10 Top Tips for Selling through My Music Resource

Tip No.1: Use social media platforms and emails to drive awareness

Many music teachers and composers have their own websites bursting with background stories, blog posts, shops and compelling testimonials.  The challenge, as with My Music Resource, is to drive awareness of these website and show people what you have to offer. Most sales through My Music Resource are via direct advertising through social media and/or emails, as opposed to general browsing on the site, so it is important to understand how to use these channels.

Firstly, let’s look at social media. There are numerous music teaching groups on Facebook, many of which allow advertising either on specific days or at any time. Take some time to find groups that are relevant to you and that can reach your target market. Relevant facebook groups may be instrument specific or focus on a certain area such as music teaching games or pedagogy. Posting in the right groups enables you to interact with other music teachers whilst including links from mymusicresource.com to your resources will help direct people to your products, increase awareness and can drive sales and downloads.

Secondly, setting up your own professional/business Facebook page can be a great way of communicating with other music teachers. You can use these pages to gather feedback from followers and inform them of upcoming promotions or new resources. Oh, don’t forget to include your page in your My Music Resource store for a bit of extra pubilicity!

For emailing customers, it is worthwhile investing in a GDPR compliant marketing platform such as MailChimp. MailChimp is an all-in-one tool where you can manage your email lists, create customer email templates and build marketing campaigns. If you are unsure as to how often to send out emails, this article has some useful advice.

Tip No.2: Increase the number of products in your store

The more resources that you make available in your My Music Resource store, the more choice there is for customers. Having a large portfolio of resources increases the likelihood of your products showing up in searches. It can also help you to understand purchase patterns, enabling you to build a picture of which products sell well (e.g. note reading resources), when they sell (e.g. seasonal) and who is buying them.

It’s always good to find your niche and have a good selection of your specialised resources in your store. For example, you may be particularly good at creating fun, educational games for beginner pianists or perhaps you enjoy creating theory workbooks. Whatever your area of expertise, increasing the number of resources increases choice for customers, can result in repeat visits to the site and enables you to build a reputation.

Tip No.3: Everybody loves a freebie!

For several years I worked for Green & Black’s, a premium organic chocolate company. Throughout the year we would attend trade shows and give out free samples of chocolate….you can imagine the queues! Everybody loves a freebie and the benefit of offering freebies is that people get to sample your resources and, if they are impressed, will come back for more.

For My Music Resource, free downloads have been hugely successful in attracting visitors to the site and increasing e-mail subscribers, which in turn drives higher awareness of the site, increases the amount of return visitors and helps to building a reputation. It’s great for music teachers too, who get access to loads of quality resources at no cost!

For Creators, offering the occasional freebie can help you to showcase your resources, bring new followers to your teaching sites and help build on your reputation.

Tip No.4: Include product previews

If you are buying a music book from a music shop, you would almost certainly flick through the pages before making the decision to purchase. This is not possible with digital products, so it is necessary to show potential customers exactly what they are getting in other ways. This can be done through clear and accurate product descriptions and, importantly, through gallery images.

When adding a product to My Music Resource, make sure to add product gallery images that reflect the content of your resource:

• For sheet music, this could be an excerpt of your piece to give people an idea of the style and level. Adding videos of your piece(s) in the product description can be extremely useful for customers, and may result in additional subscribers to your YouTube channel.
• For games, this could be a photograph of the game, instructions and its components.
• For worksheets, choose a good selection of pages and ideally post an image of the pdf pages.

All images are automatically watermarked by the website before being published to prevent them from being used without your permission.

Tip No.5: Set your selling prices at the right level

The value of anything is essentially dependent upon the price that customers are willing to pay for it. When setting selling prices for digital products sold through My Music Resource, you should consider the following:

• Is my resource a single sheet or multiple pages?
• Can it be used for just one lesson or for several lessons?
• Does it cover one specific musical concept or multiple musical concepts?
• What are similar products being sold for?
• What would customers be willing to pay?

As all resources sold through My Music Resource come with a studio licence, a minimum price level of £3 is recommended. This can be discounted using bundles, coupon codes and sales (see Tip no. 6 below).

The following Help Document which gives some advice on how to set selling prices and contains pricing guidelines for different types of resources:

Help > Selling and Sharing Resources > How much should I charge for my resources?

Tip No.6: Make the most of bundles, coupon codes and discounts

If you do want to offer discounts, there are a number of ways that this can be done:

• Bundles are a collection of two or more resources that are sold as a single product. They can be used to combine similar resources and are a great marketing tool to promote and sell multiple resources. For more information, please read the document below.

Help Document: How to create a product bundle

• Coupons codes are a good way to offer discounts to your customers and can help promote sales across your store. Coupon codes can be used to give a % or absolute discount on one or more products for a set period of time. For more information, please read the document below.

Help Document: How to set up a coupon code

• Discounts appear as a ‘sale’ on the product page and are clearly visible to viewers on the site when they click into your resource. Items can be on sale for a specified amount of time.

Tip No.7: Include relevant tags and attributes

The vision for My Music Resource was always to be a user-friendly site with excellent search facilities. Defining clear music specific tags and attributes right from the start was key to achieving this.

It is particularly important to add attributes to your product(s) as these feed into the dropdown filters on the Resources page. Including specific tags will increase the chances of your resource appearing in product searches. You can find out more about tags and attributes in the Help Document below:

Help Document: Guide to setting up a product

Tip No.8: Obtain customer feedback and reviews

All products sold through My Music Resource can be rated and reviewed. Reviews are extremely important because they:

• Help customers decide if a resource is right for them.
• Help build trust, credibility and reputation.
• Allow customers to have a voice and create customer loyalty.
• Can result in further sales if positive.
• Can lead to product improvement.

My Music Resource is currently giving away a free resource to thank any customer who writes a review. Creators should also aim to get feedback through their own marketing channels as this helps them to understand what works well and what could be further improved.

Tip No.9: Be ‘Under the Spotlight’

As of January 2022, six of our Creators have been interviewed for the Creator Spotlight and it has been really fascinating to hear about their musical background, the inspiration behind their musical journey and their wonderful resources / compositions. The feedback from these Creator Spotlights has been overwhelmingly positive and the stories and advice given is always inspirational.

Creator Spotlights will continue throughout 2022, so please do get in touch with me if you’d like to be interviewed.

Tip No.10: Make the most of the support on offer

There is a lot of support available for Creators who sell through My Music Resource. Below are just some of the ways in which we can help you:

• Creator Catch-ups
• Zoom calls
• Help Documents 
• ‘How to’ Videos
• Advertising support

Do get in touch at [email protected] if you’d like any help or advice!