12 Top Tips To Developing a Successful Music Website
I have been meaning to make this post for some time. People have been commenting and asking for advice on keeping a blog. As well as a fully functioning, regularly updated website, you should also make room for a blog in your plans for developing a successful music website.
This post is part of a post on my blog. To read the post in full, please visit my site here.
Here are 12 Top Tips to Developing a Successful Music Website
1 Keep a Blog
Blogging is one of the best things you can do for your artist website. This is because regular addition of fresh content is great for the search engines. Furthermore, search engine marketing is one of the biggest and best strategies for building up a consistent flow of traffic.
It is my plan to update my blog with fresh content, three times per week. This gives me three days to write content. The rest of the week can be spent by promoting my latest blog posts. I highly recommend that you decide whether you wish to be a blogger or a YouTuber. If your writing skills are better than your video presentation skills, the former is the way to go. That is why I am choosing to develop my blog rather than my YouTube channel.
2 Proofread Everything
This is one area where I need to put more focus. Proofreading offers the opportunity to put things right before you sell your knowledge. A poorly proofread blog post can make you look amateur at best. At worst it looks as though you lack education.
3 Developing a Successful Music Website Should Include Keeping a Patreon Page
A Patreon Page is a way for fans and supporters to donate money to you on a regular basis. It is a great idea to take full advantage of this option. You can add your latest music, templates, sample packs, synth presets, etc, to your Patreon page. This helps to persuade supporters that donating to your business, is a good option for them.
We need to work more with our own Patreon page to get it ready for you. However, this represents an excellent opportunity — especially for independent artists.
4 If You Are Serious About Developing a Successful Music Website You Should Sell Everything You Make
Sell everything you make. If you make a track on your DAW, you should sell the template. You can also sell it as MIDI or WAV sample packs. Furthermore, you can sell any synth presets that you have developed or modified to fit your song.
This does not have to be initially for monetary gain. Something I did was to write a book on marketing music online. It took me months of hard work to put together. Because I wrote it, I have full legal rights. Therefore, I give this away to my email subscribers. I also recommend products and services in my book. If the reader clicks on the links and purchases something, they will be financially supporting my business.
Therefore, you should think outside the box. Don’t only think about the tracks you make. What experience have you had? Do you have any expertise in any particular area of music? These things can be sold or given away in exchange for an email address.
5 Think About Passive Income
One of the best things about making music for a living is that it can provide passive income. What is passive income? Well, it’s work that you do once and get paid over and over again. It works because it provides you with a never-ending flow of income (or email addresses — as with my book).
Music and digital products are the best products to build passive income. This is because they cost nothing to reproduce. Therefore, you have no overheads and everything that comes in is profit.
6 Developing a Successful Music Website Requires the Development of a Promotion Plan
You cannot simply write a blog post and just expect people to read it. Therefore, you need a promotion plan. What are you going to do to make sure you have people reading your blog posts. Personally, I share all my blog posts on Facebook (on both my page and in various groups), on Twitter, Pinterest and Tailwind. I also share my posts on WordPress.com and Medium. As well as these things, I also add blog posts to my email marketing campaigns.
Here is my advice for each of these in turn…
I share posts to both groups such as Be The Next D.I.Y. Rock Star. This is my number one group for sharing on Facebook. The owner, (Vox), is really nice. She may be reading this post, but it does not matter. The group is full of people who actually want to help each other rather than people who just leave links and leave. Therefore, it is an ideal group for promoting your music on Facebook.
I also use Social Bee to automate posts to go to both Twitter and Facebook regularly. I have just under 14,000 Facebook likes and over 1,800 Twitter followers. Posts are sent to my social media automatically.
As I just said, Social Bee will automate my Twitter posts so that I don’t have to worry about it. However, whereas I just post to my Facebook page four times per day, I post to Twitter six times per day. I post to Facebook at 6am, 12 noon, 6pm and midnight. Therefore, I post to Twitter at 4am, 8am, 12 noon, 4pm, 8pm and midnight.
Pinterest is a blogger’s dream for many bloggers. However, it is not quite so great for music-related blogs as for things like social media-related blogs, make money online blogs and health blogs. However, I still get a good amount of traffic from Pinterest so I would not disregard it. Pinterest also provides some excellent analytics that will tell you exactly how your claimed sites are doing.
Tailwind
Tailwind is a community of Pinterest and Instagram users. There is a tribal system here. This means that you share pins from other members. In turn, they also share your pins to their boards. This builds a lot of traffic up if you get your pins right.
I am a member of six tribes on Tailwind. The D.I.Y Rock Star Facebook group that I mentioned in the Facebook paragraph also have a Tailwind Tribe. That is how I got to know Vox. Vox then invited me to join the Facebook group.
I have shared every pin from the six tribes I am a member of. This is a big reason why I have so many shares. It was an MLM company (Global Domains International) who first coined the phrase, “If you help enough people to get what they want, you get what you want”. This is how tribes works.
Tailwind also has a system called Smart Loops. This loops the posting of your pins so that it can measure the effectiveness of each pin.
WordPress.com
Although I do not consider WordPress.com to be the best place for a blog, there is still a lot of traffic to be sourced from there. This is because of the Reader feature. It builds the WordPress.com community for itself by providing an in-house traffic system. Basically, you search for whatever topic you want to read about. You can then read and follow the blogs in your search results. I have picked up some very good and loyal readers by operating this way.
My strategy with WordPress.com as with Medium as you will read below, is to share a certain amount of my post on these sites. I then say something like, “Read the rest, click here” and link back to my site.
Medium.com
I get more traffic from Medium than anywhere else. Therefore, it is important for me to share my work there. As with WordPress.com, I share some of my blog on Medium and link back to Krannaken.com. I also have a premium membership for Medium.
