Structure Of A Successful Music Website

Ideally each page of your website should serve a specific purpose.
The main purpose of the sales page for your cd is to sell the cd.
If have a page with Google Adsense, the main purpose is to generate
money by to get people to click on the advertisement. If its not
an important part of the process, don't load up the page with
unnecessary things like animations or sounds. This will only
distract visitors from achieving the task laid out for them,
ie. buying your product.

Below are some ideas to include in your website and the main
purpose of each.

1) Main Page
The main pages is a general landing page to funnel visitors to
different areas of your site. Create a clear and easy navigation
process linked to the other pages of your site. *If you use
Javascript for navigation, place text link at the bottom. This
ensures that search engines will be able to spider your site
properly. You could also use this page to feature your cd, music
samples and other offers.

2) Order Page(s)
Create a sales letter for each item that your are selling.
Tomorrow we'll go over some copywriting tips to build a
successful order page.

3) Press Releases
This section is where visitors can read 3rd party articles
published about you, increasing your credibility and exposure.

4) Contact Information
This is so people can get a hold of you to book shows, ask
questions about products, collaborations, interviews or other
opportunities (you never know). Include as much contact
information as possible, like your phone, cell, mailing address,
email etc.

5) Privacy Policy
Complies with privacy laws if your are collecting any of
information about your customers/visitors. This also helps to
build trust and people will give their information more freely.
Here's a link to a privacy policy generator.
http://www.the-dma.org/privacy/creating.shtml

6) Electronic Press Kit
This is where you refer the media to easily download an
information package about you.

Here's some ideas on what you can include.
*Biography
*Demo Songs
*Pictures
*Reviews/Testimonials
*Sideshow Of Photos
*Video or Film Footage (Windows Media or Quicktime format)

Create a biography with pictures in .pdf format and make it
available for download. You can use the Writer program contained
in the free Open Office Suite http://www.openoffice.org to do
this. Open then program type (or paste) in your biography and
insert pictures. When your done go to File > Export As PDF.

7) Lyrics
Allows fans to get more familiar with your music. Also adds
content to your site which will get picked up by the search
engines if it has an incoming link form your main page or
somewhere else.

8) Biography
On your bio page sections fans read about you and see your
pictures. A sideshow of your photos sometimes adds a nice touch.

9) Concert Listings/News
Keep your fans and site visitors updated with the latest news
about your concerts/shows, interviews, appearances ond other
topics of interest.

10) Forum
A discussion forum is a great place for you to interact with your
fans and street teams. An excellent free script to set up a forum
is phpBB http://www.phpbb.com.

11) Blog
Blogging is a good way to syndicate your artist/band news and
generate traffic for your site. Search engines love this kind of
stuff. Later on in the course I'll go a bit more in dept on
setting up a blog. A nice fully featured blogging script is
Word Press http://www.wordpress.org .

Make sure your each page of your site is cross browser functional,
meaning it can be viewed properly by different web browser programs.
Two of most popular ones are Internet Explorer and Firefox
http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox . Sometimes a site will
show up perfectly in IE but will be all out of whack when viewed in
Firefox, or vise versa. Have both browsers installed and check out
every page.

About the Author

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Dan Meiyers
info@musicmarketingstrategies.com