In this episode, Jared breaks down the exact online marketing system he uses to book high-paying weddings and events—without relying on agents, gig apps, or social media algorithms. From getting on preferred vendor lists to using a video sales letter and closing leads on Zoom, this is the blueprint for musicians who want control, consistency, and confidence in their career. If you’ve ever wondered how to build a system that actually gets you gigs, this one’s for you.

"Most musicians think they have a talent problem—but what they really have is a marketing and sales system problem."

- BookLive: Everything you need to start marketing and booking your act online (without having to hire or rely on a tech team!)​
- Your First Gig: Everything you need to book your first high-paying gig.
- Fulltime Music Masterclass: The Secret To an Unlimited Stream of High-Paying Private Event Gigs …Without Spending a Fortune on Online Advertising or Having Any Connections!
- Fulltime Music Academy (Gig Vault): 24,665 High-End Venues + Event Planners: Use this directory to book your highest-paid gig to-date.
- Breaking Into High-end Gigs Masterclass: How I Went From Broke Musician to Thriving By Breaking Into These Largely Unknown High-Paying Gigs

What is up, Renegade musicians? It's Jared Judge. Welcome back to another episode of The Gigging Musician Podcast.

All right, this is a continuation from the last episode where I was on my way up to Estes Park for a gig. I'm actually still on my way up.

We're doing a double header, which is exciting. So today I wanted to chat about the type of online marketing that I do as a live musician to specifically book weddings and other types of high end gigs.

A lot of you, if you've listened to this podcast for a while, you know how much I harp on getting on preferred vendor lists because they are just so incredibly powerful and they will send the right people in the right quantities to your online marketing efforts to find out about you.

And because they're the right people, that typically means that they have an event coming up that they need live music and they've got budget that they're willing to pay for that live music.

So I'm going to give you an overview of this online marketing system that I use that honestly has made me feel incredibly confident knowing that I have a full time income as a live musician.

I'm not relying on streaming. I'm not relying on auditioning for an orchestra and getting a coveted spot.

This is just purely me and my efforts and it makes me feel so proud as a musician that I'm doing it. I'm really living it, living it up and living the dream.

So, you know, back when I first started this, I had no idea what I was doing as far as online marketing goes. And the reality is, is that it's not just online marketing.

There's also the offline marketing too. But marketing was the thing that changed the game for me because I wanted these gigs, yet I had no idea of how to get them.

And so I tried what every other musician does is just work on your music and get better and find better people to work with and then kind of hope and pray. Sure.

I put it, put together a basic website and a basic social media presence, but that didn't really do anything for me.

And so that was like, I, I don't remember exactly how I discovered it, but like many other musicians, I discovered online directories.

You know, this was like my first foray into it. And I think I had heard, actually, no, I do remember now how I figured it figured it out was that I had played weddings for somebody else back in New Jersey when I lived in New Jersey maybe 10 years ago.

And I Googled them to see what they were doing, and I found their online presence, including the directories that they belong to.

You know, we're talking about gig salad, the bash, wedding wire, and the knot, those kinds of things. And so when I started to do this, I've signed up and paid for those directories too.

And that's when I learned like, oh, you know, the thing that we want to get is leads. Leads is when somebody reaches out to you on one of those platforms or your website or calls you or through your social media.

And says, Hey, I'm having an event and I need live music. Are you available? How much does that cost?

And so I discovered I want to get as many leads as possible because those should turn into gigs, right? And the reality is some of them do turn into gigs, but not all of them.

In fact, on those directories, the majority of those leads are not going to turn into gigs partially because, just the way those directories are set up is that they create price choppers.

And so when a musician actually has the guts to charge what they're actually worth, the price shoppers tend to get scared and stop responding to you.

But anyway, some of them did turn into gigs and that was really exciting for me because that was the path to make money as a musician.

And then from there, it's just about, you know, how do I do enough of those? How do I get enough gigs to be a full-time musician?

And so, you know, I started to realize with these directories, there's not much more you can do to increase quantity on them. You hit a ceiling with that.

Like, sure, you can pay for premium listings and get your listing at the top of the page and everything like that, but ultimately, like, they are limited in how many people with gigs visit their websites.

There's nothing that they can do to increase it, or they're not necessarily incentivized to do anything to increase it. And so as a result, we hit a cap on these.

This also is especially true as you raise your prices too, because, you know, the price shoppers, eventually you price yourself out of their range.

And so that became a frustration because it It wasn't enough to make a full-time living as a musician once you hit that cap. And so I was in search of other ways to do this.

And then I discovered that I could start to get on preferred vendor lists.

And that was a way for me to kind of break through that cap, that ceiling that was holding me back, is that I could actually increase the people that find out about me by partnering with venues and event planners.

