What does it take to build a successful music website?
For most people, the idea of earning a living doing the thing they love is a dream come true. For many people, music is their passion. They either play music or love to listen to music.
Either way, it makes sense to create a niche website where you can educate people, promote your own music and maybe earn money from streaming music or publishing an infoproduct.
Read on for some tips to help you get started.
Identify Your Niche
Do you want to start a music website? Welcome to the club!
If you want people to visit your site over the millions of sites out there, you are going to need to be able to offer them something unique.
If you haven’t defined your target audience, you’re going to have trouble marketing your site.
Targeting a niche doesn’t mean that you only cover certain types of music. The niche you cater to might be audiophiles, for example.
Equally, you might only be interested in fans of the glorious 80s goth rock band, Fields Of The Nephilim.
Whatever your niche is, clearly defining it will enable you to identify your target audience and start marketing much more intelligently.
Adopt the Mindset of a Musicpreneur
The main difference between a musician/music fan and a musicpreneur is that the latter wants to make money from their passion. They are creative and entrepreneurial. This distinction is critical if you want to start a successful music website.
Unless your site is strictly a vanity project for your eyes only, it’s essential that you approach it from a business perspective.
Choose a reliable web host. Go with an SEO-friendly CMS (content management system) like WordPress. Think about keywords. Make sure your website easy to navigate (more on that below).
And, finally, offer your visitors great content.
Define Your Unique Selling Point (USP)
You don’t have to restrict the type of music that you cover or the scope of your website in any way.
But there should be one clear and identifiable thing your website and brand is putting forth that no other website is.
Whatever your niche is, you are almost definitely going to be sharing it with other websites. Unless you are a true pioneer of music journalism, be prepared to compete with others.
Your unique selling point is your ace of spades, it is the secret weapon that your website has in the battle for traffic.
Your unique selling point is your ace of spades, it is the secret weapon that your website has in the battle for traffic. Click To TweetLet’s say that your website is just one of the many Bangles fan sites on the internet. So, what are you going to do that the others aren’t?
Your USP is the reason audiences in your chosen niche will pay attention to your website over rival sites.
To create a USP, define your target audience. Think about who you see visiting your site. Are they looking for help with a musical instrument? Can you offer them some cool music downloads?
Solve their problems, offer them a discernible benefit and they’ll keep coming back for more.
Plan Your Website’s Structure & Navigation
The navigational structure of a website is critical.
When a website is easy to navigate, it becomes more usable. Visitors don’t want to waste time searching for the content they need – it should be instantly obvious where each relevant section is.
Don’t forget also that search engines place a high priority on website usability when determining a site’s ranking.
Before you set about building your website, it helps to visualize it clearly. Flowchart software is great for mapping it all out. Other people prefer to sketch it, whereas some will just make a list of pages.
However you do it, it helps to know exactly what pages are going to be on your website and how customers will navigate between them.
Put the Right Infrastructure in Place
It doesn’t matter how good your website is if it isn’t being supported by adequate infrastructure. Poor infrastructure, meaning subpar hosting and sloppy code (HTML, CSS, PHP or otherwise), will sink your website like a lead zeppelin before it’s even got off the ground.
Choosing the right host is all about finding the right balance between allowing for your website to grow and paying for bandwidth that you aren’t using.
The best solution is to find a scalable service that enables you to change your hosting package as your needs evolve. This article by Sidney Alexander covers VPS hosting, which has always been a popular choice for new websites.
Creating a Successful Music Website, Conclusion
With enough passion and motivation, it is possible to grow a website into a self-sufficient platform capable of making enough money to pay for its upkeep and then some.
It takes time to reach this point but starting off on the right foot will improve your chances dramatically.
Make sure you are clear on what you want to achieve and how you will do it before you begin.
- How to Start a Successful Music Website - May 6, 2020
