Marketing for Creatives

Musicians & Filmies Jam

Kerilie McDowall. Image 2021 by Todd Jones.

Copyright ©2026 Kerilie McDowall. All rights reserved.

Welcome to Musicians & Filmies Jam. I’m Kerilie McDowall, and I’m happy to be here today to give you some tips on marketing for those of you that just want some ideas, or perhaps you’re an emerging business, or an emerging musician, or a new filmmaker, television producer, or are someone that’s just looking for ideas to get your work out there.

Need a free website? Keep reading! (If the bottom of the newsletter is truncated in an email, readers can click below on, “View entire message,” to view the entire newsletter post in your email app.)

I have a few ideas that I want to drop today. So, let’s start with just getting your house in order. First of all, if you really want to reach an audience, you also want to backup your clients. So, meaning you don’t want to only rely on social media for your clients. It’s not always the best resource. Sometimes you may be getting a lot of bots responding to any ads you’re making, or you’re just not getting the response that you’re hoping for with lower budget advertising, so what I would suggest is building up your email list, and if you don’t have an email list yet, it’s easy to start.

There are several good businesses that can get you started with that, and the two main ones that I would suggest would be either Mailchimp or kit.com and both will gift you quite a few free subscribers to start with. Many people never really get over 10,000 subscribers anyway, and I think that’s the number that you’re allowed with kit.com. It’s really great to sign up and enjoy that, you can get your newsletter happening with Kit and hook it up to your website and really get it going.

Now, of course, if you prefer the Mailchimp format, it’s a nice format, but I kind of think that the templates may be a little better and more creative in kit.com. Kit.com is really good. I have been using them now for quite a while. I chose them over Mailchimp because I felt that they have more freedom generally with the creative aspect.

They have really great features, like broadcast, where you can send out your newsletters, or landing pages as well. You can craft some great landing pages and keep them stored there, saved at kit, and just use them accordingly with links as you need to, so and there again, the templates are good. You can alter them to your own creativity and your own brand colors and everything else, so it’s really quite amazing what Kit has accomplished with their system, so that’s just one way.

Now, of course, you’re on Substack, so if you haven’t started a Substack newsletter yet, maybe you do want to start a Substack newsletter. It’s a great way to monetize your, your creativity and your thoughts, getting them out there with various formats of people being able to join you, either from a free subscription to a monthly subscription to an annual subscription, where you can offer perks to people and offer different sorts of benefits to signing up for the different packages, and that can be either with discounts or products through your store, if you have a website with a store. If you don’t have a website, I do suggest that you do get a website.

A website is the best way to reach customers quickly. Some of you may still be just working with social media, never formally going with a website, but it’s really easy to start and get a website going.

I have a link in this newsletter, so that you can get a free website built by The Free Website Guys, and it will be a nice WordPress website that’s hosted on Bluehost, and you can get that going below. The free website guys are one of my affiliates so I do make a small fee if you sign up. I highly do recommend you check them out, they do a great job, and if they accept you, you’ll have a free website, and you’ll be able to get some really great deals with hosting your site as well, so you know there’s really no excuse not to have a website when there are free web designers out there like The Free Website Guys that will put together fantastic websites for you that normally cost $5,000-10,000.

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Flashback. Image of Kerilie McDowall by Gordon Montgomery, 1995.

Now, so let’s say you’ve decided to monetize your newsletter through Substack. Again, you’re going to either have a free subscription or a monthly subscription or an annual or a founder premium subscription, so there’s those different levels that you can set up with different perks, and I highly recommend that, and sharing it widely with the people that you already have on your newsletter list.

If you have a blog and you’ve been blogging and you have subscribers to your blog, you can convert them with their permission over to your new Substack newsletter, or if you already have an email list, it’s very easy to export that list over into Substack as well. The great thing about Substack is it’s really quite organized, and it’s really laid out in a very easy way.