages on Facebook that don't somehow end up in the message request folder. I would actually really recommend just doing email and social media for that specific reason. But if you sit out a hundred emails to potential clients and you're getting no website traffic up to that point, you're gonna start to see trickles of traffic on your site from people that are looking and evaluating you to find out who you are. So this is one way, it's not very scalable, but this is a good way to get started if you are trying to figure out how to get people to your site, and this is free, it takes time, but it is a free way of doing this.

Well, and let's pause on this and let's talk about the golden rule. Let's try to put ourselves in our customer's position and let's try to treat them the way that we would like to be treated. So let's say that you do a cold outreach and you send an email to a potential customer. Brian, your idea about having your information and the signature of your email genius. You know, this is an information buffet and advice buffet. If you don't have like links in your email signature, Yo, you should absolutely do that no matter what industry you're in. But here's the thing, if I get a cold outreach from somebody, and let's say I open it and let's say I read it and let's say I think, hm, this person seems interesting, what do you think the next thing I'm going to do is Brian,

I'm going to go to the website to see if they're good at what they do or not.

Let's say you went to the website, it looked great, but you don't know who this person is. You don't have any mutual

friends, you don't know anybody. What would you do next? I'm going to Google them. That's exactly what I would do. So here's the thing. If you're going to do cold outreach, here's my advice to you. Google yourself. Ooh, I'm actually gonna do that right now. Case in point. If you're thinking about working with me as a mastering engineer, Google Chris Graham mastering or mastering engineer Chris Graham and see what pops up. It looks good. Mine looks good. Kind of sorta cause I have this sidebar for Wikipedia. I actually have a Wikipedia entry, which is really interesting to me about what does it really work is the first thing on Google when I open an incognito window is Brian Hood Husband in Colorado Springs. Fatal attraction murder gets parole.

Yeah. Well Congratulations Brian Hood on your parole. Yeah. Yeah. It sounds like you might be into some weird stuff there. Yeah. If you type Brian Hood producer, that doesn't come up so it might offense. It's not all doom and gloom. When I was in high school, I think I've told us on the podcast before, there was another gentleman from Dublin, Ohio named Christopher J. Graham, which is my full name. Those of you that didn't know, we have talked about this on the podcast before, but it's still funny and worth repeating murderer. Yeah. You make a really good point and that is people are going to Google you, so if you start doing cold outreach or really even any sort of advertising or any of the other things we're talking about, people are going to start googling you and this is a really important thing to figure out, but call that reach.

So that's just one of many ways we're going to move on from this, but finding a list of people that you would like to potentially work with and seeing them in email. Now, once you seen that email can vary. I'm not going to get into that because that's a completely different topic. I actually have a 60 or 70 or 80 minute workshop just on client relations just on what to do to push someone from a complete stranger to someone who's interested in you, to someone who might actually want to work with you and then someone to actually pay you. It's a whole other thing. So we're going to have to, maybe I'll put a link to that in the show notes@thesixfigurehomestudio.com slash 81 but let's move on cause that's just one of many ways. The second way on our free list here is honestly one of the most obvious, but also one of the most difficult.

And that is starting a blog. We've talked about this in the past, a lot of the things we've actually talked about in the past, but in the context of building website traffic, one of the best ways to get clients is to add value to them before they hire you, to give them a win of some sort. And one of the ways that you can give them a win is to write content that is helpful for them in their specific situation. So if you have a recording studio website of some sort, there's almost always some sort of blogging element that can be attached to it. So wix has this. Squarespace has a blog attachment. We, Billy does obviously wordpress because it's a blogging platform, but whatever you have your website built on, you can build a blog for it. Now, this can be a really slow and agonizing process.

You can pair this with some of the other things in the paid advertising area that we're gonna talk about later to really put fuel on the fire. But creating content, especially if you compare it with basic SEO or search engine optimization, this can be a really valuable way to start getting traffic to your site, and it may just be little trickles. What do you put a new article out? Someone's going to come read it, or a handful of people will come read it or it'll get shared around. It can also be shared in communities that have your specific target audience in there. If you go back to episode 59 with Austin Hall, he talks about this in detail about how he built his career a hundred percent online, just being part of a community on Facebook. Now he built this community but a lot of that I can guarantee you if he hasn't done this in the past, he has paired blogging with this. He has created content that's valuable for his audience, his ideal customer and he's shared that in his community so this can be paired with other things to be multiplied but this is a really, really good way to add value to your potential clients before they ever hire you.

One of the important things to keep in mind with blogging and especially with Seo is let's say you are a studio in Denver, Colorado and that you do the mothership model. We've talked about this before. You produce that have a home studio but you often go to bigger studios to track live bands or drums and then you come back and do overdubs at your place. If you did a blog post and it you know was the five best big recording studios in Denver, Colorado. If you structure the title of that article properly and you just give shout outs to the guys that you work with, a couple things happen. One, the people you're giving shout outs to might share your blog post because it serves them to do so and to, if this blog posts gets ranked highly in Google, so let's say Google doesn't have any information when you search recording studios, Denver or best recording studios, Denver or whatever, if you make this blog post and you can get some links back to your blog post, Google was going to rank that highly and if people each week are searching best recording studios, Denver, you now own an internet property.

That Internet property is going to get hits that specific page on your website and people are gonna read that article and if you've got a pitch at the end of like, you know, in a cool softball way of like, yeah, when I'm producing bands, we often will record drums at this studio and we'll often record, you know, whatever. If this studio, Getty, Yada, Yada, Yada, Yada, Yada. And then we come back to my studio to record vocals because it's cheaper or something like that. No matter what you do, people are going to come check out your website, whatever website that blog is posted on. Yeah, and every single day if you have picked the right topic and the right keywords and you've ranked well, you now have a property that sending traffic to your website. Every time someone typed that into Google, you don't have to do anything. It's a form of passive free marketing that from now on you are going to get traffic because of that blog post.

One of the thing is when it comes to this, in the next few topics we're talking about that or free advertising or free ways to get traffic to your website. This is where the customer Avatar becomes extraordinarily important. The topics you're going to write about have to appeal to your target customer, to your Avatar. You can't just write stuff that you're interested in because you are likely not your target Avatar, so keep that in mind. Bingo. Let's move on to this next one. Chris, what's the next thing on our list for getting website traffic?

