5 Mistakes Musicians Make On Their Website

5 mistakes musicians, like you, make on their website?

1) You're not using professional photos.

Great photos help create a positive first impression for potential new fans, as well as for industry and media. However, if the images on your website are low-resolution, badly cropped, poorly lit, or simply don’t fit your brand, chances are people won’t take you or your music seriously. This might seem extreme, but when landing on your website for the first time, the photos are going to give people their first impression of your music.

Be sure that your header and background images look great, and always have plenty of high-res options for industry and media in your digital press kit.

2) You haven't ensured that your website is mobile-friendly.

Reality-check: we live in an increasingly mobile world. Mobile digital media time is now higher compared to desktop. You not only need a mobile-friendly website, the mobile experience must be seamless. This means your site must load quickly, and be easy to navigate (no pinching the screen to zoom in!). Your content needs to be easy to find, music must be easy to listen to, and any e-commerce tools must work perfectly on mobile devices.

Perhaps most importantly, Google actually punishes sites in search that aren’t mobile-friendly, by pushing them further down the line in search results for any given phrase. On the plus side, this change to Google’s search engine actually boosts mobile-friendly pages, so you can get a leg up pretty easily. You can test the mobile-friendliness of your site at: www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/

3) You're not updating your (mobile-friendly!) website on a regular basis.

If someone lands on your website and sees that the last update was for your 2014 summer tour, it’s going to give the impression that you’re no longer active. This can have a real negative impact for potential fans, and especially industry and media - people are just going to assume you've given up and went into property development or selling insurance policies.

Be sure to always have your latest news visible right on the Homepage. You can use a blog for this, but then again, you’ll have to keep it up to date. Other elements you should look to update regularly would be your concert calendar, photos, videos, and, of course, your music.

One simple solution to make sure that you’re always showing your band’s latest activity is by embedding your Facebook Page, Twitter and Instagram feeds on your website. While other elements of your site may not be totally up to date, at least people landing on your site will see that you’re still active on social media.

4) You're not putting out enough music or direct-to-fan content up for purchase.

If there is anywhere that fans should be able to find your entire discography, it’s on your own website. Don’t simply offer a taste of your music, then send fans away to iTunes or Spotify with a general link.

Make sure to have all of your music available to stream. Offer some free downloads, in exchange for an email address, to help build your mailing list. There should also be direct-to-fan purchase options, where you keep most of the money (100% with Bandzoogle, 85% with Bandcamp), and also collect valuable email addresses for future promotions.

Once you have those elements in place, you can then provide links to outside store options and streaming services. Just remember that those services will not share their customer emails with you, so you won’t be able to follow up directly with those fans about future albums, tours, or merchandise offerings.

5) You haven't put a mailing list sign-up option for your fans.

Speaking of email - far too many band websites don’t have a mailing list signup. Or if they do have one, it’s buried somewhere deeply on the website. Be sure to have a mailing list signup right at the top of your homepage, with a clear CTA (call-to-action) offering an incentive for fans to join.

Why is this so important? Simply put: you own your mailing list. No matter what happens to your favorite social media platform, you will *always* own that database of emails. With social media, those platforms own that fan database and can disappear (*cough* Myspace *cough*), or change the rules at anytime (like Facebook has done many times).

If email is not the biggest part of your social strategy, then you are giving the power of communication with your fans to companies who will gladly take them, and whose advertisers will thank you to no end for providing them with eyeballs.

Also, quite surprisingly, in the era of social networks, email marketing is *still* 40 (!) x as effective as Facebook and Twitter… combined. So, if you’re looking to sell music and merch, or if you’re crowdfunding your next album, you’ll get much better results with a dedicated email blast to your fan list.

#KeepItReal