Internet Marketing For Small Business

Here are what I think are the best WordPress themes for bands, musicians, rock groups, chamber orchestras or  anyone eles involved with music that needs a web site.  To see some of these WordPress themes in action or why I think WordPress makes excellent sense for musicians, check out my article where I rave about WordPress Blogs For Bands.

StudioPress Church .

Don’t be fooled by the name, the Church theme is a very cool theme and makes  a great band web site. Designed by StudioPress, formerly called Revolution Themes,  Brian Gardner and his team continue to make clean WordPress premium themes with beautiful code and great Search Engine Optimization (SEO.) Because this is  Brian’s full-time business, he is very committed, offers support via a members-only forum, and makes sure the themes are constantly upgraded to ensure  compatibility with all WordPress updates.

You’ll need the Viva Thumbs plugin to make adding the home page thumbnails easy. This will save hours of time, otherwise you have to fiddle with Photoshop resizing, and custom fields, which just make it that much harder to do. And remember, if its too much, you won’t do it.)

Tubular by StudioPress.

This theme was actually developed for use as a Videoblog, but I think it’s a great theme for bands too. It’s eyecatching and simple, so doesn’t appear overwhelming. Just put your latest video, or a video of your band performing at a gig, or rehearsing in the top spot. Want repeat visitors? Change your video often, and invite fans to submit thier videos of your band in concert. Throw a contest and tell them that you will feature their video on the home page – that will get them spreading the word. Do this once a month and you will have many happy fans!

The image on the left is actually a screenshot from a WordPress blog site I just finished for a comedy hockey video series called Ripper Hockey. It is a very mild customization of the Tubular theme; we changed the header area, making it taller and wider, put a tagline in the top right created in text so that Google would know what the site is about, and moved the RSS subscribe links. Hopefully this will give you an ideal of  how just a few mild customizations to a well-built theme will give you a completely personalized look.

WordPress Remix

Remix is simple, clean and comes with la choice of 10 different home page layouts and 20 different single page layouts, which make customization super easy.  Try style 4 or 5 , which feature images and are a bit less corporate looking. I like the featured text areas which also are great places for you to publicize upcoming gigs or special events.

This premium theme has some extra functions that are useful for band web sites like integrated Photo Galleries and Events pages, so it makes it super easy for your band to keep your fans informed with the content that they keep coming back to see.

You can use the theme as is, or change the colours via an easy theme options page.

Tribal Music

By Gorilla Themes will get you a cool site with built in music player from Mixpod so that you can stream your music.

This theme will need some graphic work to swap your own logo and background into the design, but once you do that, you will have a super cool site which places your music upmost and centre.

Aperture Theme

By Woothemes. This WordPress theme is actually for a photography blog, but will work great for a band web site who have lots of pictures.

Don’t have lots of pictures yet? Ask your fans to send them. They’d be uber proud to see their pictures on your site.

Use one of the photo sidebars for your GigPress or Gig calendar plugin.

Abstract by WooThemes

In order to make this theme your own, just change that background image and go wild.

Ideas: Match your background to your current CD cover.

Want fans to keep coming back?

Change your background every week to match your posters.

Tell your fans to collect the series of backgrounds, or allow to download as wallpaer.

Do a contest and get your fans to design you a background.

Do a contest and feature a super fan every month on your background.

See how fun it can be?

Why do I think these make the Best WordPress Themes For Bands? Let me tell you:

• these are image heavy – people want to see pics of you when they come to your band site. They also want to see NEW pics of you when they come, so keep on adding pics. That’s why WordPress is cool. It is easy to update. Update your band’s web site often, and your fans will come by more often. And they will love you more.
• the sites are easy to customize – for the StudioPresss themes, just switch the background for a totally new look. Switch is so that it matches your most recent CD (you’ll actually need to also change the CSS for some of the themes, so they display an image vs a colour only, but it’s not that difficult – most web developers can help you with that.)
• StudioPress sites have great Search Engine Optimization capabilities. That means Google love.
• Sign up to our mailing list right up top. That is numero uno. Get your fans’ email addresses so you can send them news. They want it. They want to hear from you. They want to hear from you often.
• they’re more than a blog, allowing you to control your home page so it looks more like a traditional web site.

