This Makes Everything Work Better

Hey, what's up gigging pros. It's Jared Judge. Welcome to another episode of The Gigging Musician Podcast. This is the second episode that I promised you after a previous episode about clear communication. I'm on my way back from those two venue tours. First one was the villa Parker event venue in Parker, Colorado about an hour away from me. The second one was at the pace Center, which is I think Performing Arts Center. I think that's what it's called, like Parker arts, something. So it was actually more of like a performing arts complex that had several private event venues built right in, it was awesome. Both tours were actually really awesome. And actually, that was what I was intending to talk to you guys about last episode, but we ran out of time. So if by now you've been a loyal listener of The Gigging Musician Podcast, you know that my favorite way of getting private amendment gigs, the ones that pay you lots of cash, is by partnering and getting on preferred vendor lists with these venues and event planners in the events industry. Because they are the best source of them, if you can partner with them, they will literally recommend you to their clients. And then there's no price resistance. It's like, Hey, you gotta go with that guy, Jared, he sounds awesome. He was just at my venue last week, and you totally have to hire him for your Christmas party. And so that's why I love doing it. It doesn't cost any money. It does cost time and gas if you're driving out to these places, but it's so worth it. Because it is the gift that keeps giving once you get on their preferred vendor list and they do it, they recommend you over and over again. So I hope you're sold on that strategy. But I wanted to share with you a an amplifier for that strategy. You know, the strategy on its own works, and it works very well. I've gotten on tons of preferred vendor lists just by visiting these venues and playing for them or showing them a video of me playing on my phone. And that totally works. But I want to share with you something that I've been experimenting with. And it's been so successful, that I'm now doing it at every single one of these visits. And you'll probably notice on my extreme strings.com website, what I've been doing. So one of my marketing mentors, Russell Brunson. In one of his books, I think it was an expert secrets, he wrote a trilogy of three books on marketing with the middle one is called expert secrets. And in it, one of the things he says, he suggests is publishing. Right, you have to produce new content, either on your website or on some sort of publishing platform. So that people recognize that you are an expert at what you do, hence the word expert secrets. And once they recognize you, as an expert, they will trust you enough to do business with you. So I had been struggling with how do I publish for my musical act? You know, of course, I could do social media and post little YouTube and Tiktok shorts of me playing, you know, my my electric violin, which I have done, and I still do. But to me that didn't quite match with the publishing that Russell Brunson was suggesting he suggested three options for you to publish. If you are going to be successful at this. I'll go through the options. was to do a podcast. It's kind of like what I'm doing right now. It's a little meta talking about the podcast. So he suggests, you know, recording yourself talking about certain things or interviewing different guests about things, and then publishing that on podcasting platforms. And that works really well if your audience is one that listens to podcasts. However, many people private planning private events, I do not believe they listen to podcasts about planning private events. Correct me if I'm wrong, I would love to know because I'll start a podcast right away. And the second one is YouTube videos, which is kind of like a video style podcast, where you get on camera, and you do similar things of what you would do on a podcast, which is talk about things that are important to you, and interview people on video. And that one is actually a little bit more, I would say people in the private event planning industry would probably be a little bit more open to watching videos as opposed to podcasts. However, I still don't think that's the best one for what we're doing. You know, I put a huge asterisk because you do need to put videos of your performances on YouTube and your website. But I think that's again different than publishing publishing is about putting out consistent content on a schedule so that people know what to expect. Now, the third and final option is The one that I have decided to go into, and I think, will have the biggest impact if you decide to do it too, which is blogging. Blogging is basically the same as publishing articles on your website, kind of like what newspapers do they publish articles or newsletters, you have seen blogs out there, there are blogs that publish different musicians. But why not have a blog on your own music website. And the idea here is you're going to publish content, not just content that you and other musicians care about, but content that the people who can hire you to perform at their events would care about. And so I'd been sold on this idea for a while, but was struggling to figure out the content piece, how do I was like, what content would they care about when they're planning their private events. And so there are lots of rabbit holes, I could go down on this, one of them being like, you know, checklists of tips to avoid a disaster at your wedding, or, you know, seven songs that would make a perfect corporate event, entrance music or something like that, which that I'm doing that that is part of the blogging strategy. I'm already doing that. So you can see a couple of articles that I've written in that vein. However, I told you at the beginning of this podcast, this is an amplifier of The Gig Vault strategy of partnering with venues and event planners. What I'm doing, and I think this is very clever, I'm giving myself a pat on the back, was actually inspired by one of our Fulltime Music Academy members, Roger Harrison, down in Tampa Bay, is that when I go on these venue tours, I asked the person who is the manager, or the owner of the venue, I tell them, Hey, I just started a blog on our website. And I want to feature your venue. And why I think this