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 events in addition to other information their fans may want.
At the turn of the millennium, the trend moved to bulky and graphic heavy Flash websites. Flash websites has historically been an eyesoar to fans in a hurry and inaccessible to people on dial up. Google can still not index Flash websites the way they can standard HTML or CSS, which is not the standard.
The focus of every musician should be on their music and creating new experiences for their fans. In today’s content driven world however, the musicians need to be on the top of their game for creating content that is easy to digest and on the fans’ terms. This means giving them audio, video, text, pictures and more how the fans want them, not how you want to distribute them.
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. Taking the widgets from these social sites is very easy to embed now on your main site. You want to have your stuff on these social media giants and then funnel their traffic back to your website.
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, blogs and news without having to know the nerdy tech. If you can type and send an email, you can effectively use Wordpress.
Wordpress pleases both Google and your fans. 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 song players, videos and email optin boxes. Your main content area is perfect for updating your news and posting blogs about what is happening in your music career.
Gone are the days of expensive maintenance and constant uploading to FTP clients to update your site. 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.
Getting setup with Wordpress is super simple with their five minute installation that will have your tracks and image displayed in no time. You can get going with Wordpress by downloading the software and finding a host that will support your traffic. You are faced with many options directly from the Wordpress site. 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 strapped for money, finding a free theme is the way to go. Grab a free theme by searching in Google for free themes.
Being a musician, your time is very important. Marketing is as well. Being great, not good, at both is the key to winning in the new music industry. With Wordpress, you are getting the most use of your time by leveraging a powerful tool for content creation. 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