21 Dos And Don’ts Of Band Website Design

This post was written by Allison Sharpe and originally appeared on the Bandzoogle Blog.

The band is getting along. Songs are great. Gigs calendar is filling up. Now you just need to get people to notice you and you’ll be good to go. But where do you start?

If you focus your efforts on Facebook or Twitter, your music is likely to get lost in a sea of political rants and fur baby videos. The best way to keep fans focused on you is through your own custom website.

A website puts the focus on you and your music. It’s easy to build a website, but how do you know if you did it right? Let’s take a look and the most common ways band win and lose with their website.

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Complete SEO Checklist For Musicians

This post was written by Wes Walls and originally appeared on the Bandzoogle Blog.

It’s not easy figuring out how to start optimizing your band’s presence in search engines. So we took all of our SEO advice and broke it down into one handy checklist.

For details on how to do each of the things on the list, you can refer to our “Complete Guide to SEO for Musicians“ eBook.

Without further ado, here’s your checklist for optimizing your band for SEO:

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The Complete Guide To Marketing Your Music Online

This post was written by Lisa Occhino and originally appeared on the Bandzoogle Blog

These days, there are so many different ways to market your music online that it’s tough to even know where to start. What’s worth your time, energy, and money? What isn’t? How many social media platforms do you need to be active on? Do email lists still matter?

This comprehensive guide will outline your options and help you determine the best approach to each aspect of your music marketing.

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[eBook] A Complete Guide To SEO For Musicians

Written by Wes Walls; originally appeared on the Bandzoogle Blog.

SEO is one of those mysterious and challenging topics for musicians who want to use search engines to promote their music, and who understand how powerful it can be. If SEO matters to you, but you’re not sure where to start or how to do it: we have something great to give you.

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How To Optimize Your Band Schema For SEO

This post was written by Wes Walls and originally appeared on the Bandzoogle Blog. 

Schema is one of those things that, as a musician, you might have heard about but probably don’t want to have to learn. It’s pretty technical and easy to get wrong.

So we’ll try to simplify it for you in this post, and give you some easy shortcuts.

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Social Media Content Management For Musicians

This article originally appeared on Soundfly’s Flypaper

u’ve decided how you want to brand yourself online. You’ve created your band’s social media pages. You’re posting regularly, and still, you’re not seeing results. The solution: content planning.

By putting all of your energy into posting new content without thinking about the big picture, you’re only getting half the job done. Instead, set marketing goals, create content in bulk, and utilize the (often free) social media management tools available online.

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4 Online Marketing Mistakes Musicians Make

This article originally appeared on the Sonicbids Blog

The internet has allowed artists to reach millions of fans and grow their careers with a click of a button. While, for some, the web has been a boon for music promotion, many musicians make pivotal online marketing mistakes that prevent them from breaking out and building a successful career. Here are four of the most common mistakes to avoid. 

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8 Effective Strategies To Sell Your Music Online

For the average artist who finds it difficult to sell his/her music (hint: this is most artists) in the age of Spotify and Pandora, any attempts can often feel like a waste of time.

Below are 8 effective ways to make the most of your online merch store, digital music presence, and your relationship with die-hard fans. The following tips are not only useful, but when done right can lend themselves to a significantly greater income, a larger online presence, and stronger engagement with your fans.

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5 Solid Ways To Check If Your Music Really Is Good Enough To Release

Music appreciation is subjective. We all know this, and it’s one of the reasons why you can spend endless nights debating with your friends over whether the latest Flying Lotus release is really better than his production work with Thundercat or whether there is artistic merit in the Cloud Rap niche and how it might do better to integrate some of the sounds of drum & bass.

It’s rare to find someone who likes *exactly* the same kind of music as you, especially once you start delving a little deeper than “yeah, I guess I like to listen to all sorts of stuff”.

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Where Has The Music Loving Feeling Gone?

As technology becomes an ever increasing part of our daily lives, the way we interact with the things we label as entertainment evolve as well. Whether substituting regular cable for Netflix or curating a coveted music playlist with Spotify, the consumer is consciously changing the way companies market to them. With the focus of most marketing initiatives shifting from web 2.0 to the era of data collection and mobile, it should be noted that most marketing initiatives and the archaic ways we try to get fans or consumers to engage with the product should follow suit. It’s no longer okay to just have a Facebook page where posts are made on a somewhat normal basis or a Twitter account where a tweet lives for thirty seconds. The shift to mobile and data collection has seen an increase in how fans want to be not only engaged with but to have the content of engagement be compelling. 

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Basic Marketing Principles For Artists - Part 3 of 3: Increase the Amount of Money That You Charge

Welcome to the final segment of a 3 part series that was inspired by a mastermind program I participated in with Ali Brown who is my mentor in the world of online marketing.

Here’s the recap of what we’ve gone over thus far…

There are three ways to increase your income:

Part 1. Increase your number of clients (fans).

Part 2. Increase the frequency of purchase, how often your fans buy from you. (and you’d better have more than just music to sell).

Part 3. Increase the amount of money that you charge…

Increasing the amount of money you charge poses a problem if all you have to sell is music because music is now widely available for free, and people have proven that they are not willing to pay a premium for music.

However, fans will pay plenty of money for experiences, like a great concert or a chance to be a contribution to an artist, a special memento, or wonderful merchandise that really resonates with your fans.

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What Artists Should Know About Headliner.fm

Headliner.fm is a platform for trading recommendations with other artists on Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace. You “buy” recommendations using a virtual currency called band bucks, which can be purchased outright for real money or earned by recommending other artists.

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The Musicians’ Guide To Google – Hot Tips To Maximize Your Google Experience

Google, in my humble opinion, is the most amazing invention since anything else I can really think of. And Google is not just a big search engine, although it would still be awesome if that’s all it did.

Google has been offering a suite of incredibly powerful tools for years; way before ‘in the clouds’ become the next big thing for companies like Apple and Microsoft. And to make it even better, Google has recently created a platform for musicians that offers even further tools that will help independent musicians all over the world to thrive in the digital world.

Google is, quite simply, a portal that truly puts all of the worlds electronic information at your fingertips – there’s a good reason why the word “Google” has become synonymous with searching online.

Here are 9 Hot Tips designed to help you through all of Google’s awesomeness and use it to your benefit.

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5 Easy SoundCloud Music Promotion Tips

SoundCloud continues to be a terrific location for music promotion. Taking advantage of SoundCloud’s growing community of music lovers should be a strategic practice of all musicians, big and small. Sharing tracks, creating sets, and interacting with other users are all essential parts of good SoundCloud promotion. Add to that commenting, following and group joining, and SoundCloud becomes the online pulse of social music.

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