It can be hard when you start off either making hip hop beats or writing rap songs? I know it all too well. At one stage I was there too. When I started off I didn't have any of these tools, nor did I have the knowledge to use them. After some time and dedication I acquired these tools one by one to help me with my online music business. I recommend these tools to hip hop beat makers and hip hop artists because I use them both, to help make and promote my music online.
Disclaimer: Some of the links below are referral links , at no extra cost to you I will earn a small commission if you decide to purchase these products. Since I have used all of these products online for my own websites I have confidence in my recommendation based on my own experience with these companies. If you do go through my referral link thanks for your support.
WEBSITE RESOURCES
Most of my websites are hosted with Bluehost. With all the website training courses out here most of them recommend Bluehost.
The main reason is due to their easy of use and quick 1 click install. It's cheap and easy to use and they have an excellent support team.
I would always recommend Bluehost for anyone starting a new website today.
Thrive Themes has revolutionized the way I design and manage my website. Gone are the days of painstakingly tweaking code and waiting for page reloads; with Thrive Themes, I can create stunning landing pages in mere minutes.
As a long-time WordPress user, I was initially skeptical about deviating from the familiar platform. However, once I experienced the ease and efficiency of Thrive Themes, I knew there was no turning back. The completely visual editor is a game-changer, allowing me to design with precision and speed like never before.
One of the most significant advantages of Thrive Themes is its "live" editor feature. No more waiting for page reloads or navigating through clunky interfaces. With Thrive Themes, every edit is instantly visible, saving me valuable time and frustration.
But what truly sets Thrive Themes apart is its comprehensive suite of sales page-building tools. From sales pages to squeeze pages to download and thank you pages, Thrive Themes has everything I need to create compelling marketing content, all within a single platform.
What's even more remarkable is that you don't need any website coding experience to utilize Thrive Themes effectively. Its intuitive interface and drag-and-drop functionality make it accessible to users of all skill levels, empowering anyone to create professional-grade sales pages with ease.
In essence, Thrive Themes isn't just a replacement for the outdated WordPress editor; it's a complete solution for building high-converting marketing pages in minutes. Whether you're a seasoned marketer or a novice entrepreneur, Thrive Themes is your ticket to unlocking the full potential of your online presence.
Since I started my own online music business I have used Aweber as my email marketing software. It is vital for any online business to have an email list to reach out to their fans.
If I had one piece of advice for any artist starting out today, I would strongly urge them to start their email list today.
You can start with Aweber today with a Free 30 Day Trial.
Tools For Rap Artists
Hip Hop Lyricist Guide Ebook:This is an A-Z book for hip-hop artists that struggle with writer's block.
One of the main features of the book is to teach you habits to help you create hip hop lyrics.
This 253 page ebook is a perfect guide for any hip hop artist that is looking for guidance with wordplay, rhymes, and flow to keep your listeners rewinding again.
This a video create by freestyle rapping coach Pat Para. Pat has been teaching freestyle rapping in after school programs for years.
Here he decided to put all of his teachings into this video course for people to learn online. This is video course has now helped over 1,627 people start freestyle rapping.
Freestyle Rapping is the art of improvising lyrics on the spot. It will help you rap better, perform more confidently, and naturally write amazing rap lyrics.
Freestyle rapping can also help with songwriting for any genre of music, getting in a creative 'flow state', and public speaking.
DistroKid is an online music distributor for independent artists. It's the fastest way online for independent artists to get music into some of the top music stores and online streaming websites.
Some of which include Apple Music, Spotify, iTunes, Google Play & YouTube Music, Amazon, Pandora, Deezer Tidal Napster (beta) iHeartRadio (beta) ClaroMúsica, Saavn, Anghami (beta) and many others
It's very affordable compared with some of the other online distributors. It also has other features like legacy options just in case anything happens to you Distro Kid won't take your music down so your family can continue to earn from your royalties.
Another great feature is how has the Youtube Music content ID system to track if any unauthorised uploads of your music have occurred on Youtube. You can also control this feature by whitelist certain channels that you have given permission to use your music on Youtube.
Get 7% off Distrokid using my referral link here.
