Your Website and Bookings

Hey musicians Welcome back to The gigging musician, podcast, Jared Judge here. Today we're going to talk about your website. So let me tell you a little story. I'm going to walk back to when I was a sophomore in college, I was studying music education at Penn State and I was taking a class within my music education curriculum. That was, I think it was like professional development for music educators. It was like a half semester long class. And it was all about building up a portfolio, a resume. And a part of that was a website. And so they spent like, one lecture on how to build what they called an E portfolio. I mean, no offense to them, pretty bad name. And they didn't really know what they were talking about. Because, you know, like, every musician, we were taught how to do music, not really how to do all this business stuff. And so I followed their advice and just built a crappy, you know, website, I'm one of those Website Builder websites like wix.com, I took their advice on what kind of content to put on it. And the structure of it, you know, how many pages I needed. And they told us, we needed a lot of pages, including a teaching philosophy, because you know, as music educators, the people hiring, you are going to want to know, your teaching philosophy right off the bat. And so I followed their advice, and built it. And I was not happy with it, it was, quite frankly, a piece of crap. It just, I felt like I didn't know what I was writing. I didn't know what pictures to put on it, I would like, there was just random pictures on it. And more importantly, it didn't get me any results like nobody was going to it. And the people that did go to it, were super confused. So they wound up like leaving within three seconds. I mean, I put on the analytics for it. It my website did not keep people around for very long. And that was when I decided to research websites, I needed to know what was going wrong with mine. And why was I not, you know, getting more bookings, but getting more gigs from it, or getting more private lessons students, which at the time, I didn't exactly know the wording for. But then I discovered this idea of optimizing your website for conversion. And I know that's kind of a scary term. But really, all that means is focusing the pages and everything on your website, all around one goal. Like when somebody visits your website, what is their goal. And so the problem with what my music education professors were teaching, was that they they themselves weren't even clear on what the goal was of somebody who was visiting my website. Sorry about the wind here. I'm actually on a hike right now on a mountain. But getting back to what my music education professors didn't know, was optimizing for one conversion. So let's think about that, you know, let's bring it back to gigging because as gigging musicians, we typically have one goal of somebody visiting our website. Let's think about who that person is first. So as you guys know, when I was in grad school, I started a gigging String Quartet. And, you know, we started out not knowing who exactly we wanted to come to our website who was going to be booking us. We wandered around, you know, put just random stuff on our webpage. And eventually, we got our first booking. My first booking booking, it was for a string. It was actually violin solo, for someone's wedding at a gazebo in Illinois. And I mean, Wisconsin is where it started. But hey, it's my first gig. I was gonna take it. And it was a wedding. So I was like, Okay, let's score one for the wedding team. And then we got our next one. And it was another wedding. And hey, weddings pay really well. So it was another score for the wedding team. And then, you know, within our second year, there were 150 weddings in the second year. And I knew by that point, like, Hey, I gotta optimize this website for weddings, you know, specifically brides and grooms and possibly parents of the groom's too, because they're the ones researching on behalf of their children. And so thinking about optimizing my website for one conversion, what does that mean? What should somebody do next? When they get to my website, and I was thinking about the booking process. So when somebody goes to book me for my string quartet, I take my string quartet seriously, I treat it as an online business because it is an online business. And so step one of my booking process is for them to contact me to get a quote. Haha. So I need their email address. I need their phone number. And I need some more information about their event so that when they come to my website, that's the only thing I care about them doing. I don't need them to read my tea. Philosophy, I don't need them to check out, you know, here is my solo recital where I played some music that, you know, 21st century music that I love. But quite frankly, maybe less than 1% of the population of this earth actually likes. And so I realized my website was not focused on that conversion of them giving me their email address in exchange for a quote. So what did I do? That is when I just you, I went on a delete rampage, I was busting my delete key, non stop getting rid of my teaching philosophy, getting rid of all of the other links on my page that could take somebody away from the path that they were on to get a quote and give me their email address. So deleted everything came back with a pretty basic one page website, where all of the words on the page, which some of you might know is copy, that's the name of it, it's copy marketing copy, I deleted all of the videos that were not related to weddings, deleted all of the photos not related to weddings, and started to add a couple more buttons on the page that just repeated this idea of get a quote now. And once I did that, you know my conversions. Like all of a sudden, instead of getting random messages from people who were not interested in, you know, booking me for a wedding, I was only getting messages from people who wanted quotes, and we're pretty much ready to book. Additionally, when I looked in my Google Analytics, the bounce rate of my users would go down, like people would not come to the page, because Google recognized Oh, this page is more focused. Now. It's focused on booking, and it's focused on booking weddings. So Google actually prioritized it, because it was so focused, and people were staying on the page longer, simply because they had found the right place that was focused. So that whole process of optimizing my website for conversions and specifically for booking is a super useful and important process as part of running an online business. Because without focus, people will get confused and people will leave. So that's my story about how I started with a pretty crappy website, and then pretty much became one of the few people in music to be optimizing my website for conversions. And that's why I was able to run successfully run walkies top string quartet, and then help other musicians optimize their websites for booking. And I'm actually running a masterclass that covers this covers optimizing your website for booking and that you can join that that's happening. Actually, there's one happening later today, but there's going to be one next week as well. And so forth, so far on into the near future. You can find that masterclass at WWW dot book live pro.com slash masterclass. And, yeah, we'll go over how to optimize your your website and your your gigging career and how to treat that as a music business. And I hope to see you there. So thanks for listening to the gigging musician podcast. I'll see you next time.