Indie Music Marketer .com

Make Money from Your Band's Website

Written by Josiah Redding

Thursday, 31 May 2007

A lot of you out there probably DO have some kind of web presence, whether it is simply your Myspace, Facebook, or Purevolume page, or maybe a simple BandZoogle site, etc. But do you actually know how to make money from it? This article is to help you do just that.

THE PURPOSE OF YOUR WEBSITE
A lot of bands just think they need a website "cuz every band is on the web these days" or "the web is where it's at". The fact is, if you plan to accomplish anything in any area of the music business, you need to have a clear purpose and goal. The same is true of your website: you need to be clear on what the site is for and what you want to accomplish with it. Here are some suggested reasons for a band to operate a website:

Promote and introduce people to your music, brand and story.
Get mailing list sign-ups.
Get people to come to your concerts.
Book more concerts.

Depending on your genre, target market, etc., there may be additional reasons, and some of my suggestions might not apply. But in general, this is a good guide as to what purpose your website should be serving. A website can help with accomplishing any and all of these very cheaply and effeciently, if your site is designed and arranged correctly, and if you market it correctly.

All the above purposes for a website are good. But in this article, we're going to be focusing on OTHER ways of benefitting from your website, namely, by using your site to generate cash!

WAYS OF MAKING MONEY ON THE WEB
There are already established ways for webmasters to make money on the internet, and some established methods that simply don't (or at least usually don't) work. There are a few basic types of sites:

Pay-To-Access sites, where information is kept private until a subscription or one-time fee has been paid.
E-Commerce sites, supported by the sale of products and services.
Free sites, supported by third-party advertisers and affiliates.

Musicians, wonderfully, are in a position where they can use any and all of the above marketing methods for making money on their website. For instance, you can provide a secure "fan club member area" on your website where paying members can go and receive premium content. You can of course create your own shopping cart and storefront area where fans can come and purchase your physical products like CDs, DVDs, tshirts, and other merchandise. You can also take advantage of advertising and affiliate programs, such as Google Adsense, Commission Junction, and others, to bring income to your website.

Unfortunately, on musician's websites, generally advertising is frowned upon because it can sometimes take away from the general image of the site. But there are ways of inserting ads that won't detract from your content, but can still add some income at the end of the month.

1. HOW TO MAKE MONEY WITH PAY-TO-ACCESS MEMBERSHIP
We'll go through these 3 methods for generating income one by one. First, we'll look at Pay-To-Access and how you can implement this on your website to make your band income.

There are different options out there which can help you setup and maintain a 'private area' on your website, or as an external site, which you can grant users access to upon receipt of their payment. There are a lot of companies out there that sell this type of hosting service. I have two suggestions for getting setup with a membership site, each depending on your level of expertise with the web and HTML.

First, a company called UltraEntertainment.com, which specializes in services for bands and record labels, and has designed what they call the Fan Management System (FMS). They can provide you with a complete solution for your whole website, both public and private pay-to-access areas, which can help save you time, money, and effort. Their designers will handle the entire process from start to finish, so you don't have to know anything about web design at all. I have used them personally, and it is a very powerful system. Their system also can be configured with an e-commerce storefront as well. Their basic system starts at $50 per month.

The second option, for more advanced web users, is to run your own CMS (content management system) website. There are many options out there for this, some free, some expensive. My favorite is a free, open-source CMS platform called Joomla. You can download it and install it on virtually any web server, and then choose and customize a web template to control how the site appears on the front-end. Joomla has a user management system already built in, and you can create different privilage levels for your users, one of which can be your Fan Club privilage level. Then, simply setting different articles and content to being only viewable by Fan Club members restricts those areas of your website from other members until they pay the membership fee.

Joomla has the ability to be extended and upgraded with different plugins, components, and modules, to enhance the power of the website. You can add a shopping cart option, tour calendar option, etc.

My band, THE REDDING BROTHERS, uses Joomla for our website, and we have had great success with it. It allows us complete control over the whole website, and has allowed us to setup a very powerful web presence. The only drawback is that you do need to have some understanding of HTML, MySQL, PHP, and web servers.

After you choose your platform, you need to generate the premium content for your users. I suggest offering a private forum, chat room, email newsletter, and special screen savers, desktop wallpaper, etc. You can also provide free music downloads, streaming video, or a podcast.

