This is the fourth post in my series Marketing Your Music Online. The last post Marketing Your Music Online – Step Two covered the importance of having your own website as an independent musician with your own domain name that you control 100% of the content on. After posting Step Two I got to thinking about what I had written and realized that in order to really serve musicians, I would need to explain a little more in depth, some best practices when setting up your website. That’s why this post is called Step Two-A. It is really an extension of Step Two. Step Three will cover a number of the various methods of making your music available for sale online (i.e. – digital distribution – this is a moving target these days). As always, remember to check out my other posts for more information about Online Music Marketing.
So, before we dive into it, I will first tell you that website design is not my forte. I am not going to tell you how to code a website in this post. There are a number of resources available for free on the Internet to learn basic HTML and PHP. In my opinion that is all you would need to do it yourself. This post will cover, however, crucial pages to include in your site and how to structure them. I will say upfront that there are many many turnkey musician website templates available out there to possibly take advantage of. Some of which are free and some are not so free. I am sure that there are a solid handful of these options that are very good. If you plan on using one of these services I would like to offer a word of warning… I mentioned in Marketing Your Music Online – Step Two about not using a flash based website. So make sure to avoid any service that offers flash exclusively.
I have found some success in using a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) website design software. I have a very pathetic basic knowledge of HTML that I have really just picked up by reviewing source code from other websites and pages that I have designed with a WYSIWYG designer and I have been able to build basic websites on my own. So, I imagine that anyone can do it. For a basic HTML training simply look around on the Internet. It is not difficult to find. Or… buy yourself a copy of the Complete Idiot’s Guide to HTML. Even if you use a template I feel that it is important to know a minimum about how your site is put together. In Step Two I suggested you use Host Gator to host your website. Host Gator provides some basic templates and some basic design software that is plenty sufficient for one to put together a basic website.
Ok… That information should be enough to get you started on website design (that’s all I started with and I get by). Now I want to go through a couple of things about site structure that are important when you are trying to market your music online. Marketing to music fans online is tricky at best. I want to talk briefly about what pages to include in your site and some content that should definitely be included.
First – your home page. Your home page should display your band name prominently, a nice photo, social media links (twitter, facebook, myspace, etc.) and links to the other pages on your site. Even though I am going to suggest that you have separate pages for the following items I would add to your home page: your contact information (if you are looking for gigs), newsletter opt-in form (I will explain this in depth in a future post), a music player with at least 3-5 songs available to listen to (full versions – not 30 second or 60 second clips. An additional note here is it might not be best to set the player up to start playing automatically, some people find that annoying, then again that might work for you) and the next few upcoming gigs.
Second – the about page. Simple… Band bio, personnel (with bios) include photos.
Third – Media page. Put up the player again on its own page and more pics and videos if you have them.
Fourth – Calender. Upcoming gigs. Make this easy to find. You want people to come to your next show, don’t you?
Fifth – Contact page. This should include all of the contact methods in which you use. Maybe you have a lot of traffic and you don’t particularly want all of your fans to have your phone number so just give out an email address. You want to have some way for people who want to hire you to be able to get in touch with you and you want to give your fans and potential fans a way to interact with you. Also include on this page another opt-in form for your newsletter.
Sixth – Store. This is where you sell your music and your merchandise.
Seven – Blog. You should have one. I will talk about this in more depth in a future post.
Now, I mentioned that your home page should have links to all of the other pages on your site, but this holds true for all of the other pages on your site as well. There are a few reasons for this, but the biggest reason is that all of these pages are important to your visitors and you want them to be able to get to each one of these pages no matter where they happen to be on your site. I, for one, find it very frustrating to have to return to the home page of a site to get to another page on the site. This is entirely not cool.
On a similar note… I want to talk about layout. I think the easiest way to go about laying out your site is to think simple… really simple. Don’t put too much information on a given page, scatter it around or use a bunch of colors causing your visitor to not know what to look at. Decide what the page is about and focus the page’s content and layout on that subject only. I like to have the navigation bar listed vertically along the right side of the page, but that is my personal preference. My suggestion here is to look around at sites you think are straight forward, easy on the eyes and not a pain in the neck to navigate to get some ideas. These don’t have to be musicians websites necessarily but they certainly can be.
