Linkdisco: Internet Marketing for Musicians

When it comes to choosing a name for your band, it makes sense to avoid creating competition for yourself. The Internet is a great research tool, particularly for finding out if and where particular phrases are currently in use.

Even if you’ve already registered your bandname’s dot com domain, that doesn’t mean there’s no other band out there with the same name.

To avoid potential legal problems later on, it’s a good idea to ensure that there are no other bands already using your name. As is usual with the law, ignorance is no excuse: you can’t just say you never heard of the other band before.

The Irish band ‘The Frames DC’ were originally called simply ‘The Frames’, until another band called ‘The Frames’ threatened to sue them – so they added the DC and continued on their merry way. Dan Snaith of Caribou is also very familiar with this sort of thing, as his band used to be called Manitoba until someone else… well, you get the idea.

Here’s how to avoid a similar problem by making sure you’re the original.

How To Make Sure Your Band Doesn’t Exist Already

If you search for “my band name” in a search engine (with your actual band’s name in place of “my band name”, but keeping the inverted commas), you will see a selection of pages from the Internet that contain that exact phrase. If no results come back, then you’re probably safe - and you can give yourself credit for having a healthy (or particularly twisted) imagination.

If some results come back, but none are related to music, then you’re probably okay too. However, it might be worthwhile making another couple of searches just to be on the safe side.

Try typing these into Google:

• “my band name” music
• “my band name” album
• “my band name” gig
• “my band name” single

If none of these results indicate a band is using your name already, then you’re probably good to go.

Choosing A New Band Name – SEM Style

If you don’t have a name for your band yet, here’s an idea for tapping into a pre-existing traffic stream and giving your band’s website a ready-made source of visitors.

If you don’t really have any strong opinions about what your band should call itself, why not do a bit of keyword research and name yourself after a search term?

If your band name just happens to be a phrase that gets a steady stream of daily traffic, doesn’t have too much competition and is somehow thematically related to the world of music, then you could regard yourself as being very lucky indeed.

Or… you could deliberately choose a band name that meets all these criteria.

Not very rock’n’roll, perhaps, but a lot of the stuff people search for every day makes for extremely interesting reading. Keywords can be surprisingly inspiring – many of the search engine queries I see every day would make much better band names than the old ‘definite article plus plural noun’ formula, for instance.

Alternatively, you could use this approach when naming albums or songs. If a traffic term catches your eye as being particularly unusual or interesting, why not take advantage of it?

If you don’t know how to find traffic terms (phrases that people are searching for every day) then you should have a look at my introductory post on keyword selection.

Never underestimate the value of a good name - this applies to domain names even more than it does to band names. The Internet is built on words, and words lead people to where they want to go (whether they know it or not).

There are a lot of websites where anyone can go and set up a profile for their band, post a few photos and some mp3s. This is well worth doing, but it isn’t enough. A MySpace page can be a very useful networking tool, but it shouldn’t be your main band page. You need to set yourself apart from the millions of other bands who also have MySpace pages; you need to show that you’re serious about what you’re doing (even if your music is all about having fun).

These are just some of the reasons why you need your own domain name, and why it should be easy to remember.

Is this name taken?

If you already have a band name, the first thing you should do is check to see if the .com has been registered by someone else. Unless you’ve got a particularly odd name, chances are the domain is already gone.

Type the name of your band (without spaces) into the address bar at the top of the browser, put a dot-com at the end, then hit return. If you arrive at a web page, then the domain has already been registered.

If you arrive at an error screen, then you might be in luck. However, this is not a guarantee that the domain is available. You can use a resource such as http://www.allwhois.com to see if it has any registration information for the domain.

You can also use any domain registration service to check availability of a given TLD (top-level domain – com, net, org, etc).

Registering A Domain – The Basics

The actual process of registering a domain name is very simple, although you will need a credit card. There are a huge number of domain registration services on the Web, and there isn’t very much difference between them in terms of quality of service. Apart from ensuring that they are actually a legitimate and accredited domain registration company, the main thing to look out for is price.

It may be handy to get your web hosting and domain name from the same company, and you may get a better deal by doing so. However, choosing a web hosting package is a more complicated issue, with other details to watch out for. For the moment we’ll just consider the registration process - I’ll create a separate post dealing with web hosting later on.

Here are a few well-known domain registration service providers:

• Godaddy.com
• Ipowerweb.com
• Yahoo.com
• Register365.com

There are many more, of course, so you can shop around to find the cheapest. You can register a domain for one year, two years, three years and perhaps more; the longer you register for, the better the deal usually is. If you’re serious about your band, then I recommend registering your domain for at least two years. Watch out for special introductory offers – you can sometimes get a ‘first-time registration’ discount.

Note: It’s not clear if the search engines take domain registration length into account when determining the trustworthiness of a website. If they don’t at the moment, they may well do in the near future. Because people who create spammy websites don’t intend to keep them for long, they tend to register the domains for one year. If you register yours for longer than the bare minimum, this might be one less flag raised with the search engines, and every little helps in this game.

My .Com is Gone – Should I Get A Different TLD?

If you find that ‘mybandname.com’ has already been taken, you need to decide whether to stick with your band name or try something different.

If you are a reasonably well-established band with a lot of loyal fans, you might prefer to keep your current name. In that case, you should try to get the .net top-level domain instead.

Even if you do get the dot com extension, you should also try to get the domain for your country of origin. For example, the .ie extension is for Ireland, and is highly trusted by the search engines because only someone with a genuine connection to Ireland is allowed to register one. The Norwegian TLD .no is similarly trusted. A .co.uk, .us, or .de will work nicely, although their registration policies are somewhat less restricted.

