I felt the same way about Kickstarter at first. I didn't want to become the musician playing on the street corner begging for money. (Though I did do that once just to see what it was like. The lady sitting in the wheelchair doing nothing made more money than I did.) But after awhile, seeing all of the other projects getting funded on Kickstarter, I decided to give it a try.

I had a good first attempt, but like so many things I was not very experienced on my first try and did not succeed. I was not prepared for the amount of advertising that had to be done in order to achieve a successful campaign. I guess it was also my fault for trying to fund a Christmas album in October. I will be using Kickstarter again for my next project. This time I should be successful. I'm prepared to advertise and I'll be piggybacking on an already popular source (I'm doing an album of Final Fantasy music).

Now I see Kickstarter as a way to advertise future projects to see if there is any interest in them. Also it's a good way to take pre-orders. If the project is successful that means you're giving the fans what they want, and you should continue in that direction. If it's not successful, maybe the album wasn't such a good idea in the first place. Then again, I went ahead and did my Christmas album anyway after my failed Kickstarter attempt. I ended up funding it myself and it's been fairly successful.

So, if Kickstarter can kick start your dreams, please use it and don't think of yourself as a charity case. Our music has to be paid for somehow, so it might as well come from our fans. If you don't want to use it, you'll just have to find some other way to fund your projects. (Playing on the streets isn't bad. Make sure to perform around lots of drunk people, they give out more money.)

- Doug Clyde

ALBEDO MUSIC

I saw the potential for the "pre-order" concept a long time ago, but that's because I'd already seen artists
doing pre-orders for years before Kickstarter existed.

The one reason I don't do a Kickstarter is because the successful ones have well-done professional videos.
They didn't pay nothing for the videos that they have, and I feel that that is really hard to compete
with when you are asking for participation from people not already in your "tribe."

I have thought about putting one together for my next release as a pre-sale to take the bite out of
raising the money on my own.

One thing I noticed is: in the campaign above (and others I've seen) there seem to be too many things
to pledge for. Everything I'm learning from my marketing research suggests that when a potential
customer is presented with too many choices, they don't make any decision at all. I was thinking about
sticking to 4 or 5 good options if I decide to go this route.

John,

     I just launched a Kickstarter project a few days ago. I'll let you know how it goes, and if it's successful or not. Good or bad I'll share what I learned from the experience. After a few days it's progressing well enough to reach the goal if it keeps going up at the same rate. Click through rates are varied. Facebook is high, Bing is average, e-mail is average, banner ads are low, Twitter I'm not sure, and family and friends is pathetic. I considered doing a You Tube featured video, but I have no idea how to do it. I guess I'll have to wait until you make a monthly training for it. I'll keep you posted.

- Doug Clyde

ALBEDO MUSIC

Hey again Doug,

  I just wanted to let you know that I did a search on Kickstarter for "Doug Clyde" and nothing comes up. Maybe still too early, or hopefully not a glitch somewhere?

Also, Kickstarter just launched an app for IPhones and iPads. I will try a search later with the new app and see if anything comes up

     As promised, here is the report from my recent Kickstarter campaign. I advertised on Facebook, Bing, Twitter, and banner ads through Buy Sell Ads. I did some PR articles through a few free services, and submitted it to local media (with only one response from a small local city newspaper which resulted in no publication). It got featured on several small websites, plus a podcast. I sent out messages to my official e-mail list and posted it all over my website. I uploaded the Kickstarter video to You Tube. I sent out e-mails to family and friends, and of course posted on my Facebook and Twitter accounts. I also did some backlinks through Fiverr. Here are the various click through rates I got: Facebook promoted post 3.6%, Facebook Ads 0.9%, Twitter Ad 1.5%, Bing Ad 0.1%, Banner Ads 0.004%. With Facebook and Twitter keep in mind that these were clicks on the ad, and not on the actual Kickstarter link. On Facebook I tried various ads with different texts and demographics, some worked better than others. The image I mostly used on ads was a picture of my head with a red border. I also sent out messages to friends of friends who liked pages similar to the project, but I definitely won't do that again. It's a lot of work with poor results, not to mention the people that completely freak out when you send them messages on Facebook. I got more positive responses than negative, but mostly I got ignored. I could tell the banner ads were performing poorly, so I changed the images, but did not get a better result. SEO work resulted in the top spot on page 2 of both Google and Bing on one key word.