Shaun Letang from Music Industry How To brings you in on some hard hitting strategies that will gain you more fans, and that will actually work in this day and age. Music Industry How To (http://www.musicindustryhowto.com/) is the best source of music business guidance for independent and signed musicians! Only giving useful and straight forward advice, iMusicAdvice sets it's self apart from all the others by cutting out all the fluff. With thousands of people viewing the site daily and growing, if you've ever wondered how to do anything music business related, this is the place to go!
Beat Maker Tools
New Beat Site That Pays Artists & Producers In 3 Ways
Are you looking for a new way to sell beats online? Check out this brand new beat selling website with a Twist by Allen Brown aka FatFingers {Rocbattle Creator}.
Allen is now back with a unique beat selling website that pays artists and producers commissions for promoting one another. Let's face it. The old way of selling beats online is outdated and inefficient. One of the major flaws with promoting yourself on some of the major beat selling websites is that you only make money if someone buys a beat from you.
Music producers are sharing their beat links all over the internet, but they're only paid if someone buys a beat from them. Allen's Beats Website is the solution to this problem. As a member, you will make more money when you promote your beats and all the beats on the website.
When you share your beat link and customers sign up, they are now considered your customers. Artists and Music Producers Are Getting Paid following a SIMPLE and EASY Beat Promotion Program.
Airbit Beat Store
I have used Airbit {Myflashstore} to sell my beats online for the last 6 years. All my payments have been sent on time with Paypal.
They have a new integrations and upgrades ,where beat makers can get paid to their bank account using stripe.
Also other beat makers can now sell other members beats and split the commission.
One of my favourite features with Airbit.com in the mobile beat player and the integration with my email marketing software Aweber.
The Modern Producers Drum Kits
Possibly my favourite website to buy hip hop drum kits to help me make my beats.
It's much easier for me to mix my rap beats when I can trust the site that I bought my samples from.
The Producers Choice has all types of rap drums to help inspire you to make the best beats you can make. Trap Kits, Tribal, Sample , Boom Bab , Vox Samples / Vox Loops, Ethnic Drums and Industry Standard Kits.
Open Broadcasting Software {OBS} is the tool in which I use to screen record beat making videos. I also use OBS to help stream live video too Facebook and Youtube, as I found the using Youtube Google hang out feature is fine for conversations it's not the best for showcasing live internal audio from Logic Pro X.
Using OBS to showcase my hip hop beats and how I make beats is another way I maximise promotional power from one beat. It also showcase's my personality making my website more approachable for people. OBS is free to use for both Mac and PC and it's used by most Youtube gamers.
I would highly recommend that you begin showcasing your beat making videos using OBS as an easy way to promote both your beats and your drum kits. Also, I found carrying out these videos enabled me to become more comfortable with vlogging and sharing my background as a beatmaker. Watch My OBS Demo Video
Social Media Promotion Tools
Follow Adder For Instagram
Follow Adder for Instagram is a tool that I use to help build up my Instagram following.
Most of us online use the follow for follow method to help build up our social media followers.
Follow Adder just removes the time consuming grunt work that comes with the follow for follow method.
You can set it to target specific people on Instagram. So you can target people by followers of popular accounts that you follow, or with specific keywords.
I created a mini video course here on how to use it.
Tubebuddy is an amazing tool that helps minimize the mundane tasks with uploading a video to Youtube. You can look up the tags that other popular videos have.
You can bulk copy, tag, descriptions , cards and annotations. One of my favourite features is the ability Tubebuddy gives you to syndicate all your Youtube videos Facebook and Twitter.
TubeBuddy has tons of other features , and they have videos to explain how to use all the tools the have too offer you.
This is definitely a time saving tool when it comes to uploading Youtube videos.
Recurpost Social Media Scheduler
Social Media Scheduler With Repeating Schedules RecurPost allows you to automatically share your updates at the best time, saving you countless hours and increasing your social media engagement every week. Before I found RecurPost I was spending hours of my time every week planning, developing and scheduling content for my social media profiles.
I wasn't finding the time to write new blogs and refresh my content. RecurPost Changed All Of That. Now I spend my time creating new content, building relationships and most importantly, supporting clients. RecurPost is a must have social media program for small businesses.
For a long time I was looking for a tool that could help with editing images like YouTube Tumbnails, Facebook Ads, Web Image Content. Then recently I came across this website call Canva.
Design with millions of stock photographs, vectors and illustrations.
Canva is a simple online image editing tool. It's perfect for musicians, podcasters, bloggers and YouTubers. Canva is free to join and provides you with a ton of social image templates to use to help you create mixtape covers, album art, Youtube thumbnails, press kits, and images for social media.
