Your Bands Website. Part 1

Many working bands baulk at the notion of having their own website. This can be through lack of confidence or computer know-how or simply the fact that they are working so hard that time just isn't available. I cannot stress enough that in these modern times, an official band website is crucial for advertising. Having said this, it is not something that a band should jump into without research and consultation and precision. 


Organise a meeting with your manager who should have no hesitation in delving into your credit card to employ an expert to do the job. You may think this is costly but after the website has been completed it should be a low-maintenance affair.


Once your website has been created, it must be promoted. Firstly, the most valuable source of promotion is the contact the band already has with potential customers: CD sleeves, leaflets at gigs, posters, and press releases. Putting the web address on everything the band issues helps to develop loyalty to the site, especially if the site has a memorable web address. Online readers have a very low attention span. Ideally, your site should be attention-grabbing without going overboard.


A free mailing list is all important and should be used wisely. The people who have joined your free mailing list are interested in your music enough to join. The most common mistake made by bands is abusing their mailing list by over-using it. Offer members occasional free mp3 downloads and so-forth.


Exchanging links with other websites gives bands a chance to collect visitors from like-minded sites. If you have obvious influences or sound like a well-known band, seek out the leading fan websites and get them to review your music and exchange links. You can find them using the Ultimate Band List which lists entries for free and will create a category for your own band if you ask them to.

By visiting a search engine like www.google.com or www.webcrawler.com and entering the search keywords you want to come up under, you can see who's already got the top entry across a range of search engines. Rarely can you unseat them, but you can often exchange links with them. This is a surefire way to becoming a 'regular' appearance on SEO searches.


In a world swamped with free music, it's easier to promote ideas than tunes, so it's worth extending the ideas of your songs into webpages and using them to attract relevant traffic. You can also write music tutorials or diaries, which are likely to draw people interested in your style of music who might then download one of your MP3s. Make sure that you use descriptive keywords in the interests of search engine optimization (SEO). 


There's no point using 'music' or 'mp3', given the number of other sites using those keywords, but you might do better with '80s cover versions'. Be specific. You can submit your site to lots of search engines at once at Addme, but it can be more effective to submit the page to search engines one at a time by visiting them and then following the 'Add URL' or 'Suggest a site' links.


Another powerful promotional tool is the webring, a group of sites on the same subject that link in a chain. Visitors can follow the chain forwards or backwards by using a standardised box on each website. To find a suitable webring, visit www.webring.org. If you believe you're at the forefront of the next big thing, you can also start your own webring for free and set the rules for who gets to join.


Create a banner advert and encourage your fans to put it on their personal websites to bring you

traffic. You can also get a button from www.recommend-it.com that will automatically enable visitors to send an email to friends telling them how great your site is. In return, the visitors are entered into a competition to win US$10,000.


The Music Industry News Network is a free service that will distribute your music press release by email. To stand out online, you'll need to make sure you've got something unusual to say and a compelling reason for people to visit your website.


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