Your Music Website Isn’t Working

Hey, what's up gigging person's Jared judge, welcome to another episode of The Gigging Musician Podcast. Today, I want to share with you that your website isn't working, this just isn't working out, guys, we have to change. And I don't know you personally right now unless you have reached out to me, which I would love for you to. But if your website is anything like you know, 99% of musicians, websites that I've seen online, then it just simply isn't doing its job. It's like hiring somebody, because you're paying a monthly fee for your hosting, but they just don't show up to work, they don't do anything. And you still pay them every year you pay them a salary, but they're just not doing any work, which simply isn't right. And the reason why I say this, you know, I've been in the business of coaching musicians on, you know, the business side of things, how do you actually extract money from your passion for a few years now. And I see so many websites, I come across musicians who apply to work with me, and they send me their websites, I could check it out. And this even happened yesterday. Because, you know, as part of the walking National Association of Catering Events, I'm putting together a list of potential, you know, solo and bans acts that I could recommend to this networking group of event planners for their corporate events, and weddings. And so I posted in a Colorado Facebook group for musicians, and they asked people to reach out if you want to be considered for this list, send me your website and include videos. And about half of the responses did not include website. So that already excluded them from the list. Because as I've been in the private events business for quite some time, website is one of the major ways people discover you and get to know if you're actually qualified to perform at their event, they're not going to hire somebody they don't trust. So half of those people were disqualified for not having websites. And then when I visited the ones that did have website, you know, a lot of them were, you know, beautiful, they looked good. And their music obviously sounded great. But when you try to actually use the website to accomplish a goal, such as, how do I reach out to you in book, you don't want to have to hunt and peck for your contact form. Or, I don't even know based on your website, if you play private events, that's when you start to realize like, your website is creating a confusing and frustrating experience for the people trying to give you money. Which, think about it from your perspective, if you've ever been on a website, you know, if you've tried to purchase a musical instrument accessory from a, you know, not not a giant retailer, like not from Sweetwater or something, but directly from the Creator themselves. You know, if they created an experience on their website, that frustrated you, and confused you, unless you really, really, really want that instrument or accessory, then you're probably going to get so frustrated that you actually leave the page and not give them money. So this is what was happening to me, as I was browsing through all those websites. And, you know, it might sound like Hey, Jared, you've got a superiority complex about websites. And I kind of do. But it comes from experience because I was in their shoes, I was in your shoes. When I was first creating my website. Nobody ever taught me how to do it. I just kind of put together a website that looked good to me. And from a musician's perspective is like, really impressive. This looks good. I got my videos up. I've got some, you know, cool. I don't even know like content about why I chose each of these songs. And I put that website up there and nothing happened. Nobody visited it. Or the people that did visit it bounced, which means they close the page. In fact, if you install Google Analytics on your website, Google Analytics gives you a metric called bounce rate, which is the percentage of people who visit your site where only they only visit one page, they don't navigate to other pages, they don't fill out your forms, and had a very high bounce rate. And so I went and did the hard work of learning how to actually use a website. And that's when I discovered that you could turn a website into a marketing funnel. And if you're around me in my Facebook group and on my email list, you probably know that I preach marketing funnels, because I believe in them so much, and they make me feel amazing. As a musician, they make me feel so in demand. They make me feel like my music is better than I actually feel like it is. It was just a great feeling. But the more important part is that they helped me accomplish my goals. So What a marketing funnel is, is a process, you take somebody through, which oftentimes starts off of your website, because you've got to get people to your website. But then once they get to your website, it is a series of pages designed and laid out in a very intentional way designed to help your potential customers accomplish one goal on each step. So for example, you know, if we want to get somebody inquiring for your services for private events, then the first page on your website, you want us to send them to, typically the goal is to just get them to fill out a form, without leaving that page, like don't send them to another contact form page, give them a contact form on that page itself. And