www.dagobon.com

Ideally each page of your website should serve a specific purpose.
The main purpose of the sales page for your cd is to sell the cd.
If have a page with Google Adsense, the main purpose is to generate
money by to get people to click on the advertisement. If its not
an important part of the process, don’t load up the page with
unnecessary things like animations or sounds. This will only
distract visitors from achieving the task laid out for them,
ie. buying your product.

Below are some ideas to include in your website and the main
purpose of each.

1) Main Page

The main pages is a general landing page to funnel visitors to
different areas of your site. Create a clear and easy navigation
process linked to the other pages of your site. *If you use
Javascript for navigation, place text link at the bottom. This
ensures that search engines will be able to spider your site
properly. You could also use this page to feature your cd, music
samples and other offers.

2) Order Page(s)

Create a sales letter for each item that your are selling.
Tomorrow we’ll go over some copywriting tips to build a
successful order page.

3) Press Releases

This section is where visitors can read 3rd party articles
published about you, increasing your credibility and exposure.

4) Contact Information

This is so people can get a hold of you to book shows, ask
questions about products, collaborations, interviews or other
opportunities (you never know). Include as much contact
information as possible, like your phone, cell, mailing address,
email etc.

5) Privacy Policy

Complies with privacy laws if your are collecting any of
information about your customers/visitors. This also helps to
build trust and people will give their information more freely.
Here’s a link to a privacy policy generator.
http://www.the-dma.org/privacy/creating.shtml

6) Electronic Press Kit

This is where you refer the media to easily download an
information package about you.

Here’s some ideas on what you can include:

*Biography

*Demo Songs

*Pictures

*Reviews/Testimonials

*Sideshow Of Photos

*Video or Film Footage (Windows Media or Quicktime format)

Create a biography with pictures in .pdf format and make it
available for download. You can use the Writer program contained
in the free Open Office Suite http://www.openoffice.org to do
this. Open then program type (or paste) in your biography and
insert pictures. When your done go to File > Export As PDF.

7) Lyrics

Allows fans to get more familiar with your music. Also adds
content to your site which will get picked up by the search
engines if it has an incoming link form your main page or
somewhere else.

Biography

On your bio page sections fans read about you and see your
pictures. A sideshow of your photos sometimes adds a nice touch.

9) Concert Listings/News

Keep your fans and site visitors updated with the latest news
about your concerts/shows, interviews, appearances ond other topics
of interest.

10) Forum

A discussion forum is a great place for you to interact with your
fans and street teams. An excellent free script to set up a forum
is phpBB http://www.phpbb.com.

11) Blog

Blogging is a good way to syndicate your artist/band news and
generate traffic for your site. Search engines love this kind of
stuff. Later on in the course I’ll go a bit more in dept on
setting up a blog. A nice fully featured blogging script is
Word Press http://www.wordpress.org

Make sure your each page of your site is cross browser functional,
meaning it can be viewed properly by different web browser programs.
Two of most popular ones are Internet Explorer and Firefox
http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox. Sometimes a site will
show up perfectly in IE but will be all out of whack when viewed in
Firefox, or vise versa. Have both browsers installed and check out
every page.

Get Your FREE 5 Day Music Marketing Course
http://www.MusicMarketingStrategies.com/course

Dan Meiyers
info@musicmarketingstrategies.com

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Music marketing is by and large difficult for most artists, that is something we need to realise. Marketing yourself, being confident to allow people to listen to your tracks and most importantly, handling criticism takes a bit of time to get used to. In the majority of cases though, marketing plans do fail. you may have a great sounding track, but if it is not marketed properly then it will just be white noise.

However all is not lost.

The main reasons why music marketing fails is that 1) there is always some money involved, and 2) we market our music.

They all sound a bit strange I know, but my plan is for you to get over these hurdles and to get your music out there without any hassle. I will take each of the above points in turn, but remember they are interlinked:

1) Money marketing. This is bad. The economics of this is so: you have to sell slot of tracks to get back the amount you spent on marketing, then you need to sell a few more to make any profit. The problems is, why are we spending so much money on music marketing, or, why are we spending any money on marketing at all?! The Internet has greatly reduced the cost of marketing by 100%. Yep, marketing should be free, then any tracks that you do sell is pure profit. There are so many music marketing strategies, some of which are simple ideas that are not being utilised.

