Week 3 is all about setting up your web site to build your email list and creating two-way communication between your fans and you as an artist or band. This is actually a really short chapter but is going to be the spring-board for a number of other chapters because it starts opening a can of invertebrates, which will become more apparent in the next couple of weeks. You see, I needed to jump ahead in the book because I’d already done a number of the things that the book requests, as I’ll note later, and I’ve known that there were things I needed to do like opening up this blog to really get things rolling on my site. This is also where most of my work has gone into.
Something that is of high importance for other web sites and yours is to maintain a similar look and feel, as well as maintaining similar content and messages. How does a potential fan draw the connection between you here and you there? This was easy for me because it had already been done. “Music for the heart, mind, and spirit” was already my moniker that was on MySpace, Twitter, FaceBook, ReverbNation and everywhere else I’ve created an account, and I’d created a background image for my website long ago that I also used on Twitter and MySpace. I set up a couple quick colour schemes and added other items like photos that exist across all my web presences to make it all cohesive.
Next, I was to make sure my site loaded quickly and had no Flash intro. Well, that was also done years ago. Luckily, I have years of experience working on the internet and I know what works and what doesn’t. I wrote all the code for my initial web site in 2001 (gasp) and it does need an overhaul to bring it up to web standards admittedly, but it was built for performance and ease of use.
Lastly, the part I actually had to put some work into. Ariel wants you to offer a free download to a song as an incentive to sign up on your mailing list. Since I host my own mailing list created by Active Campaign, I had to build this into my site. I decided to offer “Be the Change”, a song that’s on my latest CD, “Between the Lines”, and currently the only song that I have a video for from the new CD. There’s another coming REALLY soon, but more on that later. And so as not to be unfair, if you’re already on my mailing list and don’t have a copy of the CD or that song, email me and I’ll make sure you get a copy.