Have I missed any? What do you think are the best WordPress Themes For Bands?

And help me out. I am currently designing a WordPress theme for band sites. What other functions do you think would be cool for WordPress themes to have for band sites?

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As you know by now I love WordPress. It’s not just the best blogging tool but it also makes great websites for:

• filmmakers (PWK Productions, Down to the Dirt)
• authors Nino Ricci, James McCreath, Paul Quarrington, Moving stories Film Festival)
• and artists (Rachel Peters)
• NEW! videoblogging sites or web series (Funny hockey series, Ripper Hockey)

What I am wondering is why there aren’t more bands using WordPress to drive their web sites. Especially indie bands who are low on cash and can’t afford the fees to get their Flash-based web sites updated.

There are great WordPress Themes for bands here. Here’s a WordPress site I built for the Toronto Blues Band Porkbelly Futures.

When I go poking about different band sites, I keep seeing nicely designed sites that haven’t been updated in months. Their tour schedule is behind, there is no way to get updates either from RSS or email, and it looks deserted. What a waste.

In this day and age you can’t afford to do that. In the ever-changing landscape of the music industry, your relationship with your fans is what counts.

Now, I know how difficult it is to keep your site updated. I am guilty of this myself. But that’s why WordPress makes so much sense. Anyone in the band can update it even if you are a techno phobe. Best yet – you can do it from anywhere on the road as long as you are connected to the web. No fancy software programs necessary – just a browser and your Login password.

With the right plugins, you can even use your mobile phone to make updates. How? You can use for phone to send a message to Twitter and the Twitter for WordPress plugin will make it appear on your sidebar.

Here are more reasons why WordPress for Bands makes a lot of sense.

WordPress is cheap.
It’s way cheaper to set up a WordPress blog for bands than to set up a regular web site. I know start up bands don’t have much money – so don’t go throwing it all into a web site that looks good but never gets updated, or doesn’t serve your fans. Build a WordPress site – save the extra for some other promo work – like proper press kits, EPKs or even a publicist.

WordPress has lots of tools to help you build a loyal fanbase.
Here I go again talking about the great community of developers that build plugins for WordPress that really allow your site to work hard for you. You need to communicate with your fans, and you need them to engage with you. This builds loyalty.

WordPress is built on a MySql database, which means you will be able to do things you can’t do with a regular HTML site. Powerful useful things. Not to mention you can update the look of your site in the future very quickly, easily and economically, so it makes long-term sense too.

Your fans can interact with you – or at least your site.
Do a “From The Road” series and let your fans comment on your web site. Add a guestbook or WordPress forum plugin and let them go at it. Write special blog posts where you ask there opinion on which album cover they prefer.

Google loves Wordress
Google loves web sites that are updated frequently and that’s exactly what blogs are built for – frequent updates. They also publish RSS Feeds (read my cheat sheet on RSS) and ping google too whenever they are updated (you don’t really need to know what that means other than it is a good thing and WordPress does it automatically.) If you comment on another WordPress blog you may get some traffic back to your site, and possibly even a backlink. And Google loves backlinks.

Here are a few WordPress Plugins that make your blog a ridiculously wonderful band web site.

• Discography 0.1. Every band site has a discography page. This plugin makes it easy for bands to store and display information about their songs.
• Gig calendar. Makes it easy to manage and display a calendar of your gigs within WordPress. It’s meant to be as easy as possible for both the musician and the fan. It even manages venue data complete with mapping and ticket links. UPDATE Jan 09 – just got a comment from Dan – he’s updated his plugin and it’s now WordPress 2.7 compatible. Go crazy.
• GigPress. Easy to use, intuitive. And very pretty. Automatically posts to your sidebar, though I wish the sidebar link went to the main post rather than the venue web site. Your post may have more info on it, like time and address and ticket prices, than the venue’s page.
• Event Calendar is another plugin that you could use to display your Tour Schedule. They are set to release a big upgrade.
• The Upcoming plugin from Yoast.com works with Yahoo’s Upcoming web site.
• Get a Twitter account and add Twitter Tools to your blog. The plugin will post and archive your tweets – so you get 2-in-one PR and an easy way to update your blog. What to tweet? Thoughts from the road, from the studio, last minute gigs, chats with other musicians. You can also get widgets that will allow your tweets to appear on your MySpace and Facebook pages – so with one tweet you’ve updated several sites. Remember – you can do this from your mobile phone.
• The MySpace crossposter is another time saver. Any posts to your blog will be immediately crossposted to your MySpace page.
• Play your music on your blog – or your podcast – with Audio Plugin.
• Sell your SWAG with this shopping cart plugin.

