Selling music online can be tough without first developing a loyal fan base.  How does one go about developing and engaging people online you ask?  Well,  lets start with the basics.

If you use your social networking tools properly, you can easily keep your fans up to date on your new albums, performances, and promotions.  Getting your fans involved with your music career is a great way to get even more fans.  Take this scenario for example:

Joe Schmo follows you on Twitter and learned about your upcoming  show Friday night.   He attended and loved your show.  When he’s at the show he tweets to his friends about how great the show is.  A few of Joe’s buddies, in turn, follow you on Twitter, and decide to check out your website.  They tell more friends about you, THOSE friends follow you as well — you see where this leads.

So, let’s talk about a the two most popular social Networks of the day and provide some examples of how to use them to generate more followers (Twitter) and likes (Facebook).

Facebook

Facebook is currently THE largest social networks in use today.  Who uses Facebook?  The better question would be, who DOESN’T use Facebook?  Tapping into such an enormous population of potential fans is a n0-brainer.  The challenge you’ll face is using Facebook properly.

If you haven’t already, it’s a good idea to create a personal Facebook profile page.  It’s free, and easy to set up.  This will allow you to make a presence on Facebook, and start building a collection “friends”.  These could be your band mates, family and friends, or fans you already know.  This is great place for you to make personal updates about your musical life, or to let your family/friends know what makes you tick in general.  Making a personal connection to your fans is always smiled upon.

The only problem with making a Facebook Profile is that you’re only reachable by other Facebook users, and can only be searched within Facebook… unless you make a Facebook page.  These can be accessed without a Facebook profile, but can also be found within Facebook’s search engine as well.  Facebook pages are used to promote artists, businesses, causes and and many other things.  You can use both your Facebook profile and your band page to diversify your updates.  You can make personal updates on your profile page, and you can announce new shows/events on your Facebook page.  This can help keep your fans interested, and can help keep them informed on your upcoming projects.

Here’s 5 Facebook tips

1. Try to post at least 3 times a week.  (We don’t recommend posting more than 3 times a day)
2. Engage people who comment or ‘like’ your posts.  Start a conversation.
3. Upload pictures from your concerts
4. Post a free song on your website and post about it with a link
5. Hold a contest on Facebook and give away a prize like a free album or T-shirt.

Twitter

Tweeting (making twitter updates) is also a really powerful and quick way of keeping your fans involved with your musical career.  For those that don’t know, Twitter is a social network that does a couple of things pretty uniquely:

1. Open communications: Tweets are not necessarily restricted to who you’re following, or who’s following you.  Your audience may be much larger than you realize.  Larger audience, larger potential fan base.
2. Short and sweet: each update has a 140 character limit.  This makes your updates easy to read through on-the-go.
3. Open forum: Tweets are, literally, open conversations.  Fans can make comments, share your updates with friends, or even reply to you directly with questions–this helps break down the artist-fan barrier which is a big plus.
4. Easy access: Twitter can be accessed from just about any device with an internet connection.  Twitter apps for smart phones are really common, and regularly used; so you can even holler at your fans while they’re away from home.

With such a limited space for your updates, you’ll want to be creative on what you tweet.  You can announce the progress of your next album, “Heading to the studio again for another recording session”, or share something that really interested you, “Man, Jay-Z’s latest album is the BOMB!”, or even look for feedback, “Hey guys, check this out [link to song in progress]. Like what you hear so far?”.  Fans love to be involved with their artists, and communicating directly with them is a great way of winning awesome-points with your fans.  Active Twitter users with a lot of fans often get almost immediate feedback, so this is a very powerful method of reaching your fans.

Finally, you can use twitter to keep up with local bookers, venues, promoters and other people that can help your career–as well as, companies you think are super cool.  It works both ways; check up on artists that influence you to get tips, look up record labels to see their new artists; most companies with a web presence (or even without a web presence) have a twitter profile these days.  If you’re curious about how to get started, and how to tweet like a pro, check out their 101 guide.

Twitter Tips:

1. Use a twitter client to manage your twitter account.  There’s a million.  We like Tweetdeck and Hootsuite.
2. Use Twitter Search to discover who’s been chatting about your music
3. Retweet other peoples Tweets.  It’s a good way to be engaged and start a conversation
4. Use Lists.  When you follow a lot of people, it can be overwhelming amount of data.  You can use Twitter’s list feature to create specific content streams.
5. Don’t just Tweet about what you’re doing.  Ask questions and share links too.

