1. Has a proper address, like yourname.com, instead of yourname.wordpress.com or .bandcamp.com
2. You can fully customize and design
3. Will help you rank well in Google and sell more music

We’ll be using the free “WordPress” software which is used by millions of other websites. Because of this popularity there will be hundreds and thousands of free guides and tutorials available online to help you with your new website in the future.

The Cost

Although the WordPress software is free, you will need to pay for your own web hosting, especially if you want a yourname.com address. Most hosting services are quite cheap ($5 – $10 per month) and include free email addresses (e.g. bookings@yourbandname.com).

When you start adding custom designs to your site there is also the option to buy premium themes. This is only optional – there are plenty of nice free themes – and relatively cheap at $20-$30.

Let’s Get Started!

The first thing you’ll need to do is get a domain name and hosting.

For this we use bluehost.com (and that’s what we’ll be demonstrating for the rest of this post), but there are plenty of others out there:

• Bluehost.com – $5.95 /mo, unlimited space, unlimited email addresses & free domain name.
• Godaddy.com – $5.99 /mo, 150gb space, 500 email addresses & $11.99 / yr domain name.
• HostGator.com – $5.56 /mo, unlimited space, unlimited emails & $15 domain registration.
• JustHost.com – $5.95 / mo, unlimited space, unlimited emails & free domain name.
• Lots of others! Just google “web hosting”

This is the fist step and the only time you’ll have to incur  a cost (any further cost is completely optional.)

Owning your own .com or .net domain name is vital for any music website that wants to be taken seriously, so pick one of the providers above (or google around for others) and register your domain name.

Once you’ve got your hosting set up, or if you already have your domain name, we’ll proceed to step two – WordPress.

Installing WordPress

Although it was originally designed as a blogging platform, WordPress is so powerful and easy to use that it now runs over 10% of websites on the entire internet!

WordPress is ideal software for building music websites – it’s quick, simple to learn, easy to update, plays really well with Facebook, YouTube and Google – and best of all, it’s free!!

On some hosting services you’ll need to do a manual instillation of WordPress. This involves downloading the files from wordpress.org, uploading them via FTP, creating a database and hooking it all together. It’s a bit of a pain and you can find full instructions here.

Luckily Bluehost have an easy to use, 1-click automatic WordPress installation. You can watch the simple step-by-step instructions here.

Finding your way around

Once WordPress is installed you should take a few minutes to figure out how it’s laid out.

WordPress.org have a great “First Steps” section on their website. If this is your first time with WordPress (or even if it isn’t) you should definitely take 15-20 mins to read it through and learn how to kick the tyres on your new site.

Making your Site Super Sexy

If you’ve read the First Steps introduction you’ll see they mention “Themes”. The theme is the template that controls the look and style of your website.

Taking the bare-bones WordPress website you have now and making it your own happens in 3 steps:

1. Find a theme with the layout and general presentation style you like
2. Customize it by changing some colours, images etc.
3. Add your own text and content

Step 1: Finding a Theme

There are two types of WordPress Themes: Premium and Free.

There are thousands of free wordpress themes available online – but be careful! – some can contain viruses and nasty bits of script that hijack your website. For that reason you should mostly stick to the official WordPress directory (which has over 1,000 free themes).

These free themes are a great place to start, but it’s often very hard to find a great looking theme amongst all the poor quality free themes.

If you’re willing to spend a small amount of money (as little as $20) you can start looking at some really nice premium themes.

I always start with Theme Forest, especially their Entertainment category. With over 1,300 premium themes you should be able to find what you’re looking for! Other sites like WooThemes or StudioPress have a mixture of some free and some premium themes, but not as many as Theme Forest.

Lastly, if you want to have full control of the site you could use a theme framework like Thesis. This takes a little bit more time to set up (although it’s not much more difficult) and costs slightly more than the average premium theme, but it’s fully customizable to make the exact website you want.

Next Steps: Customize 

This will vary depending on the theme you’ve picked, but most of the premium themes (and some of the free ones) will have “Theme Options” in the Appearance menu.

These options will let you upload your own logo image, change fonts, colours and sometimes layouts too.

You can add pages like “About The Band” “Images” “Videos” and others to let your fans see what you’re all about.

You can add posts with updates, news and any general information you want to share with fans.

You can also add plugins to add custom features to your site. Check out this great list of 25 Extremely Useful WordPress Plugins for Musicians on TightMix.