Well, this is something I'm trying to learn myself. It's starting a youtube channel. One of the things that I mentioned before about Seo is that when you're blogging, it's an SEO play. You're trying to get Google to consistently send traffic to your website by giving Google what it wants, which is content. You can do the exact same thing with a youtube channel. Youtube is the second largest search engine in the world. Google being first. Yeah, so if you are making youtube videos that your ideal customer would want to watch or like you know, it could be like five best concert venues in Denver, Colorado, or five best places to get your guitar repaired in Denver, Colorado, they don't all have to be list based videos, just so you know. Yeah, I just love the listicles. If you are making the type of content that you want your ideal customer to stumble upon, if you are making that type of content and Google is ranking that high, there's a really, really good chance that you're gonna be able to get customers out of it.

Youtube is interesting because if you have a bunch of youtube videos on your channel, and again I'm not an expert at this, I'm still trying to learn this stuff. If you have a bunch of youtube videos on your channel and someone stumbles across one of your videos as part of an Seo by that you've made and they watched the whole thing and they like it or thumbs up, one, they might subscribe so they get future videos from you and to Google's going to begin recommending your other videos to that person. Oh yeah, you get the algorithm juice. Yeah, you get that algorithm juice and now all of a sudden you are starting to get free exposure all day, every day. And so someone like Graham Cochran is a perfect example of this. We had him on the show back in December when Graham Cochran started making videos. 10 12 years ago. He built all these internet properties and when you Google mastering in logic or how to mix vocals in garageband or stuff like that, he pops up most of the time with some sort of result which pulls you into grams ecosystem. And now Graham eventually is able to turn you into a customer hopefully by getting you to take one of his courses. So youtube and blog posting are about creating properties that will passively push traffic to your website from here on out.

Another thing that's important about this is the consistency with it. I'm going to use Graham Cochran is an example again, he recently started a podcast which we're going to talk about next and he has a youtube channel for his business brand, just grand green, green copper grin, Cochran, Graham Cochran, just leave up James. She wouldn't leave all those mess ups in there. Graham Cochran, your virtual business coach, that's kind of his additional brand he's built outside of the recording revolution and be honest with you like it was a slow start for his youtube presence, but he has been consistently putting video out after video, even if they're only getting three, four or five 600 views per video, which is very small by recording revolution standards. But he's been slowly growing that over time and now it's starting to gain traction, especially with the launch of his podcast. And it's interesting to watch his numbers grow over time to slowly and steady over time.

He is growing that and it's all due to consistency. He's not worried about whether or not it's a lot of use, a little views over time. He knows he's growing it and I think that's what most people fail at the most is they give up before they can ever gain traction. So it's like a year in or more on his youtube channel and he's just now starting to gain some really good traction with that. And now the anyone finds his video on youtube, it comes back to his catalog and they just binge all of his stuff. So just something to keep in mind is consistency is what wins in this area, but this is also what makes it not really free because it takes up your time. It's a lot of work. Yeah. This is time you could spend recording more artists and making money and then going into the paid advertising area.

So keep that in mind when you're trying to balance these free methods with paid methods. Paid might make more sense in the long run because you might have more money than time if you have more time than money, than the free ones are the ones that make more sense to get more website traffic. Okay, so the final one on the free list is podcasts and it's so damn similar to a blog and a youtube channel for all the same reasons. Seo Ability, the ability to add value to your ideal customers. What else is there to say about podcasts that we didn't say about youtube or a blog?

Well, a podcast is interesting because the podcast is by far the easiest type of media to create, especially if you have a really, really smart cohost

or, I mean, we're in the audio world, so it's easy to create from a technical standpoint too.

Yeah, that's true. It's a lot less

scary to have your voice on the Internet than your face in the video and all that stuff too.

Yeah. I'm still getting over my like make youtube videos phobia, but I never get nervous recording the podcast. The thing about a podcast that's interesting is if you can build an audience of your ideal customers. Podcasts are especially good at building trust. If you can get someone to listen to you for an hour, you feel like you know them. I love the podcast. I listened to Seth Goden. Oh my gosh. I feel like I know you, Chris, you to know me Friday. That's right.

We've both had people come up to us that they just know way, way more information about us. Then they should know and it's because they listened to like 80 plus episodes now of this podcast and they've just heard so many little tidbits about our lives. All that to say like you'd build a very different relationship and a podcast. Then you do want a youtube channel or a blog article. It's a completely different thing. The numbers are smaller, but the quality is much, much better. So for the type of client that you might be targeting, they may be huge consumers of podcasts and even if they aren't, you might can just target just a small tiny niche of people in your ideal customer group who listened to podcasts and you can help them solve specific problems by interviewing experts for those problems that you're trying solve. And that might be enough listeners to sustain you in the long run and to get people to check out your website, book a call with you or get a quote requested or whatever you're trying to do on your website. Podcast can be a good avenue for that. So it's worth mentioning on here under the free, but not really free methods of getting traffic to your website.

So this brings us to an interesting transition to transition to talking about paid forms of marketing. And this is a good jumping off point for me because I've done both extensively for my mastering business. Yeah, I have spent considerably more on marketing my mastering business then I have spent on my house. I've spent a lot on my house. And so the interesting thing here is that I've pulled back from paid marketing as this podcast has exploded in popularity. So to kind of explain this to you guys, I'm a mastering engineer. My ideal customer is a producer or mix engineer. And yes, what our largest demographic of listeners of this podcast, it's producers and mixing engineers. How amazing is that? Oh Man. You would think that was almost on purpose. And so it's been interesting. I've tried to make a lot of different types of content over my career and some of them went, okay, this podcast just was like, just exploded. It was crazy. And we had never, ever, ever saw this coming. Our goal was that we would be 10% of the size that we were, I think a year in. Yeah.

We're well past the quarter million downloads point at this point.

