While I mentioned a few of these things in the last lesson, I'd like to clarify a list for you of things I'd recommend setting up to assist you with this "long-game" strategy.

*= do right away (do the rest when you can)

1. Tipping Options*
2. FB Pixel*
3. Mailing List Opt-In*
4. A Professional-Looking, Fan-Facing Email Address
5. A Webstore for Your Music Business
6. A "Helpful Links" PDF (this is for your reference)
7. Stream Description and Pinned Comment Templates (as necessary for your platform)

Tipping Options:

Establish a PayPal.me account

Here's a link with instructions to help. 

At the above webpage, click the blue "create your PayPal.me link" button.

mine is: http://paypal.me/lexland

If you have a store with products and/or a donating feature, set up some tip jar/donation options there.

Here's what mine looks like: lexlandmusic.com/love

Of course, if you don't already have one, you may want to set up a Venmo account.

(Just for good measure, I'll repeat: this personally wouldn't be my first-choice method.)

mine is: @lexland

FB Pixel:

If you don't already have a Facebook Page for your music, level yourself up and bite the bullet. If you don't have a Page yet, set one up via business.facebook.com so you're starting on the right foot.

If you've had a Page for a while, but it is not associated with a business.facebook.com "business," go here to learn how to attach your Page to Facebook's Business Manager so you can get your legit Pixel.

Take inventory of all of your online real estate. Your webstore, your Bandcamp, your website, and anything else where you can install your FB Pixel.

Here's how to find your FB Pixel. Put it in a note or document that you can easily find and reference.

(FYI - Anytime you're about to set up an ad campaign in FB, be sure you've flipped over to the correct pixel associated with your Business account.)

Now use your internet research skills to find out how to install your FB Pixel on all your stuff. Spoiler alert: it's not hard.

Once you dig into what you can do with this kind of tracking and analytic information, you're going to kick yourself for not doing it sooner.

Mailing List Opt-In:

If you don't have a mailing list set up, now's the time to do it.

If you've been meaning to update what you already have, now's the time to do it.

You can set up a MailChimp account for free and get basic auto-responding features from it if you have a small fan base. (So when someone signs up to your list, you can automatically send them something.)

If you don't even want to go that far, figure out some automated way to gather emails (maybe a Google Form that feeds into a Google Spreadsheet) so that you have them when you do get around to building out a more robust mailing list system. (I wouldn't wait too long on this.)

Here's my free collection opt-in you can view: lexlandmusic.com/free

(if you opt-into it, you'll see my very-basic nurture series)

A Professional Looking, Fan-Facing Email Address:

the bare minimum would be with your artist/band name, "[email protected]."

even better to set up an email through your personal domain. "[email protected]"

if you don't yet have one, now might be a good time to do it if you have the means.

My personal experience with domains and hosting is through Bluehost.

Do some research and see what works best.

Give this out freely to fans and check/reply regularly.

mine is: [email protected]

A Webstore for Your Music Business:

There are so many options for this.

The most obvious would be Bandcamp for digital music and physical merch.

If you want to get crazier than that with it, see what your website builder has to offer if that fits your description (Squarespace, Bandzoogle, etc.)

There are ways to set up your store on a Wordpress site using WooCommerce.

You can even put up some easy products with a little bit of text and a PayPal button somewhere on your site, and do everything with PayPal.

Want to have your PayPal purchases trigger an email delivery of a digital item? You can automatically integrate just about anything using Zapier if your current method of emailing fans doesn't provide an autoresponse feature (or you can put the download on whatever thank-you page you build out by linking that as the confirmation when you build your PayPal button, for instance).

Get creative and figure out something that works!

A Helpful Links PDF (or Word Document):

A sheet for your reference of links that might be helpful for when people ask you questions.

Your email, your events listings, your webstore, your Spotify artist links, etc.

I'll attach my current one at the bottom of this lesson for you to see what I use.

Stream Description/Pinned Comment Templates:

Depending on your platform, you'll want to have an enticing description.

Emojis are useful as they create what we call "pattern interrupt."

We want to "stop the scroll," and the unusual colors and symbols will attract the eye.

Using your description, give a preview of what the viewer can expect.

At the bottom, list all the links and other information you like, so that if they want more information, they can get it. The description also provides an area where you can direct folks to more information throughout your stream.

If you're using Facebook, create a "pinned comment" template as well.

Here's what my most recent (3/20/20) Description looked like:

☕️ 💕 Crooner Coffee Hour! 💕 ☕️

Here for our regular Friday morning date ❣️ 

Singing original tunes, standards, and taking your requests while we share a cup of coffee (or two). 🎶

📃 Here’s a list of songs I know ⬇️

🤍 bit.ly/lexreqlist

🤍 visit the link, take your pick and drop into the comments ❤️

For today only, Bandcamp is waiving its revenue shares to help support artists while they face financial difficulty. If you’d like to support me easily and get some music in return, you can check it out here: lexland.bandcamp.com.

Virtual Tip Jar: http://paypal.me/lexland

Free music download: lexlandmusic.com/free

Here's what my pinned comment template currently looks like:

❤️ VIRTUAL TIP JAR 👇🏻

http://PayPal.me/lexland

✨REQUEST LIST✨

http://bit.ly/lexreqlist

TextExpander is an app I use for this purpose, and also for tons of other things because it's just so damned handy. It will expand a shortcode of your creation (in my case "xcch" and "xpin") wherever you type in that "code," on mobile or desktop (the app syncs your codes - or "snippets" - between all your devices where you have the app installed).

Most mobile devices have something similar to this natively within keyboard settings, though the features are, of course, not as robust as a whole dedicated app.

You could always copy/paste from a note or other document, but however, you decide to do it, it will make your life a lot easier when you don't have to type it out your description and pinned comments from scratch each time.

Attachment:

Lex's (Current) Helpful Links PDF