In a previous post I explained why RSS is a great service to offer to fans.  I also explained why RSS is going to be essential to your success going forward.  Click here to read my first post on RSS.

In this post I will explain how to make RSS work for you, and how to use RSS to help you make money from your music, your shows and from your website. 

Note the images I used on this post – to make my point.
You can license images like this at iStockPhoto or at DreamsTime for $1.00 or less each.
Play Unfaithful by Jediah and slowly scroll up and down through the images.
If you are reading this post using RSS, click here to come to Unsprung and give it a try.

Note: some of this post is theoretical advice at this point.  I plan to put my own advice to work later this year.  However, since I learn by writing this blog and by fielding your comments and emails, here you go…

Notes From RSS - Part One

• 50% of the online population is using RSS.
• The use of RSS by everyone is growing rapidly.
• Just about everyone using the Internet will use RSS someday.
• RSS is the best way to slowly introduce yourself to new fans that don’t have time to read your emails or continually visit your website.
• For fans, RSS is so much less intrusive than email, and so much easier than visiting your website.
• For everyone, RSS is the most efficient method to subscribe to updates from hundreds or thousands of information sources.
• Counting subscribers to your RSS feed(s) will be as important as counting song plays or website visits.
• Having thousands of RSS subscribers is another reason why a label or an investor may invest in you.
• A blogging platform like SquareSpace is one of the best ways to leverage RSS.
• A blog enables you to sequentially “broadcast” a stream of entertainment or information.

RSS - The Television Analogy
RSS is a service that enables fans and potential fans to “tune” into your stream of entertainment or information updates.  RSS enables you to be a broadcaster.  Every fan that tunes into your RSS feed can effortlessly receive your broadcasts using an RSS feed-reader.  Feed-readers are for capturing and managing RSS feeds, just like TiVo is used for capturing and managing television programming.

Is Your Website Entertaining or Just Informative?
The Internet is global and there are over one billion people that speak English.  You should want people all over the world listening to your music.  The Internet is probably the only way 80% of your fans will ever experience you.  Are you entertaining on the Internet, or are you just boring informative?

Most artists don’t use their website to be entertaining; they use their website to be informative.

Potential fans must be entertained prior to becoming committed fans.  Converting potential fans into committed fans is easier when you are using your website to be entertaining. 

Surfing the Internet is entertaining and skipping all over MySpace is entertaining, but is your website or profile page truly entertaining by itself, or are they both just cool or fancy graphical presentations of information?

Is your site or profile entertaining to someone after they have visited it two or three times, or does the same stale information sit their – untouched – week after week?

Even the music player on your site or on your MySpace profile is not being used for entertainment; most people are using it to become informed about your music. The average new visitor to an artist profile on MySpace barely listens to one full song; instead, they rapidly skip from song to song listening to short segments.
 
My Music Is Entertainment
Vinyl albums and CDs were once a form of entertainment.  Now, consumers using MP3 players (just about everyone on earth that matters to you) have shown that they widely prefer personal playlists to listening to full albums from a single artist. 

For 80% of your target market, music becomes entertainment when it finds its way into a personal computer with an MP3 player hooked to it.  Listening to a playlist is entertaining, but sampling a song or two is part of consciously becoming informed about an artist; there’s a distinct difference.  Your music is not entertainment until it’s in a playlist.

My Videos Are Entertainment
I agree.  Video is great.  However, most of you cannot afford the time or the money it takes to continuously make compelling videos.  Moreover, once someone has watched your video a few times, it looses its’ magnetism.  

You Have To Be Entertaining On The Internet
Your website is not entertaining; your MySpace page is not entertaining; you can’t afford to continuously make videos; and now you know that your music is not really entertainment until your songs become part of a playlist.  Obviously, you have to be entertaining on the Internet to achieve your business goals.

• To sell more music.
• To widely distribute free or demo MP3s.
• To sell more tickets.
• To sell more merch.
• To increase traffic to your blogsite, website or MySpace page.
• To attract sponsors.

