It is said that the best sales person is one who doesn’t actually do the selling. His job is to cultivate an enthusiastic team who will do the promotion for him. Ten hands are better than two hands. And so the same goes for your music.

The question you should always ask internally (or sometimes externally if the situation is appropriate) when speaking to someone is “how I can be of service to you?”. By doing this, you’ll allow yourself to do the things you enjoy and share the work of music promotion with your fans - the people who like your music.

One great tactic I love is what I call Artist Partnership Programs (APP for short). Setting them up doesn’t take long - it requires a bit of out-of-the-box creative thinking and effective planning. APPs are a simple and exciting way to get people who like your music together and create a community atmosphere around you, the artist, whilst you grow your music career and get it promoted.

In terms of music promotion, it simply means those individuals who get onto your exclusive artist partnership program (or come up with a fancier name!) will get a certain percentage of any of your music and merchandise that they sell. If they’re no good at marketing, you can give them free guides or some tips to help them.

Here are a few things to look out for:-

* Perhaps set up the program with three levels. Bronze, Silver and Gold levels for the amount of sales each partner makes. The more sales, the more they move up. The more extra rewards and benefits they make. Make it more than an affiliate program. Add the extra bonuses such as “dinner with the artist”, “two hours with the artist”, “shopping with the artist”, “free guitar lessons with you”, etc.

* Also consider holding monthly or bimonthly APP group meetings where all of your partners can get together, build a community, run bring-a-friend offers so you continue to grow your networks. Once you start to build an atmosphere, it becomes very attractive.

* Link up with local shops, retail and superstores and get them to become partners. Get your music in as many places as possible and offer your rewards and incentives.

Think about it. Ten hands are better than two. 50 hands are better than two. So you can definitely offer rewards and not quibble about it. Go set up your APP and start to build a community. Have faith in it working and it will.

I was at a Marianne Williamson talk in July last year and she said, “there is no such thing as a faithless person. You either have faith in miracles, or you have faith in disasters.”

The same thing goes for this.

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