After this thread and my moan about bands not promoting gigs I thought I'd be a little more constructive and offer some tips about promoting bands and gigs online. Add yours tips to the thread. It will sound a lot like marketing speak but that's what promotion is. You can be the best band in the world but if no one knows you... you'll be the best lonely band in the world.

Websites - it's all about brand:
You need a myspace page
It needs a good design, it needs to have recent music. Everyone does that. But you also need to blog frequently and encourage people to follow your blog. You should use your blog to 'help people get to know you' this will increase your brand power. Anything is better then nothing but good topics are:

• time in the studio
• time on the road
• thoughts about new material
• upcoming gigs/festivals you are playing at
• upcoming gigs/festivals you are going to. Ask people to meet up (unfortunately this will turn gigs into a job which does suck)

Custom website
Not a lot of small bands do this as it can cost a little bit of cash. Having your own site and your own domain name (as in http://www.MYBANDNAME.com) allows you to:

• strengthen your brand
• express your brands with great site design (myspace is quite restrictive)
• build up a private mailing list of fans (we're all on the evile mailing list aren't we?)
• blog (you can duplicate the myspace blog if you want) more personal things like the readers are your friends, funny videos that kind of thing.
• run competitions (which must be run fairly btw as there are laws about competitions)

Facebook
Total ballache of a site but it's the fastest growing social network in the west. At the moment I would just duplicate your MySpace content as far as possible as people don't use it for 'music' but you need a presence there, list your gigs, pictures etc.

Twitter
Get yourself a twitter account. It's great for micro bloging (all tweets are < 140 characters long) especially on tour or on gig days. You can blog from your mobile to your fans so it's really convenient. Currently seeing huge growth in USA, UK and Germany.

Bebo
Difficult site to use, bands can pay for custom designs, v. big in the UK. IMO it's not necessary to have this at the moment but it's probably not a bad idea if most of you fans are school kids.

Youtube
Just looks at the HOD Channel for how a band can open up and let the fans in Brilliant. Also look out for fan videos - comment on them. Embed good movies on ALL your websites. Blog about them. Drive users to content about you. Both me and Radioactive Rik video gigs in London. I do it because it advertises good bands and New Metal Army. Rik does it for a DVD epic he is conjuring. You should take them to advertise you. If you ask nicely I'm sure Rik and I would give you (the band) the raw files to do with as you please.

Metal Archives
Once you have a release (anything tangible) you need to get listed in Metal Archives. It is THE MOST important metal site on the internet. Only blabbermouth gets more traffic. They are very strict about submissions so be careful but getting a listing there is quite frankly cool.

All of your websites should be entertaining, list all your gigs and ultimately aim to drive users to your custom website where you can control more effectively what they see and offer them a more brand centric experience. You are one of a million bands so you need to get people to buy into your brand so that they will spend time and money with you and feel good about it.

Gig listings:

Assuming everyone here is gigging in the UK:

you need to post flyers to:
http://www.ukthrash.co.uk
http://forum.metalhammer.co.uk/
http://www.terrorizer.com/forum/index.php
http://www.unionblack.co.uk/forum/
http://www.myspace.com/extremelondonmetal (this guy covers all London gigs and big festivals, nice guy)

at least, there are HUNDRED of forums and it only takes a minute to post. Every post should include a well designed flyer, time and date and links to ALL your websites.

I'd suggest listing your gigs on http://www.songkick.com/ and of course http://www.newmetalarmy.com/ as well (see the self promotion I'm doing there). ITS FREE AND ONLY TAKES A FEW MINUTES!

Any more tips?

And to show I eat my own dog food I've copied this post to:

NMA Myspace Blog
NMA Blog

and I've linked to it on NMA's twitter.

Metaldazza (if only i knew your real name...!!) this is a very concise and totally bang on the money. good work sir, golden star for you!

Can anyone think of any other decent UK metal forums or websites to be posting on? Ninehertz is a cool stoner/doom forum i've heard about, i only ever post here though and thats as far as my foruming goes...

forgot to mention Podcasts.... get yourself on podcasts.. and when you do blog blog blog about it. Link to the podcast so more people listen to it. This helps the podcast AND you. THe better you make the podcast the better you look for being on it.

metaldazza wrote:forgot to mention Podcasts.... get yourself on podcasts.. and when you do blog blog blog about it. Link to the podcast so more people listen to it. This helps the podcast AND you. THe better you make the podcast the better you look for being on it.

Yes please!

Good tips dazza, I'm sure they will be of help. However, they are all completely online things - there's no problem embracing the internet as a tool but let's remember there are loads of things bands can do in the real world, which would also be good to discuss in this thread.

For example, sending your music to zines and distros is still an essential way to spread the word about your band. Having a real life product that people can hold in their hands is just as important as having mp3s people can download, in my opinion.

Great tips !!

I think very very important about zines and actuall hard copies of things. I have checked out more bands through zines then i have random people going here is the link to my myspace. At the end of the day if someone is going to spend time publishing you then it is worth checking out.

Also when promoting for gigs, nothing beats getting out and flyering, sticking posters up everywhere you can. Like im sure lots of gigs happen in southampton and i only have a few of the bands on myspace (i only know of like 3 decent bands) and none advertise in the streets. If you advertise in the streets, at unis etc.. more then likely a potential fan will think

"hey im doing shitall tonite, il go down for a drink and some live music."

And of course at a gig try and speak to as many people, thanking em for comming down etc.. after! will make them wanna come back

Your completely correct. I removed the word online from the title of the thread. I went with online because that's what I know. Tangible things are very important too.

The great thing about the internet though is that you can do everything I mentioned for free and it would only take an hour a week to maintain. It's a lot of bang for ya buck in my opinion.

So lets get a list of offline tools people can use as well Anyone got a list of zines that are worth contacting?