Final Tips

• Remember to keep updating!  There’s no point in making a Twitter/Facebook profile if you don’t use them.
• Keep involved.  Follow people that interest you, announce events you want people to go to, reply to questions people posit.  Making updates is one thing; diving into the community is something else entirely.
• Find a system that works for you.  Updating multiple social networks can be cumbersome, especially with a busy schedule.  Fortunately, there are some pretty cool pieces of software that make using these tools more easily, like Tweetdeck for example.
• Advertise your involvement.  If you have a website, be sure to announce your Twitter or Facebook profile to get connected!  There are some cool widgets you can use to connect your social networks with your site as well.
• Maintain your artistic persona.  Updating these social networks shouldn’t be a chore; so post what you like.  Have fun with it and let your fans know who you are.
• Put Twitter and Facebook Buttons on your site.  Check out Niftybuttons.com
• You can read more great tips and tricks for free!  Just download our handy-dandy eBook HERE.

With emerging technologies like smart phones, portable MP3 players, and WiFi hot-spots sprouting up everywhere, it’s no surprise that digital music sales are on the rise.  In fact, the extremely popular iTunes store  now sells 28% of all music in the US, and holds 80% of the download market.  So if you’re not selling on iTunes your missing out on potential sales.

How much money can an artist make from selling downloads?  An interesting study compares the sales a musician would need to make in order to reach a minimum wage income: check it out HERE.  CD Baby revenue structure compares favorably with many other companies.

As a reminder, HostBaby is offering a great deal for our customers.  CD Baby, as you well know, is a great company for selling and distributing your CDs and Mp3s.  As a HostBaby customer, you’re allowed 5 free album submissions to CD Baby per year (account must be in good standing).  This includes singles.  Check out the details HERE. Getting your music online for sale is easier than ever!

Building a presence on the web can be very important to an artist’s success in the music industry.  Sure, there are lots of music selling services like iTunes, Rhapsody, and even CD Baby, but having your own personal website with your own domain is useful for several reasons:

1. ACCESS:  Why make fans search for you on various music store websites when they could go straight to your content?
2. VARIETY OF CONTENT: With your own website, you can provide your fans with all kinds of cool information and you get to choose what they see.
3. PERSONALITY: With your own website you get to determine how you and your art are presented. Here you may shine as an artist, show off who you and sell your music and your art.

Getting started: Check for availability

When picking out a domain name, you’ll need to make sure it’s available first!  Only one person can own a domain name at a time.  You might think of a domain name like a telephone number for websites: there is one number for one person.

Keep in mind that domain names have some rules:

• NO SPECIAL CHARACTERS ALLOWED: only hyphens (”-”) are allowed
• NO EXTRA PUNCTUATION (sorry no periods besides the ‘dot’ in the extension)
• NEEDS DOMAIN EXTENSION (.com, .org, .net, etc)

To see if one is available, you’ll need to perform what’s called a “whois” search.   To check this out, you can use this nifty whois search tool we put together here: http://hostbaby.com/whois.  All you need to do is enter a domain name, and click “whois”.  Keep in mind that a domain name does NOT include “www” or “http”.   As an example, OUR domain name is “hostbaby.com”; that’s it.

When searching for domains, you’ll get two types of results:

1. “No Match Found”, Unknown/available: Meaning it is not recognized as a domain that is taken, and that it’s available.  Search results will vary for different types of domains you look into (.org, .net, .com), but the message itself is pretty clear if it is not taken.
2. Unavailable: Meaning it is taken by someone else already.  You’ll know a domain name is unavailable if you get a listing showing the domain “Registrar”, who owns the domain, where it’s pointed, etc.  So if you see someone’s name here, it’s not available.

Be Careful What You Wish For – Pick your names wisely

Even with the restriction of 1 owner per domain name in place, there are a large variety of domain names out there.  Yet we often get domain requests that are a bit confusing or could be misread. Here is where reading, and analyzing your domain name can be really important.  Let’s look at a few examples to show you what I mean:

Let’s say I own a consulting firm, and wanted to make a website to exchange notes among these experts.  One domain name could be “Experts Exchange dot com”, as it points out the idea behind the site: exchanging of experts and information.  However, if you read the domain name as it would show online:

expertsexchange.com

That can be misinterpreted as “expert sex change”.com, which is really far from the original idea.  Some more funny examples can be found here.

