There are lots of artists online promoting their website. Some are still starting a website and building an online presence. The following tips are absolutely helpful for musicians who plan to succeed in promoting and selling their music online using their website.
13 Tips that you should be implementing
Tip#1: Make your website to load VERY fast – remember a study on the effects of slow loading website to your visitors.
It says that 25% of the visitors will abandon your website after 4 seconds. Of course, if you are musician and planning to get more fans. You put a strong effort in improving your website loading speed.
What you can do is to use a fast CMS like WordPress and use that in your website. Do not add too much graphics and slow loading elements like Flash. It’s why I hate visiting artist pages if it loads very slowly!
Tip#2: Showcase your music – the biggest mistake you can commit in your website is that you forget to showcase your music. Remember that your music is your product. You need to show it to your visitors so that they will impress your performance and catalog. As a result, they will most likely buy the music or become one of your loyal fans.
Do not forget to test your music player in all web browsers, to make sure it is comfortable. You can read more details here.
Tip#3: Sell your music – again one of the big mistakes is that even though you showcase your music; most artists forget how their fans or visitors will buy or license their music. Once your visitors are in your website, eliminate all possibilities of a guessing game and tell them everything what they need to know and that includes where to buy your music.
Some artist uses Paypal as a method to accept payment online while some others are using iTunes, CD baby or Amazon as their distributors. Kindly put the exact URL and make sure it is constantly updated. Websites like SoundCloud offer ways that you can sell your music to your fans. You might as well try that.
Tip#4: Always include a fully working contact form – you should find a way for your music fans to contact you. Some of these are not your fans anyway but could be A&R searching for you. So make sure you have a fully working contact forms.
Tip#5: Use high quality MP3 – some music websites afraid of using too much disk space in their hosting accounts and are too conservative with MP3 file sizes. As a result, the music that they are streaming in their website is relatively in very poor quality. Make sure you stream your music at an acceptable quality. With increasing Internet speeds, you can now stream at 320kbps without much of a problem while having a CD audio quality. If most of your customers are coming from countries with very slow Internet, reduce the bit rate to at least 128kbps.