13 Reasons Why You Need A Website

1. 12. You are investing in yourself.

1.1. Build this website on a domain that you’ve bought and a hosting that you control. Building an asset for the long term 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.

2. 10. You can make money from other sources

2.1. There are 2 ways to do this. One is by becoming a YouTube partner and getting paid for the ads that YouTube run against your videos. This is called monetisation. The requirements for this is a minimum of 1000 subscribers and 400 minutes of viewing time. 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.

3. 9. Sell what you like at whatever price you like.

3.1. You can dictate the price of any sale and, when selling digital files, the quality that you offer. ‘Direct-to-fan’ platforms such as Topspin show that the flexibility of offering tiered packages and bundled packages direct to fans converts at a significantly higher rate than ‘raw traffic’ to a site like iTunes. 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.

4. 8. You can do everything with it.

4.1. Your social media profiles and other outposts might be good places for alternative or additional methods of ‘first contact’ but your site can do those things and can be optimised to acquire them as fans and convert them into paying fans. You can make your site the centre for engagement and the place where all your ‘joined-up thinking’ takes place.

5. SEO – search engine optimisation – is a dark art and almost universally underused by musicians. SEO allows you to make pages and posts on you website appear in search results that you target. If you think that fans of Goth music and bands will like your music, you can ‘optimise’ pages on your site and your content to try and make them appear in Google search results when people look for related things such as ‘Goth bands’, ‘Goth music’ and so on.

6. 7. You can do whatever you like with it!

6.1. On your own site you can take risks, try new strategies and do stuff that you’re simply not sure about. On your own site there are no restrictions and your site is ultimately customisable. You can do what you like and see if it works without any fear of breaching the rules, getting shut down and losing your fans forever.

7. 6. You can use the wonders of SEO to rank and get new fans.

8. 11. You can build a members area and forum

8.1. Create a forum where your fans can congregate and discuss you and your music brings exceptional additional value to your website. Every post in your forum gets indexed in search engines making your site more visible in Google, in turn meaning that more people will discover you.

9. 13. It's yours...forever

9.1. Having a Facebook Page and a Bandcamp page 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.

10. 5. You CANNOT rely on social media platforms!

10.1. Sites such as AOL, Geocities, Bebo, Friendster or MySpace are examples of platforms that have disappeared over time. When making a website, you need to be sure that the social media sites you are posting on are popular and you need to back your fan base data somewhere in case they do evaporate.

11. 4. Having your own artist website looks professional.

11.1. Having a website that looks professional will make your audience spend more of their time on it. It makes it look like you are serious about your work and that you understand the importance of building for the long term.

12. 3. You can have a coherent brand and image.

12.1. If somebody finds out about your band, they need to be able to find you and one of the first places they will look is the internet. It is easy to display all of your key information for a lot of people to see.

13. 2. You need to be in total control.

13.1. If somebody finds out about your band, they need to be able to find you and one of the first places they will look is the internet. It is easy to display all of your key information for a lot of people to see.

14. 1. You have to have at least one place where people can find you and your music.

14.1. If somebody finds out about your band, they need to be able to find you and one of the first places they will look is the internet. It is easy to display all of your key information for a lot of people to see.