Official John Nagle Blog

Musicians-Succeed By Looking After Your Fans

Add comment October 28th, 2006

Following on from my last post, I thought I would mention another very common problem that seems to arise with band/Artists websites.

As was mentioned in passing yesterday, visitors to your website are not that easy to come by. It really is a crying shame to allow them to just visit you once and then just wander away into obscurity.

So, what is the solution to this problem?

I actually touched on the answer in my last post. The email list! Some of you may have one; someВ  of you may not. The really important thing is not just having a list but also using it well.

Okay, first things first:

If you don’t already maintain an email list, start one IMMEDIATELY! There are any number of tutorials freely available on the Net on how to do this.

For those among you who already have a list:

Offer things of interest and value. If you just use your list as a way to constantly hype your latest CD or gig people will just run away from you! Believe me it’s easy to do on the Net!

You can do many things to keep it interesting. You could offer a free mp3 exclusively to your list members. You could comment on events that will be of interest to your readers.

Obviously you will be promoting your CDs, shows etc. but don’t do it in every newsletter. If you offer info and freebies of value then your list is far more likely to be responsive when you are trying to sell them something.

Building relationships is what all business is about and while I completely understand that music is not a normal business the normal rules DO apply in this case.

When you boil it down, look after your fans and they will look after you.

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One Of The Biggest Mistakes Made By Indies

Add comment October 28th, 2006

I have noticed over a period of time that a lot of Indie musicians seem to be very fond of using a lot of Flash animation on their sites.

There are a couple of serious reasons why this is not a good idea.

Firstly, not everyone has broadband. Flash can be slow to load on dial-up connections. Also, there are a lot of people who do have broadband but use the Internet on an older computer. The problem here is that Flash can be a real resource hog so even with a fas connection if the machine is a little on the slow side this can cause all sorts of stuttering in playback of animation and slow response on menu items.

This is the kind of thing that will encourage your visitors to leave and not come back.

The other problem is that search engine robots cannot read flash and this could make your site difficult to find. I am in no way anti Flash. When used properly it looks great and can really enhance the experience for the user but you need to use it sparingly and have html as well.

Visitors to your site are hard enough to come by without making your site harder to find and a bit on the user unfriendly side.

Technorati Tags: John Nagle, Guitar, Ireland, guitarist, electric guitar, acoustic guitar, Weblog, blog, Music, recording, mastering, Internet, Mp3, Music Marketing, Entertainment