And You’re Ready!

By now your new website should be live and visible at your new domain name (yourname.com etc.).

If you have any specific problems or questions you can try google WordPress + the problem, or of course you can always leave a comment here and we’ll do our best to help.

Note: Some recommendations here give us a small commission if you click and sign up. We only recommend services that we genuinely use ourselves and of course you’re free to take the advice and not click the links. If you do want to use these services, however, it does help us pay the rent!

What you want to do next is acquire the fan and connect with them somehow. They may be the kind of person that “subscribes” on YouTube, but most people aren’t, so what you want to do is try get them back to your website to either get their email address or get them to purchase.

Traditionally, the best way to do this was with a link in the description box, but here’s a little tip from us on how to get a much more prominent, clickable link on the video:

Change The Advertisement

You’ve probably noticed that YouTube shows little ads at the bottom of some of your videos. These are mostly useless, and a little bit annoying because they take people away from watching your video.

What we’ve discovered is a little work around that will actually let you control what gets placed in these ads – including a free link to your own site! It’s a slightly lengthy process, but pretty straight forward and well worth it.

Google Adwords

You’ll need to make an ad to promote your video using Google adwords. This doesn’t have to be a big ad or a long campaign, we usually do a $1 ad for 1 day. If you haven’t used Google Adwords before, it’s pretty straight forward – just click “start now” and follow the steps.

Once you’re inside adwords you want to create a new “display ad” and select the “YouTube Promoted Videos Template” as you can see in the screenshot below

Click the “select a YouTube video” option and find your video that you want to promote.

You can set the budget to as little as you want, we usually do $1 – or you can put some proper money into the promotion if you’d like to try boost the hits it gets

Customise Your Ad

One this ad gets approved by the Adwords team (it usually takes about 24 hours) you can login to your YouTube channel, find the promoted video and click edit.

Over on the right hand side, below your video, you’ll now see a new menu that wasn’t there before – “Call to Action Overlay.” As the name implies, this is where you can insert a message that encourages the fans to click through to your website. In this example below – we were giving away a free download of the song being performed in the video, in exchange for the fans email address.

Now when fans view your video they’ll see your ad shown on your video, which will attract WAAAAAAAY more clicks than a link in the description box.

Keep The Clicks

So there you go. Now, instead of fans clicking on random ads for other business’ products, they’ll be clicking through to see more about your music, to join your mailing list or buy your album!

You can also do more to encourage people to click the CTA overlay by mentioning it in the video or do a colored annotation pointing to it – which will help overcome the natural ad blindness that some users have.

Because it’s Google, stupid

The single biggest reason the music industry has spent so long speculating about Google’s venture into their world is because of the sheer size and power of the organisation. Google has cash reserves of $35billion. Yes, that’s right BILLION. And they are getting richer to the tune of billions every month. They are the single biggest player in the world of the internet and despite Facebook getting all the media attention of late it is still Google who continue to be the most successful at monetising the web. The fact is Google could buy the music industry outright, if it wanted to.

They don’t though. What they want is to continue doing what they’ve always done; bringing internet users to content and making money on the side through advertising revenues. Google Music is “At least while it’s in beta, …. free,” said Paul Joyce in his keynote presentation of Music Beta. So it looks like they are testing out how to achieve the balance of providing the expensive infrastructure behind the service free to users but with support from advertisers. They’re not newbies at this game remember – they’ve gone down this road with YouTube before, an arm of their business which was initially loss-making because of expensive video hosting costs, but is now one of their key growth areas. And let’s not forget that the biggest driver of traffic to YouTube is music videos. Revenue sharing deals (or should that be lawsuits?) with music labels  and the Vevo experience are both examples of how Google has learned a lot about working with the music industry in the past few years. Music Beta will see them ramping up their influence in the area and flexing their considerably powerful muscles.

Of course Google have earned this power because they provide useful services to people. It is their giant user-base which marks them out from their rivals in the cloud music stakes. Google keep their user numbers close to their chest but they are the most popular search engine in the world with market shares ranging from 66% in the US to circa 90% in Western Europe., there are an estimated 200 m illion users of their email client Gmail, their web browser Chrome is used by 12% of the internet population and there are 2 billion YouTube video views every day. In addition to all this, Google are running strong in the mobile internet race. Their mobile operating system Android has outstripped rival Apple’s iPhone OS and looks set to continue its rise thanks to the eager development  efforts of  handset partners like Samsung and HTC. Apple will have to draw on their longer experience in the music field and develop a cloud music service that is extra special, with their trademarks of usability and high design to compete with an Android-integrated Google Music.

