Big Jason Henderson put out a comment on his Facebook wall last week that said:

“…is thinking someone at Starbucks HQ needs a beating for offering a free drink after you do an online survey BUT doesn’t ask for your email address. WTH? offer a free Grande and upgrade it to Vente for email. Offer a scone with email. Offer discounts and periodic free coupons for email. Or how about getting their cell for txt specials. How about iphone/cell app and geo-target those suckers!”

I was on my way out of the office on Friday to the Iowa State Fair to go see Keith Urban when I read that. It got me really thinking.

Early on in my marketing career, I worked with all kinds of entertainers helping them with the business aspect of their show business. Most of them were incredible performers, but very few were good business people or marketers.

Which is why most of them are nothing more than just a bunch of broke ass bands & entertainers.

It still never ceases to amaze me the number of entertainers and bands that don’t have an opt-in form on their website. They have “fan clubs” and forums, but absolutely NO WHERE is there an opt-in form. It just absolutely BLOWS MY MIND.

Last summer I was watching America’s Got Talent and was bored one night so I decided to take the top 10 or so finalists and look them up on Google. WOW! Only one of them actually had what I would consider to be a professional website, two of them had absolutely no web presence, and I don’t think a single one of them had an opt-in form on their website.

Folks, this is what separates the men from the boys.

Normally, if you were a professional entertainer you would have some sort of list building tool on your site. As an amateur, who has never had an ounce of exposure, now you are one of the finalists on the biggest talent show of the summer that’s going to bring your website tons of traffic, and you don’t have anything as simple as an opt-in form on your website….. then you deserve to be homeless (or at least remain an amateur).

One of the ladies that was a finalist, that I remember looking up, had some sort of dog that could do some pretty cool tricks. It was stated on the television show that she trained dogs fulltime, competed for a living, blah, blah, blah. I checked out her website and it was done on some free crappy hosting service with a lot of pop-ups, banner ads, etc that weren’t hers. She had nothing about America’s Got Talent on there (no site bling) and the only thing she offered was like 1-on-1 training lessons with your dog for like $25/hour.

Now, I’m not very smart at math, but that doesn’t even sound like a business that would be making a profit at the end of the year. That’s about $52,000 per year working full-time as a trainer. That doesn’t include any business expenses. Clearly, you would be better off working for someone else in that situation.

Here’s how I start thinking a little bit crazier than the average “Jane”. If I were in her shoes you would come to my website, I would offer you an ebook or video training course for free about the “Single Greatest Dog Trick You Can Teach Fido in 10 Minutes or Less” as long as you gave me your e-mail address. This would be in efforts to get you on my email list where you would receive communication from me 1-2 times per week. I would also make sure that I put you on a follow-up autoresponder to get you a low-cost trial into my Inner Circle or DVD of the Month club at $29.95/mo. From there I would also share with you some of the various products we had and also allow you the opportunity to enroll in a GROUP COACHING program. Want to know how I train my competition dogs and would like to work with me to train your dog? That’s fine, because I only accept 10 clients at a time for $500/mo each (Remember my national credibility? That’s why I can charge that price).

Let’s roll with some financials over the course of the year.

500 Inner Circle Members x $29.95/mo = $14,975/mo
Additional courses = $5,000/mo
Personal training (10 clients at a time only) x $500/mo = $5,000/mo

Total monthly revenue = $24,975
Yearly revenue = $299,700

Now, doesn’t that look better than the $52,000 you would’ve been making previously? Of course it does. These numbers I shared with you are probably pretty conservative. There are a lot of other products and services off the top of my head that I could think of offering also, but I don’t want to complicate this example.

Let’s take this from a different angle. Instead of an entertainer, let’s look at some sort of decent regional band with a good following. Here is what I’d do (and I honestly have done this with a real band before and it worked wonders).

I am not going to take this in all the different monetization areas that I can think of, but just want to share with you a quick example of how a band could make money off of a CD project before they even walk in the studio (and I’ve done it before).

The regional band I was working with probably saw between 50,000 — 100,000 fans within 6 months. I started getting them to build their email list at the concerts via several methods. We also put an opt-in form on their site. When whomever opt-ed in, we gave them like a couple never released songs and also some great footage clips of a live concert. Both of these things had never been seen before. Over the course of the next 6 months, we got their opt-in list to about 15,000 people.

Ding, ding, ding……it’s recording time.

I worked with them to craft this brilliant email campaign for their fans on the e-mail list to pre-purchase their newest CD that they were in the studio making at the time. I think they estimated the cost to cut the CD was going to be about $13,000. Over the course of the next couple weeks we pitched their list of 15,000 people to pre-purchase the CD and save $5 plus get another couple cool things (that didn’t cost us hardly anything).

The result?

We converted nearly 30% of that list to pre-buy the CD. That means we pre-sold 3,000 copies of the CD and made about $30,000. Their entire CD project was paid for plus some before they even finished recording it. Of course, they were amazed.

I know of some other regional type of acts that are just frickin KILLING it because they know business and marketing. Most bands and entertainers don’t. That’s why fortunately, they are getting to do what they love to do, but unfortunately most of them are just broke ass bands and entertainers.