The First Step In Earning $1k/mo From Your Home Studio

The First Step In Earning $1k/mo From Your Home Studio

The reality is that many home studio owners have never broken $1,000 in a single month. Of those who have, very few are doing it consistently month after month after month.

In most cases, they had one good month with a few good projects… Maybe they recorded an album and they got a big paycheck from a label.

After that one good month, they had months and months and months of little or no work at all.

I've seen this play out over and over and over again.

This is happening to people who I personally know. It's happening to my students, to people reading my articles, and to our podcast listeners.

In this article, I want to talk about the first step of breaking the $1,000 per month barrier consistently.

It all comes down to math. I know, I know, math sucks. Bear with me here.

Let me start off with a caveat: every single persons' business is different.

If you're a mastering engineer, your business model is going to be different from that of a mixing engineer, producer, songwriter, composer, or voiceover artist.

Everyone is different.

It's going to be up to you to take all the numbers I talk about today and use your common sense to then translate it to your specific situation.

Just to give you an example, in this article all of the methods I talk about are charging per song. Obviously, if you charge per hour or per day, the math will be different for you.

It's up to you though to figure out how that works, and how you can adapt it to your situation.

The goal here is for you to look at the big picture of what I'm talking about. Ignore the tiny little details that are going to differ for everyone's situation.

Four Ways You Can Consistently Earn $1,000 Per Month

Let's get into the four methods. I've listed them in order from lowest price to highest price. Depending on your business models, some will work better than others.

Method #1: $35 A Song For Thirty Songs Per Month

Lots of songs, not much money

This is a lot of songs for a little bit of money. It works well for mastering engineers, voiceover artists, or maybe someone who's doing small projects.

This doesn't work for people who are doing long drawn out annoying projects that take forever.

Let's look at how all this plays out:

This is about a song per day, and the negative of this is obviously the fact that you have to find a way to work on thirty songs a month. Most people are not in the position where they can generate the necessary amount of leads every single month to have thirty songs a month coming through the door.

Anyone I know who is in that position is already well past the $1,000 a month threshold. That means it's really not an option for most of you who are struggling to break that threshold.

That being said, let's pretend for a second that you can get thirty songs per month in the door.

That's going to be about 15 to 20 projects. If you are getting 15 to 20 projects in the door, that's about 60 to 75 leads.

That's 60 to 75 potential people that you have to talk to and 60 to 75 conversations you have to manage.

This is a communications nightmare.

Don't let your communications nightmares turn into this

If you're just starting out and you don't have the communications systems to actually manage that many projects,  you're going to have things slip through the cracks. You're going to have customers who are pissed at you, and it's going to be a bad time for you and your customers.

Furthermore, unless you have ridiculous systems in place or you're a business automation expert, handling 30 songs a month is going to be a bad time.

Thirty songs per month at $35 per song is an option. Some people do it, but this is the probably my least favorite option of all the methods I'll discuss in this article.

Method #2: $100 Per Song For Ten Songs Per Month

This is roughly two songs a week, and it's a bit more manageable for the average person with a day job on the side.

This could be spread out between one 10 song album with an artist, a couple of EP's with two artists, or a lot of singles from different artists.

In all actuality, it will probably be a combination of all of these projects together. If you're working with ten songs a month, you're probably working on around five projects a month, give or take.

If you have roughly five projects a month that you're trying to manage, you're going to need to generate about 20 leads. Again, a lead is someone who is a potential client and is a good fit for you.

Between people who are reaching out to you, referrals from your past clients, and people you're reaching out to, being able to generate about 20 a month is much more sustainable than what is required in method #1.

This is the number of leads I had for a while early in my career when I finally broke the consistent thousand plus a month barrier.

This can be done, but one thing that I learned is that it is just as hard to turn someone into a customer at a hundred a song as it is at two hundred a song.

If you're putting in this much work to get a customer, chances are you can bump your prices up

The hardest thing to do in this business is to get a client to hand over any amount of money.

To turn someone from $100 per song customer to a $200 a song customer, however, it's not as hard as you would think. It's not twice as hard.

Method #3: $200 Per Song For five songs Per Month

This is my personal favorite method. It's about a song per week.

You'll find it's a lot more manageable than method #1 or method #2 because you'll be averaging about three projects a month, give or take.

You'll only need to find about 10 to 12 leads per month. This is only 10 to 12 quality conversations per month with people who are a good fit for your studio. Most people can handle that, it's one conversation every two to three days.

If you have a day job that you're trying to do full time while juggling your studio on the side, the math has to work. This has to be something that is sustainable and realistic for you.

This is why I like method #3 so much: even if you have a day job, method #3 is manageable for you.

One song per weekend, or two songs in a weekend every other weekend, is a lot more manageable than method #1 and method #2.

Method #4: $1,000 Per Song For One Song Per Month

Obviously, this sounds appealing because you only have to work with one client a month. You only have to find a few good leads every month.

The reality is that the law of diminishing returns comes into effect.

When you get your price up to a certain point, the pool of potential clients drops dramatically.

