Hypebot posted a nice article with three tips about your own domain. Good tips. But I want to add two more tips that I think are even more important and come from my personal experience working with many clients.
1. Auto Renew – Set your domain to auto renew. Just do it! I promise you will not be sorry. This means that when your domain expires it will automatically be renewed, with no interruptions. I have had too many experiences with clients, large and small, who did not auto renew their domain and did not notice the emails being sent to them to alert them to the need to renew. One day somebody notices the website is down and the panic begins. The scramble begins to quickly get the domain renewed and back online, in the meantime your site is down and often replaced with a generic page. This leads into tip number two.
2. Master List – Keep a master list of where your domain is managed and the site is hosted; company name, company url, tech support number, username and password. Note, your hosting company can be different than the company managing your domain. Make sure you know both. When you are in a scramble to get your site back online, or just want to move your site you are going to need this information.
Read the original three tips below.
Though I advocate for the use of a lot of different web services and social networks, I’ve always maintained that musicians and music-related businesses should have a home-base that is under their control at their own domain.
Platforms come and go. Accounts are destroyed. If your primary web presence is on a platform controlled by someone else, your future is also under their control.
Fred Wilson, an investor partly responsible for the ever growing range of social networking-related sites, recently stated:
“Don’t be a Google Bitch, don’t be a Facebook Bitch, and Don’t be a Twitter Bitch. Be your own Bitch.”
Wilson was giving advice to developers creating apps for social network platforms such as Facebook who periodically find their businesses undermined by the platform on which they depend. But the advice is also useful for musicians who give up control of their web presence by making a social networking site the center of their activity.
Given that there are a variety of ways in which your social network presence could be obliterated, as can happen with Facebook pages, or simply made outdated, as has happened with MySpace, the inherent instability of constant change is one strong argument for having your own website at your own domain.
The bottom line is that if you haven’t yet established a site at your own domain, you need to do so right away. Here are three simple tips for a quick start:
- Buy a domain that includes your band’s name. If possible, get one that is just your band’s name.
- Set up a single page website that includes, at the very least, a paragraph about your band and links to your various outposts on the web.
- Share the domain wherever you can while encouraging friends and fans to link to that domain and to consider it your band’s official site.
From there, you’re set to expand your website and to build the site’s presence in search engines. Your core long-term goals should be to create a site that is the ultimate resource about you and your music and for that site to be the first thing that appears in web searches on your band’s name.
Doing these things should make it easier for folks to find you on the web and for you to strongly influence the key messages and resources made available to friends, fans, press and whoever else matters in achieving your goals as a musician.
Hypebot contributor Clyde Smith is a freelance writer and blogger. Flux Research is his business writing hub and All World Dance: World Dance News is his primary web project.
Definitely ‘auto renew’! I don’t know how many times I’ve forgotten to renew my domain manually. I usually find out after the site has been down a day or two already.
Luckily it has not happened to me personally. But I worked at a company that did not auto renew one of their many domains, the domain lapsed and someone else actually picked it up. The IT dept was really in hot water for that one. I also had a major adult studio I worked with that let the domain for their online store lapse. It took them a week to get it back and live; meanwhile they lost alot of sales.
Oh, boy. I’m guilty of not having auto-renew set. Yikes! Changing that.
However, GoDaddy seems to give me a call when anything is going on my account. Really great customer service on their part. They’ve actually saved me money because I’ve accidentally signed up for services that I didn’t use.
Still, I’m not going to rely on their customer service. Checking that auto-renew now! Thanks for the tip!