Here are some fantastic free marketing strategies are not being used, at all. How about leaflet distribution, flyers, making a mailing list then advertising your new tracks on that (they already like your tracks because they have signed upto your mailing list). Applying to competitions will always bring in some much needed traffic as competitions generate 1) leads and interest from the host site, 2) your tracks will get viral marketed especially if it has become in the top 3. Viral marketing is just another way of spreading interest, all the people who voted for your tracks will recommend the great track that they heard, and you name spreads. 3) You can always advertise the fact that you got in first, second or third in X competition (always state how many other competitors were there as well- coming third out of four entries is nothing to promote really).

Surely the ultimate advertising strategy is…give away your MP3s for FREE! A simple technique that promotes your tracks. People then trust you, they love quality items, they assume then, “hmm, if this is free, and it’s good, what would his selling tracks be like?” Free stuff sells pay goods, fact. Give away alot of free stuff…MP3s being the main one, and then be patient.

Once you have finished your free marketing, start again. Just keep on promoting yourself by free processes. It gets your name banded around, people will see your Webpage link and click on it increasing your traffic. It might not too successful in the first few months or maybe even a year, but stick with it, gaining visitor confidence will ultimately prevail.

2) The above is great, but why would anyone buy any track from you in the first place? To most surfers you are faceless, they don’t see you on the music videos, so why should they buy anything from you?

Harsh words I know, I’m sorry, but it is true. That is the real reason why there are thousands of good groups and artists out there in Internet land marketing away, spending cash and showing nothing for it. They marketed first, wanting cash, and their visitors are literally saying “I don’t think so”. You then become the banner ad- looks really good, but never gets the click.

What you need to do is create content within your site. Simple as that. Without content you are just another site that the visitor has no real reason to come back to. Content also increases the chances of you being picked up by the search engines. Please note:Google, and the other big search engines have stated that their thousands of calculations per site includes content search. This is a fundamental statement, even if you are a music site giving away your MP3s.

If you have ever looked for MP3s within the search engines, there are about 6 million sites dedicated to the term MP3. Now, your one site has to be found by a visitor, the chances are very low. However, if your site has content focused keywords, such as “good guitar riffs”, “how to gig” etc, then you will be picked up much easily than a simple MP3 search. Within the various pages that you have created you put, “download free guitar MP3s” or something that suits your music, and you then advertise your MP3s through the “back door”. Content will also bring back the visitors, they love a site that they are interested in, they sign up to your news-letter, and then you email them with new updates, your new MP3s etc. Then you start to create your own little buzz, you create people willing to listen to your tracks.

A sideline to content is always relevant, up-to-date content. Offering tapes with your tracks on is music marketing suicide. I have seen these actually being offered on some websites. Offering a tape states that 1. You are not up-to-date hence your sounds won’t be, 2. You are offering poor quality, hence your tracks won’t shine, and 3. You have to pay out for the tape (postage and packaging etc). People on the Internet want things now, not tomorrow, offering MP3s, even short WAV files is giving the visitor what they want- immediate access to your tracks.

Relevant content is just as important as current content. If you have a rock website stick to rock related web pages. If I was into hip-hop I wouldn’t go onto your rock site and look at hip-hop related articles. Obvious I know, but scarily this has been done. It also has another effect. The search engines see topic specific sites as just that, topic specific. If you stray away from your chosen topic it will not look good for you with the engines. They will see that your relevance has reduced and so to will your page ranking.

Content is not that easy to accomplish. It comes with time, you need to tweak, track whether that has done any good to your traffic or click throughs. You could also just be writing alot of drivel. Content needs to be “Search Engine Focused”, you need to honestly persuade people to buy from you, you need to have a one to one style (like you are talking to a friend), and definitely not be boring. Nearly forgot, you need to assess who your audience is. Are they young, middle aged, technophobic? You writing style should cater for your audience. For example, a younger audience will like more colour, more tech information, a friendly banter, and up-to-date chart acts. Generally if you write as you would talk to a friend then you will be on safe lines.

Dominic Hough has made music for over 18 years. On his site http://www.make-your-own-dance-and-techno-songs.com he has proved that you can make, and market your own techno songs for free. His site also covers sampling, MP3s, loops and much more.

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The fundamentals of any site, especially music sites (where the competition is harsh) is to 1) keep the visitors and 2) for the visitors to find you. Most of the methods listed have the other advantage of being search engine friendly.

