You are a musician, not a web developer, designer, internet marketer, etc.

As a web developer, I work with people who do not have a clue about the web, and often times hardly a clue about technology.

That said, you and they have great products or services to offer, and a tiny little budget for marketing, and more often than not, are going to try and build your own website.

Instead of trying to sell you on working with me, this article is designed to give you a top level look at some of the essential things a music website needs so that you CAN do it yourself.

Key Elements of a Great Music Website

• Music Player
• Email Signup Form
• Calendar Of Upcoming Shows
• Videos and Photos
• Contact Information
• Press
• Bio/About
• Blog

Music Player

First and foremost you need to have a very prominent music player on your website. This is the number one thing people will be looking for when they come to your site, so don’t hide it from them.

To note, even on a musicians website, auto playing your music is annoying as hell and you should stop it right away if you are doing it. Let your user click the play button.

There is nothing worse than clicking through a website, musicians site or any other business, and hearing music start over and start playing on each page. Please do not do this and you will make me and 99% of the population believe you are smarter than most people.

As you can see here on Hijacking Music site, as well as many of our artists, we display the very clean, very simple, Soundcloud player.

You can embed a player from many different sources like Soundcloud, Bandcamp, ReverbNation, etc. We recommend getting your music on all of them, but just focus on using one for embedding on your website.

You can also use a tool we’ll discuss next from Topspin Media to embed your player.

Email Signup Form

Email is still, hands down, the best marketing tool you’ll have access to online. Email has been around as long as the internet, and is not going anywhere.

When the current social media sites die off and you move your entire social media presence to the next one, your fans will still be checking the same email address.

People change their phone number more often than they change their email address, marinate on that for a while.

While there are many 3rd party services available to help you handle your email marketing, we personally recommend Topspin Media.

Topspin is a service that is specifically designs for musicians and allows you to manage your email list and ecommerce for physical and digital products. If you look at the bottom of this website, or the top of the sidebar, you’ll see a Topspin widget in use.

How do you get people to sign up? Using topspin, you have the ability to offer something in exchange for the users email address…an incentive to sign up. They call this “Email for Media” and it works great.

For our Atlanta Music Festival, we offered a full download of our music sampler in exchange for an email address, and used this as a promotional tool before the festival. It worked and we gathered a ton of new email addresses during that period.

Calendar of Upcoming Shows

Since these people are interested enough in you to be on your website, there is a good chance they want to know when you are playing next.

There are many easy ways to get a calendar on your website. The easiest way we have found is by embedding a Google Calendar directly into the website.

If you visit our Atlanta Music Calendar, you’ll see it is just a Google Calendar resting right inside of our page.

Several of the musicians social networks also allow you to maintain calendars, and sometimes have embed codes for those as well. Regardless of the solution you choose, be sure to let your fans know when you are playing next and you’ll see more of those bright smiling faces at your shows.

Videos and Photos

This one is especially important, and here is why. As a promoter, when you email me and say “OMG I have the greatest band ever and we want to play your shows, BOOK US PLEASE!!!!”.

The first thing I am going to do is look for a live video of your performance. I want to see if you have good stage presence, make sure your songs don’t suck live, and what the crowd reaction is to that.

As a fan of music, I also like to watch my favorite bands videos. They can be live videos, interviews, funny skits, or whatever they are doing. Entertain me and I’ll watch all of your videos.

There is nothing special about the way I think or feel here, this is true for most people. Give them what they want.

Photos are also a great way to make your band look more awesome than you probably are.

Get a professional to take some good shots of your band and make you look good. Use these on your website and your press kit…(side note, at this point, your website should be your EPK)

Take a second and think about this as a way to full engage your fans and use this fine piece of technology we call a website.

You are on stage at your next performance, you tell everyone to raise their hands, and then you take a picture with your fancy pocket computer..err cell phone… and immediately send it to your website, that then sends it to Twitter and Facebook with a link back to your site. All in an instant, your are engaging your fans in person and those that didn’t make it to the show.

Contact Information

You NEVER know who is browsing your site. If you are actually on your hustle there is a good chance that someone that can hook you up is going to land on your site.

As a booking agent, I know when I get to a bands website that does not have easily accessible contact information, I move on.

