First thing you need to do is get the following in order:
1. Notebook
2. Pen
3. PC, MAC, or Laptop with Internet access
4. A BUSINESS-oriented email account (not suckadick@yahoo.com)
5. An hour or two per night
6. A calendar
7. DRIVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!
You probably have all of these things, right?
Remember, touring isn't easy for rock bands, so expect it to be at least twice as hard for a hip hop act.
So the plan is, "we go on a local or statewide tour" This is the first type of tour you will execute; easy for a rapper from New York, but harder for a rapper from Wyoming, and that is the way it is.
Not that Wyoming doesn't produce sick rappers, I don't know any rappers from Wyoming, but I won't put it past them to have an elite ripper or two in that state.
If you've got some real good friends, you can ask them to help be your committee.
**Clarification Note***DO NOT PUT YOUR CAREER IN SOMEBODY ELSE'S HANDS! You still need to have total confidence in your future, enough that you want your own influence on it. You can get a TRUSTWORTHY and psyched friend or family member to help you plan and communicate with the world. They probably want to help anyway, right?
You should still plan this by yourself, at least the first time, so you know what goes into it, and if you ever enlist the services of another, you know what to expect from deadlines to cost.
So, in a local draft of a plan you want to open up GoogleMaps which we will use forever and again.
Then add a tab to this window. Go to Google (they're just the best, period) Zoom in to your state, find a circular route beginning and ending in your hometown.
You know your state, you know where the universities and the party cities are. Write down every town you want to visit in the same order of your tour. Something to help with that, would be to calculate the distances and driving times between each city.
You should be able to input the zip codes if you looked up the city zip codes for your targets on the Googlemap interface. Open a calendar, and find your dates and make sure they coincide with your driving times and distances.
A 10 city tour should last 2 weeks.
It won't be like you'll be writing any of those directions, you won't even have to print them out; you can if you want to and I'm sure it will help a bit to have it in front of you; However, it doesn't have the venues addresses, and you will want them to make a printout of your final plan-in-action file.
Oh yes, you will have a file for this.
It can create a lot of paperwork, which is why you should normally wait to have all of your tour information and confirmation emails on paper. And work off of your computer.
Once you can see what type of tour you'll be doing it looks like, "this isn't so hard" but we know better than to underestimate this process...
A poorly planned tour can drain your finances, effect your employment, and you could end up burning bridges with venues with a display of your poor planning which just appears as bad event management, regardless of your intentions.
But now you have an idea about what kind of tour is being created in your first steps.