And so that started to work out really great. Got on a bunch of preferred vendor lists back when I was in Milwaukee.

And yes, that increased the number of leads because more people finding out about you means more leads.

They're going to submit your contact form asking if you're available and things like that. But again, that's when I discovered like the majority of people who visited my website do not turn into leads.

They just visit the website, read a little bit, maybe watch a couple of my videos, and then they peace out, which again is frustrating because this is another glass ceiling that we have to break through.

How do we raise our own salary? In this case, it would be, how do I get more people who visit my website to turn into leads?

And that's when I branched out away from what other musicians were doing. But I guess the preferred vendors was already different.

But the second thing that I did was I started to send, like put on my website, something called a video sales letter.

I talked about this once before on my podcast, but it is so incredibly powerful because what it basically does is it's a 20 minute video that I have actually had couples tell me I've watched all 20 minutes, sometimes I've even watched it more than once.

And that convinces them and persuades them that I am the right fit for their event.

It basically distinguishes me and differentiates me from all the other violinists in my area and in other areas too, because there are not that many people using this type of online marketing.

And so that turns potential price shoppers into people who no longer care about price because they want me specifically performing at their I'm going to talk about the event, which is super exciting.

And as a direct result of this, it increased the percentage of people who visited my website that became leads. Pretty huge, right? That felt incredibly awesome.

But then I kind of discovered the next glass ceiling, the next thing the breakthrough was not all of these leads were turning into gigs.

So that was when I discovered I had a sales problem. because the purpose of marketing is to really get you leads, but the purpose of sales is to turn those leads into signed contracts and gigs with money in the account.

And so most musicians don't realize that not only do we have marketing problems, we also have sales problems. And our ability to sell directly impacts our ability to make money as a musician.

And so when I moved to Colorado and started doing all this, I didn't want to just charge, you know, a couple hundred bucks for me to play at somebody's wedding.

That didn't feel what I want, like what I wanted. And so I realized I needed to get better at sales.

And so what I started doing instead of just emailing people a price quote when they became a lead on my website, I actually started requiring them to book a call with me on Zoom to chat with me.

That way I could really discover what are they looking for and then walk them through a thought process where they realize like, oh, you know, in addition to everything I saw in the video, like Jared is the right fit for me.

He has the confidence, he knows what he's doing, and then I wanted to make it really easy for them to sign a contract.

And so I started offering them the contracts right on the call and people would sign them. And so that is like the game changing thing about this is that it's a whole system.

It's a process start to finish multiple steps, but they all work in conjunction with each other. And then the other cool part about this is that you can measure your success at each of these stages of the game.

At every level of this game, there are what are called conversion rates, which are percentages of success.

And so the goal here is like, how do we increase the conversion rate at each stage of this funnel? Because it is a funnel, but that only can happen if you're measuring your success of each step of the funnel.

So the first step is the percentage of website visitors that turn into leads.

That is your opt-in rate, and you can measure that. Then the second step of this is what percentage of those leads turn into booked calls.

That is called your set rate or your appointment set rate. And then the third thing is out of all of those calls that occur, what percentage of those turn into gigs?

And there are different baselines for each of those. And I'm currently measuring mine, so I'll give you a baseline as soon as I have those measurements in place.

But it took me a while to get to this really refined spot.

So if we're putting in really good traffic, meaning we're getting the right people who are, you know, referred to us by their venue or event planner, and then we're sending them to a website that is optimized to generate leads and then showing them a video sales letter that is designed to get them to set an appointment with us.

And then on that appointment, we've got the right scripts, the right question to ask, to get them to say yes and actually book us, then we've got ourselves a pretty bulletproof system to book these high-end gigs.

Now, I know that might have been a lot for some of you, and it was a lot for me when I learned it. That's just the reality of this game, because the thing is they don't teach this in our music lessons or music school at all.

And so we have to go outside of the world of music and do some uncomfortable things to make it happen.

But I can say it's been so incredibly worth it. so, you know, many musicians, we struggle with how do we make a living as a musician?

But if you have this marketing system and this, this tool and a way to measure your success and a way to optimize it and, and fix it when things aren't working, that just provides so much more confidence and then provides you with fun way to make a living as a musician.

All right, that is it. That's all I got time for today. I'm actually in the town of Estes Park right now. There is traffic. which luckily I planned for this.

So I'm here pretty early anyway, so I'm not too worried about the traffic. So I will update you on how the gig goes.

But by the way, if you're interested in seeing my funnel start to finish, just reach out to me, give me a call, or go to my website, fulltimemusicacademy.com/call.

Book a call with me. I'll show you my funnel and see how you can implement it yourself. All right, thanks for tuning in to another episode of The Gigging Musician Podcast.

Remember, "Your music will not market itself!"

Bye, everybody.