     All of that advertising resulted in only 10 backers with an average of $15 per pledge. The rest of the backers were my Facebook friends, who also gave the biggest pledges at an average of $50 per pledge. I received zero pledges from family members. Chip Davis of Mannheim Steamroller, my main musical idol I might add, was my biggest pledger and also sent his best wishes. He heard about the project from his employee Tom Hartig, who is a friend of mine that I met while touring the Mannheim Steamroller warehouse. So, no matter what happens I'm finishing this project, even if I have to fund it all myself and even if everyone else hates it.

     They say that 82% of projects on Kickstarter are successfully funded once they reach 20% of their goal, and 98% are successful once they hit 60%. I was not able to reach 20% of my goal and therefore was not successful. A similar project on Kickstarter was able to raise over $150,000. I thought for sure I would be able to get at least 1% of that, but I was wrong. It got off to a great start, but then quickly lost steam and died.

     Next time, if I choose to do crowd funding again, I will go through Indiegogo instead. That way I can at least keep the pledges I received without having to meet the goal. Kickstarter requires too much personal information to set up your account, plus the hassle of having to set up an Amazon account as well. Also, I will choose bigger banner ads since I used the 125x125 size. The small size was probably the main reason why the click through rates were so low. I did get some likes to my Facebook and Twitter pages in the process, plus an e-mail sign-up, so it wasn't a complete loss. Before the campaign was over I announced that I was still going ahead with the project, without any funding from Kickstarter, and if anyone wanted to continue to receive updates to sign-up to my e-mail list. Overall, I learned some necessary things, and will definitely do it better next time or at least apply the knowledge to other aspects of my music career.

- Doug Clyde

ALBEDO MUSIC

John,

    Yes, I was sending traffic directly to the campaign on the Kickstarter website. Now that you mention it, I should have sent them to my squeeze page first. That way I could have at least gotten several new e-mails sign-ups. I'm hoping you'll do a Crowd Funding lesson soon, so I that I don't have to keep learning the hard way. Thanks for the tips!

- Doug Clyde

ALBEDO MUSIC

Kickstarter has just announced that it reached $1 Billion in pledges. The best part about this is they've provided a link with some very useful stats. They let us know which countries pledged the most and how much. They have even included which days of the week had the most pledges and which days of the month. As advertisers this provides us with some very useful information, letting us know exactly when people spend the most money. Personally, this will help me to know which days are best for sending out e-mails and doing facebook advertising campaigns. You can find the information at the link below!

https://www.kickstarter.com/1billion

- Doug Clyde

ALBEDO MUSIC

John,

    The biggest takeaways I got were the following:

Outside of the United States, the United Kingdom spent the most money. Even more than Canada, but still only 5% of the total. U.S. was 66%.

$1 Billion was donated by only 5.7 Million people, and only a quarter of them backed more than one project.

62% was pledged by returning backers. Which means 2/3 of the money was donating by only 1/4 of all pledgers.

Wednesday was the highest pledging day of the week, followed closely by Thursday and Tuesday. Friday and Monday were next with Saturday and Sunday the lowest.

The 13th was the highest pledging day of the month followed by the 1st, 14th, 10th, 11th and 12th. The 31st was the lowest of course (only happens a few times a year) followed by the 29th, 30th and 28th.

On the highest grossing day $75 was the average pledge with 1,985 projects getting an average of $2,000 each. Overall the average pledge was $175.

     All very useful stats and very interesting.

- Doug Clyde

ALBEDO MUSIC