The best thing about Canva is that they have the correct image sizes for these social media channels. One of the biggest things Canva has enabled my site to achieve is amazing Youtube thumbnails, which help my videos stick out more clearly on YouTube.
It's not as in depth like that of photoshop nor it's that complicated to use. If you need some help with Canva watch this demo video where I show you how and why I use Canva a lot in my music production business.
This WordPress plugin enables you to lock certain content like free beats or mixtapes, in exchange for a social follow or social shares. This a great tool for spreading the word about your website. Also I found it quite useful for building up my social followers on twitter and promoting new blogposts.
This has to be one of the coolest tools out there on the web. Sniply enables you to create a little pop up message to be added to any link you send out on social media.
This tool is great for promoting new mixtapes , free beats , squeeze pages and building a following on social media.
Watch My Video Tutorial For More Information
OUTSOURCING FOR MUSICIANS
Onlinejobs.ph is an outsourcing website where you can hire Philipino virtual assistants. I previously used sites like Odesk, Freelancer and Fiverr to hire help, but when I needed the same people they end up, busy or more expensive than the last time I hired them.
I knew I needed to hire some help full time with the daily tasks of creating content and managing all my websites. So I hired people from the Onlinejobs.ph website which was affordable to me and gave me less daily chores to do and spend more time making music and better business decisions.
You can't do everything yourself. If you really want to be successful you need to build a team. Now that I have hired help I can never go back to doing all the work on me again. It's just impossible. There is only 24's in a day and 7 of those are for sleeping.
I hire Philipino Virtual Assistants because they are very influenced by American culture and they have excellent English. They do a lot of transcribing, article writing and adding content to my websites and social channels. Freeing up a ton of time for me to make beats.
This is the best music marketing advice I can give you. Hire some help !!!
This has to be an underrated resource for hip hop artists. I feel that a lot of artists are not using Fiverr to it's potential. Keep away from paying for twitter Followers and fake Facebook likes.
There are tons of quality hiphop blogs on here for just five dollar submission fee. Also if you are in a tight budget you can get mixtape graphics , DJ Drops and Music radio submissions.
More Useful Tools & Resources
Freelancer: I have used freelancer for a whole host odd jobs to help with music promotion.
I have gotten people to help with music submissions to hip hop blogs. Other times I get people to create mixtape covers for me and graphic design, or help with submitting a guest posts to other blogs online. Freelancer is an all round of a website with tons of affordable talented people.
99 Designs: This is the site is great for getting quality graphics. The site is pretty pricey but you are guaranteed quality.
Hoosuite Is a social scheduling app that allows me to bookmark and share all my favourite links to my social profiles. The chrome extension makes life so much easier.
Buffer This app is similar to that of Hootsuite but I tend to only use it for my own content. This way I schedule all of my content with buffer app and all the content from other sites I use HootSuite. Again the chrome extension is a life saver.
Website Analytics
Google Analytics: A website statistics tool that I use to monitor my website traffic.
Statcounter: This is a website statics tool that I use to see where my website traffic is coming from and what they are doing on my site.
BEATMAKING SOFTWARE AND TOOLS
Logic Pro: I love logic. I took a course in logic back in 2008 and I use it for 95% of all the beats I make online. I feel like that logic is the composer digital audio work station and with all the build in stock sounds and plugins are amazing. (MAC ONLY)
Pro-tools :I studied pro-tool in college. It is pretty similar to logic but is more suited to the sound engineer or for recording bands and live sound. I mix a lot of my beats on Pro-tools and it is well known as the industry standard digital audio workstation.
Apogee Duet Interface: Apogee’s Duet is the best audio interface ever. The best thing about the Duet is that you have the sound quality as Apogee’s industry standard Ensemble but smaller and affordable for the home studio.
M-Audio Axiom 61 midi keyboard:This semi-weighted keyword is a beast. I love the action this keyword. Touch sensitive pad for creating drums make on of my best purchases online. There are two other version the 25 key and 49 keyboards it’s up to you. I picked the 61 key because I like to have the full range of the keyboard.
Krk Rokit 5 Monitors:These monitors have been with me since I got Logic Pro and the Duet years ago. I never once had any trouble with them and they give me the sound that I am looking to hear in my beats
