Having a great website is essential to having a career in the new music economy coupled with enhanced lifestyle design. Bands started with mini pages on sites like SoundClick and then graduated to more sophisticated social networks. These sites allowed the bands to showcase their pictures, top songs and showcase their live shows in addition to other stats and information.
In the late 90’s the big trend became large flash websites that were very visual heavy. This type of website has historically been an eyesoar to fans in a hurry and inaccessible to customers on dial up. Flash content is still not Google friendly, so while your site may look good, Google cannot index your content and that is not good for finding new traffic.
Creating new songs and making your fans happy is the focus of your effort as a musician. In today’s content driven world, musicians need to be marketers just as much as they need to be musicians. You need to give your fans great content and you need to implement it in whatever form they desire.
Social media gives you a ton of leverage due to their large volume of traffic. Make your videos and syndicate them with TubeMogul. Use those same YouTube videos and embed them on your Blog and your main site. Put your music on Myspace, Facebook, BandCamp and other sites. You can take the best of social media and bring them right onto your site. This way you are putting content on these larger websites where you can find new traffic and fans, but you are always pointing them in the direction you want them to.
What are you going to use as the funnel to take your fans to? Wordpress. Wordpress is an open source content management system that will allow you to easily add content, pages, blog posts and media without knowing any of the techie stuff that scares many musicians. If you can type and send an email, you can effectively use Wordpress.
Wordpress aims to please everyone from your fans, Google and you. The dashboard is very user friendly and you are free to add anything to the site that you can think of. Add YouTube videos, photos, your songs are more to your customized sidebar. The body of your site is perfect for updating news and what is happening with your band.
You no longer need to use FTP clients and call your webmasters to put up a new video. These days as a musician you need to be able to update your music site on the fly, making your online music marketing efforts much more effective and timely as possible.
Get your new band website up in five minutes with the power behind Wordpress. Start your adventure to Wordpress by downloading the software and getting a Wordpress friendly host. You are faced with a plethora options directly from the Wordpress site. From there you click a few buttons, name your site and boom, it is live to the world. You are free to update at will and create as many pages and posts as you like. You can easily manage your look and feel by grabbing a free theme for Wordpress. The quickest way to find free themes is to Google them.
As a musician, your time is money, so you need to spend it wisely. Marketing is as well. If you are a rock star in both areas, you will have a rock star career. With Wordpress, you are getting the most use of your time by leveraging a powerful tool for content creation. Use this and your online music marketing will start to skyrocket.
Tags: creating websites, indie music promotion, internet marketer, internet music marketing, music marketing, website design