Here are some cool WordPress premium themes that are easy to customize and image heavy, so will work well for a band site:

• StudioPress Church – That’s right, the Church theme is one of the coolest for a band web site. Think of it as the church of rock and roll. But most of these themes will make great wordpress sites. Formerly called Revolution themes, these designs are upgraded constantly and come with support if you buy. We can customize them for you too. You’ll want the Viva Thumbs plugin to make adding the home page thumbnails a snap (especially if you’re on the road, this will save hours of time, otherwise you have to fiddle with custom themes and photoshop resizing…)
• WordPress Remix – This was one of our favourite WordPress themes for corporate web sites, but with the recent upgrades there are some great looks for bands. Try home page style 4 or 5. Has integrated galleries and events pages.
• Tribal Music by Gorilla Themes will need some graphic work to swap your own logo and background into the design, but you will get a cool site with built in music player from Mixpod so that you can stream your music.

More Best WordPress Themes for bands here.

To build a custom site like this would normally cost many thousands of dollars. With WordPress, not so much.

Why don’t more bands use WordPress? Why? Why?

Tags: Internet Marketing For Bands, wordpress for bands, cheap web sites for bands, web sites for musicians

21 comments

Here’s my first quick post for the How to Market Cheaply and Effectively Using the Internet For Starving Artists and Other Small Businesses. It’s a quickie, and comes from an email I had with Alison Humphrey, who is working at Sarrazin Couture film production as well as at Stratford Shakespeare Festival (a multi-talented artsy gal!)

Here is my big time and money saver for companies in industries with notoriously small marketing budgets: use WordPress blog software to build your web site.

You will get more bang for your buck.

Here are 2 sites I put up for tv/film production companies using WordPress. These are using free WordPress themes to dress up their site a bit.

• Streely Maid Films producers of Diamonds in a Bucket
• PWK productions producers of Puppets Who Kill

WordPress themes, or templates, are kind of like “skins.” It’s the same WordPress engine underneath, but the theme can make the site look quite different. It’s kind of like dressing up Barbie.

There are also fancier WordPress themes called Premium Themes. These make WordPress sites look more like a magazine site. For these sites below, we used the wonderful WordPress WordPress Revolution Magazine theme by Brian Gardner

• Author Paul Quarrington
• Moving Stories Film Festival. Watch for the June 15th big announcement at BookExpo.

You can also do an all out customized original WordPress with your own design.

Production costs gets more expensive as you go from top to bottom of the above list, but looking at the Canadian TV scene, I think the top ones are fine. There’s little point spending thousands of dollars on a site if no one comes to it – or worse – when they get there, it really wasn’t worth the effort.

So – build your site using WordPress, then take that extra money and build a WordPress site for each of your film productions. Audiences are starting to expect this.

By using WordPress for each film’s site, you can start your site early and build hype and Google authority. You can cross promote the site’s existence during your promotion and publicity, and then invite fans to come to the site, interact and leave comments. You build fans. You can also grab their emails so you can send them news about the show, or other upcoming shows.

With the money you saved building your web site, you can now put more money into other marketing initiatives – like building really cool EPKs or electronic press kits. These will have all the necessary things up on your site ready for press and journalists to download. The easier it is for them to gather their information, the more likely it is that they will write or talk about you.

The more I do this for clients (and myself) the more I think this is smart.

WordPress is still becoming hotter and hotter. With a monstrously huge fan base that keeps developing for it, it’s become a huge Lego for web sites, allowing you to add really cool functions and plugins – like send to a friend, or forums, or notify me.

I can go on and on – but this is enough to get you thinking. I will write more about WordPress in other posts

I love lurve WordPress.

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