How to Stay Productive

The biggest key to success is staying productive, period. Success doesn’t happen in a single moment, it is the accumulation of efficient actions – usually very small actions. So with that being said, I think as an entrepreneur selling beats, you must make the most out of everyday if you want to be successful selling your beats online. Here are some of my biggest tips for you to keep a steady work flow.

Plan Your Week
Make sure to write down your goal for every week. There are 2 reasons for doing this – 1. So you don’t get side tracked. and 2. So you don’t get overwhelmed with tasks. By writing down your goal, you will have a clear assignment to do every week, for example, you can say that you will make 10 new beats, mix them, and post them up by the end of the week. So if you write this down, you will definitely get it done because it will be your focus. Now for the 2nd reason, it is very important not to get overwhelmed with tasks throughout your week. So you definitely don’t want to be thinking about next weeks tasks while you are working on your daily agenda. This will really impact your performance becausze too much will be on your mind. So do yourself a favor and organize your weeks, so that you can enjoy yourself knowing that you finished your task for the day, and when next week comes, you will be ready to tackle that goal as well, but in the meantime, you are staying productive.

Turn Off Your Phone
This might seem obvious, but really, turn off all your phones, log off all of your social network sites, and get to work. If you have all your stuff on, you might now be on them as you work, but it will be on your mind, so keep them off.










Get Some Sleep
Again, another obvious one, but an important one. I know alot of people say stuff like “Grind or Go Home”, “If you ain’t grindin, you’re sleeping’, and a bunch of stuff like that, but the truth is, if you don’t get rest, you will eventually burn out. Also, I’ve never understood the point of having to work on beats or your site for the whole day anyway, because if you think about it, if you really are “Grindin” on your site or beats, shouldn’t you be done with it quite quickly if you are doing this in an efficient, successful manner? GET SLEEP.

Sell Beats On Your Own Website Or Soundclick?

This is the #1 question I get from producers. It is def a good question, and an even more simple one to answer.

The answer is – Both. But here is a technique – Use Soundclick as a traffic generator for your own site. Treat Soundclick pretty much as google listings for artists looking to download or buy beats. So now you are thinking like a business man. You see, your own website is exactly that, you can put up anything you want, there are now guidelines for putting up sample beats, you don’t have to have any advertisement banners anywhere,, it is completely yours. So you are free to market your beats however you like. Soundclick will have those limitations, which is why it is best to use a site like that for getting traffic, then once they come to your website, you can showcase your catalog. Because let’s face it, having your page on Soundclick is like having a store in a crowded shopping mall, there are tons of other producer pages up selling the exact same thing you are, and they are just a click away. Now when you take those visitors from Soundclick out of that shopping mall and bring them to your very own website, they are no longer a click away from visiting another beat page,, they are completely tuned in to what you have to offer. Your conversion rates will increase indefinitely when you do this.

Now don’t get me wrong, Soundclick is a still a profitable site. I made over $2,000 my first month selling beats online, and the only thing I had was a Soundclick page. But the thing is, as a business man, I knew that it was not a good idea to just keep all of my eggs in one basket – that basket being Soundclick. Because, what if one day the site gets shut down? Then what? So that is why you should have your own domain, and website, so that you do not have to rely on a third party beat site.

Here is a great service to buy your domain name and hosting for your own beat site -

http://www.bluehost.com

Giving Your Beats “Value”

I see alot of producers trying to get more sales online by lowering their beat prices. Or they will offer a crazy bundle package of leases. Sure this may be an offer to good to pass up in the eyes of the producer, but how do you think this will appeal to the customer?

The customer comes to your site, he/she has never heard of you before, and the first impression you give them is that you are trying to wheel and deal with them to bite a bargain deal. Now this may be effective if you are ALREADY a known presence online in the beat game, but if you are just starting out, this will most likely make you look like a desperate beat maker trying to get a sale or two. This is defnitely not the first impression you want to give off to any customer.

So what’s the best impression to give to a customer? Answer: Have value – in yourself and in your beats.

Now when I say create value for yourself, I’m talking about yourself as a Producer Selling Beats. If the customer see’s that you are just some “Beat Hustler” trying to get a sale, they will automatically be turned off. Now, if you present yourself as a professional, who puts out new beats daily, and is not desperate to get a sale, they will feel more comfortable browsing through your site, because they will not feel like they are being marketed to a sale. You know exactly what I’m talking about – Have you ever walked into a shoe store to look at some new kicks, then all of a sudden 5 workers jump on you and ask if you need help, ask if you have heard of the new deal going on, blah blah blah, and so on? Did you feel uncomfortable and rushed? Of course you did, and that definitely impacted your shopping experience, so DO NOT do this with your beat site or soundclick page, because the same will happen to your customers there.

Now, let’s talk about putting value on your beats. If you are giving away 100 beats for a buck, the customer is INSTANTLY going to label your beats as NON-VALUABLE. Think about it- this is what is going on in their heads when they see a crazy deal – “Aw man,, if all these beats are so cheap, I bet you 1,000′s of cats already got these beats,, dang, I don’t want these used up beats!”…You see, you have to market your beats by putting value on them, so that the customers feel they are browsing through beats that are hard to get, almost like finding an exclusive offer, but still affordable for them to buy. Now I’m not saying never run a bundle deal on your beats, I’m just making it a point that if you always present your beats as “Cheap, easy to get joints”, customers will devalue your beats instantly.

The Importance of Branding

Let’s get straight to it here – If you want to be taken seriously, and make consistent beat sales online, you have to brand yourself, period. Just think about it from a customers perspective – They go to about 14 different beat sites or Soundclick pages a day, gather a bunch of free downloads, then move on about their day. So what’s the chances of them remembering your site? NOT LIKELY. You see, if you don’t brand yourself in some way to stand out from the crowd, you are technically invincible. You WILL be forgotten, and you have just threw away a potential customer.

So now we have come to the question – How do I brand my beat site effectively? There are many ways to do this, here are some very effective ways to make sure your visitors remember you in some way or form, so that when they decide they are going to lease or buy some beats, they think of YOU first:

• Tag Your Beats – By tagging your beats with your website name, your customers will always have a link back to your site each time they listen to your beats.
• Give Away Freebies – 9 times out of 10, a visitor on your beat site will not go out of their way to see if your beats are for free download, they don’t have time to waste, so they will just click off your page and move to the next. So to stop this from happening, make it clear to your visitors that your beats are for free DL, and because they will be tagged with your domain name, you now have supplied them with a bunch of beats that will link them back to you in the future.
• Get a Logo – This one is a must. If you don’t have some sort of logo or symbol, you are really far behind from everybody else in your market. One of the strongest senses in marketing is Visual, which means, customers tend to remember brands that they can match a symbol or logo with better. So make sure you cough up some cheddar to have a graphic designer wip up a logo for your beat site.

So that’s that. I hope you take these branding techniques and apply them to your marketing, they will def pay off.