Ok here is a simple strategy to promoting your band online. This could be a very long post so in the interest of brevity, I’m just going to lay out an outline now and do a few more posts on the finer points of these.

1. Get your own damn web site. Buy a URL (internet address) from Godaddy ($8) and sign up for a hosting plan from them or someone else. I use Dreamhost but there are others. Sometimes these services (like dreamhost) will give you a free domain registration when you sign up. That’s fine, but I prefer to keep all my domains registered in one place because it makes it easy to manage them all. Good hosting is generally fairly cheap (but not free). A lot of hosting companies charge around $10 a month and often less. It’s worth it.
2. Put good relevant information on your site. Photos, band bios, mp3 samples of your music, and links to other services, like MySpace that you might use. But make sure that URL that you registered (you know the one you OWN) is the only URL that you publish for your band. Don’t promote a MySpace address, because you never know when a fickle service like MySpace might accidentally delete your shit (see previous post). And put your URL on all everything you get printed, and use it in your message signatures, on myspace and everywhere else.
3. Set up a blog. Yes, this is the single best way to generate traffic to your site and develop a community of fans around your band. It doesn’t have to be great, it only needs to be relevant. Don’t do long posts. Just keep people updated on what you are doing as a band– recording, taking a break, up coming gigs, or what you are listening to, blah blah blah. Make it relevant and make it regular. Why does this work? Regular updates mostly. Blogs get indexed by search engines more often than other sites because search engines know that they are up dated more frequently.
4. Link to other sites and blogs that you like. That’s important because if those other bloggers and site owners are smart they are curious about who is linking back to them. And if you like them, chances are they’ll like you and link back to you. And that means more traffic for everyone, and the beginning of a community. Sites like MySpace exploit this idea with their “friends list” construct. But this kind of interaction has already been in place on the open Internet for a long time. Learn this and use it.
5. Set up email addresses for you and your bandmates with your own URL. Use this email for official band communication. Most web hosts make it easy to set up forwarding addresses so you don’t actually have to set up a mail box. I have all my mail forwarded to my gmail account because it makes it really easy to manage all my mail there. Yahoo mail can work too, but nothing beats gmail IMO. DO NOT DEPEND ON MYSPACE MESSAGES FOR OFFICIAL COMUNICATION. If you are a serious band, you need to manage your band business seriously. MySpace messaging is not a serious messaging system. It’s a toy for kids.
6. Use other web services besides MySpace. Again I’m not saying to not use MySpace, I’m just saying it’s not the only game in town. Some of these other services are used by people who wouldn’t get caught dead on MySpace. If you want to reach them, you need to go to them. Some of these services I like are Flickr (photos), UpComing.org (calendar publishing), Twitter (short messaging), Google (for all kinds of stuff), Yahoo (all kinds of stuff too—owns UpComing and Flickr above). But always use your own web site as a hub that links to your identity to any and all of these services that you choose to use. Someone asks if you are on one of these other services just send them to your web site for the link. I’m a big proponate of not trying to reinvent the wheel. If someone has a great service that you can’t do just as well from your own site, use it!
7. Set up a store for your music and merch. There are a number of ways that this can be done. There are services like Sno-Cap that allow you to sell your music online, and of couse there is iTunes. And for merch there are a number of options. Café Press is very popular but there are others like Spreadshirt and GoodStorm. And don’t forget CD Baby. If you are really ambitious you can even set up and manage your own shop hosted on your own site. But if you have a lot of popular items you might have a problem keeping up with order fulfillment.

So that’s a start. But it’s mostly common sense. I’ll add more to this list in future posts as I think of them. I think my next one is what to put into an online press kit. But if you can think of anything else, or have questions please ad it to the comments.

Here is my standard advice to bands in regards to dealing with social networking sites like MySpace.

A few bands I know have as their singular Web presence their MySpace Page. A really bad idea, IMO. I’m NOT saying that you shouldn’t use MySpace at all—it’s a great tool for promotion—that’s not really in despute. I use it myself. But what I’m saying is DON’T make it the ONLY place on the web where your band can be found. Here are some reasons not to and my next post will be what I think is a much better strategy for promoting your band online (using myspace and other web services).

1. You Don’t own your MySpace Page.
MySpace can and does delete user profiles often without notice or an obvious reason. If you are using MySpace as your bands only web site and this happens you are shit out of luck. If you also have a real web site that is hosted on a paid server, then you aren’t necessarily SOL. If you aren’t paying for a real web site on a paid host then do it now. It ain’t that hard and not that expensive. The cost is less than 2 beers a month. Give up 2 beers a month for tour piece of mind.

2. MySpace wants you to host all your media with them.
Have lots of photos on Photobucket, or Flickr embedded on your MySpace page? Guess what? MySpace can easily block these services to force you into hosting all your media with them. In fact they just started playing hardball with Photobucket. Put a few choice photos on your MySpace page but host the rest on your own paid for web space. Embed them on MySpace from there. Yeah MySpace could block that too, but it’s not very likely.

3. Looks like shit
MySpace profiles all look the same (more or less) and they all look like shit. There are a lot of reasons for this, but it’s a fact. I can’t help but think that using MySpace as your only web site degrades your bands image on at least one or many levels.

4. MySpace is slow and it breaks a lot
You know it, I know it. Enough said.

5. MySpace us only as useful as the number of people using it
What happens when the day comes that there is a mass mirgration from MySpace to the next new hot social network and you’re fully invested and only invested in MySpace? Yeah you can move too. But if you have a real web site you can keep your fans updated on all the services you participate in right there, on your page, that you own.

6 … So what am I missing? Can you think of any other good reasons bands shouldn’t use MySpace as their only web presence? Am I wrong? Tell me in the comments.

Next I’ll lay out my online band promotion tool kit.