There is nothing like playing music for a crowd of people. The rush is incredible, and it gets even better when your crowd of fans grows. I plan to write a series of articles on how to promote your band and grow your fan base.

If you don’t have a band yet, consider Bandmaking.com, where you can meet musicians, find band members and connect with fans.

How do you keep in contact with your fans? How do you find new fans?

Most bands start with a number of fans. Your mom, your friends from school… your co-workers. After that, using “social media” to promote your band is a great start. This allows you to advertise to a larger network of people. Unfortunately some of your fans will not always check your MySpace or Facebook page. They might not find out about your next gig in time, and they might even feel bad about missing it.

The next step your band should take is managing your own fan list. By having direct contact information for all your fans, you can be sure to let them know ahead of time. This is where you can use a website! It can cost as little as $5 or $10 a month to have your own band website. I would recommend choosing a hosting company that supports Wordpress or Joomla. They are pre-built websites that allow you to pick a template, add your own content and images, and even program (or hire a programmer) to add your own applications. Once you have a website, you should put a form on your home page that tells your fans something like “Sign up to find out where and when we are playing our next show” It should ask for a minimum of name and email. I would also recommend some optional fields such as phone number and city where they live.

Now, the next time you have a show booked, you can send out an email to all your fans and even text or phone them. The personal touch of a phone call can make your fans feel great and they will be more inclined to attend your show.

In Part 2 I will explain how you can get your own website up and running.

Feel free to contact me if you are ready to get your own band site, or you need a programmer to add some features to your site.

All the best for the New Year!

Frank Forte
www.bandmaking.com

About  a year ago, I came up with the idea of Signup7.com, where a simple ajax script would fill out forms for you, using the information you maintain on the one website. This is how it would work:

1) You register on Signup7.com

2) you keep your info up to date

3) any website that has the Signup7 script allows you to simply enter your username and password, and your information would automatically fill out their registration form. Those websites can also get up to date information from Signup7 automatically so you don’t have to worry about outdated information on those websites.

After reading Chris Sukornyk’s post about OpenId I started thinking about the idea of using one login across multiple websites again. This idea is backwards!  With websites like twitter, you no longer need to log into multiple websites to send your information across the internet. You post it once, and let those websites do the work of coming to get your information. Twitter allows you to tell people what you are doing. People can track what you are doing from their mobile devices, computers, and probably some other obscure places because twitter makes it easy for programmers to get that information and put it practically anywhere. (Why would you want everyone to know what you are doing??  There’s a lot of reasons, but I’ll save those for a future post. ) Where does RSS come in?  It is a method of presenting content so other programs can grab it and use it. This is the technology that will allow websites like twitter to flourish in the coming years.

Among other ideas I am working on, including www.bandmaking.com to find band members, savemymoney.ca, and countless others, I think I have a new idea that might hit the top of my priority list.  I’ll tell you about it in future posts.

-Frank