There are lots of artists online promoting their website. Some are still starting a website and building an online presence. The following tips are absolutely helpful for musicians who plan to succeed in promoting and selling their music online using their website.
Musician website success
13 Tips that you should be implementing
Tip#1: Make your website to load VERY fast – remember a study on the effects of slow loading website to your visitors.
website loading time
It says that 25% of the visitors will abandon your website after 4 seconds. Of course, if you are musician and planning to get more fans. You put a strong effort in improving your website loading speed.
What you can do is to use a fast CMS like WordPress and use that in your website. Do not add too much graphics and slow loading elements like Flash. It’s why I hate visiting artist pages if it loads very slowly!
Tip#2: Showcase your music – the biggest mistake you can commit in your website is that you forget to showcase your music. Remember that your music is your product. You need to show it to your visitors so that they will impress your performance and catalog. As a result, they will most likely buy the music or become one of your loyal fans.
Do not forget to test your music player in all web browsers, to make sure it is comfortable. You can read more details here.
Tip#3: Sell your music – again one of the big mistakes is that even though you showcase your music; most artists forget how their fans or visitors will buy or license their music. Once your visitors are in your website, eliminate all possibilities of a guessing game and tell them everything what they need to know and that includes where to buy your music.
Some artist uses Paypal as a method to accept payment online while some others are using iTunes, CD baby or Amazon as their distributors. Kindly put the exact URL and make sure it is constantly updated. Websites like SoundCloud offer ways that you can sell your music to your fans. You might as well try that.
Tip#4: Always include a fully working contact form – you should find a way for your music fans to contact you. Some of these are not your fans anyway but could be A&R searching for you. So make sure you have a fully working contact forms.
Tip#5: Use high quality MP3 – some music websites afraid of using too much disk space in their hosting accounts and are too conservative with MP3 file sizes. As a result, the music that they are streaming in their website is relatively in very poor quality. Make sure you stream your music at an acceptable quality. With increasing Internet speeds, you can now stream at 320kbps without much of a problem while having a CD audio quality. If most of your customers are coming from countries with very slow Internet, reduce the bit rate to at least 128kbps.
Tip#6: Treat your website as serious as your real press kit! – Your website acts exactly like an online demo press kit. So this means, it should include your high quality photos (of course, publish using a reasonable image sizes so that it will load fast- remember Tip#1); your music; bio; your achievements; etc.
Tip#7: Include the URL of your website in your business card– this is very helpful because most of your fans and acquaintances may remember you and need to contact you. The easiest way they can get to you online is by visiting your website.
Tip#8: Include the URL of your website in all of your social networking profiles – if you have a Facebook, Linkedin, Google + or Twitter account; by all means include the URL to your website.
It is recommended you have an active social media profile throughout the Internet. Make some friends to other artist and those related in your industry. Example are the record producers, engineers, music publishers. In this way, your presence can be well-felt throughout the industry.
Tip#9: Use a catchy homepage title – for example if your name is Juan Dela Cruz and you are a pop/rock musician for hire in Gotham City. Then you can formulate a more descriptive title such as:
Juan Dela Cruz- Gotham City Pop and Rock Musician For Hire
If someone is searching in Google for “Gotham City Musician for hire” you can be ranked first and you get more business from it.
Tip#10: Write more music tutorials in your website and offer it for free. If you have some expertise in music theory, write in-depth tutorials about music and publish it in your website. Make sure it is originally written and not copied from somewhere else. This is a very useful marketing tool because great music tutorials written by performers themselves are very hard to find on the net.
Tip#11: Find more friends in your music genre and link to them. Ask them to link to you as well. For example if your genre is rock and you will find a lot of independent rock artist on the web. Contact them.
Tip#12: Offer some of your music for free. Your fans will think you are not only a great musician but generous as well. However only some of them but not all. It is important that you give them more value than being more focused on making money.
For example, you might be willing to give some gifts to your loyal visitors/fans or other incentives. That makes them feel especial. Again by being unique and providing value is what you should be known as a musician. Show that to your website and visitors would tend to like you more.
Tip#13: Join any music forums; contribute actively on a daily basis. Make sure you contribute useful posts and information. Forums are great way to make some friends that can help or support in your projects.
Content last updated on July 5, 2012