Reputation: Remember, you must view yourself as a business and your beats are your product. Maintain a positive relationship with former customers. Be attentive and answer their emails as soon as possible. This helps to establish trust in your business and in turn will help to generate return customers. It is hard to recover your business reputation after it is damaged with many claims of poor customer service so make sure you respond to your customers as soon as possible, assist them, and show them that you appreciate their business. It is also important to remain professional in your emails/communications with your customers. Keep your audience in mind and use somewhat of a formal tone when communicating with your customers. If you carry yourself in a professional manner your customers are more likely to invest their trust in your business.

New Material: Some may feel content with just posting a select amount of their best beats on their website in hopes they will attract enough customers. However in order to increase your website hits, you must create return value in your website. Ask yourself, what if a customer has listened to all of your beats and, although impressed with your ability, has not found a beat that fits their style? If you are not updating your website, there is no reason that customer will make a return visit to your site. Make sure you are frequently updating your beat website/soundclick page with fresh material. Keep your audience engaged. Motivate potential customers to continuously visit your page by “promising” them frequent beat additions to your website. Adding new content to your website should not be limited to just beat additions. Post some news, make them aware of new discounts, and keep your visitors updated.

Quality..Quality..QUALITY: When attempting to sell beats online you must take note of the golden rule, Quality over Quantity. Too often many new producers attempt to post as many beats as possible, regardless of quality. This also ties in with your business reputation. If you present yourself as if you do not care about the quality of your product, the visitor will not invest their money into your business. Put yourself in the shoes of a potential customer. If you were visiting your site for the first time you would want to hear a beat you like as soon as you begin listening. People tend to have a short listening span. If you flood them with a large amount of sub-par beats with a few quality beats here and there many people may be turned off to your music before they ever get to your better beats. First impressions are generally the lasting impressions. You want to create a great first impression in order to keep that visitor coming back!

Take Advice/APPLY IT!: If you are a music producer now looking to sell beats online, you typically feel as though your beats are good enough to be sold. However there should never come a time in which you do not accept criticism. Don’t dismiss all criticism you receive and don’t get defensive when someone gives you their honest opinion of your music. No matter how successful you become, you are always learning something new each day. Take relevant advice and apply it.

Market Yourself: An entire article could be written on this topic alone. It is one of the most important aspects to consider when you sell beats online. However in this article in particular, I will focus on a few of the overlooked marketing tools available online. Article and blog writing are two useful marketing tools that tend to get overlooked by those that sell beats online. By creating content rich articles that target your core audience, you will be able to create a relationship with your audience and help to drive them to your beat-selling website. Connect with your audience on a more personal level and write blogs documenting news/events in your everyday life. Always include some sort of link in your blog/article that directs the visitor to your beat selling website.

I hope you’ve found this advice useful when you begin to sell beats online. If applied correctly, over time you will see that following these tips will help you increase your business.

Kyle H. (KH Productions)
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