Search considerations and additional pages to include …
It is not likely that people are out there surfing the net and could possibly stumble upon your website through the use of a search engine and then decide to buy your music (I am not saying this won’t happen, I am just saying that you should probably not set up your website with that goal alone). That being said there are a couple of easy things that you can do to set up your website so it can be found by someone who may be looking for you or your music.
You may have a really catchy band name (and I hope you do) and hopefully your domain name matches your band name, still people looking for your music could be forgetting your band name (I know… how dare they). However, these people might remember one of your songs. Even then, I would bet they don’t know the name of the song unless the name is in the hook and that is the part of the song that is stuck in their head. So, how do we deal with this? How do we set up our website so that someone who doesn’t know your band name and doesn’t know the name of the song that they want to buy from you can find you online? This is one of the few instances that Search Engine Optimization is used for marketing music online. I am not going to explain search engine optimization in any depth except to tell you that this is what you will be doing if you follow the steps below.
1) Make lyrics pages. This means make a separate page for each song with lyrics written out. Why do this? Because when the only thing a potential fan can remember about you or your music is one line from one song, they might put it in a search engine. If that lyric is not somewhere on your site, your site will not show up in the search results.
2) Make the more memorable lines from each song more prominent. Not to get too technical but if you took my advise and learned some extremely basic and very available HTML you should be able to follow just fine – buckle up! Make the title of the song an H1 tag. This is just the HTML language for a Heading Tag. Then take the first line of the chorus or the hook and make it an H1 tag as well. If the song title and the hook are not the same then you may want to make the title an H1 tag and then make the hook into the subheading and give it an H2 tag. It is commonly hypothesized that search engines give more weight to the content in the H1 and H2 tags.
3) Put it in the title tag. In every page on your website there will be meta tags. There are several, but I am only going to focus on three here. The meta title, meta description and the meta keywords – listed in order of importance. No content that you add to these tags will be visible on your site. However the title tag is visible at the upper right hand corner of the browser window (for example while you are reading this the upper right hand corner of your browser should read – Marketing Your Music Online – Step Two-A | Online Music Marketing and Artist Promotion. That is the title tag of this page. So, one would think that you want the song title to go in the title tag. I would suggest however, to let go of any notion to brand the name of the song and put the key lyric that people are likely to be searching for in the title tag (i.e. if your song title is different from your hook, I would put the hook in the title tag as that is likely what people remember about the song or if there is a particular lyric that everyone remembers that is not the hook or the title, it may be best to put this in the title tag). This takes some guess work and may need to be changed at a later date… and that’s ok.
The description tag should contain lyrics that may be being searched for as well. I would suggest simply putting the title of the song and a dash and the hook or some other catchy lyric in the song. The keyword tag is really not all that necessary here. If you want to use the keyword tag its fine, it may not make one bit of difference. If you do I would just put the lyrics in question and maybe the musical genre or genres that best describe your musical style. It will not likely make much difference.
One more thing… Your band might have a signature way of dress or you might all wear wigs or you might say something over the mic at the beginning or ending or a show that would be somewhat unique to you. I would at a minimum put this information somewhere in the content of your website (a blog is useful for this – we’ll get into that later). For example, lets say you’re a punk band in Seattle and the bass player dresses up in a clown costume at every show. If I am looking for your band on Google I might type in “punk band Seattle Clown bass player” or some variation of that. If that content is not somewhere on your site it is not likely that your site will be returned in the search engines.
Well, that’s what I’ve got for you on that for now. I hope it is helpful. Keep a look-out for Marketing Your Music Online – Step Three in a future post.
Tom Siegel
P.S. – For more information about how to put together an online music marketing strategy sign up for my newsletter at www.indieleap.com. and check out my other posts for more information about Music Marketing

