The hardest thing to do is go from nothing to something.

This is true in life, business, and your music career. Getting started in anything involves finding your strength, developing your innate talent and idea, honing it, and promoting it. Then repeat again and again as necessary. There is also some self-analysis involved – for things you are not good at you need to find others to help.

For music, once you feel as if you have ability to be unique or have an impact in some way, you start practicing. Practicing leads to skill development. Then you perform, and that hopefully leads to fans and some justification for your time, energy and faith.

But after you have some core fans, perhaps a somewhat loyal and consistent fanbase, and maybe made a self-published album or two, now what? It seems that many bands get stuck at this level for a long time, most forever. And there is good reason for this. After all:

-Touring is expensive: Even solo acts have a difficult time breaking even while touring.

-There is competition everywhere: While the Internet and reasonably priced quality recording software has given you the ability to do what you are doing now; so to has it provided that same benefit to thousands of others. Now you compete in your local music scene with other musicians and the tech savvy folks using the Internet.

You may think that promoting and competing in your local music scene is different than promoting and competing for time, attention and money over the Internet, but it is no different. You still need to define your target market and learn what gets the attention of that market. Do you need to play certain cover songs to get their attention? Use a more acoustic or personal feel? Is there a certain promotional tactic that works better than others? For example, perhaps handbills for shows works better than email, facebook or myspace blasts. These are questions you likely ponder and analyze while promoting your local gigs. However, this same sort of analysis is required online as well.

With a myriad of online resources available, pre-planning is necessary so that your efforts provide you with the most value for your time. One way to make your marketing time more efficient is to target the people who have the best chance at spreading the word.

“Every industry has people who are worth more, buzz more, care more and buy more than other people,” Seth Godin recently stated. “Don’t treat people the same, find the ones that matter more to you, and hug them.”

Search online for new music similar to yours, communicate with these fans during your search, and you will find out how others end up finding and locating your music. This way you will also find the fans worth “hugging.”

I will be sitting on a panel at the upcoming 5th San Francisco Music & Technology Summit on Monday, December 7, 2009 that will be discussing topics similar to this post, although with more of a technology focus. Thus, several articles with this theme will be published this month.  Hope to see you at the SF MusicTech Summit!