Music Success In Nine Weeks week three. Once again, we are working through Ariel Hyatts book, Music Success In Nine Weeks. This weeks task is website optimization. This is obviously a super important step. Ever since Al Gore invented these crazy interwebs, folks have been checking out bands’ webpages. The book walks through 6 steps to make sure your webpage is awesome.
After reading through this chapter this week, we have actually already done these things. Which is rad as we are manic as hell trying to complete our goals from the first chapter.
So instead I will walk through the process that we went through trying to get our website set up. Then match it to the steps that Ariel lays out in her book.
A few years ago, setting up an awesome website was hard. It typically took a lot of time and frustration or some money to pay someone to get your site up. In the last few years there has been a bunch of new tools that make band pages very easy for a small fee. Almost like finding love in Vegas. We have had several web page providers, and they have all been pretty good. However from the experiences that we have had bandzoogle is god. Their tools are easy to use and their designs look great. They have killer analytic tools to monitor your traffic, and the best email list management of any of their peers. Basically, they fucking rock. Clearly we are fanboys and highly recommend bandzoogle. Hostbaby is another great service that we tried, and worth a look as well, but we have had a much better experience at bandzoogle. Definitely worth $20 a month to have an effective webpage.
Following are the six steps outlined in the book and how we have done somewhat the same things.
Add your pitch to your homepage. Our homepage is a blog and news section. It also includes our pitch, from last weeks chapter.
Your site must load in less than 3.5 seconds. Once again, it’s a no brainer to pay a service and then you never have to worry about load times or uptime. Awesome music must load fast and be available at all times!
No flash intros. Flash intros on webpages thankfully fell out of favor five years ago or so. Unless you’re running a movie production or graphic art site, there is no reason for a flash intro. And a flash intro prevents google from finding you. So- no flash intros! With today’s aforementioned site builders, there really is no reason for a flash intro.
Have a consistent look and feel throughout the net. This rule stipulates that all of your websites should look the same. We use the same logo and branding across all of our sites, with the exception of myspace, because myspace is a dead bloating whale. However, be sure to check out our awesome new re-done myspace later this week. Actually don’t. Our website, facebook and tumblr are way cooler. But all of your sites should be branded with similar graphics and feel.
Give away an exclusive free mp3 video. We currently give away a track to join our mailing list. Unfortunately since we make all of our music available on a creative commons license, it is not an exclusive free track. We are currently working up alternate acoustic versions of some released and some unreleased tracks and will use these in the future for our mailing list. The end goal will be to have an entire exclusive album only available to members of our mailing list. Coming soon, so sign up!!
Make it clear and set everyone at ease. This is one rule tha requires some attention to correct. It needs to be clear that when people join your email list, that they will get something for free and that you will not spam or sell their address. Again, bandzoogle has a tool that allows you to do this easily. Once an email is entered, they get a link to your awesome free track. You can also offer songs up through your forum which requires an email address. We need to offer up more exclusive tracks(which we are recording now) and state that we will never spam or sell emails. Which we have no intention of doing, but it helps put folks at ease when it’s in writing.
