to feel special and they want to be part of a group. An offer such as, “Just for our newslet-
ter subscribers ...” can be a great motivator and also encourage your subscribers to pass
on your newsletter sign up information to their friends.
With your email marketing in place, it’s a good idea to have at least three or four
newsletters written and ready to go. As your marketing and promotion efforts begin to
pay off, you’ll get busy. When you get busy, you’ll forget to get your newsletter ready to
go. So, you miss a month. Then two. The next thing you know, you’re subscribers are
opting out and your newsletter fizzles away. Having a few newsletters in place and sched-
uled to be published will help ensure that doesn’t happen and you don’t find yourself in a
scramble to send one out. When you’re rushed, errors happen and your newsletter efforts
tend to become weak.
A Word About Selling Merchandise Online
Selling merchandise, such as t-shirts, hats, mugs, posters and similar items, can be a nice
shot in the revenue arm for solo performers and bands. But, there’s still a notion that sell-
ing stuff online is an easy road to riches. It’s not. Getting even a loyal fan to dig into their
pocket and pull out some cash or a credit card is no easy task. But it can be done.
Before you can sell stuff, you’ll need some stuff to sell. Sure, that’s a no-brainer, but
not as simple as it may sound. You have some options. If you want to sell t-shirts, for ex-
ample, the conventional route is to hire a designer to create the design, or do it yourself.
With art in hand, it’s off to the silkscreener where you’ll need to buy shirts and pay the
printer. Then, you’ll need to store the finished shirts somewhere, arrange for payment