But enough analysis – what is it going to look like? Well, Google have released a video to demonstrate the technology’s slick-looking features which includes easy-to-use music library syncing and cache storage to your mobile device so that you can listen to selected music even if you’re not online:

Google are currently testing Music Beta with staffers and developers, after which they will roll out beta-invites in the US-only. So in reality it will be a while before Google Music hits the rest of the world. But when it does, it has the potential to change the music industry forever.

Karmin are a duo from Massachusetts who have exploded to fame in the past few weeks thanks to their cover of Chris Brown’s Look At Me Now. The spectacle of Amy Heidemann delivering Busta Rhymes’ and Lil Wayne’s raps at breakneck speed has caught the imagination of YouTube viewers and more importantly of tastemakers like Ellen, Ryan Seacrest and Perez Hilton. In the past 14 days they have ratcheted up almost 7 million views for Look At Me Now and millions more for their other cover songs.

It’s no doubt that the pair are very talented – Heidemann’s possesses the ability to shift between ghetto rapper and soulful songstress in nanoseconds and partner Nick Noonan provides the musical framework from which it all hangs. It’s this talent, combined with hard work and a canny strategy of covering high profile songs that have gotten Karmin the attention they deserve. Rebecca Black these guys are not. Instead they have been making music together for years, releasing an album of original material in May 2010 and DIY-ing it all the way through their website, YouTube and social networks. Over the past eight months they have been steadily self-making videos  for their covers of pop hits ranging from Katy Perry to Bruno Mars and Jessie J. The result is that along with picking up fans  on YouTube  over the past year who have been spreading the Karmin message, they now have an impressive back catalogue of cover material for people who have just discovered them to enjoy and share.

Impressively (and again in contrast with Rebecca Black who was slow out of the blocks to sell Friday) Karmin are already turning all those YouTube views into hard cash. The store on their website sells both their original material as well as the cover versions they’ve become famous for and a selection of merchandise and ringtones. This is a band who are taking the DIY approach to their marketing seriously and it’s paying dividends. Other artists, take note!

-  Music video (i.e. YouTube) is the most popular means by which people are consuming music. Nielsen call this the “watch” habit and believe that there are opportunities for “more explicit monetization” from online video channels.

-  Legal music downloads are still growing with downloads to mobile devices promising to play a more significant role in the future.

-  Overall about 25% of the surveyed sample used music streaming sites like We7, Spotify or Grooveshark. To put this in perspective, this figure is more than the 18% who legally downloaded music. With awareness and understanding of music streaming sites at 63% of the total sample there should be room for growth in streaming adoption but the challenge will be in persuading people to pay for such a service by adding additional incentives such as exclusive track access and discounted event ticketing.

-  Mobile music application development is fertile ground both for marketing tools (artist apps) and also as a revenue generator (streaming / music discovery apps).

-  21-24 year olds are the “nucleus of the music industry“. They are the highest consumers of music online and the most likely to adopt new music technologies, thus drive innovation in the area. Conversely they are the least likely to purchase physical product in a record-store context and therefore the industry must pay attention to their habits and engage with them in order to ensure their potential as customers does not go untapped.

The paper concludes by noting that the diversity of music consumption patterns is a situation in which there are “as much potential as there are challenges” and while the old music business model might be dead, there is unlikely one single business model which can replace it. Their end statement is worth reading in its entirety:

“The real issue to solve is that the channel or source of music is often regarded as much as a marketing tool (audio‐video sites, apps) than as a revenue generation channel. It is somewhat confusing for the consumer, who does not make a distinction between being exposed to music via marketing and promotion and looking proactively in the “free” digital jukebox for what they want to listen to. In a future where this previously held consumer distinction between conventional marketing, purchase and consumer‐led listening is blurred, how should the industry market and generate revenue effectively? Gradually, it may well be that the B2B part of music industry revenue will be as important as the revenue generated directly with consumers”

If you don’t know the difference between the two; a profile is meant for ordinary people to add friends, share pics and comments. A page is meant for businesses, band, authors and public figures to communicate with their audiences.