So, as a good rule of thumb, read out your domain name after writing it down on a piece of paper.  Some of the most innocent and chaste of ideas can be transformed into something completely different.

How to Fix up Domain names

So you have a domain name idea that’s great, but it’s either taken, or it looks odd in writing.  There are a few things you can do to hopefully fix it up.

1. Use a hyphen (”-”) : Hyphens are acceptable for domain names and are used pretty regularly.  Granted, you should use them sparingly to make your site easy to type out.  One popular example would be the webcomic, Penny Arcade : http://www.penny-arcade.com/  I imagine www.pennyarcade.com was taken, but a simple hyphen made the domain name available.
2. Try a rename: from our earlier example, expertsexchange.com could easily have been replaced with expertexchange.com if it was available.  The theme and idea behind the website is still intact, and the name is far less likely to be misinterpreted.

Final Tips

• Keep it simple: You want your website to be easily recollected by memory.  A domain name like “vegetableargonautsasparagus.com” would likely be available, but would be difficult to type in every time someone visited your site.
• Acronyms are okay:  The key is to make your domain name easy to type in and remember.
• Make it represent YOU. After all, your website is your online storefront and persona.

Videos.  Are.  Cool.

One of the best ways to promote yourself as a performer/artist online is by sharing videos of your music performances.  These days there are thousands of video tools and sharing sites that make posting videos easier and more affordable than ever before.   With so many options out there, we’ve decided to highlight some of the methods and techniques that make the most sense to us.

Where do I start?

The first obvious place to start is to have a good video file available.  The type and size of your video will be important in determining where you want to upload your show/event.  Sometimes your raw video file will need some adjustments to make it ready for the web.  You may need to convert the file to a type (.wmv, .mov, .mpg, etc. ) and/or the resolution of a video to make it compatible for web use.  Although internet connections are getting fast, you can’t stream movie-theater quality videos to your computer yet.  Furthermore, you should consider the potential web visitors who don’t have the fastest connections when encoding your video.

Here are some file size examples to give you an idea of how big these movie files are:

DVD’s are typically several gigs in size (4.6 GB per 1 sided disk).  2 hours of film on a highdefinition camera can often take up more space than this.  A 4-5 minute video on Youtube is about 7-10 MB on average, depending on the format of the video.  However, the file size limit for YouTube videos has slowly been increasing.   Because of this, that average has shot up closer to 50 MB.  Either way, there’s a huge size difference between DVD quality film and online videos.

So you can see, you’ll often need to shrink down your videos before posting them online.  Fortunately there’s a really cool tool we suggest using for fixing up your video.  Check out HandBrake, a FREE video encoding tool HERE.  Don’t worry, it works on Macs, PC’s, and even Linux computers.  It’s pretty simple to use and FREE!

Why post videos elsewhere?

Although you can simply upload your video file directly to your website, the benefits of posting your video to a video sharing site, like YouTube or Metacafe are many. First of all, videos posted to sharing sites like those below are accessible to a wider variety of web surfers. For example, if you upload a .mov file to your site, some people may not be able to see your video on your website if they do not have the proper plug-in installed on their browser. However, people who view videos at YouTube and the other video sharing sites usually can see everything posted regardless of their computer and browser because the videos are rendered in Flash.

Another compelling reason to post videos onto video sharing sites is that you can easily embed them onto your own website.  Doing this will also increase your score on web search engines. Embedding links onto your website for popular sites (like YouTube, FaceBook, MySpace, etc.) will increase the likelihood your site will appear higher up on search engine results lists.

Cool places to post your video

There are so many options out there for posting videos and it would take a book to describe them all.  Here are some of the more popular ones that people have used. And unless you wish to post really long videos or HD videos, these services are pretty much FREE!

YouTube

YouTube is an obvious choice, of course.  It’s the most popular video site in the world!  This is a great place to find new and potential fans and be exposed to as large of an audience as possible.  Having your videos on this site is a great start, and easy to do.  They have some pretty clear guidelines on what video type/size is alright to upload to their site.

Facebook

This is another great place to upload video as well, since many, many users around the country and the world have Facebook accounts.  Not only can you post videos here, but you can also tag friends and band members on your videos as well, much like tagging in images.  Facebook also claims to accept just about any video type out there, but they have some suggestions on what works best with their site.

