Online Music Marketing and Artist Promotion

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