What is Entertainment?
For me, entertainment is anything that stirs my emotions and increases my heart rate.  I think you have to look at or listen to everything you create and ask yourself a series of questions like (but not limited to):

• Does it incite?
• Does it motivate?
• Does it compel?
• Does it pull at the heartstrings?
• Does it energize?
• Does it arouse?
• Does it seduce?
• Etc.  If it’s not entertaining, perhaps it’s just background noise?

A Blog + RSS = The Easiest Way To Be Entertaining on The Internet?
A blogsite and RSS go together; a website combined with RSS does not make nearly as much sense.  Look into ditching your website and possibly your MySpace page for a blogsite.  I advocate SquareSpace, but there are lots of great blogging platforms to choose from.

Remember, when you have a blogsite and you are using RSS, potential fans can tune into your entertaining broadcast (see analogy above).

Consider this scenario: Sarah, a regular user of RSS and a potential fan, somehow ends up on your website and she listens to two of your songs for the first time.  Sarah thinks: “Not bad, I could get to like this band.”  What do think Sarah does next?

• Does she go immediately to iTunes to buy your songs?
• Does she fire up her torrent client and pinch your songs?
• Does she download your songs for free (because you smartly enabled her to)?
• Does she subscribe to your email list?
• Does she bookmark your site or MySpace profile?
• Does she click your RSS icon?
• Does she do cartwheels down the street while screaming you name?

Outside of downloading your songs for free, the easiest thing in the mind of a regular RSS user is to click your RSS icon and move on.  When Sarah clicks your RSS icon she’s thinking: “I will get to know this band as they periodically feed me information and ENTERTAINMENT.”

Shit!  People Are Clicking My RSS Icon
When potential fans start subscribing to your RSS feed (tuning into your broadcast) there are a few things you should know:

• Most people will not tune out (unsubscribe) to your RSS feed unless you are continually posting crap to your blog.
• If you go months without posting anything you will not be dropped (tuned out). 
• Once someone subscribes, the work has been done; people don’t unsubscribe unless you repeatedly post garbage.
• Some formatting and various widgets will not translate or carry over from your blog to the various RSS readers people use.  Become an RSS user to see what your fans and potential fans will experience when they see your posts through an RSS reader. 
• Subscribe to your own RSS feeds.
• DO NOT partially post.  Post your entire article.  Some people only post the first few sentences of an article (referred to as an excerpt); this is a mistake.  When you start using RSS, you will notice that you will skip right over partial feeds.  Once tens of thousands of subscribers get to know your stuff – then you can think about partially posting; until then, post your entire article. 
• DON’T FORGET: You can have multiple feeds on your site for people to subscribe to.  One feed for INFORMATION, and another feed that features your art and ENTERTAINMENT.

Translating RSS Subscribers Into Cash – Know Your Viewers
Do your blog posts incite, motivate, compel, pull, energize, arouse, or seduce potential fans into buying your music or into downloading your free demos, or into purchasing your show tickets, or into trafficking your blogsite, or somehow into helping you attract sponsors?  If the answer is no, then you are probably being informative, and you are NOT being an entertainer on the Internet.

When you start to post blog entries with your business goals in mind, and when you begin to become entertaining instead of being informative, I believe you have to do the following:

• Look through magazines and cut out pictures or print pictures of your fans and potential fans.  This is your target audience; this is whom you are speaking to when you post a blog entry.  Tape those pictures to your wall. 
• When you post text, music, video, or images, you are speaking to the people depicted in the pictures on your wall.
• Seduce them.  Compel them.  Incite them.  Supercharge them.  Etc.

