Get The Web To Work For You!

Last week, we brought you the first part of this look at how artists and musicians can manage their web presence to be as effective as possible. There are a whole wealth of services out there to use - many of them for free. But once you're signed up, up how can you ensure that they serve your needs as well as possible, without eating into that precious music-making time? There's no point having a strategy for promoting your music if it means you don't get a chance to write any! So read on, as we suggest a few hints for getting maximum results from your web exposure...

The first thing is to make sure that prospective fans can find what they want. If you imagine that you're checking out a new band's website, you don't want to read their biography first - you want to hear some tracks. That's the important thing. So to that end, make sure you have obvious links to where people can hear your tunes, and then where they can buy them. Make sure also that they're your best recent tunes - this sounds obvious but so many artists have just a few tracks on their Soundcloud, all from over a year ago. This just makes you look like you've quit!

This point is key - however many sites and accounts you have, you must make sure they're all up to date. If that means cutting back to just a couple, then do so, otherwise it could just be counterproductive. If someone's looking to buy your latest release, and one of your sites says you haven't released anything in 8 months, then you've just lost a sale. If you don't have time to keep everything up to date, then just cut things down a bit - only keep as many sites as you have time for.

Similarly, although it's possible to upload your tracks to any one of a number of sites - Last FM, Pandora, etc, it's arguably not the best use of your time. You could spend weeks making sure you're on every site possible, but so long as you have a good selection of work available in a few key locations, your time will likely be better spent honing your tracks instead. People will find them if they're good enough!

The whole point of all these sites is to make life easier for you. It is not, as a rule, to generate fans. There is only one thing that will guarantee fans come to your page, and that's good music. It's a cliche, but it's also a liberating one – so long as the basics are there (people can hear your music, get in contact with you, find out how to buy your tracks) then you can spend the rest of your time actually writing and recording tracks!

That said, play to your strengths. If you find social networking difficult and tedious, then just do the essentials - news updates, new tracks etc. If you are a natural chatterbox, then indulge it - the more retweets you can get on Twitter, the more comments on your Facebook posts, the more people will see you on their timelines and the more exposure you'll get.

To this end, smartphones are a revelation. With phone apps for Twitter, Facebook, Soundcloud and more, you can update your networks while you're on the bus to work or away for lunch. Apps like Seesmic Ping can synchronise all your social networks, so one status update can be pushed through all your sites, pages and blogs at once. This means you can get more time to spend on your tracks - the important stuff.

There's a lot of talk about things 'going viral' - and once again, this something that can only be achieved if you have cracking content. Videos, jingles, mashups - whatever it is, the most important factor is that you work hard at it and ensure that it's as good as possible. That sounds obvious, but in all the commotion about how to maximise your crowd engagement, it can often be overlooked! Just as you'll never have a number one hit simply by connecting with your fans on Facebook, so your music and videos will only go viral if they're good enough and if people want to share them. One band who have made their videos viral is American rock band Ok Go!

This doesn't negate the whole process of finding fans online, however. The concept of 'web presence' can also include being an active and useful participant on a forum - the respect you can build up will translate into people taking you more seriously when you have something to promote - for instance the chief engineer at one mastering company is a keen contributor on a certain music forum, constantly offering technical advice to other users. It's won him a lot of friends and a lot of business.

Overall then, getting your web presence right is crucial - it's your method of converting curious visitors into fans, and of keeping existing fans up to date with what you're doing. But it's also something that should facilitate your musical efforts. No-one gets into a band or artist because of their fun and slick internet profile, and as such you shouldn't devote too much effort to acquiring fans through the internet. But you certainly do need to make sure that if someone lands on one of your profiles, the route from there to listening to your tracks, buying them, or booking you for a set is as simple as possible. So make sure your web presence is complete, simple, and manageable, and then get on and make it work for you!