what this does, and so, the funnel itself, you know, you, you have several pages that are designed to achieve a specific result, like the end goal for me, is to get a booking. And so once they become a lead, that's not the end of the funnel. Like that's just really the the beginning or the second step after I've driven the traffic to that funnel. So I get them to give me their contact information. And then after that, my goal is to get them on a zoom call, which is essentially a sales presentation. So I chat with them face to face, discover why they're looking for live music for their event, and then get them to convince me why I should accept them as a client, why they should, why should accept them to work with them. And then on that call, is when I asked for their credit card and get them to, you know, secure the date. And then I send them the contract later, as a very high success rate. It's incredible, because I booked gigs very consistently. This is the process that I used when it moved to Colorado, set up a funnel for myself, and then started driving traffic to it. And so I'm so passionate about it. As far as like, what platforms work to do this, like I've gotten that question like, can I use Bandzoogle or Wix or Squarespace? And the answer is kind of like a yes with an asterisk. Some platforms make it harder than others. Just set up this very intentional process. I will say Bandzoogle is one of the worst. It's very difficult to do is because Bandzoogle websites are not designed in like with a funnel mindset. They're more designed to get you going to Spotify, streams and followers and fans. But they neglect the private events side of things. The neglect if you actually want to do any, like traditional style marketing, which is that traditional style marketing works, it works really well. And just feels awesome when you see it working. And same for like Squarespace, Wix. They all work, but it's hard to do it. WordPress is slightly better. But WordPress does have a little bit higher learning curve. But because it's more powerful, you can do cool things. But my all time favorite. The one that I would recommend to musician is called ClickFunnels, which you can get a free trial to it by the way using our gigging musician, podcast affiliate link. He didn't know if he could hear the dog in the background, but go to bit bitly.com or bit.ly/MusicFunnels to get a free 14 day trial. And I will not lie to you it is more expensive than these other platforms. But it's more expensive because it's worth it. From my experience and the experience of others for us that kind of getting back to that analogy we used earlier. When you hire a person, like your website, you've basically hired somebody to be in a constant 24 hour presence for you online and selling your wares online. Would you want the best person in that job during that job? Or would you want somebody who's like maybe Okay, at doing the job. And if I had a choice, I would choose the best person to do that job. So he wouldn't hire the somebody fresh out of high school. No offense high schoolers. We wouldn't hire somebody fresh out of high school to be in a management role at like a corporation. It just it wouldn't make sense. They don't have the experience. They don't have the tools and the knowledge yet. They will someday maybe but if you're hiring somebody to do you know one of the most important jobs for your music career. Wouldn't you want the best possible person doing it? That to me that's why ClickFunnels is the way for that because it's literally the Name is designed to build these marketing funnels. And once you set up your funnel, you will start to get leads, like you will, you'll have to figure out how to get traffic to it. But I've dropped you a bunch of gold nuggets throughout this podcast on how to do that, which one of my favorites is partnering with venues. But once you do that, and your funnel is working, you will start to get leads. And these are like leads or just people who are ready to book you. And in order to maintain contact with them, you're gonna want to follow up with some emails. And one of the cool parts about ClickFunnels is that it's so easy to set up an automated email sequence. So that the when people give you their email address, they automatically get emails from you. Like this kind of stuff used to be reserved for like corporations, like you know, you sign up for Spotify, and you get all the Spotify automated emails, like that stuff is no longer reserved for just corporations and companies alike as musicians can get access to these very powerful tools. And they're worth paying for because they make you money. So to me, that's my funnel rant for today. Yeah, again, get your free trial for ClickFunnels at bit.ly/MusicFunnels. If you use our referral link, then we get a little cut every time you renew, which you know, I've been a Clickfunnels user for like three or four years now. And I just can't change to any other platform because nothing else works quite as well. So go ahead and get your free trial of clickfunnels at bit.ly/MusicFunnels. And yeah, let me know what you think. hope hope this was helpful for you to think about how your website really isn't doing its job and how to make it do its job. And yeah, let me know if this works for you. Alright, thanks for tuning in to another episode of The Gigging Musician Podcast. Remember, "You were just one gig away!".