How to Build a Professional Musician Website for Under $400
Before we explore how to build a professional musician website for under $400, let’s understand why you would want to do that in the first place…
Social Media Sucks for Marketing! Have a Website and Newsletter Instead
In my previous article, I covered why social media shouldn’t be your primary source of marketing to your Fans and Followers. In this post, we’re taking a deeper dive into why social media sucks for reaching and marketing to your people.
And why you should build a professional musician website and direct your social media followers to your email subscription page…
Here’s the Data to Prove why Email is Better than Social Media for Marketing
Basically, using Twitter for your primary source of marketing to 10,000 followers will reach 361 and engage 5 people. On the contrary, using email marketing as your primary source will reach 2,390 and engage 290 people.
The bottom line is this – on average, with the example of 10K followers, you will reach approximately 640% more followers with a newsletter versus Twitter. And your engagement increase would be insane at 5,700% more than Twitter.
Also, if your account gets hacked, suspended, or permanently deleted, all your content, followers, and posts can disappear – forever, with no options for retrieval.
These numbers are from Twitter post reach stats, Twitter post engagement data, and email marketing analytics.
Own Your Content by Building a Professional Musician Website and Starting a Newsletter
When you own and operate a professional musician website and email marketing campaign, you own 100% of everything. Your pages, posts, photos, videos, email subscribers – all of it… No one can take it away from you, ever!
The single most effective thing you can do for your music career is build a professional musician website and direct your social media followers to your website’s newsletter sign-up page. It’s even more important than sending followers to your music on Spotify, Apple, or any other streaming platform.
Why? Because you may never see that person again. With attention spans dwindling, why would you send a potential fan to a site that has millions of other artists and billions of other songs? Don’t you want to convert that potential fan into a permanent, life-long fan?
The only way to accomplish this is to build a professional musician website with a link to your newsletter.
Here’s How to Build a Professional Musician Website for Under $400…
You may be thinking, well shit, I don’t know how to build a website. And you probably don’t have thousands of dollars to spend to have it done for you either. Well, I have some sweet music for your ears!
You can have a professional musician website build from scratch for under $400. Yup, you read that correctly, under four hundred dollars! In fact, it’s actually cheaper than that. The exact price for a 10-page site is $290.
Using Fiverr, I hired Austin, a web developer who specializes in building websites for musicians. He did a kick-ass job on 2 musician websites I had him build. One for my singer-songwriter wife, Natalie Nokomis, and one for myself, Cosmicus Music, the website you’re reading this post on.
At $290, even if you left a 25% tip, you’re expense would be $362.50 (plus fees and tax).
He built both sites using WordPress, which is the easiest platform to use as a total newbie. I paid less than $800 for both websites – and that included a generous tip. It took him about 2 weeks to build my 10-page site.
And he was open to unlimited revisions, included for free! 10 pages is more than enough for a basic professional musician website. You just want to make sure you have an About page, Music page, Videos page, a Contact page, and a Newsletter subscription page. And a Blog page if you plan on sharing posts like this with your fans and followers. Oh, and a store page if want to market your yourself with branded merchandise.
Plus, he’ll give you basic training on how to modify and update your site if you don’t want to learn how to use WordPress yourself.
Build, Market, Automate, Sleep, Repeat…
My newsletter page is very basic, and I had Austin set it up using MailChimp. He’ll integrate whatever email marketing service you want. I use MailChimp because I’ve used it before on a website I had in the past and I’m comfortable with it.
You’ll also want to have him to build a pop-up to gather email subscribers (also integrated into MailChimp). Mailchimp has tons of educational content if you want to learn how to use email marketing for your website.
Trust me, this is all easier than you think. And once your site and email subscription service is built and configured, you’re all set. MailChimp has automation features that you can setup, so your newsletters are sent while you sleep!
Get Started Now!
Feel free to use my website as an example when working with Austin. Or you can send him a website of an artist you’re influenced by and want your site to look similar. Just make sure you’re as detailed as possible when describing the site specifications (colors, logos, layout, etc…).
More information upfront means better result at the end.
Are you ready to navigate your social media followers to your brand-new professional musician website and newsletter?
Contact Austin on Fiverr to get started today!
