Music Success In Nine Weeks #4

Optimizing Your Website

If you've been reading my blog you'll know that before going through the book sequentially I read the whole thing and did a few bits and pieces before starting. One of which was to optimize my site, the site now definitely loads quicker than it did! And I'm pretty sure that if you've got a modern broadband connection you should be seeing it fully loaded in under 3.5 seconds! So that's that bit out of the way. Now on to the other more tangible marketing ploys, that you can go and see for yourself at Aidy.com.

PITCH

My pitch is now displayed on my home page in nice big writing, and in a slightly different colour so it stands out from the rest of the text on there.

NO FLASH INTROS

Never had them, never would. Winds me right up when I have to click that Click here to skip intro link on sites that do.

CONSISTENT LOOK THROUGHOUT THE NET

Already there, if you check out any of my various internet incarnations, you will find a tasteful black and white look and a charming picture of my face, much like the one on this blog. If you don't believe me go to my site and click the links section, and have a look! Go on! Do it!!

GIVE AWAY EXCLUSIVE MP3

Hmmm, all my stuff was actually available for free anyway, so I took down one of my songs from the site, and it's now available as an exclusive free download if you join my mailing list. I did this with FanBridge they make the whole thing very simple and they have a nice fast loading html fan collector, rather that a slow loading flash one like Reverbnation, which occaisionally seems to struggle with the @ key when using a UK keyboard and Google Chrome. Anyway, if you join my mailing list you'll now get an 'exclusive' mp3, and you'll also find out what a sterling job the folks at FanBridge do!

MAKE IT CLEAR, SET THEM AT EASE

I have made a lovely little banner, with a picture of my good friend Gimpy on it, which now sits above the fan collecting box thing to make it nice and clear that you are indeed joining my mailing list in return for an exclusive track! Just look at it! It doesn't get much clearer!!

PS. Just a quick note on Reverbnation, I love their site and their widgets and they are very helpful when you email them, but you have to use a horrible email template if you use their services to email fans without paying, and the email widget is slow loading and a bit buggy at the moment. If they sorted these problems and let you send plane text emails without paying $9.99/month, I may actually use their email widget, and I may even pay them the £9.99/month if my email list grows to a more than the 20 odd people I currenlty have on it(only just started it since reading this book). I'm still using there widget on a couple of other sites though, just not the main one. You can quite easily export your emails from them in the form of a spreadsheet and import them into something else.