Having a great website is essential to having a career in the new music economy coupled with enhanced lifestyle design. The first iteration of band sites were single page communities like SoundClick or MP3.com. These sites allowed the bands to showcase their pics, top tracks, and show off their live shows in addition to other information their fans may desire.
In the late 90’s the big trend became large flash websites that were very visual heavy. Flash sites still take forever to load and are awful for viewers with dial up Internet. 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.
The focus of every musician should be on their music and creating new experiences for their fans. Musicians really need to be on the top of their game, producing content and staying in touch with their ADD fanbase. You need to give your fans great content and you need to implement it in whatever form they desire.
The best way to do this is through the leverage allowed in social media sites that funnel to your home base. Make your videos and syndicate them with TubeMogul. Then take those same videos and embed them on your Myspace page and main website. Put your music on Facebook, Reverbnation, Bandcamp and other sites. Then take the widgets and embed them on your main 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 ope source content management system where you can easily add fresh content, web pages, blog posts and pictures without having to know the technical. If you can work Google Docs, you can easily navigate Wordresss.
Wordpress aims to please everyone from your fans, Google and you. It is easy to read and navigate and you can add all the bells and whistles your heart desires. Wordpress sidebars can be formatted to add MP3 widgets, YouTube videos and email optin boxes. The body of your site is perfect for updating news and what is happening with your band.
Gone are the days of expensive maintenance and constant uploading to FTP clients to add conterts. 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.
Creating your new music and band website on Wordpress is effortless with their 5 minute installation that they are so famous for. Start the process by grabbing the code and finding a Wordpress friendly host. There are lots of options directly on the Wordpress website. 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. When you are just starting out with your band website, its good to go with a free theme to customize the look and feel. Grab a free theme by searching in Google for free themes.
As a musician, your time is extremely important. Marketing is as well. If you are a rock star in both areas, you will have a rock star music business. using Wordpress gives you the freedom to spend more time being creative and less time worry about the technical side of the business. 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