There are a huge number of advantages to setting up a Page instead of a Profile (not least because using a profile for a band is against Facebooks Terms!).

It’s often painful to see a band having built up one or two thousand friends on a profile, only to have to start from scratch with a new page. You have very limited options here – you can spam the newsfeed and send individual message to each friend urging them to “like” your new page. It’s time consuming (believe me!) and not very effective.

But now Facebook are giving us the ability to convert a personal profile to a page. This lets you keep ALL your friends (as fans) and your pictures, but the rest of your data has to be re-entered.

If you have a page you want to convert, just click here to begin the process.

Our first reaction to this news was delight – this will be a HUGE time saver for any band that made the simple mistake of building a profile instead of a page.

Scammable?

However, after a while it dawned on us that this has another potential use. As all musicians know, growing a Fanbase on Facebook is hard work. It takes regular updates, competitions, promotions and even advertising.

But this update offers a new back door approach:

If you’ve just set up a band, why not create a personal profile, start adding people until you get 4,000-5,000 friends (5k is the max) then migrate to a page with 5,000 fans.

Is it spammy? Absolutely. Could it be effective? Probably. Am I recommending it? I’m not sure.

On the whole, the quality of fans you start with might not be high enough to warrant the investment of time. On the other hand, starting a page with a few thousand fans is a huge boost for a new band.

What do you think? If you were starting your Facebook page today would you consider taking this approach?

It’s another excellent example of the band using their creativity and passion for communicating directly with their fanbase to promote their music. In short, it’s great marketing and here’s why:

1. It maximises physical album sales

Enticing fans into record stores with a free and unique piece of merchandise like ‘The Universal Sigh’ is a brilliant way to maximise physical sales. It’s an added incentive for people who don’t already own the album to purchase it in-store, while those fans who already have the digital download (whether paid-for or illegally downloaded) are being up-sold into CD or vinyl.

2. It ties into social media

The accompanying website is a fantastic example of social media integration. Official photos are taken when fans receive their copy of ‘The Universal Sigh’ and are immediately uploaded to the website. Another section of the site displays a photo feed from the ‘The Universal Sigh’ group on Flickr where fans can upload self-taken photos featuring them reading the ‘newspaper’ in unusual locations. And they cannily encourage all tweets to display the #theuniversalsigh hashtag. With so many excited fans out there sharing and tweeting the message who needs to buy advertising?

3. It Extends the Purchase Life-Cycle of the Album

The release of ‘The King Of Limbs’ has been a well-planned affair. By breaking up the release into three distinct stages (digital, physical, ‘Newspaper Album’) and supporting them with unusual and creative events like ‘The Universal Sigh’ they are keeping the band and the album top of mid over a three month period, thereby increasing the likelihood it will continue to sell past the traditional one-month peak for new album sales. This is no mean feat as any music PR person can tell you. Stage Three in the record release will be the first shipment of the ‘Newspaper Album’ packages in early May 2011. We’re looking forward to seeing what tricks Radiohead might pull out of the bag to promote this.

Every medium goes through a life cycle and the nature of the internet has accelerated the cycle hugely so that it’s hard to contemplate a world without Facebook, YouTube or Twitter, even though those technologies have been around for just half a decade. Facebook is pulling through it’s awkward adolescence having figured out a way to monetize its platform while not pissing off its user base too much. Zuckerberg and co.’s website has matured into an independent powerhouse of the online world. With the powerful backing of its parent company Google, YouTube was fast-tracked into the major league a long time ago and now represents probably Google’s best entry into the social media sphere that it has been trying unsuccessfully to achieve through failed projects like Wave and Buzz. Twitter continues apace at being adopted by the mainstream masses and once investment has been secured to safeguard its future it looks to become just as influential as its two major contemporaries.

So much for the state-of-the-social-media-nation address. The point is, as written about nicely by Kyle Bylin (again in Hypebot), that a hyper-connected, always-plugged-into-social-network reality is upon us, and has been for a while. While everyone  got excited about the phenomenal growth in social media with new start-ups to shout about every half hour,  what matters more now  as this growth plateaus, is the way we adjust to the new reality in the long term. For artists that means taking control of their own online identity, it means paying lots of attention to their visuals, it means absolutely having their own website from day 1, it means being ready and able to interact with their audience. It means not trying to get famous solely through A&R like Alanis Morisette did in the 90s or even through Myspace like Arctic Monkeys did in the noughties. Social media is like those skinny jean wearing 20 year olds in your local bar – it’s part of life, it’s everywhere. And success in music isn’t about gimmicks – like always, it’s about talent, luck and hard work.