MetaCafe

This is yet another really popular website for user-submitted videos.  The neat thing about this site is the integration with Facebook.  You log into your Facebook account from here, and you can share your videos as updates on your own profile, or your friend’s profile pages.  They do have a few more restrictions on their videos, particularly the length (they encourage 8 minute videos).  You can read more about their submission rules HERE.

Now how do I get the videos on MY site?!?

No problem!  These video sites will typically provide you with “embed code” or at least a way to link to your video from your own website.  Usually this code can be easily copied from a button or box located within or next to the video player itself.   For example, YouTube makes linking to your site really easy.

And, there you have it!  There’s nothing stopping you from getting your video content online for the world to see, so get uploading!

The Power of Fan-Driven Sharing

There are many ways you can promote and share updates of your HostBaby website. You can use Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, ListBaby, Digg and other services to update the online world with your musical comings and goings. These are all great things to do when you have time between gigs, but why not enable your fans to do some of this work for you? What if, with the click of a button, your fans could easily and quickly tell all their friends about the cool things they found while checking out your site!

Enter: the new “Share It” feature of the Hostbaby Wizard!

Now you can make your web pages shareable!  With a couple of mouse clicks, visitors can quickly share specific pages of your site with others.  The “Share IT” button allows visitors to make a Facebook post, share a bookmark through reddit.com, even tweet on Twitter without even leaving your website. Think about how easy it would be if your fans did your marketing for you? That’s the definition of “Viral Marketing” and that what the “Share It” button helps you do.  This is a great way to get your content spread far and wide across the internet – places you wouldn’t have the time and resources to reach alone.

How to do it!

Want to learn how?  We at HostBaby are happy to provide a tutorial:

CLICK HERE TO READ HOW TO SHARE YOUR PAGES!

Things to keep in mind

To share your page on different social networks, visitors will need to already be members of Facebook, Twitter, etc. Also, consider which pages you want to be sharing.  You may enable Share for all your pages or just a selection. Some people regularly update their home page, some their blogs; it really doesn’t matter which page you share. The key is to make your pages interesting enough that visitors to your site will want to share them with their friends.

We hope this help you help your site visitors spread the word about your website to their friends and neighbors. Happy sharing!

The power is yours!

Hi folks!  As most of you know, we offer unlimited Email accounts when you host with us.  But some of you may be wondering, what is the best way to get to your Email?

We, at Hostbaby, offer everyone access to Webmail.  Webmail is an internet (or web) based Email client.  You can perform all your basic tasks from Webmail (send, receive, forward, reply, send attachments).  Every hosted domain with us should have access; you simply go to http://(yourdomainnamehere)/webmail.  This way, you can check an Email account hosted by us online at any machine with internet access. 

There are some good advantages to using Webmail, especially if you’re a casual Email user:

1. It’s easy to access ANYWHERE, as long as you have internet access.
2. It has very little system requirements.
3. It’s from Hostbaby, which immediately makes it cool.

However, if you frequently communicate via Email, there are some other Email options that may suit you better!

Email Forwarding!

Just about everyone has a Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Comcast, (insert Email service) address already.  Why go through the trouble of checking your Email in multiple locations?  Hostbaby allows you to forward your Email from your hosted addresses to any address that you check on a regular basis.  This is pretty darn easy for anyone to set up as well.

There are some great perks to Email forwarding:

1. You only have to check one Email account
2. You can have multiple addresses forwarded to the same location
3. You’d work with the same Email client you’re already familiar and comfortable with

This is definitely the best option for those of us that already use Gmail/Yahoo/Hotmail/etc already.  If you’re comfortable with their Email interface, more power to you!  There are a few things to watch out for if you chose this method of managing your Email.

1. Your Email will be going through 2 spam filters (ours here, and your Email account’s filter… just about everyone out there has one).
2. You’ll need to be careful about additional forwarding (like if you decide to change your main address).
3. Emails can take a bit more time to get to you (since it’s going from one server to another).

Email Clients, Galore!

Finally, you can always use a desktop application to check your Email.  There are plenty of clients available, but the vast majority of users out there use Outlook, Thunderbird, or Mac Mail.  We have some great documentation on how to set up any of these clients on your computer. There are several great reasons for checking your Email this way:

1. You can save your Emails locally on your computer
2. Some people enjoy the desktop applications versus the online options (Gmail, hotmail, etc)
3. It can make managing your Email via folders/archiving a snap!

