| |
Independent Music Distribution & Cheap CD Duplication How to duplicate your homemade cd on your own computer and sell it online. |
|
Duplication Yes, cheap cd duplication is possible. You can produce them yourself, or you can have a professional duplicating service do it for you. Of course it's more expensive to have someone else do it. If you are confident you will sell alot you might not mind cutting in to your profit margin a bit by paying to have it done. But if you're not sure, you can start out doing it yourself. If sales go really well and you find you can't duplicate your cds fast enough, you can always turn it over to a pro later. (Then you will have a little more money to afford it!) Meanwhile, it might not be a bad idea to duplicate your own cds. Since most computers these days have a cd burner, cd burning software, a printer, and a graphic editor, I'm not going to touch on those topics. I'm assuming you have them, and know how to use them. If you don't have them, you will need to get them if you want to duplicate your cds yourself (they are useful for so many other things anyway!) If you already have them but don't know how to use them, it won't take you long to figure it out. Just get into the help menu and start clicking. Really, these applications rely heavily upon being user friendly. Use your graphic editor to create your cd inserts, one for the front and one for the back, and print them out on light colored card stock or photo paper. It's just a matter of figuring out how big each needs to be (based on the size of your jewel cases), how to fold them, how to import images, write the text, and play around with the resolution. (Design tip: Try altering some of the artistic photos you have taken using the various applications on your graphic editor. For example, click here to see how I altered a photo of a church I took down in Mexico. I just randomly applied different alterations in Adobe Photodeluxe until I found an effect I liked). Finally, use your cd burner and burning software to make copies of your master disc. A great place to get your blank cds and jewel cases online is Meritline. Their prices are competitive and their customer service is superior. I have found my average cost (per cd & jewel case) to be around 60 cents. Add in the price of card stock and ink, and you're still way under $1 to produce a cd ready to sell, and that's buying 100 cds and 100 jewel cases at a time. Buy in higher quantities and of course it's even cheaper. The one piece of equipment you probably don't already have is a printer that prints directly on cds. You could use stick on labels, but they are very expensive! Besides that, they won't play well on some systems, even if you do a great job of applying them. I was using them for awhile, but that all ended when we bought a new truck and heard clicking noises when we put my cds in the player. The music played alright, but so did the clicks! Not quite what we had in mind. Needless to say, I began looking for an alternative. I can't tell you how happy I was when I found the Epson Stylus R200. I was blown away with what this little machine is capable of. The printing on the cds is absolutely perfect, as professional looking as anything I've ever seen. Amazingly, this printer costs only $99. It's an absolute must have. It's an ink jet printer and so requires "ink jet printable" cds. Distribution  CD Baby! Once you have some cds made, you need a system for distributing them. The first thing you should do at this point is sign up with CD Baby. Simply put, Cd Baby is the best thing going for independent musicians seeking independent music distribution . There are other online stores, including Amazon, CD Street, Planet CD, and more, but CD Baby is the clear winner if you look closely at all of them, at least for the time being. That's not to say you can't sign up with all of them, you can if you want, but get started with CD Baby first. You can always sign up with more later. The only one that rivals CD Baby's size (Amazon) just can't compete with all the benefits CD Baby offers. I don't even know where to begin here. First of all, you can call them anytime and speak to a real person at their office in Portland, Oregon. They are friendly, offer all kinds of marketing advice, and make you feel like they really want to help you. You can sell your cd there without a bar code and without shrinkwrap if you want, as long as your product is well done and looks nice (try finding a shrink wrapper that is cost effective!) Their program works like this; pay $35 once, and send them some cds. They create your webpage with sample clips, graphics, bio, links to your personal website, etc... They warehouse your cds for you, take orders, and handle shipping. After the initial $35, you pay them only if you sell. They take a flat $4 per cd sold, regardless of the price, which you set. Their digital distribution program is icing on the cake. Just by "opting in" to this program, you can have CD Baby send your music to dozens of digital distributors, including the likes of Apple i-Tunes, Rhapsody, Musicmatch, Napster, and many more, where your songs can be downloaded individually or collectively to paying customers. You do have to pay $20 (to get a bar code) to participate in this program, but other than that you pay only if you sell. CD Baby keeps 9% of digital sales, you keep 91%. The bottom line is this; once you have your cds produced and ready to sell, sign up with CD Baby and they will take care of the rest. All for a very small sum of $. Building your own website Now that