There are far too many good artists out there who DO have their shit together that I can work with.

Make it as easy as possible for people to get in touch with you and there is a much greater chance that they will get in touch with you.

Press

Positive social proof is one of the most powerful marketing tools in your arsenal. What does this mean? It means that you need to showcase all the great things others are saying about you.

If you get a good review from a magazine or blogger, use that to let people know that other people care. The majority of people are not ones to lead, they are followers. They like to know someone else thinks you are awesome, which confirms their own thoughts that you are awesome.

Take the time to put the best press that you’ve received on display on your website.

Bio / About

Holding true for most businesses, including an artists website, the About page is the second most visited page after the home page.

When people land on your site, regardless of the page they land on, if they are interested they naturally want to know more…so they look for and click on the “About” page.

This page is a great place to do the following:

• Let fans know they are in the right place
• Call to action
• Show fans that other people think you are awesome in the form of testimonials
• Call to action
• Talk about the bands history
• Call to action

Sounds like a lot of asking, but it works. For a good example of a high converting about page, check out our About page.

Blog

Your blog is a great resource for bringing traffic to your website. It allows you to post new content to your website, as well as archive it.

Make a new blog post, send the link out to your social media sites, and watch the traffic come in.

Here at Hijacking Music, we use our blog to post upcoming shows, new music, new videos, these DIY Musicians Guide articles, interviews, and much more.

For some of our artists, their websites are designed so that they can post new videos or photos to specific categories, then display all of those photos/videos on one page as an archive. This gives your users easy access to all those great images and videos you’ve been posting before they found you and became a fan.

Have Any Questions?

This is just a high level look at artists websites. We will go deeper into each one of these sections later in the guide to really give you a strong understanding of which tools to use, and how to use them.

If you have any specific questions right now, let us know on Twitter or Facebook and we’ll try to help you out.

Thanks for reading, share this with your friends

Did you see last weeks article about Living in the Cloud with Google Account Mastery?

Hijacking Music superstar Sarah “Snare-uh” Wilson is offering up drum lessons in Atlanta.

Click here to learn more about Atlanta Drum Lessons.

Sarah has been playing drums for years, and started her drumming by taking lessons herself.

After years of playing and honing those skills, she is ready to pass along that knowledge to YOU.

You can find her playing drums for Odist and Jack of Hearts, as well she puts out drum solo videos which can be found at her website or on youtube.

Do it!

Tomorrow night prepare to get your ass shakened…..that’s right I said it.

This line up is nuts

CLOUDEATER http://cloudeatermusic.com/

HANZELLE http://hanzelle.com/

JUNGOL http://jungol.net/

21+ $7

Line Up
1) Cloudeater
2) Hanzelle
3) Jungol

Cloudeater opens the show so arrive early!

As a DIY artists, some of the roles you’ll be playing might include booking agent, social media manager, master of the website, marketer, public relations, fulfillment..the list goes on.

So outside of just making good music, you’ll be doing a ton of things online that require management and maintenance. It’s hard to keep up with these things, but we are going to give you some tips that will make your life easier and save you time.

Thanks to our good friend Technology, we now have what some call ‘the cloud’, which is where we are going to be managing much of the day to day administrative stuff we need to do.

“Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product…” – wikipedia

So instead of having to store your data and files on your own computer which can get lost, stolen, or damaged, you can storm them on ‘the cloud’ or ‘the internet’ through a 3rd party service. This allows for easy sharing of these files or data.

If you want to learn more about the technical details, google it

Enough of that, let’s get started with and see how we here at Hijacking Music are using a single Google account to manage everything.

Google Account Mastery

Google has managed to make it so easy to manage everything with one Google account, it’s almost stupid not to use them.

Just because Google says so doesn’t mean I say so, but they are some smart people doing some smart things, I just choose to take advantage of that.

Here are some of the ways we use our Google account here at Hijacking Music.

Gmail

If you send a message to the email address I give you when we meet, it says “thinkbig@hijackingmusic.com”, which is set to forward to our Gmail account where I can manage all emails.

I have access to this account from any computer anywhere in the world, as well as my phone which is with me almost always. If I need to access it, it’s not stuck at home on my computer on my desk, it’s available anywhere.

