Ariel Hyatt founded Ariel Publicity & Cyber PR and her firm has worked with over 1,000 musicians and bands of all genres. Her company is now 100% digital and helps artists increase their online exposure. Sign Up here:http://www.arielpublicity.com. Follow Hyatt on Twitter @cyberpr.

It happened a few weeks ago in Australia.  I was standing at the opening cocktail reception for APRA’s Song Summit Music Conference overlooking Darling Harbor in Sydney, and I was chatting with a perfect stranger (who it turns out is a very famous Australian musician with quite a few top 10 hits in Oz).  Noting my foreign accent he asks “What brings you here?” “I teach artists about online marketing and social media.”  I answer sheepishly, because this news is not always met with elated enthusiasm.

Shane Blay is a guitarist/vocalist for the indie band, Oh, Sleeper. The Texas based group has been compared to Slipknot and Underoath. You can learn more about the band here. Follow the band on Twitter @weareohsleeper.

For the past five years my brothers in Oh, Sleeper and myself have sacrificed our lives, our time, relationships, birthdays, holidays, health (haha) to travel around and play shows for our fans. Not to say that isn’t been a fun ride!

I would just like to bring a few things to our fans attention.

I would like to show you guys an average day in finances for a “mid-level” band like us. I’m going to breakdown the average monetary ins and outs of a day on tour.

On tour, bands have two ways to make money – guarantees and merchandise.

Twitter is a great tool for musicians to market their music, but many musicians are unsure how it can be helpful to them. The typical musician spends much of their time being musically creative, but many musicians who should be using Twitter to market their music aren’t sure where to start or how to use it to its full potential.

Luckily, Twitter is simple and easy. The only work that really needs putting in is a little thought and some time on a regular basis, and I’d like to share a few ways that this popular social network can supercharge your music career:

Find New Fans of Your Music

Many people are on Twitter these days – and many of them are music fans that live in your town, and the cities you visit. With Twitter’s search function, you can find local music lovers who enjoy the style of music that you play. Twitter also allows for two-way communication via replies and direct messages, so you have the opportunity to make true connections.

Internet music marketing is a major struggle among many who have tried and failed repeatedly. I was one, however, I somehow persisted through until I was comfortable enough to teach about it. I’m here to briefly disclose 3 important techniques I’ve learned about online music promotion.

1) Your Fans – Your Business

A person does not like to be turned down by their idol by numerous ignored messages. The amount of messages you have not responded to over the internet, is approximately the amount of money missing from your wallet multiplied by $5, or whatever amount you sell your music or product for.

In an ideal world, the music is all that would matter. You would play and the legions of fans would come. This is not, unfortunately, an ideal world, which means that you need to market yourself if you want to be successful. Fortunately, we are living in a time when marketing your music and yourself has never been easier. The Internet has brought the whole world closer together, and this has made it easier and cheaper to both contact your fans and potential fans as well as made it easy to give them a wide variety of stuff to sell. But marketing can seem overwhelming, so here are six ways to market yourself and your music:

Have an Online Presence

Do you want a successful, stable and rewarding music career? Would you like to know exactly what record companies, producers, and management companies are looking for when seeking out new artists?

There are many great musicians who are not able to build a successful music career because they do not know what it is these companies want from them. As a result, many struggle and wonder why they are unable to “make it” even though they may be incredible musicians with great songs. What usually happens is that people start to believe the common myth about luck. They believe that you need to “get lucky” in order to “make it”. The result is that most musicians give up on their dreams and get a normal (non music related) day job.

Because you are reading this article, I can imagine that you have probably faced similar challenges. I know how you feel, because I went through the same depressing struggle for years and have seen hundreds of great musicians travel along the same path. But over time, I have discovered that in many cases the lack of success is caused by the musicians (including myself in the past) simply not knowing what it is the music business companies want from new artists.

