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Indie Band Internet Essentials

Now that you're intrigued and even somewhat confused by the title of this article, I shall explain what it means. Today we will discuss helpful Internet tools that indie artists and bands can use to promote themselves. And we're not just talking about having a website. I'll try to cover a range of lesser-known yet helpful tools to keep you in front of the competition

Paypal

Now it?s even easier to make money! If you don?t already have one, I would suggest you get a free Paypal account (www.paypal.com). Consider Paypal as one huge world-wide bank. You can pay for items online (posters, stickers, blank CDs, mastering and more) to anyone with an email address in more than 50 countries. What?s even better is that Paypal does all the currency conversions for you (whether you?re buying or selling).

You can also upgrade to a Premier or Business account and accept all major credit cards with no setup fees or monthly merchant account payments. You can start selling your CDs, t-shirts and other merch directly through your website for a measly %2.9 commission. That?s all it costs for you to accept credit cards. Whereas if you were to get a real merchant account through the major banks, you would pay a setup fee, rent a processing machine for about $35/month (whether you use it or not), plus pay the commission on all purchases. If you don?t sell enough wares in any one month, you?ll have to pay another minimum fee. And then you?ll have to pay a web designer to implement the online processing functions into your band?s website.

Once your Paypal business account is up and running, you can start selling anything from your band?s website (t-shirts, CDs, bootlegs, stickers, cups, pens, blah blah).

RSS

RSS is an online news distribution format. The advantage of setting up an RSS system on your website is that it makes it easier for your fans to get your latest news releases. RSS is more of a passive distribution of news, where the headlines go to your fans (instead of your fans having to go to your website). All a person needs is an RSS aware program called an aggregator. These are freely downloadable from the Internet and can sit on your fan?s desktop. The second you add or update a headline in your RSS newsfeed, it will show up immediately in your fan?s RSS aggregator.

You can get more info from these sites: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS or http://news.yahoo.com/rss.

Blogs

Blog is a short word for Weblog. Very simply put, it?s an online diary. These are great if you have Internet access during a tour and want to keep your fans updated with each date of the tour. You can post your thoughts on your shows, hotel room experiences, the bad food you?re being forced to eat and more.

Each entry is dated and your fans can even comment on the entries, giving you feedback and support along the way. It?s an excellent way to keep your fans closely involved with your daily happenings. You can go to www.blogger.com to start your own free blog site. Or if you can find a way to include a blog directly on your home page, all the better!

Mambo

Mambo is an amazingly FREE and easily installable website content manager. If you're used to making web pages in Frontpage or Dreamweaver, Mambo will be a godsend to you. The difference is between offline webpage designing and online management. If you were to create a webpage in Frontpage (or other offline webpage designer), you'd have to upload the page back to your server and hope that all the links are valid, make sure the pages point to each other, make sure your images and mp3 files are in the proper sub-directories etc.

But with Mambo, you can just log in to your website, change any part of any page, and the system will automatically update all the relevant pages. That change will now be permanent. Unlike the offline editors, where you would have to ftp into your site, download the html page, open up your editor, change the words, save, close the editor, login to your server with ftp again, and then re-upload the page. What a hassle!

The best thing about Mambo is that there are programmers all around the world constantly creating add-ons. Mambo directly supports all the above Internet utilities already we talked about, including; blogging, RSS, Podcasts, Forums, online group calendars, newsletter emails, internal messaging between users and much more. And the super administrator of your website can assign different password levels to anyone else, allowing them to add to or change individual webpages (ie: current newsflashes etc). For a sample of a Mambo website, go to: www.digitalsoundmagic.com. To get a free download of the Mambo CMS, go to: www.mamboserver.com

And remember, there are infinite resources online for band and artist promotion, link exchanges, myspace.com, mp3 hosting sites and more. Take advantage of them and watch your careers take off.

?2005 Richard Dolmat (Digital Sound Magic Studios) ===========================================================

About The Author Richard Dolmat is owner, engineer and producer for the Vancouver based recording studio Digital Sound Magic Studios. Visit his site at: http://www.digitalsoundmagic.com

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