A 10 Step Guide to Selling Rap Beats Online

Many music producers from all over the world dream of selling their rap beats to major record labels. Often times the chance to connect with the right decision maker in the industry never happens. Partly because record label executives are inundated with tons of submissions and usually listen to rap beats only submitted by managers, deejays and music producers they know and typically unsolicited demos end up in FILE 13. That's right...the trash.
Furthermore, if the right industry connection is made often times you spend months and months negotiating your fee and hardly ever seeing any real residual income from your efforts.
So what should a music producer that specializes in rap beats do?
My suggestion is to consider selling your rap beats online and taking advantage of a growing market. Stop limiting yourself to wishing you can connect with a major record label A&R.
I recently researched a few successful websites that already make thousands of dollars online from selling rap beats and have I outlined a step-by-step model based on the their website.
1. Find a domain name that has the words "rap beats or beats" in it. Something like "westcoastbeats.com" or "eastcoastbeats.com." This will help your website rank in the search engines a lot higher than those that do not have keywords in their domain.
2. Next you want find a good hosting company that can hold a considerable amount of bandwidth. Make sure the hosting company also offers a platform for a blog and guest book.
3. Find a graphic designer to make you a logo, header and footer. The cost of this service ranges from $50 to $500.
4. Find a website designer or use one of the templates that come with your hosting package to design your website. I suggest staying away from Flash based website templates that cause your site visitors to have to upgrade to latest version of Flash just to review your website.
5. Create 00:30 second promos for all of the rap beats you plan on selling. Make sure you put your best rap beats first.
6. Create 3:00 to 4:00 minute mp3's of the rap beats you would like to sell. Zip your mp3's into a folder and make sure you include a text file outlining the terms of use.
7. Create a merchant account with PayPal to accept payments when people want to buy your rap beats. Make sure you checkout and file delivery is flawless otherwise PayPal will penalize you and possibly shut down your account.
8. Go to Google and create an AdWords account and start driving traffic to your website.
9. Also sign up with the most popular forums in your niche and make daily posts.
10. Create a YouTube video announcing your website to the world and use your rap beats as the background music.
So what will the initial set up cost be?
Domain Name: $9 to $12
Hosting: $9 a month
Graphics: $50 to $500
Web Design: Free to $2,000
If you would like to check out some of the top websites online that specialize in rap beats then check out Mix Me Entertainment, Beats365 and Beats2Rap2. The owners of these websites have sold thousands of beats and offer other useful information that can help you get your music career off the ground.