Why You or Your Band Needs Your Own Website Part 2
Today we continue from our previous post about Why Your Band Needs Your Own Website. You can find part 1 here.
1. You can do everything with it
Your social media profiles and other outposts might be good places for alternative or additional methods of ‘first contact’ – for reaching people and giving them a first taste of you and your music but your site can do those things and can be optimized to acquire them as fans and convert them into paying fans. It can be all things to all types and levels of fan. This is much harder to do on a third party platform.
You can make your site the center for engagement and the place where all your ‘joined-up thinking’ takes place.
Post images to Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, but link back to your site for more information or for fans to see a full set of photos from a recent gig. Post videos to YouTube but embed them in a post on your blog and then mail that link to your fan mailing list. Post your press releases and important news items to your website and, by all means, share those posts on Facebook and Twitter, but just an excerpt so that your fans must come back to your site to get the full story.
If you post all your news in full to Facebook, you’ll end up training your fans to look there to engage with you – which is not what you want at all. People will stop going to your site.
Make your website offer the best experience to all your fans and make it the one trusted source for the latest info, the best quality audio streams, the only place for videos with extra behind the scenes info, and, of course, the place for exclusive discounts on music and merchandise for fans to buy.
Make it the place with the best total fan experience and then when you attract a visitor there on a whim, they may stay, do more, share your info across their networks, buy your music and become an evangelist for your band.
2. Sell what you like at whatever price you like
Of course we believe that you should have your music for sale on the usual digital retailers, but you’ll inevitably discover that selling music from your own website, once you have established a core fanbase, is far more profitable per sale.
You can dictate the price of any sale and, when selling digital files, the quality that you offer. Many fans want full bandwidth audio files (WAV’s or other ‘lossless audio’) which they can’t get from iTunes. Sure, you can try and sell music within Facebook, but are your fans looking to buy when they are ‘being social’? Probably not.
Not only will it convert better, but you’ll get to keep all the cash, not the smaller percentage that you’d get through a digital distributor or aggregator.
Once again, it comes down to flexibility and efficiency.
3. You can make money from other sources
I’m not going to make a big deal about this but I most places where the average musician can make money from their online properties that aren’t directly from selling music or merchandise (ignoring branding, sponsorship, live co-op’s and ancillary income from artist activities). One is by becoming a YouTube partner and getting paid for the ads that YouTube run against your videos. The other is by leveraging traffic on your artist website so that you can sell Advertising space, do co-op deals with brands such as paid reviews or competitions and running affiliate marketing offers.
We’ll look at some of these possibilities separately as they are very specific and they really won’t apply to everyone (a certain level of traffic is a pre-requisite) but they are only going to be open to artists who have total control over their main web property. You can’t sell separate ad space on your Facebook page!
4. You are investing in yourself
I’ve assumed throughout this article, without actually saying it, that you’re building this website on a domain that you’ve bought and using hosting that you control.
But, the point is that you build this website for all the reasons we’ve covered and you don’t let go of that domain that is so intrinsically linked to your artist name after all the years of effort you’ve put in.
And, as long as you do, you’re building an asset for the long term which will bring people in to discover you and your music constantly. If you engineer the ‘conversion paths’ (how you get those fans on to your mailing list and turn them into buying fans) effectively, you will slowly and incrementally build an army of fans through your website.
It is a simple truth that if your music is good enough to get a positive reaction from a small section of your potential global fans, you can build a sustainable career through the proper use of online music marketing. If your music isn’t yet good enough, potential fans can watch your journey as you strive to become ‘good enough’.
Whichever stage you’re at, you’re investing in yourself and creating a digital home for you and your fans that will work for you in silence and with an automated dedication that you cannot afford to be without!
5. It’s your’s… forever
I’ve said this more than once between these two posts.
You get the point right?
Your Facebook Page and your other social pages are NOT yours. They belong to other people and cannot be forced to do all the things that you might want to do.
Build a band website that you control completely as soon as possible and it will serve you forever.
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