The Nameify Blog

You have a band…you want to get noticed.

You have done the MySpace thing, and although it’s great, it’s not YOUR SPACE!

Having your own website does many things for your band… it builds brand awareness, helps promote tours, singles, albums, novelty items and band merchandise, and allows you to speak directly to your FANS!

Band Awareness

Write down all of the things that you currently do with your music.

Describe your audience.

How do your fans connect with you and your music?
Do you have a particular kind of crowd?
What are they like?
What do they do?
What are they doing when they listen to your music?

Make a list of things that you’d like to have done with your site.

Make each activity the heading on a clean sheet of paper.
On each activity sheet, list all the things that you want your site to include.
This is where you should be imaginative.
Do you want to embed songs and live performance clips?
Do you a fan forum or a band blog?
Maybe a store for band memorabilia?

Once you have a shortlist of features in mind, ask yourself the following questions to narrow your choice further:

Will the domain name suit the band’s image?
Can we incorporate all the band members’ wishes into the site?
Will we be able to incorporate enough social features to make fans want to return often?
Who will update and keep our site working smoothly?
If we incorporate a blog, who will post to it? Will all members of the band participate?

Make It Official

You absolutely want to come up with a cool domain name. You should do searches for cool band domain names. You may even want to consider incorporating song titles into the domain name. A good domain is like a good song, and a good song is going to get noticed!

Your next step is to register your domain name. Choose a name you like and then see if it’s available. Check out www.hostingcart.com to register new names…and you can also get great deals on hosting for your website here.

And check out www.nameify.com for some cool domain names.

Wordpress is great for creating your blog and really great for band blogs and music websites. Log in to your brand new site and choose a template, add pictures and content about your band and other features and whatever else you want to do. The main thing is to just start blogging.

You will want to add features that allow you to add music to your site. You want to involve your readers and fans — and start to implement some of those ideas that you wrote down.

Start telling people about your new web site and put your cool new website address (URL) on your flyers.

Have all the band members add it to their email signature. Get it out to your mailing list.
Put it on your MySpace page.
The best way to see what things will work is to add different features to the site. Change stuff. Get feedback.
Your website will always be changing and growing.
Get ideas and implement them.

The best way to just get started online is to… just get started.

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