by Eric Hebert
One of the most important aspects of being a musician these days is trying to understand how to efficiently use the web to promote your tunes to people in the hopes of creating a rabid fanbase. Unfortunately, most do not understand the underlying principles of how to use your website in order to actually get the attention they are looking for.
Most view a website as a “traditional” advertisement and construct one with that mindset. Many bands build glossy looking Flash-based websites that, while visually appealing, do very little to help the band out. They think a website needs to be a pretty-looking page that visually grabs the viewer into wanting to listen to the music. Other then maybe some bio information and pictures, their usually is very little content on the site for the viewer to learn more about the band and the music. And usually these websites take forever to load and are just downright annoying to navigate around.
If you’re not using flash, chances are you just have an old-school static html site. Again, the graphics might be pretty and your music might be available to stream or download, but there is probably little in terms of interactive content.
And that’s the big thing about marketing online that everybody misses – building content. The goal is to increase traffic, and building content (and knowing how to get that content indexed in Google to gain visitors from Search) is how you go about getting people to come to your site, learn more about you, and then perform calls to action that will being them into your fan “filter”.
Now, while you CAN add content to a traditional website the old-fashioned way, chances are most musicians aren’t entirely web savvy enough to do it themselves. And, after you start adding a LOT of content, trying to mange all of it by constantly adding new links becomes tedious and inefficient.
If you REALLY want to get serious about using your website to interact with your audience, then you need to get with the times and build a dynamic website using s Content Management System, or CMS.
A few years back you would have had to pay an arm and a leg to get one custom built; luckily today (and thanks to the open-source movement), you can download FREE software to get you up and running with a state-of-the-art CMS in literally a few minutes.
Wordpress is an awesome piece of software that, once you learn how to use, will completely change how you view publishing content on the web. It’s easy to install, customize, and has a back-end where you can easily add new blog content using a visual-rich text editor that allows you the freedom to add content right from your browser. You don’t need to know code in order to get it up and running (but hopefully as you get comfortable using it you’ll teach yourself how to work around the code for further customization.
Here is a screenshot of what a basic post/page layout looks like in the Wordpress dashboard to give you an idea on how it works:
What’s really cool about Wordpress (other then being free and easy to install) is the large community of developers that support the software and help make it more powerful. You see, Wordpress is open-source – which mean anyone can take the code and add whatever they want to it. This large community of developers creates “plugins” which takes the deafault Wordpress software and adds extra functionality to it.
So while by default Wordpress is primarily a blogging/publishing platform, it’s capabilities are endless with the thousands of (mostly) free plugins out there. Want to optimize Wordpress for SEO? Need to add social media buttons to your posts? How about a contact form? There is an endless supply of plugins that make your site 10x as powerful.
So what about design? By defauly Wordpress has a simple (but boring) design. Luckily you can easily create a CSS driven “theme” that can alter your Wordpress install’s design – because, as with the plugin community, their is a large Wordpress design community that creates professional themes that are also available for, you guessed it, 0 dollars.
So lose that flash site and start building interesting and interactive content that engages people to want ti become a fan; you have no excuse to learn how to install and customize Wordpress and start building relevant web presence to promote your band.
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