Wow. Crazy. That's insane. Yeah. And so, uh, that you're throwing on my phone. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to distract you with statistics, man. You're overwhelming me with like, whoa. That's weird. So the big thing for me is, you know, I made a living getting strangers to hire me by running ads all over the place and then doing a free mastering sample for them and then having a conversation on the phone and then ended up working with them like again and again and again. That was intense. Running paid ads is very challenging. Making content free content is also very, very challenging. But the thing that's interesting about making content is if that content takes off, if it catches on, it can be wildly successful. And so that's one of the reasons I've pulled way back from paid advertising as this podcast has grown, there's not really any need for me to reach out to somebody who hasn't heard about me on this podcast to try to win them as a customer. There's a lot of people that reach out every single day from the podcast as is.

I got so distracted, Chris, I'm sorry, I'm in like my fucking Google, my Google analytics, like looking up.

It happens, it happens.

Look again. I'm like something something sparked a thought in my head of like, oh, I wonder how the podcast is affecting shit on certain pages. So I'm now comparing this thing versus the year before or whatever. Like, sorry, I'm,

I'm back to the show here. I'll add no checking analytics to our check or pre episode checklist, hence forth, but Brian paid advertising.

Let's talk about the first point on here with paid advertising. Facebook ads. Chris, for so much to talk about with Facebook ads that I don't even know if I can even, I'm almost willing to just be like it exists. Go figure it out next. Like there's just too much to talk about with Facebook ads.

Yeah. Well let me just talk about the two types of paid marketing.

Oh, this, that's actually a good, so before we even get into paid advertising platforms, let's talk about the two different types of advertising.

There's interruptive advertising and there's intent based advertising,

and I like to put it a different way. Chris, can I say what I please, please do. I think about it in two different ways. There's demand creation and there's demand harvesting.

Oh, that's better than mine.

Yeah. So demand harvesting is capturing something that someone is specifically looking for. So someone that's like looking up mastering studio Nashville or someone who's searching on Google for recording studio Vancouver. Vancouver. Yeah. They're like clearly searching for something specific that they want to hire for. That is a really good example of harvesting the demand that is already out in the world. We talk about this in the past episodes before. Honestly I would encourage anyone who's new to the podcast and go binge every single episode because we touch on this stuff so much and you're just going to get little bits and pieces everywhere cause he can't possibly cover all this in one episode. But that's demand harvesting and that is what basically Google ad words is really good at. Demand creation is a completely different animal. What happens when you're trying to create demand for something?

No one is searching for recording studio Butte, Montana, maybe they actually are, I don't know, but just some obscure thing. They're not really searching for that. So if you're recording studio in an area or a niche that no one has specifically going out of their way to search for, how do you create demand for that? Well, that's where interruptive advertising is really good. That's things like Facebook, youtube, that's where you're just putting yourself out there so they know that you exist and if you do your job right, then you can get them to take the next action, which is to evaluate you on your website. So then they become a website visitor. So those are the two types of advertising. Anything else to add to that, Chris?

Well, yeah, I would say I think that our society right now is too fixated on interruption advertising. This idea that like I'm on Facebook, I'm scrolling, I'm scrolling, look on ad, Hey, do you know your songs? Mixed did last or checkout list and mastered.

Cool. Like that was the worst I've ever done on the five. That's great. Here's the deal though. I'm going to push back a little bit and just say some business models cannot survive on demand harvesting at all.

I agree. I agree. But I think that as a marketer, you're first job is to harvest the lowest hanging fruit. Here's the thing, if you are a recording studio in Denver, Colorado, let's go back to them again. And when someone searches recording studio Denver, Colorado, if you ain't the first freaking thing that pops up in that search result, you a problem, you're leaving money on the table.

It depends on what your niche is. You may not be trying to be a all purpose recording studio. You may be specifically for indie pop artists like our guest Mark Eckert on episode 68

that's true. If you're listening to this, you're like, I don't have enough customers. And when someone searches recording studio your town and you record bands that you're recording, so you're sort of a traditional recording studio, that's a problem. If you search for, and we talked about this before, if you search for Chris Graham mastering, if I didn't pop up, that would be very concerning to people. It'd be a red flag. I would say this. If people have communicated in intent to Google, to youtube, to you know, whatever it happens to be. Yelp even you should show up, you should be available. If there's a specific key word that only an interested great potential customer would search for.

Another one is, I see this all the time in the software world. I don't see it as much in the studio world, but I think it would work and that is paying for advertising on Google adwords for your competitors studios kind of sketchy thing to do, but I really honestly people searching for those studios are in buy mode and they're evaluating these studios and if you can be brought into the picture as a potential option by an ad, that is I think a good thing. I think the ads are there for specific purpose of showing up in related searches. So I don't specifically have any problem with advertising on your competitors' keywords. You may push back on that, Chris, but I personally don't. Not Ethically at least.

Yeah, I mean, I would have to say I have done that once or twice, but typically if I was doing that before, it was like, you know, on the lander. Yeah. You're trying to save them from a terrible mistake. Yeah. Don't do this. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't think there's an ethical issue there. It does raise an eyebrow. Yeah. It might not be above reproach.

Yeah. I will say this, you may end up stepping on toes in a way that you don't see the consequences of until later. So if people start searching their own studio and they start seeing you advertising on their name, that could actually have some detrimental consequences that you don't want to really

deal with it. So you may want to tread lightly. I would say this is an advice buffet. If you have the opportunity to advertise on a competitor's name, I would probably say 90% of the time you shouldn't do that. There are occasions when that would be appropriate, but if it's a situation that could really damage your relationship and create personal animosity, they could harm your reputation. I would never do that.

Yeah. Especially if you're a copycat. So like if you are a huge fan of Crisler analogy and you ripped his website off piece by piece, you ripped his sound off as closely as possible as far as a mixing engineer. And then you started advertising on Google ad words to show up when people search for Chris Lord Algae Mixing Services or whatever,

people are going to

never respect you if you, that's not cool. That's just way, way across the line. It might work actually, but it would be short term cash grab and it wouldn't be much of a career. So let's move into this. Let's actually get into the paid advertising methods for getting people to come to your website. Oh yeah, that's the point of the episode. Last week we talked about on episode 80 we talked about how to get clients from your website. So I had actually have an effective website once people actually come to your site. But now we're trying to solve the problem of what if you don't have people that come to your site. It doesn't matter how effective my site is, if no one's coming to it. So let's talk about the paid advertising methods for getting people to your site. I got to interrupt us and throw off our flow one last time.