Translating RSS Subscribers Into Cash – Be Episodic
You want to sell music.  You want to sell show tickets.  You want to sell merch.  You want to increase traffic to your site to increase advertising and sponsor revenue.  Great.  If you were writing for network television, how would you do this?  Forget what every other band’s website looks like.  Don’t go look at the websites for 24, or Lost, or Buffy… Answer the question: What would you WRITE if you were creating episodic television?  Start with a black blank slate.   What’s first thing you would put onto that slate?  It wouldn’t be your soundtrack… I don’t write for television, but here are my thoughts:

• Your site or blogsite is your “set” (as in television set).
• You need to tell a story.
• The story should have a plot.
• Your songs or music are part of the story.
• Your lyrics should fit into the story.
• Your songwriting snippets should fit into the story.
• Remember: seduce, compel, excite, energize, etc.
• You need a timeline – the story happens over numerous “seasons”.
• You need a reason / a plot / an outcome.  Something people buy/bite into.
• You need images and possibly some video that snaps into all of this.

You should be radically departing from the usual website and MySpace page that is plastered with pictures of you, banners for your band, and is covered with widgets featuring your music.  You have to think “television series & episodes”. 

One of the great things about SquareSpace (this blogging platform) it’s so easy to have multiple blogs under one URL.  Using SquareSpace, you could concurrently “produce” multiple episodic television series from one site, and you could still have a portion of your site that features your traditional artist presentation (pictures of you, your shows, etc.).

When you become skilled at using the Internet to seduce, compel and excite, the money will follow and the value of your “stock” will rise.

Make Sure Your Website Matches
Don’t forget to make sure the look of your blogsite matches the seductive, compelling, and energizing words, sounds and videos you are posting to your blog for fans using RSS.  I would say this is obvious, but I’m amazed at the percentage of artists that have websites and MySpace pages that violate this obvious advice.  You may want to read my post on putting your ducks in order for more advice on this subject.  

Famous or Unsprung (not famous) – You Need To Be Episodic & You Need RSS
This advice about RSS applies to the known and the unknown, the famous and the unsprung.  If your video became a sudden hit on YouTube tomorrow, and 5 million people watched your video – how would you make money?  Sure, you would sell SOME music, but what’s the best way to capitalize on the success of that video?  The best way to capitalize on the success of a hit song or on the success of a hit video is to build a subscriber base, and the best way to motivate a subscriber base is to continuously entertain them.

Increasing Traffic To Your New Blog – Increasing The Number of Subscribers
The promotion problem that’s always a problem.  How do you promote your new television series?  Actually, the answer is: how do you promote any television series?

• Know your target audience (the pictures on your wall).
• Stare at the picture of Sarah (from example above).
• What are Sarah’s interests?  What else does Sarah do for fun? 
• What other blogs does Sarah read?
• Where does Sarah go on Saturday night?
• What does she eat?  What movies does she like?  Etc. Etc. Etc.

List some blogs that your potential fans read.  These blogs can be written by anyone in the world.  Find these blogs and try the following:

• Post comments on the blogs created by others.
• DON’T just leave a freaking link to your blog – only idiots do this!
• If the blog you are on is about birds – tell a story about you and your songs and how they relate to birds.
• Paint a picture.  Be a writer not a blatant advertiser.  You can be fictional.
• Do this every day – find one blog a day to post a smart comment or story upon.
• You may want to also subscribe to these blogs.  Fresh feeds from these blogs will give you an opportunity to post a new comment (fresh, seductive, intelligent story).

Try Google AdWords – you could try putting catchy Google text ads all over the Internet for as little as two cents per click.

• AdWords enables you to target by demographic
• AdWords enables you to target by interest, hobby, subject matter, etc.

I have used Google AdWords successfully.  However, I recommend using AdWords after you have a digital merch store, some sponsors and some advertisers or AdSense banners in place; this way you can recover your cost of advertising. 

The companion to AdWords is AdSense.  AdSense pays you when someone clicks an ad on your blog.  If you experiment with AdSense – do it smartly.  Make the colors blend in and put the ads where they will not detract from your “television series”.

Good luck and have fun.