Having a dedicated website offers you many features and options but what may be the most important is the ability to track your marketing efforts. This includes page visits, how long a potential fans stays on your website, specific pages visited, where your visits are coming from, how your visitors found your website, what search terms where used in finding your site, and much, much more. Social Networking site do not offer these options.

In addition to tracking a dedicated website offers you the ability to host your own shopping cart allowing you to  sell your own music and merchandise. This is huge as you will not have to use an outside distributor and give away a portion of your earnings to do so. Hosting your own shopping cart has become pretty easy and there are many free options available that allow you to use Paypal.com as the means of collecting money.

Most artists and musicians shy away from building their own websites due to the massive learning curve involved with actually building a website. In the past, building a site meant you had to know some sort of programing language like html, java, or php. Today, you can build a complete website with all the bells and whistles including video hosting, audio juke boxes, interactive photo galleries, user forums, and much more without knowing any type of programing what-so-ever. There are many customizable template driven systems available for free including my favorite, Joomla. Joomla is a free open source “software” that easy to learn, has many developers building easy to install “plug-ins” that give you massive freedom to create as you want rather than being forced to make what is offered work, and best of all there are many communities available to help you through questions and road blocks. Check out www.joomla.org for more information. In the next few weeks I will be releasing a Joomla training course on the main site at www.IamMusicNetwork.com that will help you get up and running fast!

Basically, the point to this post, start thinking website, your own website, and take the steps to get one up and running so you can take advantage of all it offers. I suggest going to www.godaddy.com and doing a search for your name with their free domain search tool and if it is available grab it now.

Peace,
Jai
“Love the MUSIC in Yourself, Not Yourself in the MUSIC!”