Sort Out Your Online Artist Branding and Development

Matt from Kurb does music marketing and stuff - and this is his music marketing blog.

Email: kurbpromo@gmail.com

Oh man. With this downtime over the holidays leading up and into 2010, again I attempt to beef up my branding, and substantiate it a bit more.

People know what a shonky DIY website looks like (it’s only marginally worse than this one), and a lot of people can read the signs of a hollow online brand, of which a big one is no content. No long tail. No evidence of a backstory or of having existed in anyway before their latest release.

However it’s a bit tedious getting into the details of building a thorough brand through content, uploading, organising, embedding, tagging, there’s a lot of work to do to build that foundation that states to visitors you’re real, and you have a real stake in what you’re doing.

You didn’t just throw a band together a website up yesterday, and you can prove it.

It’s not an easy thing to do, I had this big plan for 2009 about how I was really going to push my branding forward, but business kept grinding on so there wasn’t really the time.

A big one of course is getting this blog looking half decent, I’ve got to accept that there’s going to be a proportion of visitors who are not impressed with the standard of visual communication on a blog which does not look professional.

First impressions last and all that, am I communicating much professionalism with this blog? Are you? Colours and design and functionality are all very important, but also bold imagery or at least imagery that communicates, that’s tells stories.

That’s important for branding and imapact, but of course also music websites must have visual flow. If the most important thing you’re aiming for early on is to build up a critical mass of email sign ups, then the visual flow of the website and the page where that action really goes down needs to reflect that.

So once you have your website where design and functionality work in harmony, the predominant trend I see is for all else to really be patched in but staying organised with stuff.

This is the stuff your garden variety social media expert teaches and you should be able to run this stuff yourself, merely providing your website designer with the appropriate code so they can then put it together in a suitable way with your web design.

So it’s just a matter of using the tools and understanding what features are available to take advantage of, and how the tools will allow your audience to interact with the content in their own way, on the platform they prefer to use.

We got visual content we want to upload and present, so I’ll be checking out flickr.

I’ll be looking into bandcamp and soundcloud as well as possibly reverbnation, ilike, imeem, last.fm maybe one or two others to provide the music content for the sites.

And of course youtube provides the video content that can be embedded into

Aweber is the paid email management solution I use, to take addresses for regular email sign ups.

While a wordpress blog can deliver the all purpose platform for publishing non primary content.

It’s easy to see it all comes about spec’ing your site out with the right aps and widgets to help your fans get what they need, and you’re able to meet the requirements for depth of content which provides the substance to your brand.

We can’t be sure that every fan will be coming to your site looking for all the explicit details of your epic journey as an artist but I think it’s fair to assume that when people are intrigued enough by the music and are interested in finding out more are more likely to become those essential fans who are at your core, providing that secind layer od social proof - that you are at the level where some fans are deeply loyal.

That’s the beginning of a career brand that’s strong enough to last.