If you are a brand new band without any fanbase, and your dot com domain is taken, I would recommend coming up with a new band name. After all, you probably want to be as original as possible, and if the dot com is gone that means someone else thought of that phrase already (although it may not be in a musical context). Owning the dot com domain for your bandname is very important, so you should at least consider changing to a name you can be in pole position for.

I’ve written another post that provides some tips on using the Internet to help you choose a new band name.

Why Is DotCom So Important?

The .com extension is still seen by most people as the default for the Web. As such, dot com sites tend to get a lot of ‘type-in traffic’.

For example, when someone is looking for ‘bass strings’, they might type in ‘bassstrings.com’, even though they don’t know if such a site exists. It is also common for people to type searches into their URL bar – the browser will usually take them directly to the .com for the phrase they typed in.

For a band, you can probably see where this is going. If someone hears about you and wants to find out more, the first thing they will do is visit ‘yourbandname.com’. If this turns out to be a site about plumbing valves, your potential fan may be somewhat disillusioned.

Also, it’s easier to get someone to remember ‘yourbandname.com’ rather than some unusually formatted variant. It may be hard enough to get people to remember your band name in the first place – anything you can do to make it easier for fans (or clients) to find you is well worth the effort.

Here’s a list of some places where you can get yourself a blog and/or post your own content online (in no particular order). If you want to set up a site quickly, these might be an ideal option, as you don’t need any Web design or HTML knowledge to get started here.

• Blogger
• Wordpress
• Aeonity
• Blog.com
• Blogates
• Blogr
• Blogsome
• Blogster
• Bravenet
• Clearblogs
• Easyjournal
• I Seek Blog
• Squarespace
• Thoughts.com
• Stikipad
• Scribd
• Tumblr
• Weebly

These are general content sites, and not particularly focused on bands or musicians. However, they generally allow you more control over your content, layout and presentation than typical band profile pages.

You should also set up as many band profile pages as you can - you can find a list of band profile and music networking sites here.

If you’re new to the world of website creation, then the easiest way to get yourself online is with a blog. There are a lot of sites where you can get a blog; I prefer WordPress because it’s free, versatile and there are loads of useful plugins available for it.

Wordpress comes in three basic flavours; if you don’t have your own hosting, then you should use Wordpress.com, which will host your blog for you. This is the easiest option, and recommended for beginners. All you have to do is set up an account and start blogging.

If you want to install Wordpress on your own hosting, you need to visit Wordpress.org, download the latest version, unzip it and then upload the files to your server via FTP. If you have Fantastico, you might be able to install Wordpress automatically from cPanel, so you should check that first.

The third form of Wordpress is called Wordpress MU, where MU stands for Multi-User. This allows you to set up a site where users can register and create their own blogs on your hosting. We’re getting way ahead of ourselves here though - maybe I’ll come back to this one later on…

Why Should I Host My Own Blog?

Although a blog hosted on wordpress.com can be a valuable asset, if you want full control of your site then you should get your own hosting package. There are starter packages available from as little as a dollar a month, and any decent site will begin paying for itself within a very short time anyway (I’ll cover monetisation issues later on).

Having your own site means you can control exactly how it is structured, and how it looks. You can go into the style sheets, html and php to add, edit or modify anything you like. Although a wordpress.com blog is great for getting started, if you’re serious about developing a long-term web presence then you will quickly outgrow it.

How To Install Wordpress

As mentioned above, the typical way is to download the latest version and upload it to your server using an FTP client. Wordpress recommend using Filezilla, although you can use any FTP client; a useful alternative is Smart FTP.

I won’t go into the details of installation here, as there is a very clear guide to installation on the Wordpress site. If you run into problems during the installation, the support forums on the site usually provide an answer.

Before you can set up Wordpress, you need to set up a database that it can use. This is usually done from your hosting control panel, where you should see an icon or menu item for mySQL databases. You need to give this database a name, and create a user with all priveleges. This means that you can read/write/execute any file. Make a note of the database name, user name and password that you created.

Potential Problems: Wp-Config File

The installation requires that you enter your database information in the wp-config.php file. Remember not to leave any spaces inside the apostrophes.

The database name and user name will have an underscore in the middle, so that they appear in this format: ‘user1_mydatabase’, ‘user1_myusername’. Your actual information will be different, of course, but this is the structure you should follow.

Your password will be entered on its own, like this: ‘password’.

Some people encounter problems connecting to the database when they run ‘install.php’. If this is the case, the first thing to try is changing ‘localhost’ in the wp-config file.

Some hosting providers use a separate server for SQL databases, so if you have a look in your control panel you might be able to find out what that is. If you can’t find it, you can always ask them. Once you have this info, you replace ‘localhost’ in the wp-config file with the correct server name, probably in this format: ’sqlserver17.myhostingpackage.com’.

If this doesn’t solve your problem, then it’s time to hit the forum.

Potential Problems: File Permissions

At this stage, you probably have Wordpress installed correctly, and it looks like everything is working fine. However, if you go to the ‘Design’ menu and enter the Theme Editor, you might find that Wordpress won’t allow you to save any changes you make. This is because the Wordpress files are not writeable, so you need to change the file permissions to allow Wordpress to modify these files.

If you’re using cPanel, you can just click on a file or folder and select ‘permissions’. Here you can make the files writable; it’s faster if you apply changes to all files and sub-folders.

This process is also referred to as CHMOD, which stands for change mode. The highest level of access is 777, which means that all actions are allowed on that file or folder. As always, you can find plenty of help on the Wordpress site if you run into difficulty setting file permissions for your blog.