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 generatemoney by to get people to click on the advertisement. If its notan important part of the process, don't load up the page withunnecessary things like animations or sounds. This will onlydistract visitors from achieving the task laid out for them, ie. buying your product.

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

1) Main Page

The main pages is a general landing page to funnel visitors todifferent areas of your site. Create a clear and easy navigationprocess linked to the other pages of your site. *If you useJavascript for navigation, place text link at the bottom. Thisensures that search engines will be able to spider your siteproperly. You could also use this page to feature your cd, musicsamples 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 asuccessful order page.

3) Press Releases

This section is where visitors can read 3rd party articlespublished about you, increasing your credibility and exposure.

4) Contact Information

This is so people can get a hold of you to book shows, askquestions about products, collaborations, interviews or otheropportunities (you never know). Include as much contactinformation as possible, like your phone, cell, mailing address, email etc.

5) Privacy Policy

Complies with privacy laws if your are collecting any ofinformation about your customers/visitors. This also helps tobuild 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 aninformation 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 itavailable for download. You can use the Writer program contained in the free Open Office Suite http://www.openoffice.org to dothis. 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 addscontent to your site which will get picked up by the searchengines 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 yourpictures. A sideshow of your photos sometimes adds a nice touch.

9) Concert Listings/News

Keep your fans and site visitors updated with the latest newsabout your concerts/shows, interviews, appearances ond other topics of interest.

10) Forum

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

11) Blog

Blogging is a good way to syndicate your artist/band news andgenerate traffic for your site. Search engines love this kind ofstuff. Later on in the course I'll go a bit more in dept onsetting 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 Firefoxhttp://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox. Sometimes a site willshow up perfectly in IE but will be all out of whack when viewed inFirefox, or vise versa. Have both browsers installed and check outevery page.

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Dan Meiyers
info@musicmarketingstrategies.com