But of course, this option isn’t for everyone.  We would suggest against setting up a client like this if you don’t plan on using Email very often.  A desktop client like this was meant to be used regularly, and maintained.  If you’ve never used one of these clients before, you may find it somewhat difficult to use the first couple of times.  Some other disadvantages to this option would be:

1. The system requirements for an Email client can be pretty heavy, slowing older machines down
2. It can be quite cumbersome to set up at times, especially if you’re on anything other than high-speed internet access (even more cumbersome if you don’t have administrative rights to your machine).
3. Your ISP (Internet service provider) may restrict how you send out mail, or require you to use certain ports on your computer
4. If you check your Email at multiple locations, keeping all your Email straight can be cumbersome

If you check your Email daily, and send multiple messages out daily, then this option may be best for you.  While the setup can be difficult at times, it can often be well worth the trouble; especially if you like using these clients.

In Closing…

You have a few ways to check your Email with us at Hostbaby.  The challenge is finding what method works best for you!  What’s really important is your comfort.  Stick to an interface that works for you.  Just realize that each Email option has its limitations, and do your best to keep that inbox clean and tidy; a messy mailbox is a sad mailbox!  And no one likes a sad mailbox.

We’re all about empowering our users!  There’s nothing sweeter than making your own site, and being able to make updates on the fly.  Plus, a lot of our templates are pretty darn sweet.  Making sites with the Wizard can be pretty darn easy.  However, there are some tools that just about every Wizard user should have at their fingertips.

OH THOSE DARN IMAGES

Some of you may have noticed that resizing images, and getting them “just right” can be a pain in the butt!  For example, a lot of our templates accept “Style Graphics” to show some cool pictures on your site.  However, the fields that house your images can be very picky about the proportions of your image.  Until there’s a fancy re-sizer built into the wizard, you’ll want to have a powerful resizing tool handy!  Granted, there’s no tool quite like Photoshop, but that can be awfully expensive!

For PC’s; some of us like to use the windows XP resizing tool, that’s free for download here!  Just keep in mind you’ll need to be running Windows XP to make this work!  It’s called the “Image Resizer”, which does exactly that!  It’s a pretty quick install, and super easy to use.  Simply right click on the image you want to resize,  select “resize pictures”, and chose the proportions you want.  Presto!

Mac users may want to check out iZoom! This is also a free application for download (go go Open Source!)  There are Linux and PC versions out there as well.  After installation, you simply drag the photo you want to re-size, tinker with the proportion settings, and export a new image!  This program will even allow you to modify the quality of your image, to make them more Email, or website friendly.  Pretty savvy tool, and the price is definitely right!

BRING ON THE TUNES!

Obviously, a lot of us are artists.  The majority of our users have music that they want to share with the world, which is great!  But how do you get the music from your CD, onto your computer in MP3 form, and THEN uploaded onto your site?  Enter iTunes!

Yes, it’s an apple application, no hating on this program you PC people.  It’s free for download for PC and Mac HERE. Click on the download button, and you should get prompted to download the right application for your PC or Mac.  Install that bad boy, because it is one powerful piece of music encoding software, that also happens to be free!

Importing Music on iTunes is really straight forward.  Once you pop in a music CD, you’ll have an Import Settings and Import button handy (at the bottom of the window).  This is assuming you installed iTunes 9, the latest version as of today.  You just want to make sure you adjust your import settings to produce MP3.  If you want to get really fancy, be sure to keep the sound quality at a good level; around 192 kbps.  Most people these days have high speed internet access, so having higher quality music shouldn’t bog down most systems out there.   From there, upload your music to your page via the Wizard, and you’re rockin’ the web!

WHAT ELSE SHOULD I HAVE!?

You should definitely be running the latest web browsers on your computer. For those of us that aren’t the most tech savvy, here’s the definition of a web browser:

An application used to view websites on the internet.

Common web browsers would be:

1. Internet explorer 8
2. Firefox 3
3. Safari 4
4. Chrome

To give you an idea of what people are using, nearly 50% of users out there are using Firefox (and for good reason too!).  You can see general web browser trends HERE!

Of course, there are more applications out there that lots of people find handy when making their sites.  If you have one you’d like to share, make a comment on this blog post!  We’d love to hear what you guys out there are using.  So, good luck with your websites and keep the internet rockin’!