Online Music Marketing and Artist Promotion

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

Before you dive too deep into this post, please read Marketing Your Music Online – Step One. And as a reminder, check out the rest of my posts to get even more information about music marketing.

As an overview, I will briefly recap step one… In step one we discussed market research. It makes no sense at all to throw your music at the entire world via the Internet. We discussed a couple of methods in which to decide who your target audience is. The point that I really wanted you to take away from that post was… make sure that you are marketing your music to people online not to the Internet itself.

So… let’s move on to step two. If you want to market your music online you will, very simply, have to make your music and your message available to people who are online. This might sound like an obvious concept, but I can’t tell you how many times I have seen musicians not take advantage of the resources on the web. What am I even talking about…? Well, the Internet is made up of billions of interconnected websites. This is why we call it the web. What you or your band needs to do in order to market your music online is to be one of those websites. Now I can already hear some of you saying, defiantly, but I have a MySpace page or a FaceBook page or a ReverbNation page. I am certainly not telling you to trade those things in for a website of your own, but you just simply cannot exist on social networking sites alone. You absolutely must have both. Why? Because you need to have a place where you can control 100% of the content that your visitors are seeing.  Social networking is going to be a large part of your online presence, don’t get me wrong, but your website should most certainly be your hub online. This is where your message is detailed and delivered in the most effective way possible. This is where your message leads your visitors toward your sales funnel. This is where you can concentrate your efforts in branding yourself. Social networking is a part of this process and will be covered generally in a future post. For in depth information about how to use social networking as a musician, visit Music Success in Nine Weeks and Road Map to Social Media Success. These are the best resources I know of to really hone your social networking efforts.

I know that many of you don’t have a lot of money to spend on things like a website or hosting. Here’s the thing… of all the expenses that we incur as musicians or as humans living on this planet, it seems like hosting is a pretty reasonable value for the money you will need to put out for this. The hosting service I use is: Host Gator. They have plans starting at $4.95 per month. However, I strongly recommend that you choose the plan above that for $7.95 per month. The major difference here is the latter plan offers unlimited domain names for the same monthly price. This is very important for what you want to do. I will give you one example of why this is desirable: If your band name is “The Noisy Pieces”, you should seriously consider buying www.thenoisypieces.com, www.thenoseypieces.com, www.thenoisypeaces.com and so on. With the $7.95 per month plan you are able to put all of these domain names (and more) under the same hosting account. The point is simply, you don’t want to rely on people getting the name of your band right in order to find your site.

Why not free hosting? you ask… Well, free hosting is cool for one reason only… It’s free! I love free things with a passion and if there was a free option that I knew of that worked, I would certainly tell you about it. Here’s the deal with the free hosting… Free hosting accounts often force you to allow advertisements for whatever the hosting company chooses to appear on your site. Now if you have an indie pop band and people who visit your site see advertisements for baby diapers, this is not good. Not only does it not jive with the feeling of your band or your site or the interests of your visitors, it also offers an exit from your site to your visitors. Also not good. Unwanted advertisements are only one reason to avoid free hosting. Two other important reasons are: you don’t get to have your own domain name and it may not stay free. With free hosting your domain will look something like: www.hosting company.bandname.com – no good. You definitely want www.bandname.com (as well as variations). Also, I have heard of free hosting becoming not free. This means that you can choose to pay what they are suddenly asking you to payor you can loose your domain with them and any visitors you have coming to your site or inbound links you have won’t work. Again, no good.

So, very simply, having your own website is an absolute necessity and having that website hosted is the best way to go hands down. Again the company I use for my hosting is: Host Gator. I find it affordable, their customer service is very accessible  and I have never had any problems with the company.

I did not talk about any design suggestions for a musicians website. This feels like a topic that deserves its own post. I will go into the detail of design suggestions in a future post. The only thing that I will say now, in case any of you are wanting to jump into the design phase is: Host Gator offers basic design templates and editing software and  don’t use flash. It is slow to load (visitors hate slow websites) and the search engines can’t read it. I will expand on that in a future post.

Keep a look out for Step Three of Marketing your Music Online 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

As I said in a previous post (Online Music Marketing – Do It!), with a couple of simple steps you could market your own music online (without the help of a record label) and possibly make a profound impact on your desired audience. In my next few posts I will spell out some simple steps to get started with your online music marketing campaign. This post is dedicated to step one… This step is the first step in the process of marketing anything, music or otherwise. Many independent musicians don’t think like a marketing professional and furthermore do not regard their music as a product nor do they consider their audience consumers. Here’s the deal… for the purposes of this post that is exactly what we are going to do.

So… what is the first step in marketing your music online? Research. Now, maybe this seems boring, but it is extremely important. If you are planning on making any kind of impact with your music online, you first have to figure out who your audience is. There are 1,802,330,457 Internet users worldwide (26% of the global population). There is a pretty good chance that not every person on the web is a potential fan of yours. So you need to figure out the demographics of your audience. 

There are the typical demographic factors such as age, gender, race, income bracket, level of education and so on. I imagine that you can answer some of those questions off the top of your head. Here is a suggestion… At your next several gigs look around at your audience. Try to notice any of the above demographic characteristics that you didn’t immediately have an answer for. Then start to look at what they are wearing. Look for anything that they have used their sense of taste to purchase. If you can find any common threads amongst your audience that will help you imensely to market your music online. While this is a good idea for any marketing plan, this is especially crucial in marketing music online.

Let me explain why… If you were a designer of handbags and were looking to capture some of the existing handbag market, you would try to find people who are already shopping for handbags and attempt to get them to notice yours. Not to say that is easy, many designers fail in accomplishing just that. But the point is, that there are people looking for handbags online. These people are looking in a general sense (meaning just searching for any handbag) and in specific sense (searching for a particular brand or style handbag). So if you have designed a clutch, you might want to find a stream of people who are looking for a clutch style handbag and try to position your product in front of their eyes.   You are selling music. People aren’t usually on the Internet just typing into google the word music by itself. Nor are they searching for music according to style (i.e. typing “country music” or “emo” into google). People have to discover music while doing something else. The question that I am suggesting you answer here is… discovering what? Well if you notice that your audience is all wearing the same brand of jeans, or a certain baseball team’s hat, or a certain style of shoes, then you are closer to answering that question. Knowing what material things your audience spends money on is only one thing to pay attention to. The next thing to try and figure out is, in short, everything that they spend their money on. Lifestyle choices. What do they do for fun? Where do they buy their groceries? What kind of car do they drive? Do they take the bus? Do they live in houses or apartments? in the city or the country? A great method to answer as many of these questions as possible, is wise use of all of the Social Networking sites available. I will give you an overview of which social networking sites to use and a basic approach to using them in a future post. For in-depth knowledge of how to use these tools effectively visit these websites – Music Success in Nine Weeks or Road Map to Social Media Success.

So, in short, the first step in marketing your music online is to figure out who you are marketing to. Before you go through the trouble of making your music available online, crafting a marketing message, and developing a system to deliver that message you need to determine who wants to receive your message and be exposed to your music or you will just be spinning your wheels.

Keep a look out for Step Two of Marketing your Music Online 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.