you have an online store where sales can take place, it is imperative that you also build your own website to drive traffic to that store. Of course you will get some traffic from people who just happen to be browsing your distributor's site (CD Baby, Amazon...), but imagine how much additional traffic you will receive if you have another website (that is well positioned in all the major search engines) that links to your store front? I'm not saying that your store front page won't get indexed with search engines, it will. The question is how well positioned (how close to the front!) will it be? You see, there are certain "key phrases" which best describe your music. You have to decide what these phrases are. They have to be phrases that people who don't know you (your own name isn't a good keyword, unless you are Eric Clapton!) are likely to put into a search engine when looking for the type of music you play. When you build your own website you will optimize each page on the site around 2 or 3 such key phrases. An important part of optimizing is writing the meta tags in the source code of any given page, and utilizing your selected key phrases in this code (more on that in a minute). Obviously, customizing every artist's metatags for their own self-appointed keywords (for tens of thousands of artists!) would be a logistical nightmare for CD Baby, and it is impossible for them to do that. Therefore, your page may not rank so well for your best key phrases. The other important thing you cannot do at CD Baby, Amazon, et al... is develop reciprocal links on your page. When you have your own website you can have a page dedicated to "links". This page will be full of many (tens, hundreds, even thousands, the more the better...) of links to other sites that are related to yours. Of course, this won't do you much good unless they point back to your site (hence the term "reciprocal"). The more sites pointing to yours, the better. This improves your Google "pagerank", which in turn greatly improves your listing position on many other search engines. (More on reciprocal links in a moment). Ok, so we need a web site that points to our store front, but how does one go about building one without hiring expensive help? A good way to build your website yourself is using Netscape Composer. This site building tool comes bundled in with the Netscape browser, which is free. Composer is a "what you see is what you get" application, which basically means you don't need to know html to create a website. Once you get it downloaded, you can start building your site. But first, create a folder somewhere on your hard drive to put your soon to be created files in. Then open the Netscape browser, click on the "Window" toolbar, and select "Composer", and start composing! When first using Composer, you may notice there is no help menu. Don't despair. Trial and error can accomplish more than you think here. Just start trying things and you will catch on. (Also, there have been quite a few tutorials published online. Just enter "Netscape Composer" into a search engine and check out some of the results). The first thing to do is write the html files, each representing a page, that will be the skeleton of your site. Start with the home page. Open Composer, and type the name of your site at the top of the page (or wherever you want it to display). Then in the "file" menu select "save as", name this page "index", and write it to the folder you created. "Index" will not be the title you see when you open the page (you can choose any title you want for display), but will simply be the name of the html file for your home page. You can add all the graphics and text later. Do the same for the other pages on your site. For all these other pages, you can name the html file the same as the title you actually see when you open the page. For example, your links page will probably read "Links" up at the top, or "Related Links" or something to that effect. Whatever it reads, you can name the html file the same thing if you want (for the sake of simplicity) when you save it to that folder you created. Again, once you've created the html file, you can go back and add all the graphics, text, etc... later. Now it's time to create the title tag, description metatag, and keyword metatag for each page. Each page on your site will have a different purpose, and these tags should reflect this. They should all be rich in keywords and/or key phrases that pertain to that page. (Since the pages on your site are related, there will be some crossover, and that's ok). To create these tags, access the page's source code. First, open a page. Then, select "edit" in the "file" menu. Then select "HTML Source" in the "View" menu. The three tags should go in the "head" of the page at the top, between <head> and </head>. You can look at the source code of the page you are now viewing simply by selecting "Source" in your browser's "View" menu, just to get an idea of what these tags look like. In fact, if you want, you can copy and paste my tags into your own header, then just remove my information and put in your own! (For example, my title tag for this page looks like this; <title>Independent Music Distribution and Cheap CD Duplication</title> . So just remove the "Independent Music Distribution and Cheap CD Duplication" and insert your title). Do the same for the description and keywords metatags. Deciding exactly what to write in your tags depends on what keywords and/or key phrases you choose for each page. Remember, these should be words and/or phrases that people who