When your site loads up, it must load up quickly. Any pictures must be quick, and small. This has an advantage. Within 15 seconds your visitors will either be saying “I like this site”, or “only half loaded, I will go to the other site listed on the search engine”. The visitor will leave your site and that is one down. If you have other pages listed, would they go back onto your site? Probably not. What the visitor should know is:

1. What your site is about

2. Where to get what they want

3. What other things do you offer.

So with that in mind, any load up animations or any Flash intros should be replaced (I personnally can’t stand these, some even have a “skip intro button”, what is the point of that?! Don’t use it!). Any visitor wants information fast, now. Not in 1 minute’s time. You can save the anims to another page, direct people to it if they want to download or see it- they can judge it for themselves. The main problem with too slow or no-info main pages is that the search engines know the time people spend on the pages referred from them. In other words, once a surfer has clicked through to a page from a search engine, the engines then see how long the surfer is on there for. If the surfer goes off the page quickly (due to slow loading and frustration) then the engine will deem that page poor, and rate it lower.

MIDI sounds are cool, great on mobile phones, but please leave them off the web-site. It gives a tacky feel to the site. If you are using your own tunes then why use a MIDI file? MP3s are the way to go, use a 1 minute sample of an MP3 if your really have to- sounds better, better quality, and shows off your tunes much better.

Slipknot artists, thats great. But if you link to pages talking about drum n’ bass then this is bad. The search engines will rate you much lower if your neighbouring pages are unrelated. Related pages “Slipknot sounding, best Slipknot tunes, Slipknot related artists” etc is fine and can then open up and can expand your site.

The Alt tag for pictures- always name them. If your page title is called best rock acts, and you include pictures of them, the Alt tag would be called “bestrockactmetallica”. Again this tells the search engine that everything is related to the main topic of the page.

Speak with passion about your subject, include little anecdotes about the topic “I went to their concert and they did this”. Say how you came about liking the group. Virgin Music is a competitor, they can only go off what the PR people tell them, what the back of the CDs say. They have realised now that the personal touch is much better at selling to customers and attracting them, so they have set up forums. Amazon does the same, but they have “your view” under the CD that you clicked on. A personalised chat is better than any amount of advertising revenue being thrown at a product.

Make sure you have an RSS feed. If you have a newsletter then you have to wait a while until someone submits their email address (very sacred) and subscribes to you. With an RSS feed they subscribe to your site, but telling their RSS software to pick up the chosen sites feeds. No email addresses given out! If interesting article links catch their fancy they can click through to your site. Becasue you have only asked the software to keep in contact with know sites to you there is no junk. A sort of screened email. It is still in relative infancy, but it is wise to start one now rather than wait. If it catches on you will be at the forefront (most companies don’t really know what RSS is or its potential, at the moment). For musicians it is a must. You can put MP3s into links for people to download, increasing your marketing spread. The search engines seem to like RSS, they either list more of your pages or rank your pages slightly higher with a RSS feed attached.

Watch out for your spelling. A search engine will place your site pages much higher than a site that has poor spelling. Even street words could have a negative effect (unless it is a specific searched for keyword)- MP3z, gr8, and tunez to name a few.

Never assume. If you use words like accapella, Vibrato etc how do you know that your readers know the words? If you did your research, then you should know who your visitors are. But always put a glossary, or brackets with an explanation. It can become frustrating for someone who is just starting out to look up another web site to find out what words mean from the first web site. This disregard for new, rookie visitors (you will get quite a few, no question) will have a negative effect on your traffic. People will leave or just get fed-up with a “members only site”, they could email you with the same question” what does this mean, why are you saying that”. After a while you then see FAQs appearing.

Never assume, part two. Yeah sure, you know how to work the software, you know how to set your kit up, but it is a really good idea to show how you did so. Pictures help a great deal. With general text screens, after a while your eyes start to see just a blurr of text. Hence that is why most sites use colour, bold, or paragraphs to split text up. Write a guide, write a “how to”, include pictures, little tales of what happened to you, and write in a logical step-wise manner. Brief and to the point. This demonstrates that you know your subject and are not lying. It also demonstrates commitment, understanding and builds up a great web site term- trust.

Dominic Hough has made music for over 18 years. On his site http://www.make-your-own-dance-and-techno-songs.com he has proved that you can make, and market your own techno songs for free. His site also covers sampling, MP3s, loops and much more.

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