4 Ways A Great Graphic Designer Can Help Musicians Market Their Music

A well-designed image can serve as a strong marketing tool. As a musician, your desire is to share your music with a certain audience. In addition to creating quality music, using a great graphic designer will help your music get to more people in a quicker amount of time. A graphic designer can also help shape your audience’s perspective, since the graphics serve as a visual representation of your brand. There are four ways a graphic designer can have a direct impact on your marketing efforts.

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The Power Of Promotion: How To Get Your Band's Name Out There

What does it take for your band to gain success? Some will say talent, others may say hard work and determination, but though all those things can help, the real secret to gaining success is promoting and advertising. Face it: there are thousands of amazing artists out there with raw talent and catchy riffs, but if they lack in advertising then they might as well be nothing to the rest of the world. So how does one promote? Here we narrow it down to the most essential tips to help you find your target audience.

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Bands: How to Properly Use a Landing Page on Your Website

This post originally appeared on the Bandzoogle blog. Dave Cool is the Director of Artist Relations for musician website & marketing platform Bandzoogle. Twitter: @Bandzoogle | @dave_cool

Bandzoogle makes it easy to add an intro or “splash” page to your website. When used properly as a landing page for your visitors, they can be an effective marketing tool for your music.

However, intro pages can easily be misused, which can hurt your site traffic, fan engagement, and your sales.

4 Common Mistakes To Avoid with Intro Pages

Here are four common mistakes that we see with intro pages that you should avoid:

1. Permanent intro page: Intro pages should only be used for short periods of time and for specific calls-to-action. It becomes annoying for repeat visitors to keep having to click through to your main site.

Also, Google picks up text content on your page, and if the first page of your website is an Intro page, there isn’t much to tell Google how your site is relevant to search queries, which can hurt your rank.

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Musician's Arsenal: Killer Apps, Tools & Sites - Crowdbooster

Welcome back to Musician’s Arsenal. This week we’ll be going over analytics. Too few artists actually pay attention to their social media analytics. Some just don’t know analytics for social media exist, some don’t know where to find them and some don’t think it’s important. It’s time to remedy all of this here and now. Crowdbooster recently launched the public version of their site (it had been in private beta for a while), and they join a legion of other social media analytics solutions available to musicians. I choose Crowdbooster to write about due to it’s ease of use and affordability (how’s free?). Crowdbooster provides straight ahead, no nonsense analytics in an easily digestible format.

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Musician's Arsenal: Killer Apps, Tools & Sites - Limelight

I hope everyone survived hurricane Irene this weekend. Now that natural disasters are out of the way, it’s time to get back to rockin’ the music world! This week in Musician’s Arsenal, I’d like to talk about something most musician’s don’t like to think about. Rights.

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Musician's Arsenal: Killer Apps, Tools & Sites - Onesheet

Welcome back to Musician’s Arsenal! In this edition, I’m very excited to be presenting Onesheet to you. Onesheet is a very easy and effective web presence solution for musician’s struggling to create an attractive website. For those of us who can’t build a nice WordPress site to save our lives, Onesheet is here to save the day (while I don’t want to give the impression that creating a Onesheet excludes you from needing a website, this is a fantastic option that can take care of your web presence needs while you build a website the right way).

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The Musician’s Arsenal: Killer Apps, Tools and Sites – NoiseTrade

Welcome back to the Musician’s Arsenal: Killer Apps, Tools and Sites. In this second edition, I’d like to turn you all on to a very cool site we, here at Ariel Publicity, have been familiar with for some time now; NoiseTrade (www.noisetrade.com). Like I said, we’ve been hip to this site for a little while now, but a few weeks back Brannon from NoiseTrade came to our Brooklyn office to give us a sneak peek at their newly designed site, and we were very impressed. NoiseTrade is a platform for both artists and fans to discover each other. For the fan, it provides a fantastic and easy way to find new music. The fan is not obligated to pay for this music, but has the option of ‘tipping’ the artist when they download the tracks.

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Do Social Networks Really Help Musicians?

The purpose of this article is to cut right through to the heart of why it’s so hard for musicians to benefit (in any meaningful way) from social networks. The social network provides new and exciting benefits for musicians, which is why most embrace new social networks as a way to expose their music to thousands of potential fans and music industry reps. The only trouble is overcrowding. What always struck me as strange is the myspace mentality. It appeared that musicians actually thought that having a million friends was a good thing on myspace, despite the fact those friends were all musicians who only ‘friended’ you so that they can get more ‘friends’ for themselves. Perhaps myspace’s tag line should have been, “Join myspace, an endless circle of incestuous pleasantries probably amounting to nothing”. I guess that wouldn’t have been snappy enough.

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The Musician’s Guide To Affordable, Effective Websites Part 2

This is a response to Ariel Hyatt’s recent post ‘The Musician’s Guide To Affordable, Effective Websites’. In this article, Ariel outlines the fact that all musicians should have a website, and goes on to detail how you can set one up on a tight budget. In this article however, I want to elaborate on some of the points she makes, and give you an alternative method to setting up a lot cost website. As I’m sure you know, there’s more then one way to skin a cat, and today I’m going to show you a method that has worked well for me.

I’ve already outlined step by step how to build a music website, but today I’m going to be looking at the reasoning behind each of these decisions, so you can yourself decide if they’re right for you. I will also be looking at the set up cost, so you will know how much something like this will set you back. Considering what it costs to get a ‘professional’ to set up a website for you, I’m sure you’ll be pleasantly surprised…

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