Create Your Band Website in Minutes Using Wordpress
Having a great website is essential to having a career in the new music economy coupled with enhanced lifestyle design. Bands started with micro-pages like SoundClick and kept growing into communities like Myspace and more robust social networks. 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 sites still take a long time to load and are terrible for fans with dialup connection. If you want to take advantage of the massive amount of traffic that Google drives to websites, you need to stay away from Flash at all costs.
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. You need to give your fans audio, video, pics and anything else you can create and in the format that they want, not how you want.
Social media gives you a ton of leverage due to their large volume of traffic. Make your videos and syndicate them with TubeMogul. Use those same YouTube videos and embed them on your forum and your main site. Put your music on Myspace, Facebook, BandCamp and other sites. You can take the best of the social sites and bring them right onto your site. The goal is to use social media traffic to gain attention and visibility in order to get them back to your main site to get them into your sales funnel.
So what do you use as your main website? Wordpress. Wordpress is an open source content management system that will allow you to easily add content, pages, blog posts and media without knowing any of the techie stuff that scares many musicians. If you can type and send an email, you can effectively use Wordpress.
Wordpress pleases both Google and your fans. The dashboard is very user friendly and you are free to add anything to the site that you can think of. Your sidebars are easily customizable to add your YouTube videos, song widgets 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.
You no longer need to use FTP clients and call your webmasters 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.
Get your new band site up in five minutes with the power behind Wordpress. Get started with Wordpress by grabbing the software a host that has 1 step integration with Wordpress. You are faced with many options directly from the Wordpress dashboard. 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 building your first band site on Wordpress, look for free templates to get you started. The easiest way to find free themes is to Google them.
Your time is extremely valauable as a musician. So is marketing. If you are a rock star in both skill sets, you will have a rock star career. Stop spending time on the technical aspect of your career, and spend more taking creating great music and amazing content. 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