290 – How to Make a Ghetto Sales Funnel to Sell More Music

0 Shares

Everyone’s talking about making sales funnels. Yes, they are great, and yes, they are built on a solid foundation of traditional marketing philosophy.

But there are some serious challenges to getting your first sales funnel up and running never mind selling your music and merch for you.

In this episode of The New Music Industry Podcast, David shares how you can test your sales funnel idea without wasting an insane amount of money and time.

Table of Contents

Podcast Highlights:

01:02 – Setting up your own “ghetto sales funnel”
02:46 – The four items you need to set up your sales funnel
04:02 – Step by step process for building your ghetto sales funnel
05:47 – Driving traffic to your sales funnel
07:48 – Episode summary
08:15 – Closing thoughts

Sponsors:

Digital Marketing Essentials for Musicians: When it comes to getting your music out there online, it’s easy to get caught up in a lot of stuff that doesn’t matter and will never work. If you want just the essentials that have been proven to work, you need the Digital Marketing Essentials for Musicians course.
The Music Entrepreneur Companion Guide: Get the official, definitive companion guide to The Music Entrepreneur Code covering, in clarity and detail, secrets to making it in the new music business.
Productivity, Performance & Profits Blackbook: The first of its kind – David’s new premium book covering productivity, featuring content from Music Entrepreneur HQ, his personal blog, his many books, and even Start Your Year the Right Way, which is included in its entirety. Be fully unleashed in accomplishing your dreams and desires!

Transcription:

Hey, it’s David Andrew Wiebe. As you know, I love to connect you with other great music industry resources and today I wanted to share The Unstarving Musician with you. The Unstarving Musician, hosted by Robonzo, was created as a way to help other independent musicians better understand the marketing, business, and creative processes that empower us to make music and make a living doing it. Episodes feature insights from Robonzo and a wide array of guests. Topics covered on The Unstarving Musician includes songwriting, recording, release strategy, building an audience, music licensing, and more. hear it at UnstarvingMusician.com or wherever you get your audio. And if you’d like to dig in the archives a little bit, you can hear Robonzo on episode 164 and episode 259 of the New Music Industry podcast.

Alright, so in today’s episode, I wanted to talk about setting up your very own ghetto sales funnel. I’m interrupting a series of podcasts on my latest book, The Music Entrepreneur Companion Guide to bring this to you. But rest assured I will be sharing more insights from the book in future episodes.

Ghetto Sales Funnel?

What the hell is a ghetto sales funnel? And why would you want to build one? And why does it even matter?

Look, a lot of people are going to sell you on purchasing expensive software to build your first sales funnel, and that’s not wrong.

But the problem with it is that you’re not going to be very good at building sales funnels the first time you do it. And this is something you get better at with more experience.

I’ve done many launches before, not all of them sales funnels, but there were definitely a few of them. And I can tell you from experience, every time you do it, you get better. And so, so many people that are trying to build sales funnels from scratch, they don’t have the experience, or knowledge, or knowhow to create anything great on the first go round. If you have an idea, you might as well test it. Minimum viable style, right?

And then the other problem is that many experts are teaching you how to sell like a $5 tripwire, and then a $15 upsell, and a $30 one-time offer. This is wrong. You’re either not going to be able to make enough to spend on advertising, or you’re not going to make any money at all. There’s the danger of losing money if you do things that way.

So, you can test your sales funnel idea relatively inexpensively, and the reality is you’re going to need to do all the same things to promote it anyway. So, the only thing that changes when you go from a normal sales funnel to a ghetto sales funnel is the step-by-step setup.

For this episode, some knowledge of sales funnels is recommended, and if you have no idea what I’m talking about, well by the end of this episode, you should be good and murky.

The 4 Items You Need for a Ghetto Sales Funnel

So, why don’t we look at what we need to get started. There are really just four items.

First, you need a way to capture email addresses and send email campaigns. I recommend ConvertKit. You can find it at MusicEntrepreneurHQ.com/ConvertKit. I am an affiliate of ConvertKit and may earn a small commission on qualifying purchases.

Two. We need a way to sell the product. So, it could be Bandcamp, it could be Gumroad, or even Sellfy. Free to low-cost solutions work great for ghetto sales funnels. Honestly, that’s the point. I’m an affiliate with Sellfy, and you can check out their e-commerce solution at MusicEntrepreneurHQ.com/Sellfy.

Three. You need something to give away. You need an irresistible offer. It could be a series of music or behind the scenes videos, free album or EP, an eBook, a free report, something people will happily exchange their email addresses for.

