Tips To Getting A Band Website Up And Running

Having a website for you band is great for online promotion. You have total control over the whole site (as apposed to your myspace or facebook profile page). You can have everything on your site from your bio to your press and even contests you hold. Holding a contest on your site is a great way to get more traffic to your site. But before you do that you need to do a few things to get your site up and running.

Domain Name – The domain name is the link your visitors are going to type or click (if you’ve been promoting it) to go to your website. Preferably the domain name you are looking for is www.YourBandName.com but sometimes that name will already be taken by somebody else. Some other suggestions would be www.YourBandName.net or www.YourBandNameMusic.com. You could also use .us if you are American or .ca if you are Canadian. A good site for checking for and registering available domains is Godaddy. Domain names typically cost $10 US per year but are well worth the investment once you get your site active. Even if you don’t have a website it’s always a good idea to get a domain and redirect it to your myspace page, making it easier for people to remember the URL to your page.

Hosting – You are going to need to host your site on a server to make your site available to the public. Hosting sites can cost anywhere from $3 – $15 but you can find good hosts from $6 – $10. Again Godaddy is reliable and you can get hosting for your site for around $5 a month. If you get a domain name and hosting at the same time they usually reward you by only charging you $1 for the domain name. Here are a couple of other reliable hosting sites:

Hostgator Ipower Gate

Building Your Site – Do any of you have any kind of programming skills? Are you familiar with HTML? CSS? If not then the question your band is going to have to ask yourselves is do you build your site yourselves or do you hire somebody to do it. If you hire somebody to do it be prepared to pay anywhere from $100 – $800 depending on how complicated you want your site.

Band Website Theme is a great way to get your band a website up and running even if you have little or no programming experience.  This is an inexpensive way to get a fully functional professional website up and running in an instant rather than paying a programmer hundreds of dollars and waiting weeks or months for your website.  If you promote your site right and get some merch and songs available for download then your Band Website Theme will quickly pay for itself.

Meta Tags And SEO – If you don’t know about meta tags then you are going to want to go to W3 Schools and read up about what they are all about. Within your meta tags is where you include your sites description and keywords. Your sites description is what people see when your site comes up in the search engines and should include your keywords in it. Your keywords are words that are relevant to your site and what it’s about. If your band name is Pogo and your a rock band from L.A. then some good keywords would be Pogo band, L.A. rock band, or rock band Pogo. A good description of your site would be: Visit Pogo the rock band from L.A.. Check Pogo out for tourdates, pics and up to date info on their rock music. Using keywords that you use a lot in your content will increase your bands ranking in the search engines which will increase your chance of getting some extra free traffic.

Selling Your Merch On Your Site – Selling your merch on your bands website is a great way to make some cash and to get your name out there. If you are going to get Shirts you are going to want nothing less than great quality. Nobody is going to want to buy (or more importantly wear) something that looks tacky and cheap.

Mailing List – A mailing list is important on your site so you can gain subscribers and keep them up to date on everything your band is doing. It just makes contacting people a lot easier than if you had to do it individually. Plus keeping people informed about upcoming shows or new merch for sale will bring more people to your shows and put more money in your pocket.