Some of you are thinking, well that seems crazy. Why wouldn't you try to get traffic first and then worry about your website second, because you should never pay to send traffic to a website that doesn't convert. Oh God, yeah, no, no, no, no, no. When it comes to paid advertising, if you're going to first listen to our episode last week, make some changes. Try to get as close as you can from gut feeling, but until you get website traffic, you won't know if it converts. So I would say from paid advertising standpoint, do small tests on one of these channels to just get a trickle of website traffic for very cheap, no more than 50 to a hundred bucks a month. And then with that small trickle of traffic, you can start making changes based on what we talked about last week. Maybe what we talk about in our Facebook community, if you're a part of that, it's a free Facebook community.

Start making changes with that small trickle of traffic, but these are more caveats for caveats sake. Let's actually get into this. Let's talk about the first point and that is Facebook ads. This is the demand creation engine. This is what is called interruptive advertising, and we've all seen this because every fifth post, for me at least every fifth post on Facebook and Instagram, which is all part of the Facebook ads platform. By the way, if you're doing ads on Facebook ads platform, you can do both Facebook and Instagram. This is all interruptive advertising. This is all demand creation. This is a way of saying, hey, I exist. Come to my site and evaluate me. What are your thoughts on Facebook and Instagram ads, Chris? Well, Facebook and Instagram can work really, really well, but it all depends on a couple things. One, if you're going to run Facebook and Instagram ads, and I'm gonna repeat myself 17 times on this point on every other thing, we do, set a budget in your software so that you don't spend more than a predetermined amount each day.

That's easier on Facebook than it is on Google. Ad Words, so just Facebook makes it easy to do this because you can just set a daily budget and they will never spend more than this amount per day and then you can just go in and cut it off when you feel like you have either failed or you've learned what you need to learn and you can adapt and adjust and pivot to something else. But if you try to set a set budget, they have a really high minimum, like 300 or $500 minimum on like a set budget to where you can just say, I want to spend only this amount and after this has gone stop spending, it takes actually a lot of money to do that. So I just recommend people start with a minimum, which is like a dollar to two to $3 a day and just go from there. Yeah, that's definitely what I would recommend to every single person that thinking about dipping their toes in this start small. And I would say the other thing

is that as you are thinking about advertising on here, the thing you need to understand with paid marketing is something called targeting. Targeting is deciding who is going to see your ads. Targeting is outside of Sydney in a budget is the most important thing because you want to make sure that only your perfect potential customer will see your ads.

And again, this goes back to what we're going to be talking about next week on the podcast, which is creating your customer Avatar. So you know who you should be targeting on these ads. Because if you don't have it

customer Avatar, you might as well buy a Superbowl ad because that's about what it's going to be like. Totally. Well, and here's the thing with the Superbowl ad. A Superbowl ad is very expensive and the reason for that is that most of the people that will see your ad don't care about your ad. So if you do like a men's shaving razors or tennis balls or whatever it happened to be, the people who watch the Superbowl are really varied. It's such a wide demographic of people that only like maybe 10% of the audience is going to think, wow, I should buy that. And because of that, you still have to pay for the other 90% of people. It's very expensive. Targeting with paid advertising is extremely powerful because you can make sure that the only people who will see your ad, our potential customers, it's much, much, much, much cheaper.

So Superbowl ads, if you notice the type of people that are buying ads on the Superbowl, it's Pepsi, it's Coca Cola, it's Geico. It's maybe a razor company of some sort. It's people that have a very, very broad market. It's actually a different, a lot of the people that watch our, the target customer, because it's such a broad topic, everyone in the world that doesn't have diabetes is a coke. Actually. They have diet coke. So everyone in the world is a potential person for coke or Pepsi. Not me, Brian. Not me. Any man that can grow facial hair or women that grow leg hair or whatever are razor companies. Sorry, do you mean grows women? There was just a weird way to quantify the maturity of a of a female, but can she grow legs?

We're not cutting that skirt or limited in, but yeah. You see the point though is these are companies that have very broad markets. You're recording studio is not going to be interesting to like anyone at the Superbowl, so it'd be the biggest waste of money of all time. But to bring that back down to Facebook, why Facebook is so powerful and why we like it so much is because you can just say, I only want to target men between the ages of 21 and 28 who listened to these bands and who can grow leg hair and crawl care. Exactly. That's coming in. Facebook's update in 2047 I think you can even like they're targeting algorithms are so crazy. It's actually really creepy. It's like people who are about to move, people who have just moved, people who are expecting people who earn more than this amount. Like Facebook knows way more information than you even know about half the time

or about your family members have the time. And you can use this to your advantage to advertise very specifically. Yeah, it is really impressive and you can do some really, really, really amazing targeting even geographically. So you can say, Hey, I only want people that live within 10 miles of here to see this ad. So case in point, I've got to do a six figure home studio. Shout out and salute. Ooh, some a dude will Carlson, he is a music producer here in Columbus, Ohio, googling him right now. He has does an exceptional job of this site type of stuff. He runs targeted ads to potential customers on Instagram and Facebook is this Tim World Carlson. Dot. Coke. Yeah, dude is awesome. And so will's ads are only seen by people he thinks are great potential customers and he does a really great job at this.

So that's one of the things to keep in mind as you're doing this. Paid advertising. The targeting is everything. A lot of times I'll see people that are like, Yo, I'm gonna do paid advertising and they'll just target everybody. You have to niche down. It's debatable whether you can be successful in our industry without niching down. It definitely helps. There are people that have done it without niching down, but man, if you try to do paid advertisement that niching down. Good freaking luck dude. Yeah, he's got a good website. So you said he does retargeting or just local targeting ads on Facebook? I'm not sure exactly what he's targeting. Settings are and I think he probably wouldn't want to tell anybody that. If you did, maybe we'll get them on the podcast and just grill them about how he does is add to his site.