You might be able to sucker someone into paying you $1,000 a song.

But, chances are if you're not already consistently generating $1,000 a month from your studio, in all honesty, your services probably aren't worth $10,00 per song.

This is what people will expect if you charge $1,000 per song. Can you deliver?

This leads to unhappy clients. They're unsatisfied because you underdelivered on what they thought they were going to get by paying $1,000 per song.

Another situation that could crop up is that people start hearing that you charge $1,000 a song. Once they hear the quality of work that you're giving out at $1,000 a song, this starts to damage your reputation.

Some people might be able to justify charging $1,000 per song. Especially talented people that just don't have time and they're doing this on the side, maybe.

But, in most situations, Method #4 is far less than ideal.

Why I like Method #3 The Most

As a refresher, here are the methods we talked about:

  • Method #1 was 30 songs per month at $35 per song
  • Method #2 was 10 songs per month at $100 per song
  • Method #3 was five songs per month at $200 per song
  • Method #4 was just one song per month at $1,000 per song

Again, my favorite is Method #3. I want to share some numbers with you that I think are gonna be eye-opening for you.

These are numbers that I have pulled from my successful students who are at $1,000 or more per month consistently as well as my own business when I was back at that level. I'm trying to show you the numbers from a top-down perspective.

When you get to the level where you're making $1,000 a month consistently, you need to understand where all of your leads are coming from. Are you generating them, or are they coming to you?

In most cases, when the consistency is there, it's people who have leads that coming to them consistently. In most cases, the leads coming through their website.

Here are how the numbers pan out from website traffic to paid customer:

  • On average, people who generate $1,000 a month or more have about 200 website visitors coming to their website every single month.
  • Of those website visitors, about 5% are converting to quote requests.
  • That means of the 200 people who come to the site, about eight to twelve people are reaching out for rates or asking to tour the studio.
  • Of those eight to twelve quote requests, about 25% of those turn into paid projects.
  • On average this results in three projects per month and the average price per project is $300 – $400.

People with these numbers are consistently bringing in $1,000 a month. A lot of these people are part-time by the way, but and they're moving towards running their studio full time.

Lots of traffic, or light traffic?

If You Have Enough Website Traffic, but Not Enough Leads

So let's say you have 200 people coming to your site every month, but you're not generating eight to twelve quote requests per month.

If that's the situation, there is an option for you!

You can take my free website creation course, 100% free. Go to recordingstudiowebsite.com and you can sign up for the free course.

It will show you how you can revamp your site. You can completely rebuild it from the ground up, or you can take things that I teach and tweak certain things in your existing site so that you get more conversions.

If You Need More Leads

What if you don't have 200 monthly visitors?

It's up to you to then go out and generate leads. Instead of waiting for them to come to your website, you have to take charge of what you're doing and find those leads!

You can do that through cold outreach; sending emails or Facebook messages to people who are good quality candidates but don't know you exist. Maybe they do know you, and you know they're about to record but they don't know you have a studio.

If they aren't thinking about you as their “top of mind candidate” you need to change that.

Let's say you do have eight to twelve quote requests per month, but you're not turning those into about three to four projects per month. In this case, you have another option:  you can sign up for the free workshop which I'll talk about at the end of this article.

If You Have Leads And Conversions But Aren't Making $1,000 Per Month

Finally, let's just say that you do have the three projects per month, but you aren't breaking $1,000 per month.

That means your average price per project is too low which means you need to charge more on all of your projects.

There are only so many projects you can do in a month, especially if you're part-time. You have to make sure you're charging the correct rates so that your average price per project is going to be where it needs to be in order to sustain yourself.

Eventually, for a lot of you, the goal is to move out of your day job into doing this full time.

Is your goal to fill this calendar with projects?

In Conclusion

There are a lot of different ways you can slice these numbers, and it will look different for every person (including you).

At the end of the day, if you're not generating enough leads at the top of your funnel, it means you're not getting enough people who are interested in working with you in some way, shape, or form.

If you do not have those potential projects, you do not have any projects. Period.

You have to make sure that the math is going to work out.

  • Do you have enough leads every month?
  • Do you have enough paid projects every month?
  • Is the average price per project high enough to sustain the $1,000 a month threshold?

If you're not able to grasp the math behind this, you will continue to struggle. You'll spin your wheels.

If you're trying to figure out how to:

  • Consistently generate leads every single month
  • Consistently turn those leads into paying customers
  • Consistently charge rates that are going to generate enough income

Then I highly encourage you to go sign up for my free workshop by going to theprofitable.studio.

It's a free 90-minute online workshop where I go through a lot more details than I could ever cover in this short video.

I hope to see you in the workshop, and thanks for reading!

Raise Your Rates With Confidence

This free guide gives you rate benchmarks for a number of services–including recording, mixing, mastering, reamping, drum editing, guitar editing, and more!

Also included are The 5 Rules of Free Work. Follow these five rule EVERY SINGLE TIME you do free work, and you'll set yourself up for success.

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