Here’s my take on how to share your music online via a website. Hope this helps!
One, share your music and music making ideas via video, audio, writing and pictures. In theory, the more you share, the more people will be able to find what you have to offer.
Two, keep the masters of the recordings. Also, control (as much as possible) the channels which you use to share your creations. In 2017, that general means your website, a YouTube channel, a SoundCloud channel, and for sharing images – Instagram or SnapChat (I guess?).
Three, consider learning about SEO and SEM – this stands for Search Engine Optimization and Marketing. Also, consider creating a newsletter.
I talked with a professional guitar teacher who teaches people via Skype. While I don’t have tons of experience teaching Skype lesson, I do have a little bit. I also have taken quite a few Skype-based lessons in singing, guitar, and different languages (and hope to continue).
Table of Contents
“Internet Marketing Advice” for Music Teachers + Musicians!
Here’s the “advice” I offered to him, as I best can remember. While I am not in his exact situation, here’s why I think the following methods will help him, and may help you, too.
Do this:
- Create and share good (and hopefully, great) content on your website, i.e. articles, guides and blog posts
- Create and share good+ video via YouTube (and maybe Vimeo)
- Contribute to relevant forums, and places with comments
- Try this for a year or two; you won’t see “results” for at least 6-12 months
In a year or two, this will probably happen:
- More “organic” traffic
- More students contacting you for lessons
- Other teaching and performing possibilities
- More people who will know about you in your field
- A website that’s like a resume
Step-by-step guide for music websites
There’s plenty of steps in each of these points. Let’s start more or less at the beginning. This is what I started doing about 12 years ago!
Get a website and domain name
- Get a website host – I use BlueHost, but there’s plenty of options
- Find your domain name
- You may want to choose a descriptive domain name (i.e. GuitarKitchen has the word guitar in it), and or a creative name. Though it doesn’t really mater in the long run if you do the other content stuff.
Setup your website using WordPress
- Setup WordPress
- Pick a Theme
- Create about me, contact, blog, homepage (also disclaimer and privacy policy)
- Write copyright and the year in the footer
- Consider adding a photo to each page
- Eventually, install some WordPress plugins (they’re like apps)
Write good quality content on a regular basis
- Writing on a regular basis will help you develop the habit
- Try to write between 1-4 times a month, once a week is considered good.
- Aim to write at least 300 words
- Check your writing with spell checker
- Consider using something like Grammarly.com for additional quality control
- If you’re extra inspired, create amazing content
- If possible, write longer articles
- Also, you can post shorter post with links, or video of stuff you like
- Remember to organize your writing into sections using paragraphs, headers.
- Consider “scheduling” the publishing date of articles. You can space out the publishing dates and keep a more regular schedule. If you write a bunch of stuff all at once, you may want to space out the publishing dates.
- Steve Pavlina has a great article about content and websites
- It can be as simple as recording video on a phone, tablet or computer
- Setup your YouTube or Vimeo channel
- If you want, you can add much higher-quality video and audio using
- Lighting
- Cameras
- Audio recording equipment
- Video and audio editors
- Provide the URL of the website and corresponding page of the video in the description
- Include contact/website info in the credits of the video
- These could be original songs, covers, podcasts, backing tracks or whatever else you want
- Consider using something like SoundCloud share the music
- You can go low-tech, anywhere in between, or use professional level studio, engineer, mixing and mastering
- Include your website info in the about section
Create a mailing list
- Most people suggest starting a mailing list write away
- It’s apparently one of the best ways to communicate with people
- Consider an annual, quarterly, monthly, weekly or whenever you feel-like-it newsletter.
- Make sure you test/edit your newsletter before sending it!
- Check out this how-to guide on creating an email guide. I use MailChimp.
- If you published a blog post, consider using twitter, facebook, etc. to announce
- With a video – do the same as a blog post and also make a blog post
- Then with audio – do the video part, and make a video with a picture or a collage of pictures
- Doing all that I’ve described may sound like a lot, but there’s plenty of ways to automate many of these features
Participate in online communities in your field of interest
- Check out forums to where people are learning guitar
- Leave comments on videos and other people’s blog post
- In your comments, if possible, include your website in the footer. Some comments will allow you to enter your website URL.
SEO and Music – keywords and how search engines rank
- The priority is quality content, if you have extra time, check out these articles.
- Consider the Yoast plugin, which helps you with basic writing style and SEO keyword optimization
- Here’s a bunch of resources
Cool Resources to learn more about writing, video, audio, SEO, WordPress
Credits
Thanks to Benjamin Linh VU for sharing the photo (under the Creative Commons license) that appears at the beginning of this post.
Music Websites Infographic