don't know you are likely to put into a search engine when searching for whatever any given page on your site offers. Some pages may offer music (a certain type of music...), other pages may offer links, others information, advice... The keywords/phrases you select for each page should reflect this. For any given page, think about what you might put into a search engine to find what that page is about or what it offers. Brainstorm to create a list of ideas, then narrow it down to your best keywords or phrases. You should only need 2 or 3 good keywords/phrases to describe any given page. (More than this tends to be counterproductive). To narrow down your list, Overture's keyword tool is very useful. This tool tells you how many times a given keyword/phrase was searched for the previous month. Keep in mind that if a term is getting a huge number of searches, it is most likely very competitive, and it will probably be very difficult to rank well for that term. Conversely, if a term gets very few searches it may be easy to rank well, but you won't receive many searches so it doesn't matter! Also keep in mind that none of this matters if a keyword/phrase doesn't accurately describe the page it pertains to. This is the most important thing. (eg; using the key phrase "free cds" may bring some visitors your way, but they will only be satisfied insofar as you can deliver!). When you are finished doing the tags for each page, import the graphics, write the text, create hyperlinks & sample clips, and whatever else you want to do. If you are using Netscape Composer, choose background colors, text styles, colors, and fonts in the "Format" menu. To link to another page, highlight the text that will represent the link, right click on it, select "create link", and choose the file you want to link to. To create a sample clip, do the same thing. You will just point to an audio file (probably an mp3) instead of another page (html file). Click "Browse" (below the "Window" menu), save your work, and test the link. One tip I would suggest is to create a table for each page and expand it so it borders the entire page, then put everything inside it. You can create additional smaller tables inside the big table to contain titles, headings, graphics, links, etc... This will make it easier to control the layout of the page, especially if you don't know html! To insert the initial big table (in Netscape Composer), click on the "Table" menu, select "insert", then "Table", enter "1" for "rows", "1" for "columns", and 100% for "width" (% of cell). Then put your cursor inside the table and expand it by hitting "enter" on your keyboard. Expand it as much as you need to to border the entire page. Manipulate the variables for "rows", "columns", and "width" to enter smaller tables inside the main one. Save your work frequently! When you do something bad, and don't know how to undo it, it's nice to be able to revert back to your last saved copy ('Browse">"Don't Save") to get rid of the problem! Lastly, make sure all your main pages are linked together (like at the bottom of this page). Get started on a "links" page right away, because it will take some time to develop it. This is definitely a process... It involves contacting webmasters of sites related to yours, one at a time, and requesting that you exchange links. When trying to figure out who to contact, plug your key phrases into search engines. The results of these searches are a great place to start. This will give you a good supply of related sites. Then, screen these by making sure they have "links" pages. Related sites with "links" pages equals potential link partners. When you e-mail each one of your potential link partners, make sure to include links to your site for quick reference. I usually send out only 10-12 reciprocal link requests at a time. If you send out too many requests you may find yourself stuck with alot of work getting the new links posted. There will always be some requests that you don't get a response from. After a few weeks, send a follow up request to these, but never any more. Remember, even the sites that don't link up with you provide you with a valuable resource; their links page! Every site on their links page is likely to be a good potential link partner for you too! (Of course this is also true for all the sites who do link up with you). This process ensures you will always have a good supply of potential link partners. Domain Name & Host How about a domain name and a host? A great place to get these is ix webhosting , who offer state of the art web hosting starting at $4.95 a month, and a nice array of plans to choose from. At last check this company was tough to beat. If you really want to keep it cheap, keep in mind that your internet service provider will probably host a small domain (probably around 10 meg) for free. This is enough for a small site, as long as you are careful about the size of your graphics and sample clips. Give em' a call and find out! Above, I mentioned file transfer protocol (aka, "ftp"). This is a tool that enables you to transfer (publish...) your website files to your host. Some hosting programs have a file transfer utility, but it's still nice to have your own separate utility as well. Netscape Composer has a "publishing feature" which is basically a primitive ftp. This will work, but you might as well get a "real" ftp since they are readily available online, sometimes for free. Ipswitch has a good free one called WS FTP LE . Your host will give you the information necessary to login to your ftp and upload your site.
|