Everyone wants to learn audio recording don’t they? It’s so easy and, as it turns out, inexpensive to do. You can do everything from transferring cassettes and records (remember those) to CDs, create audio books, voice-overs, put great audio onto your video files instead of the crappy audio that usually comes from camcorders. You can release a CD, start your own record company, be a 1-person band, etc. Audio is everywhere. Have I convinced you? Good, now read on:).

Before you do anything else, read the rest of this article. It will be your shield against the advice you might get from a salesman at your local music store, or from some other audio experts. Here are the five secrets:

You DON’T need to lay down a bunch of money to get started.

It is very possible to sell your beats online and make money from your hard work. There a quite a few people who believe making money online selling their beats is not possible and I want to offer some clarification as to the possibility of making money with your beats. Since we are in the internet age selling rap beats is much easier than it has ever been in the history of the music industry. The internet has made it possible for you to make a lot of money without being ’signed’ as a producer on any label.

In the past in order to make money from your rap beats you would need to be signed to a label and work with the artist on that label or you would have to network continuously with rappers and upcoming artists so you could provide tracks for them. The internet has eliminated the need for all of that by giving you the ability to put your music in front of people that are searching for rap beats. The phrase rap beats is searched over three hundred thousand times a month and ‘beats’ is searched over five million times a month. These searches represent potential customers for your services.

You’ve just come together as a band and you’re ready to gig. But when you approach clubs to play they want to know where you’ve played in their market before and what kind of draw you usually bring. (Draw means how many paying fans usually come to one of your shows.)

If you’re a new band then your answer would be “we haven’t played before so we don’t really know how many paying fans will come.” And you know what will happen with that answer. They’ll tell you to come back when you have a fan base.

You’re thinking, “Yeah, but we’re such a great band your customers will love us.” The reality is clubsdon’t have customers, bands have customers. People go to a certain club to see a certain band. They don’t go to the Club X instead of Club Y because of the club; they go there because of the band that will be playing.

Social media is the buzz phrase of the web today, however, ask any two web professionals what “social media” actually is and you will get two differing answers. In fact, social media means different things to different people including the most important group of all, the users.

Users are bringing change to the web because of how their web surfing habits are evolving. This is leading to new and creative ways to satisfy the changing demands for how information and content is searched and used.

Social Media Defined

The World Wide Web was conceived as a medium for information exchange between users, however, it is only with the advent of Social Media innovations this has become reality for ordinary users as individuals and collectives including businesses. Social Media is not defined by “What It Is” but more by “What It Does” – it is the enablement of any user to share information whether uploading it to the web for others or viewing and downloading content for their own use.

Some of the most common errors songwriters make, are copyright related. Many a time an individual has asked me for help after discovering his song had been used in a movie, commercial or someone’s CD without his permission.

My initial response is to ask if he has at least received a written credit on the CD, movie etc.

“No,” he says, shaking his head.

“Okay, did you register the song through a performing right society?”

“Ah, yes, ASCAP,” he ventures at length.

At last, I think, we’re getting somewhere! So, we go online to the ASCAP site checking their “ACE Title” search and find the title with the same writer credits, and surprise, surprise, his name is absent!

Before the days of internet – becoming a successful songwriter depended on a whole different set of factors. For example, as a non-performing songwriter, you would have needed to go out and find an artist or band willing to record your song, or have a music publisher get a cover for you.

As a performing artist, you would at least have had a vehicle for your songs subject of course to whether you or your band had a record deal.

A great deal of the “ifs and buts” of success would have depended not just on the commercial potential of your song, but on who was out there promoting for you, and how much marketing power your music publisher or record company (if you were an artist), had. Of course, much of that still applies today. So why has the internet had such an enormous impact on song writing, commercial recordings and tons of other commodities? I can tell you. Two things: digital, and distribution.

Online music promotion is an essential part of any artist’s successful marketing campaign in the “new music” business model.

The music business has been forced to change its business model as a result of the internet. This in the long term is good for musician’s bands and artists as they have more control of promoting themselves online using the various platforms of web 2.0 and are not as beholden to record companies as they were.

So how do we market music online?