A good landing page

We’ve blogged about this in detail in the past so we’re not going to repeat ourselves. Just go here for the info.

ReverbNation have just updated their Facebook app and added lots of easy-to-use functionality. Well worth having a look.

Photos

The new Facebook layout allows you to customise which 5 photos you want to display on your page. There are some creative ways to hack this to lead your fans into different photos. Here’s a handy tutorial thanks to Ian from makeitinmusic.com:

Store

Facebook is first and foremost a way to connect with your fans. But that doesn’t mean you can’t use it to sell your music too. More and more artists and businesses in general are integrating stores into their pages. The best one out there for musicians is through  Topspin Media.  Topspin have just this week opened up their platform to all musicians (previously you had to be a agency/label like us in Amp, or have a large number of fans to gain access to the software). Integrating your Topspin products into your Facebook page is done with the click of a few buttons and has the professional eCommerce support you’d expect.

While having a store on your page is great, it can be hard to find on the new Facebook layout; now that tabs have been removed links to the different areas of your Facebook page are less prominently located under your profile picture. One way to get around this and get your product into the news feeds of your fans is to embed your product links into Slideshare presentations and post these as status updates. This method has the advantage of allowing 100% visual customisation and the launching of store links directly within the Facebook News Feed.

Audio

The best ways to post your songs to Facebook is not to use the Facebook Music Player. You’re much better off using third party sites like a ReverbNation landing page (above) for on-demand listens or, to highlight new music, simply post SoundCloud or YouTube links in your Facebook status. Here at Amp we love the portability and customisation that SoundCloud offers – it’s a great way not just to share your music, but also to distribute it and get fan feedback.

Link Sharing

Keeping your Facebook active with interesting content can sometimes prove a struggle – especially if you are going through a quiet period. One way to ensure you have things to post is to use link agregator tools that collect information based on your interests and connections and share these back with your social network. The best-known of these tools is probably Paper.li which creates a regular newspaper-style webpage of links and stories. Other examples can be found here, including the awesome (unfortunately iPad-only for now) Flipboard. It’s only a matter of time before a sophisticated ‘personalised magazine’ that integrates with your social networks like this becomes mainstream and cross-device.

These are just some of the things you should be thinking about when managing your Facebook page. Using the best applications, combined with an attractive layout and a consistent posting strategy will grow your connections.

Contact Us if you’d like to discuss in more detail how we could help you make the most of your Facebook page.

Here are some of our favourite recent examples of artists cleverly making the most of website interactivity:

Robyn     We Dance to the Beat

The Swedish dance-pop artist has caught our eye in the past for her interactive Twitter webvideo and she’s building on the groundwork for her latest release ‘We Dance to the Beat’. An interactive Flash site allows you to create your own unique version of the single by selecting four different beat samples which are automatically mixed and assigned a url which you can share to your Facebook or Twitter.

Duck Sauce    GoBarbra.com

One of the catchiest and just-plain-silliest songs of 2010 came from a powerhouse group of producers, songwriters and performers under the moniker Duck Sauce. An intrepid bunch of Polish developers saw the opportunity to use text-to-speech software and allow people to customise the song with their name and in a variety of accents. They created the site as a marketing tool for themselves not for Duck Sauce, but the huge viral response convinced the artists to approve the site with the addition of an iTunes link at the bottom of the page.

U2    FanCam

Not the first time this has been done, but the best executed we’ve ever seen. The Irish rockers allow fans who attended their concert in Johannesburg, South Africa to tag themselves in an incredible high resolution 360 degree photograph taken at the centre of the concert stadium.

Arcade Fire    The Wilderness Downtown

Named ‘best website of 2010‘ Arcade Fire with the help of Google Creative Labs commissioned a HTML5 site which used mapping technology and complex Javascript to create an interactive film for their song ‘We Used to Wait’.

This is an approach which takes planning, the involvement of technical experts and (by corollary) money. Let’s face it, not every band has the budget of U2 or buddies in Google Creative Labs to help them with an interactive web project. But when it works, boy does it work. The spirit of interactivity is something even the smallest of artists should think about. Your website is your terrain – do something interesting with it to involve your fans and make you stand out from the crowd.