Making money online, Ringtones

First off let me start by saying this is not a free way to make money, there is a small investment but I can tell you how to get started without putting in any money for the software needed. This article is not an advertisement, it is simply me sharing my experience making, selling and for several months living off the income generated from this method.

When it comes to mass distribution of anything, even digital products the general rule is easy to use, easy to get and valid pricing.

The idea to give this a go came after seeing an advert during the festive period two years ago, in the back of a computer magazine featuring third party adverts from small companies and organisations. They were a company, who I won't name but were selling ringtones.

Ringtones, even though so simple and with so many companies making them are still an amazing way to make money. But there is more to it than putting together a few notes and listing it up for sale. Plus, if it takes off you will have to remember to file correctly any necessary tax and income documents which are required where you live.

Here I am going to tell you how I got started, how I made my first sales and how I lived off the income for several months before I started on a new project.

Now, you can use any music creation suite you can find, or buy. But for me the best was FL Studio. What is FL studio? Well to put it simply it is the best thing to happen to music creation since the guitar was invented. It allows you to make music with any instrument, any style and is commonly used in game development where talented teams or individuals will use it to create epic compositions. To test the theory of just how good this software and at the time being a very big fan of Guild Wars on the computer. I used FL Studio to recreate some of the fantasy music found within the game.

This software is not free though, but it is not expensive either. (Note, I don't support or approve of pirating software, especially in this case as the guys behind this bit of software really deserve everything they get from it!) But they do offer a fully working demo on their website, simply type “FL Studio” into Google and you will be able to find their website for yourself. The demo version works just like the fully functional retail version but lacks the ability to publish and save any creations. But it is great to get started with while learning the ropes of the software.

Making the music.

Now this is not going to be a guide on using the software, as I feel everything that follows can be achieved on many other different software suites. But the basic idea is to pick what you think sounds good, along with the fun side of novelty tones. I will be writing a detailed guide and introduction to FL Studio in later weeks to accompany this article.

• It is important to understand that with music, of any type there is copyright and it may not only be a good idea to copyright any creations you make. Although not necessary it is very important to be careful not to infringe on anyone else creations. So cutting up a favourite track from your itunes collection into ringtone length clips is a big mistake. You want to make everything yourself, avoiding making it sound like anything else.

Here are some of the ideas what work well and also sell well. Both using vocals and the musical elements. You want to keep any creations short, around ten seconds long. Or four to five seconds if the audio and be looped.

• Creating simple beats with popular sounds such as drum and base, guitars, violins and other nice sounding instruments with rhythm will always sell well.

• By far in today’s ringtone market the most popular, I found. Were the novelty tones. Most popular with younger phone users but they do make up a large chunk of the market. Some examples of these fun, novelty tones which have sold well in the past few years are the “white noise” which creates a high pitch noise to annoy their friends with. These sorts of tones also come under sound effects such as dogs barking, alien sounds, car engines and so on.

• One of my own tones which was downloaded Europe wide in 2010 was a simple yet popular one which was aimed more towards a male user but you could adapt the idea to match an idea you may have. The tone was simply a vocal edit of a friend saying “Run quick, it's the wife calling” Great for phones which can apply pictures/tones to individual contacts. This tone was bought over 9,000 times in a year. I even found friends telling me “Hey, check out this” and then asking their wives to call them. So as you can see there is a lot more to ringtones now than there was ten years ago when a simple beep or standard ringtone would of done the job.

• Yet still just as good are the tones that have a nice beat to them. For example, in FL Studio if you mixed a nice violin track along side some electric guitar gives a great almost James Bond opening sequence result. They are simple to make and you can even find “For dummies” guides on You Tube containing information on how to get started with those sorts of projects. They really can take minutes to put together.

• Generally with FL Studio and other creation suites you can find inspiration for tone creations just by playing with the sound effects and compositions included.

Sales and distribution. There are several different ways.

Before I moved this into the advanced state of selling via a custom made iPhone application sales were strong through the following methods. It is up to you how you would go about making this happen for yourself as some areas may work differently depending on where you live and what you have access to.

The first move for me was to put all the files online, I found it best to use simple hosting provided by a United Kingdom based host as I wanted to sell these throughout Europe as after research I found that the United States market for these sorts of things were not as great at that time. Now I am sure most of you reading this will have seen those adverts in magazines, or during the commercials that offer picture messages, ringtones and other phone related products. “Just text TONE to /their number/” in which you are billed from your phone credit or bank account attached to a phone contract and receive the item you purchased all through the simple act of sending a message.

• There are many different ways to going about the above, but unfortunately as none are really international ways of doing this, this part will have to be researched by yourself first. There are companies offering this service in almost every country but you will find they differ in how they ask for payment. How it generally works is you sign up for a number, registering it like you would anything else, selecting a package that allows data files to be sent in return for a premium rate message. With the two companies I used it was a simple as going into my account page on their website and attaching the ringtones to a different name, but all on the same number. If you would like some help setting this up, contact me and I can share some tips and advise.

• Once you have the number you can advertise it in many different ways, the first and most popular is over Facebook, by creating a page for your ringtone company you can get great exposure by people visiting and liking the page, their friends see it and the ball starts rolling.

• The second way to go about this and for great results choose one or many of these ideas is to, like I stated at the top of this page, where I found out about this in the first place. Buy advert space in the back of popular magazines, this can be done cost effective but make sure you choose the best magazines. For example, advertising in Yard Work weekly would likely get a worse response than advertising in say, Xbox magazine. These adverts normally don't cost that much and you can in most cases find how to purchase an advert within that selected paper or magazine in the small print in the advert sections.

• This final way is how I started making money quickly, I bought a simple hosting package with a .com domain name. Allowing people to purchase with Google checkout and Paypal and then download the tones to their computer and send it to their phones. In some cases I found it easier and more cost effective to simply send the item from my own phone to theirs, if there was an issue with their download/install. But that was in the early days where problems were caused simply by the process not being ideal. So generally the best way is the first option getting yourself a premium rate text service you can buy. (Some are even free, they just take a small percentage of the final purchase. But you can make money by offering the tones for free, on a webpage adapted to be used by internetal able phones with adverts for revenue.