Looks great though. He's getting on Squarespace. He sets it up just like I like. So I will also shout out to this guy. Great job. You will probably see his ads on Instagram tomorrow or the next day. I didn't hear half of what you said about him though, just because I was listening to his portfolio while you're talking. So I was like, it's got some good stuff. Well he, he does a good job of targeting and I think on this note we should probably move on and talk about Google ads. Yes, yes. So Facebook ads are my bread and butter. I do a lot of Facebook ads and I love Facebook ads just because of the demand creation element. But Google ads is all about demand harvesting. We kind of talked about it before this section and this is what you are an absolute master at. I think I've spent $5 on Google ads in my life, couldn't figure out what the heck I was doing and just bounced.

Chris, let's talk about Google ads. Now. Google ads are interesting. The simplest form of a Google ad is a Google search ad. So let's say that somebody wanted to hire a voiceover recording studio in Denver, Colorado. How's that sound? Denmar Hey, so let's say you wanted your ad, which would show up and say it'd be like a text ads. So it looks like a Google search result. So I would say like want to record your songs were the number one studio in Denver, Colorado, schedule a free tour today, that sort of thing. So you could run that ad and it would only show up when someone searched Denver recording studio or Denver, Colorado recording studio or even like you know, Boulder, Colorado recording, whatever. You could make sure that keywords that

someone would type in to find that would communicate intent. Anyone that types in recording studio Denver is looking for a recording studio in Denver and guess what? If they click on your link, they are very likely to convert because you know that timing is right. They're looking for it right now and the demographic is right there in the market for a recording studio in Denver.

Well, I want to pause here for a second and give a little tool tip for people. I use something called Keyword Keg. You've probably know like a million other tools like this Chris, but it's say chrome extension that will, when you Google something, it just shows you the amount of search traffic that you get on that specific search terms. So I see I put voice over studio Denver zero searches a month, $0 million cost per click to advertise on this, but on the right sidebar, it shows related keywords that actually gets search find. So recording studio Denver is a thousand searches per month and ads are costing on average $5 and 29 cents per click.

That's very, very high. Someone's running ads. There's a bidding war

going on over there. Yep. But if you go back to what we talked about last week, the higher converting your website, the more you can spend per click to come to your website. So I guarantee you whoever's bidding this high has a really, really, really good converting website because they are getting more people to buy from each click. If it takes 10,000 clicks to get one customer, you're spending over 50 grand to get one customer. If it takes 10 clicks to get one customer that only takes 50 60 bucks to get one customer. So you start to see how important last week's episode is with all of this stuff.

Yeah, and I would say for those of you that shudder at the cost of $5 per click, I would say that tool is probably wrong about that. I would be shocked if it was that high. Could be, but I seriously doubt it. There are plenty of keywords. If you want cheaper keywords, add more words to the search so you could do rock recording studio. Denver is going to get way less traffic, but it's also more qualified traffic. If you're a rock and roll studio that only does rock in Denver, you're only looking for those people. And if you're bidding on recordings to do a Denver, you're going to get every type of music under the sun and that might not work out so well for you and by might not, I mean it won't work out so well for you.

I want to point out an ironic fact real quick. Assuming that keyword keg is not wrong here. Recording studio in Nashville is like a dollar 26 per click right now. Cheap recording studios in Nashville is $3 and 57 cents a click. So it's more expensive to advertise for cheap studios in Nashville and you're probably going to get worst clients.

That's a fantastically interesting. So that's one of the things that you're going to see as you are exploring your own niche and trying to figure out, you know, what's a strategy that'll work for you. There are certain pockets of the Internet that just haven't modernized yet. So like there are definitely huge cities in America where none of the studios are running Google ads or any other type of ads for that matter as a young gun like podcast listening, digital Ninja like yourself talking to you Steve. That's right. I can see you Steve. I'm just kidding. I don't know who I've just made that up. I know someone named Steve is listening right now and is like, what the hell? But uh, that was so weird. Anyway, love that, Steve. What you can do is you can begin to run ads on your studio and you can eat the lunch of these old geezers that aren't running ads that have not modified their actions to meet the demands of 2019 Yup.

We're going to actually speed up on these just because I think Facebook ads and Google ads, I actually think 80% of all digital marketing is spent on those two channels alone. Yep. So that's where you're going to find most absolutely. Probably the most competitive places to advertise on. So some of these other places actually might be a little easier to get cheaper clicks that are targeted traffic depending on who you go to. But let's talk about Youtube ads. Chris, you are an expert in youtube ads. Is this all

rolled in with Google ads? Is this a separate platform? How is this done? Yeah, you can run ads in youtube through the Google ad words, which is now Google ads through their platform. Youtube ads are very powerful because video is very powerful. I would say the number one form of advertising that I've done over the years is youtube ads. I've significantly pulled back. Now that I've jumped a little bit more into the free advertising and content creation podcast boat, but the youtube ads can be very powerful because the targeting gets a little more interesting. You can target with demographic information better than you can in Google search results as well as there's a whole lot of crap you can do that. It would take me an hour and youtube, but youtube is particularly interesting for remarketing. If you put a Google remarketing tag on your website, you can be sure that if somebody searched for recording studios Denver and then came to your website through an ad, that that piece of code within tag them and then now the next time they're on youtube, you can run an ad and say, hey, when they're watching videos about music, show them an ad for my studio and it's kind of this interesting thing where you could do a tour.

It's actually a really good idea for a remarketing ad. Yeah, it's very powerful stuff. People have already evaluated your studio, like that guy who is the guy you just gave the six figure homes video salute. We'll Carlson with Carlson, I just went to a site, he had a pixel set up on his site. If I was evaluating him, listen to his portfolio, and I got distracted because I'm on a podcast right now and maybe I wanted to work with him, but I forgot that I went to his site. All of a sudden the video pops up where will's like, Hey, I'm will come check out my studio. I'll give you a tour real quick. Now I'm sucked in. I want to see this dude's studio because I just looked at his site earlier today. So that's a very interesting thing that I haven't really heard of before is using a video tour of your studio as a retargeting ad.

Yeah, I mean, absolutely do that guys. That's a powerful strategy. It's a little hard to implement because you need to learn little bit about, you know, putting code in your website and then how to use Google's interface. But man, this skill is powerful and honestly I know a lot of people who have learned how to do this for their small business and who have ended up doing this as a service, setting up ads and stuff for other businesses because there are so many businesses out there that are like, oh my gosh, please teach me how to do this. I've done this. I've done consulting for businesses that are trying to figure this stuff out. They'll bring me in for an hour or two and I'll be like, hey, have you thought of this? Hey, have you thought of that? I don't do it very often. It's not something that's a major part of my life, but I know for a fact there are a lot of businesses trying to figure out how do we do this and it's an incredible skill to learn. It's definitely probably more valuable than most of the other skills that you could learn out there because there's such a demand for people to get more customers for their business.