works really well is because people who are in the process of planning a private event, they need to shop for a venue, they need to get inspiration and ideas. And this is a great way to kill like two three birds with one stone by interviewing the event planner, or the venue owner, and then publishing an article about the venue that I just visited on my blog. And so I've been doing this, I think I've done five interviews so far. So I visited five venues recently. And every single one of them, I tell them, I'm publishing a blog, I would love to feature your venue if you're down for it. And almost actually all of them have said yes, I am so down for this. Let's do it. And why would they be so down for it, which is because they are kind of like musicians, they're trying to market their own services. And they recognize getting an article published about them is a great marketing opportunity. Even if my blog has no readers. Like I don't tell them how many readers I have. In fact, I don't even really know right now, how many readers my blog has, I could check the Google Analytics on that later. But so they're just appreciative of this opportunity, which is at no cost to them. It just takes them a little bit of time. And so they've all said, yes. So when I'm taking these venue tours first, they show me all of their really cool spots at their venue and I pull out my violin and I play for them or show them a video. And then I said, Do you mind if we sit down for five minutes, and I interview you so that I could put together a really good blog article? And they say yes. And then I sit down and I ask them questions, and I record the interview on my voice memos app on my phone. I do this for several reasons. And the big one is that I actually don't write the articles myself. Ooh, big surprise. Yeah. So I actually have my assistants, which is the Fulltime Music Academy Dream Team. They're my support staff that I lend out to my Fulltime Music Academy members, I have them write the articles. And the way that they're able to do this is I send them the audio from the, from the interviews that I do. And what they do next is they transcribe it which they use an AI transcription tool to do this. And they get an A text Trin transcription of it, which then they feed to chat GPT with a special prompt that I created, that when they feed the prompt and the transcription of the interview to chat GPT it outputs a an amazingly well written blog article featuring that venue, which is pretty awesome, right? That saves me so much time, all that I need to do is do the interview and then send the audio file to the dream team. And they output an amazing article. The last step is I do take pictures of each venue. So I send the pictures of the venue to the dream team and a video of me playing which that reminds me I need to ask the last venue I did at the venue tour I did at the pace Center. She took some videos of me, I have to ask her to send those to me. But then I will send them As pictures and videos to the dream team, and they will log into my website, and then they will just publish the blog post. And it's like, almost completely hands off for me, which is amazing. And so I've noticed that when I do this, it makes the venue owner or manager more interested in what I do, which is a great thing. Because we want them to put us on their preferred vendor list. This is an amplifier, it's an it's a value add for them, I'm always trying to look how can I add more value to the situation, because I believe when you give more than you take, you get a lot more in return. kind of counterintuitive, but like giving more helps you get more. And this is one of the ways that I do that. But also, this is how I leverage and delegate things. So I don't have to be the one doing all the hard work. So that's kind of the basic outline. It's not really just the outline, I gave you the step by step, let's be real here. But I imagined there will be not many musicians who take me up on this. You might say something like, Oh, this is too hard. How could I possibly do this? Well, that's why I'm telling you. I don't do all of this myself. I have people who helped me do it. I have tools that help me do it. And you also can have access to those tools too. But it all starts inside a Fulltime Music Academy. Yep, you're wondering, Where's the pitch gonna happen bow here it is. So if you want access to the chat, GBT prompts the list of venues to go to. And more importantly, you want access to the dream team that is actually reserved for my Fulltime Music Academy Gold members. That is the medium level, there are three tiers of Fulltime Music Academy. And at the middle level is when I actually let you use our virtual assistants. So you get some support staff helping you out with this. And they're trained to do all this, you don't have to teach them, you just have to want this. And then you have to ask them to do it, which is as simple as filling out a form. So if you're interested in joining Fulltime Music Academy gold, I do have a couple spots open that I could open up to you who've listened to this podcast right now. But you have to really want it. And you have to, you know, be a good fit for it. Like this is not a good fit for people who just want to build an original music career. This private events really are for cover musicians who get if you're an original musician, if you play covers, in addition, the originals, so totally work for you. So I really only want to work with good fits, who are the ones who care about the music business side, and who care about private events and understand that this is not a game for everybody to play. This is a game for those who want high paying gigs that you don't have to tour. And you don't have to basically sacrifice your soul to the devil to do so if you're interested in Fulltime Music Academy gold, I have a couple of spots open right now. All you have to do is go to FulltimeMusicAcademy.com/gold and that will tell you more about the pricing, what's included, and then a way to join. So I hope that helps. And yeah, let me know what you think about this. Again, I don't think many musicians will take me up on this, but the ones that do are the ones that will get ahead. So go to FulltimeMusicAcademy.com/gold Check it out. And thanks for tuning in to another episode of The Gigging Musician Podcast. Remember, "Your music will not market itself!" Bye everybody.