This type of feature on your website will mainly be marketed to your already-established fanbase. You can advertise it at shows, have a signup form or computer form at your merchandise table, etc.

2. HOW TO MAKE MONEY WITH E-COMMERCE
With the two web hosting options listed above, both can come with an E-Commerce option for selling products and taking payments online. But if you are not in need of a membership site, you can setup a storefront for your already-established website fairly easily as well.

When setting up a storefront, you have MANY, MANY options, some are free, some charge per month, some charge for initial setup, etc. First, you need to understand the difference between a shopping cart, and payment processing.

A shopping cart allows visitors to browse a catalog of products, read about them, look at images, add products to their cart, and then checkout with whatever payment options are available.

A payment processing platform simply allows you to receive and process credit card transactions. When combined with a shopping cart, when users get to the checkout portion of the shopping cart, their information is passed through to your payment processing service, and the transaction is completed.

SHOPPING CART OPTIONS
Again, you have many options. osCommerce is a free shopping cart solution that many people like. A great directory of shopping carts, some of which are free and some of which are not free, is available here:
https://www.paypal.com/en_US/html/SolutionsDirectory/sd_wp-pro-us.html

If you are using the Joomla website option I mentioned earlier, you can use osCommerce or VirtueMart, which seem to be the most popular and compatible for that platform. Both of these options are free and very powerful.

PAYMENT PROCESSING GATEWAYS
To process your credit card payments, you'll need a gateway and a merchant account of some fashion. You can sign up for a very reasonably-priced merchant account at this site:
http://www.merchantexpress.com/

When you sign up for the merchant account, they will sign you up for a payment gateway as well. Authorize.net is the most popular gateway out there, but usually you are automatically setup with this service through the same company that creates your merchant account.

You can expect to pay anywhere from $30 to $60 per month to start receiving credit card payments, including your merchant account and gateway membership.

There are other options out there which will allow you to avoid applying for a merchant account, paying a monthly fee, etc., and these can certainly be cheaper if you are not going to be processing as many transactions. They also may be best if you have less than perfect credit, which is something merchant account providers look at. We'll go over those options now.

PAYPAL
You may already have a Paypal.com account if you've used eBay much or if you send and receive money online a lot. They are the world's largest online payments processor. If you haven't opened an account, you can do so for free. They allow you to setup both a limited shopping cart and use their pay-per-transaction payment processing service. There is no monthly fee, so you only pay when somebody purchases something. This is by far the most popular choice out there for smaller operations. You can also accept Paypal on payments on a lot of professional shopping carts out there as well.

2CHECKOUT
2Checkout.com, like Paypal, allows you to avoid the trouble of applying for a merchant account yourself. They charge you a one-time setup fee of $49 (as of this writing), and then a per-transaction fee whenever someone buys something. They also have a limited shopping cart feature which may be right for your site as well. 2Checkout.com is popular among people who sell electronic products, such as eBooks, as well.

Once you've setup your shopping cart and plugged-in your payment processing service, all you have to do is upload and list all your products in the shopping cart's catalog, and sit back and watch the money roll in.

3. HOW TO MAKE MONEY WITH ADVERTISING
As I said before, this may not be suitable for your specific website, depending on how it is setup. But if you have a steady amount of traffic to your site, you can definitely add income to your site by inserting ads.

The best service out there is almost universally going to be Google Adsense. By inserting some simple HTML code into your website, Google will target which ads appear on your website based on what content is on the page. If someone is on your tourdates page, Google will show ads that relate to tours, concerts, live tickets, etc. Once your visitors are done with what they're looking for, if they click the ad, you make money.

Another option that I really believe in is affiliate marketing. There are hundreds of companies out there with affiliate programs where you refer people to their site to either sign up for a service or buy a product, and each time someone does, you make a commission. For instance, if you write a review of your newest guitar, and beside it put a link an affiliate link to the Musician's Friend page that sells it, each time someone buys it through your link, you make a commission.

There are "clearing house" sites out there that operate affiliate marketing programs for most of these companies. The main sites are:

CJ.com
LinkShare.com
Performics.com

Once you sign up for an account on each of these sites, you'll be able to apply for and get links for the hundreds of different companies they serve.

CONCLUSION
If you put these three money-making methods together, you'll have the recipe for large profits through your band's website. But remember, you have to keep driving traffic to your site from you live shows, online advertising, and peripheral sites like Myspace, Purevolume, and others. The more traffic, the more potential to make large profits!