All right, so let's move on to the next method of paid advertising. And this is kind of like going back in time, but surprisingly this is still a industry that has some players in it and this is banner ads. You've probably experienced these as a little banners that are the top of the page or the sidebar. You see these on message boards or blogs or gears. Let's, well that's a message board, but whenever you see these less and less, because I mean people like me, I use adblock a chrome extension that blocks those and so I rarely see those, but they still exist and people still click them surprisingly. So the best part about banner ads is that you can a lot of times go directly to a website that is appealing to your specific type of customer and you can pay for banner ads on that website. And if you're just looking for a way to get targeted traffic to your site, it doesn't require as much knowledge about the inner workings of an ad platform like Facebook ads or youtube ads or Google ads. It just requires upfront capital understanding which sites are going to send you the right kind of traffic for your studio and to create some sort of appealing banner that people will click on.

Well, and there's two ways you can do this. I got to confess, I'm not heavy into banner ads. I've tried it many times and never really been happy with the results. That's just my business. Marketing is different for every business can also be called the display network in Google, like I mentioned, there's two ways to do this. You can get your banner ads on a bunch of websites right through Google ads. One of the other things you can do is, let's say you are a recording studio in Toronto and there's a website in Toronto with message boards and stuff that all the musicians are on all the time. It's like the main community hub. If you reach out to the owner of that website, you can negotiate with him a price to put your banner ads on his website and then he will manually add those banner ads to his website and you can be like, yeah man, I'll give you 50 bucks a month if you'll keep my banners up.

You know, all the time on your website and for some people may be like, oh dude, 50 bucks a month. Heck yeah, all right, that's a deal. Or 100 bucks a month or whatever. And now all of a sudden, every musician in the town or in the city of Toronto that is using this website to talk about shows or talk about, you know, writing events or whatever it happens to be, they're going to see that ad. You don't have to be digitally savvy to do that. You just have to find someone who has a website that's community center and negotiate with them to get a banner ad placed on it.

If I were going to advertise for my studio on a website for banner ads, I do metal and hardcore bands are just heavy music. For those who didn't know. There's a website that I've been going to for years for all my metal news and there's a bunch of other ones like this now, but this is the one that's been around forever. It's somewhat popular in the heavy music scene is called lamb goat, lamb, goat.com.

That sounds so terrifying. Yeah.

On the site there's a banner at the top, there's a banner on the side and a lot of times they'll do a full page takeover with like the outside of the website is like this up noxious Lee, huge ad for something. Sometimes bands or labels, we'll buy ads for that stuff. The type of people that go to the site or fans of heavy music and a lot of those fans of heavy music are in bands. So I would say a large portion of the site are my ideal customers for my studio. So this would be a place that I would try them. I wouldn't spend a bunch of money. I would try to do the smallest package to start seeing the numbers with the website. Traffic that comes to my site is qualified or not, but as a completely different conversations Mahayla's package. Okay. I lost respect for you. You just know

me too, Brian.

If you go to the footer of their site, there's a link that for that says advertising and there's some facts about this specific site on advertising. They say that we currently get 2 million page views per month. Our button ads generate hundreds of click throughs within their first few days online. Previous clients includes Sony Music, roadrunner records, live nation and hundreds more. That just give you a few little teasers and then you can just email them and they will let you know how much the ads will be. So that's just something to keep in mind is better ads are not dead. They can actually be really targeted for your style of music depending on what you're trying to do.

Well, and that's a great place for us to segue into this next item, which is sponsorships. If you find a website that's a community center that your ideal customer spends a lot of time on, you might be able to find other opportunities. That could be a radio station, a small like college radio station. It could be you know, a micro Instagram influencer. It's got you know, 2000 followers in your city that is like an authority on bands or it might be, there's a couple newspapers here in Columbus, Ohio that sort of revolve around like the entertainment scene and you could totally reach out to them and put an ad in there and you have to figure out whether this is a good idea for you. For some of you, this is the stupidest idea you'll ever hear in this podcast. For others, it's the best idea you'll ever hear in this podcast and you could have figured that out for yourself.

Yeah, everyone's in a different position and for some sponsorships I'd been influencer marketing under sponsorships. Basically you're going to an influencer. It's kind of similar. You're going to influence in your space and they'll make a post on Instagram or a series of posts on Instagram or somewhere. But sponsorships can take a lot of different angles. So it's hard to really put that into one quantifiable

category. It really is. Yeah. You have to be very creative to figure that out. This is going to be out of left field, but we had someone recently in the Facebook group who posted a question and the question was something on the lines of, I have the opportunity to buy the URL, which is like, you know, website.com whatever that word is for my business is the most perfect business you are likely possibly have is to, I forget what he said, $2,000 or something like that. Is it worth it? And what was kind of interesting was people weighed in passionately,

it was a pole. It was like 98% and said no.

Yeah. And what was interesting about that, it shouldn't have been a pole because anyone that says, yes you should do this or no, you shouldn't, is making a blanket statement about all businesses everywhere. And that's really, really hard to do. You know my website, I wouldn't do this personally, but if I was in a situation where I could buy, say audio mastering.com and rebrand Chris Graham, mastering for 2000 bucks might not be a bad idea because I will now rank really high anytime someone searches for audio mastering. See what I'm saying there. So it might be a good idea for his business. It might not be, but even that's in a way a form of paid advertising because what you're doing is you're buying an asset that then makes you look better to Google and that also makes you look more authoritative to potential customers.

Side Note, Chris, how does this apply to what we were just talking about? I don't know, but it's paid marketing in some way, shape or form. Side note, that's how much we spend on file. [inaudible] dot com there you go. Yeah, there you go. The next point is something that I'm dubbing referral networks and a referral network is just a group of people who have agreed to send you leads to said you paid clients or to send people to you for a cut of the project. A friend of mine is doing this right now, very successful with it. He works with a producer who just doesn't have the time to do all of his paid projects and so that producer, we'll send him projects and he'll send that producer a 10% cut of the project. So you're getting basically clients and you don't have to pay for them upfront like you do with paid advertising.