You can set up a Gmail account to ‘send as’ a different email than your @gmail.com address. For example, when I reply to you when you send me the email, you’ll receive it as ‘From: thinkbig@hijackingmusic.com”.

We actually have several email addresses that filter into a single Gmail account which makes managing them easier.

Google Calendar

You might have seen it already, but we host an Atlanta Music Calendar right here on this website. Several people, through their own personal Google accounts, have shared access to this calendar. They can make updates from that Google account, which will be reflected right there on that page instantly.

You could use this to manage your tour schedule, band practices, meet and greets, etc.

Don’t forget, this is also available from any computer or smart phone anywhere anytime because it’s ‘in the cloud’.

Google Documents

Google Docs is one of my favorite cloud applications. I’ve been using it for many years to manage all kinds of data.

As Hijacking Music we use it to share important documents and files. We have things like

• Booking spreadsheet
• Account login document
• Expense spreadsheet
• Out of state touring bands list
• Meeting notes document
• Marketing strategy outline document

You get the idea. Any kind of similar document you would save on your own hard drive, you can store, organize, and manage at Gdocs. To boot, you can also access it from anywhere in the … alright I’ll stop but you get the idea.

Youtube

Guess you have probably already heard of this site no? If you are not putting videos on the internet, you are missing out on a valuable marketing tool.

Using your same Google account, you can access and manage everything at Youtube seamlessly.

Some videos you could be putting up include

• Music Videos
• Show Preview Videos
• Live Performance Videos
• In Studio / In Rehearsal Videos
• Skits and Shorts
• Interviews

Don’t be scared to get on camera, the people want to see you and know what you are all about. Give it to them…you ARE entertainer right?

Analytics

Google Analytics allows you to install some script to your website, then receive MEGA AMOUNTS of data in regard to who’s visiting your site, where they come from, what they did when they got there, and more.

If you are not tracking and measuring your stats, how will you know if you are doing better or worse online? The data Google Analytics gives you in extremely valuable and should not be overlooked.

The same goes for any analytics or metrics you can receive from social media sites, email campaigns, or anything else you are doing online.

If you do not have analytics already install on your website, get cracking!

Google +

The newest addition to the social arena from Google is Google Plus.

I know what you are thinking…”great, ANOTHER social network to join”

Here’s the thing, Google dominates and is not going anywhere. While, at the time of writing this, they might not have the largest membership of the social networks, they’ve already pass 40 million users, which is no small change.

Using your same Google account, you can utilize Google + to your advantage. Here are some ideas

• Create Circles to manage fans in different states
• Live webcam shows to any of your circles
• Post pictures and videos straight from your phone
• Advertise upcoming events

Google + is not going away any time soon, and is going to continue to gain traction in the social media world. If you are not already at least looking in to it, now is the time.

“My Brain Hurts Can You Stop Now?”

We almost decided to go into websites, ecommerce, and mailing lists on this article, but we’ll save it for another day

I hope you were able to take something away from this article. I challenge you now to go  get yourself organized.

There are many other tools out there that do the sames things mentioned here, the beauty of the Google account is single user account access to ALL of these things and the instant access you get from any device with an internet connection.

Share some of the ways you are using your Google account with us on Twitter or Facebook, would love to hear from you!

Did you see lasts weeks article about The Business Side Of An Aspiring Artist?

Buy Tickets

Toy Devils is a four piece rock powerhouse hailing from Atlanta, Ga. The band combines the angst of 90′s grunge with the attitude of punk and the experimental spirit of bands like the Eels and Sonic Youth. Themes of violence, sexuality, self exploration and a dark sense of humor permeate the band’s work. This, coupled with a unique pop sensibility and a ferocious live show, creates a sound and experience very much their own, self described as “bum rock”.

Out of Austin Texas, Bright Light Social Hour are bringing some solid as rock and roll to the masquerade.

They are a mesh of blues, rock, electronic, pop, and progressive rock.

The Bright Light Social Hour at The Masquerade

Buy Tickets

January 21, 2012
Doors @ 8PM / Show @ 8:45PM / The Bright Light Social Hour @ 11PM
Tickets: $7 Advance/$9 DOS
All ages

The Bright Light Social Hour by thebrightlightsocialhour