And then number four, we need something to sell. You need to think big here. Let’s not go to all the hard work of setting up a sales funnel and getting people to check out our offer only to sell them on a $5 to $15 product. Go for at least $65, please.

Setting Up Your Ghetto Sales Funnel

Okay, now let’s talk about setting up your sales funnel.

Hopefully you have an email list and an email service provider or ESP already, but if not, go set up an account at MusicEntrepreneurHQ.com/ConvertKit now. You’re going to need one of these whether you build a sales funnel or not.

Now that you have your account, put capture boxes on your website promoting your free offer. We want to make sure this is loud and clear and visible and it’s the first thing that people see when they go to your website. You want to prioritize people signing up.

You’ll want to set up an autoresponder with a link where people can download your free offer.

Then this step is crucial. You want to set up your download page, and you’re going to want to either link to your upsell on the download page, inside your free offer, or both.

In an eBook that’s pretty simple, right? “This is where you go to buy the thing.” You can put that link at the end of the eBook, but if you’re giving away audio or videos, remember you can include a call to action at the end of these. Even if it’s an album, you can include a secret audio track saying, “Hey, come and check out our offer right here at this link.”

And this is really important. You need to sell people on the spot. It’s crucial because there are always people who will buy then and there.

Now you can set up your upsell on Bandcamp, Gumroad, or Sellfy. And again, we’re going to skip tripwires completely. So, sell something that’s about $65, no low ticket offers please.

If you’re not sure what to sell, here are a few ideas.

Merch bundles
Your entire music catalog (if you have more than one or two albums)
Vinyl albums
Remixes
Handwritten lyric sheets
Guitar tabs
Behind the scenes or making-of videos
Some combination thereof

And that’s all you need to get your ghetto sales funnel up and running. It didn’t take any fancy software, just a willingness to innovate.

Driving Traffic to Your Ghetto Sales Funnel

How to get your sales funnel out there.

We’re going to use all the standard channels to drive traffic to the ghetto sales funnel. If you’re not acquainted with these, we’ll go over them real quick.

Remember, if you’ve got time, but no money, make more content. And if you’ve got money, but no time, make more ads.

The first channel is content and there’s simply no excuse not to be doing this anymore.

You’ve got ChatGPT and other AI tools and other free or low-cost tools that can help with the process of producing blog posts and social media posts. Canva‘s another great one. I still recommend editing and fact checking everything yourself. If you’re going to use AI. And putting it all in your own voice. But either way, AI can help make the process more streamlined.

You should link to your free offer in every content piece, place an opt-in box at the bottom of the page, or both. It doesn’t matter whether you’re making video or audio or text content.

The second channel is Dream 100. There’s a blog post on this topic at MusicEntrepreneurHQ.com you can reference, but the essence is to identify the specific influencers, artists, journalists, bloggers, podcasters, labels that could help you grow your following, build relationships with them, and create opportunities to collaborate. That part is up to you though. You’ve got to put in the time and the effort and the work to build that relationship, which might include sending gifts.

The third channel is advertising. And as I mentioned earlier, it’s a channel worth pursuing if you’ve got the funds for it. With advertising, the moment you turn the tap on, rivers begin gushing towards your offer, but the moment you turn it off, the waters disappear. And we have to create compelling ads, and that’s a form of content too, and it’s honestly not the easiest thing in the world. You usually do end up having to test multiple offers to see what works.

Now what I’ve just shared with you aren’t all the ways you can promote your sales funnel. But if you’d like to dive deeper, you should certainly explore the nautical ton of podcast episodes we’ve published to this point, and you’ll come away with plenty of traffic strategies to action.

Episode Summary

Now here’s your episode summary:

You can create your own free or low-cost ghetto sales funnel without having to purchase expensive software and spending ages getting the design and copy and colors and everything else perfect.
Setting up a ghetto sales funnel is relatively straightforward and only requires a few components: an email capturing and sending tool, a way to sell your products, something to give away, and something to sell.
And finally, there are many ways to send traffic to your ghetto sales funnel.

Closing Segment

One of the best resources I’ve created on digital marketing for musicians is the Digital Marketing Essentials for Musicians course.

I invite you to go to ContentMarketingMusician.com to learn more about the course.

This has been episode 290 of The New Music Industry Podcast. I’m David Andrew Wiebe, and I look forward to seeing you on the stages of the world.

Author
Recent Posts

David Andrew Wiebe

Founder & CEO at Music Entrepreneur HQ

Award-winning composer, best-selling author, professional musician coach, and podcaster of over 10 years. Wiebe helps musicians like you unlock your full potential. If you'd like to be notified whenever the blog is updated, click here to subscribe.

Latest posts by David Andrew Wiebe (see all)