You just pay once you've gotten paid. And this is really powerful because you don't have to put any upfront money when you get a client you're paying after the fact, and I've seen very few people doing this and I'm actually surprised by it because this can be a very powerful way of generating clients and leads and ultimately website traffic, which is what we're going back to for this topic. Anyone that is referred to is going to go to your website to look you up before they hire you. So this is all one in the same, but referral networks can be built out very strategically that Chris Graham, if I were talking to you about this, and if I were looking for a way to cut down on my paid advertising and I were to go to 10 high volume mixing engineers, people that mix a lot of music and work out some deal where any client they send your way, if they mentioned your name, you will pay them a 10% commission, 10%

is likely, I don't know if that's the case, 10% likely more than what you're spending on ads to acquire a customer. So if you're spinning ads, more than 10% of that is the cost of getting that customer. So to me, that's a win when you're getting customers for less than what you would have to pay for it on Facebook ads or Google ads. So if you're strategic about this, these partnerships can be really, really a cheap way to get clients upfront and then pay for them after the fact. Any thoughts, Chris? That's an interesting idea. Honestly, there's probably a big opportunity amongst the mastering engineers community to do something like that because mastering engineers typically have scheduling issues. Typically their schedules fill up and if it was something where there was a few mastering engineers referring to each other as well with like, hey, here's a coupon code.

Let's see, there's a mixing too. Like my direct competitors, like I would send them work all the time. A friend to visit you do it and vice versa. If they're too busy, they'll send it to me. So there's cross advertising like referral that way. If it's a relationship like that, I tend to not necessarily put a monetary amount on it. It's weird. There's certain relationships. I don't want to put a monetary amount where there's ever money exchanged and then there are some where there is a professional relationship where you can put a monetary transaction in there and it won't taint the relationship because that's the way the relationship is. So there's things to consider with this, but it's definitely worth mentioning that you can strategically build out a referral network of people that will send you clients and then you will pay them a commission.

Yeah, that's very interesting. I think there's definitely some possibility there. That's something I have experimented with years and years and years ago. I didn't roll it out very well on my website, but yeah, there's definitely a lot of potential. The thing that I love the most about this is it for you guys that are listening in and thinking, hmm, well that worked for me without work for me. I would say with all of these ideas, and this is kind of goes to the podcast as a whole, be slow to write every idea off because each time there's an idea like this, especially in marketing one, there's an opportunity for you to chew on it and to see if you can find a creative tweak to make it work for you. And the beauty of our industry is that we are creatives. The only reason you would want to get into the music industry is creatively driven and marketing is also creatively driven, perhaps more so in some cases then certain parts of our industry.

So it's definitely something worth considering because if you can find a creative solution that creates wind, wind, wind scenarios for everybody involved, there's an opportunity that you can grow the heck out of your business and it can be really effective. And I would say that every one of our listeners is going to have a quote, best way to get people to come to their site. And it's going to be different for every one of our listeners. This all I'm trying to say, so not everyone's the same. So be open to all of these, but also don't dwell on too long without taking some sort of action. There is a balance there. But let's move on to this last, last paid advertising method to getting traffic to your site. And that is through hosting or sponsoring events. And we kind of lump these two together. They're actually

pretty different from each other, but hosting events and sponsoring events. Chrysalis first talk about hosting events.

Yeah, so I've talked about this with some of the gas I'd been coaching. This idea is if you have an ideal customer, let's say that your ideal customers, a band, and the person that typically hires you in that band that drives the process is the songwriter. So let's say you have a recording studio and you're like, Hey, I'm going to host a songwriting night and a bunch of songwriters going to get together and we're going to write songs together and we're going to do, you know, like pair people up and they're going to write songs and we're gonna play songwriting games, Yada, Yada, Yada. Something like that where you're hosting an event that draws your ideal customer to you can be very, very powerful because now you own this platform, this event where you can then either use it to build relationships with these ideal customers or you can use it to promote whatever service or product or whatever that you're offering. So for something like this, obviously like a battle of the bands would be a good example of this. We're a bad example or a bad example of opinion. It could go either way. It could go either way. It could go either way. Um, a song writer's Club, there's a really, really big songwriters association here in Columbus and the guys that put that on have a lot of sway with an awful lot of people that want to book records.

And that's why we put these two together. Hosting events or sponsoring events. If you don't have the time or desire to create your own event, that draws your type of customer to you, there probably is an event that already exists. And if that's the case, you can become a sponsor for that event. I used my real estate group as an example that I've brought up multiple times. Most of the regulars that are the service professionals that feed off of real estate investors, those service professionals sponsor the event and they get a lot of clients through that sponsorship. They become a sponsored person because they want to invest into that group and they don't want to just take from that group. And so this can be a really good way of getting in with an established group that has your ideal customers. Just sponsoring the event, helping them fund it and put it on can go a long way to getting clients through that event that's already established. So that's one way of looking at it. Anything else to add to that, Chris?

I Dunno. I, I think the events thing is particularly interesting. I think that that would probably be one of the first places I would recommend exploring. Hosting an event is kind of this weird thing where it could be free or it could cost you money or it could just cost you pizza money. If you're in a situation where all you have to do, if you have a space to host this type of event is all you have to do is have the creativity to come up with it and reach out to a bunch of people. And here's where the real rubber meets the road. If you had been doing the cold outreach nonstop and you're like, hi, my name is Bob, I would love to record your record. This is an email. I will keep emailing you until you respond. Cool. Good for you. But that's not gonna work. You're gonna have a hard time with that. You know that approach. Yeah, but let's switch it around. Hey, my name is Bob and I'm hosting an event for and we want to invite you to come and potentially share one of your songs. Would love to hear if you're interested.

Yeah, it's a great way to do it. You're going to get an answer to that email. Yeah. Mix and match is the way to go on this list because you could also take an event like this, do a Facebook ad, target songwriters in your city, boom. All the sudden you've spent a little bit of money to get a hundred people to come to your event that are your perfect customer and you get face to face time with those people. You get to be the person on stage and seeing the vent and introducing the speaker for that event or whatever. All of a sudden you are the hub of this event that you spent a very small amount of money advertising on Facebook and then putting together so these things can really be mixed and mass to get extra effectiveness. Yeah, and here's what I would say

with this, what we're talking about, the Brant Brian just went on was incredible. This idea of it's dating, it's dating your potential customers. What a lot of people that are struggling do is they find a potential customer and they propose your mind, do customer, will you marry me slash recorder record with me? That doesn't work very often. That freaks people out, but if it's, hey, you guys want to come to this event, you guys would be perfect for this. We'd love to have you perform the to have you share a song. We'd love to spotlight you guys. Now all the sudden there's an opportunity to get to know each other and to figure out like, oh my gosh, I love these freaking band is awesome. I'm gas, they freaking love me. Then you can naturally let the relationship grow that way. So I would say finding a way to do these things in steps that builds the relationship to the point where you feel comfortable going in for the kill and say, Hey, I fricking love your band. I would love to work with you guys some day. That's not weird. If it's predicated by several conversations and lots of hangout,

that's great dude. So there's a lot to consider here. Don't write off any of these without really putting some thought into it, but again, don't just put thought into it without taking action. Yeah, do something here. If you have no website traffic at all, do something. Do one of these. What would you start with Chris today? Knowing what you know, what would you do? Where would kind of be Chris Graham's method to start here? Zero website visitors a month.

My fear and answering this question is that you guys will see my answer is prescriptive and that you will just do it. Ooh, good call, but I'm going to give you my answer any ways. Your job is to be creative and to figure out a way that works for you and that is you. What I would probably do first and foremost is I would go to Google adwords and I would try to harvest demand. If I'm offering a thing that's really specific, I'd want to make sure that hopefully people are going to find me that are actively looking for me because the most important thing in marketing is if someone's actively looking for exactly you, it should be easy for them to find you. Secondly, I would think about when someone googles me, what does it look like? Everything that we're talking about here is dramatically amplified by good search results when someone searches your name and the service that you provide or the thing that you do.

And then the third thing I would probably goof with is really small blog posts. Just writing blog posts on specific keywords or youtube videos or whatever you feel comfortable with where you know people are searching for a term that could lead to relationships that could lead to projects. I think finding a way to just begin to do that with whatever is the easiest least time consuming, smallest feasible opportunities to begin to generate traffic to your website. I think it's important to get small wins quickly to build momentum. So all of my answers come back to that small wins quickly to build momentum.

I'll give my answer to that same question cause I think it's helpful for people to hear please. I think I would start with the referral network and this is assuming that I had the same skill level that I have now, which I'm good at. What I do is it mixing engineer in the heavy music scene and that my site is set up in a way that I can track results like we talked about last week. I can track everything and I can start seeing my numbers. And what I would do is I'd approached people that I know are complimentary services. So recording, editing or mastering things that I don't necessarily specialize in. I mostly just do mixing and go to those people and offer some sort of commission, whether it's 10 to 25% doesn't really matter as you're starting out and start to try to grow that snowball that way.

Cause here's the thing, it forces you to start having conversations with people and these are starting to give you facetime with people. You may just have a really good relationship you hit off of somebody just as a friend that you don't even have to go down the referral network rabbit hole with the referral fee that you're offering people is just one of those like I'm willing to offer something and not just try to take from you. You don't have to offer that if you have conversations. And I think going after referral partners is a good way to force you out and meeting people that are going to be sending you a lot of leads. And so I would like to see how that would affect my traffic. And then in the same time I would also be setting up Facebook retargeting video or anyone that hits my site's going to get a tour of my studio, or at least a tour of my process or me talking about how the whole process works because mixing, I have a studio, it's cool, but it's not like that interesting for a studio tour and they're not gonna come to the studio anyway.

So I'd probably have a video of me talking through how the mixing process works. Show some examples of my before and after, like here's how bad a song is in protools when they get sent to me. Here's what it sounded like after I nixed it. And I'd love to mix your song as well. Click the button below to get a free quote. That's how I would do it, David. That's exactly right.

What will Carlson's doing as I've been like sort of watching the retargeted ads that pop up on my Instagram feed. Um, it'll be like, hey, I'm gonna walk you through how the process works. It's been really cool to see him do that stuff. Speaking of, well Carlson and web traffic, check out his website. We'll carlson.co it's w I L L C A R l s o n. Dot. Co. He's doing some cool stuff. If you hit his website

opinion on how he has his targeting set up, you may or may not see his ads and that's a good thing. Yeah, that's true. It may be because you're in Ohio. I haven't seen a retargeting ad yet, but I just haven't been on Facebook since I've visited his site. I shouldn't see an ad if he's looking for people to come into the studio. Bingo. He's probably not advertising. Actually Nashville was only five, six hours from that area. So he may target Nashville.

Yeah, I mean if you're in like anchorage, Alaska and you see an ad for him know that might not be great cause you're going to spend more on your plane ticket than you will on your record. But Yep, there's a lot of cool stuff there and it's cool to see people like will that are doing this really, really well and that are leaning into the future which is being able to navigate these digital tools that are available to us. It has never been easier to get the word out about your product or service as the little guy than it is right now. It just keeps getting better and better. It's a great time

to be an entrepreneur

so that is it for this episode of the six figure Home Stereo podcast. If you have any questions about what we've talked about today, just go to the six figure home studio community on Facebook. It is a free Facebook group where we can talk about all the stuff we talk about on this podcast. If it were any questions is go on there and ask a question and Chris and I are usually monitoring to answer your questions and there's 5,000 other people in there to help you answer your questions. Next week we are going to, as we said, talk about customer avatars, creating a customer Avatar, because a lot of the stuff we talked about today hinges on the fact that you have a good customer Avatar. Just like last week's episode hinges on the fact that you had traffic to convert to customers. So these three episodes go hand in hand in hand. We probably should have recorded him in a reverse order, but you know what? We didn't. So make sure you listen to next week bright and early 6:00 AM Tuesday morning. That next episode will be coming out at Ya. Thanks so much for listening. And until next time, happy hustling.