Ok here is a simple strategy to promoting your band online. This could be a very long post so in the interest of brevity, I’m just going to lay out an outline now and do a few more posts on the finer points of these.

1. Get your own damn web site. Buy a URL (internet address) from Godaddy ($8) and sign up for a hosting plan from them or someone else. I use Dreamhost but there are others. Sometimes these services (like dreamhost) will give you a free domain registration when you sign up. That’s fine, but I prefer to keep all my domains registered in one place because it makes it easy to manage them all. Good hosting is generally fairly cheap (but not free). A lot of hosting companies charge around $10 a month and often less. It’s worth it.
2. Put good relevant information on your site. Photos, band bios, mp3 samples of your music, and links to other services, like MySpace that you might use. But make sure that URL that you registered (you know the one you OWN) is the only URL that you publish for your band. Don’t promote a MySpace address, because you never know when a fickle service like MySpace might accidentally delete your shit (see previous post). And put your URL on all everything you get printed, and use it in your message signatures, on myspace and everywhere else.
3. Set up a blog. Yes, this is the single best way to generate traffic to your site and develop a community of fans around your band. It doesn’t have to be great, it only needs to be relevant. Don’t do long posts. Just keep people updated on what you are doing as a band– recording, taking a break, up coming gigs, or what you are listening to, blah blah blah. Make it relevant and make it regular. Why does this work? Regular updates mostly. Blogs get indexed by search engines more often than other sites because search engines know that they are up dated more frequently.
4. Link to other sites and blogs that you like. That’s important because if those other bloggers and site owners are smart they are curious about who is linking back to them. And if you like them, chances are they’ll like you and link back to you. And that means more traffic for everyone, and the beginning of a community. Sites like MySpace exploit this idea with their “friends list” construct. But this kind of interaction has already been in place on the open Internet for a long time. Learn this and use it.
5. Set up email addresses for you and your bandmates with your own URL. Use this email for official band communication. Most web hosts make it easy to set up forwarding addresses so you don’t actually have to set up a mail box. I have all my mail forwarded to my gmail account because it makes it really easy to manage all my mail there. Yahoo mail can work too, but nothing beats gmail IMO. DO NOT DEPEND ON MYSPACE MESSAGES FOR OFFICIAL COMUNICATION. If you are a serious band, you need to manage your band business seriously. MySpace messaging is not a serious messaging system. It’s a toy for kids.
6. Use other web services besides MySpace. Again I’m not saying to not use MySpace, I’m just saying it’s not the only game in town. Some of these other services are used by people who wouldn’t get caught dead on MySpace. If you want to reach them, you need to go to them. Some of these services I like are Flickr (photos), UpComing.org (calendar publishing), Twitter (short messaging), Google (for all kinds of stuff), Yahoo (all kinds of stuff too—owns UpComing and Flickr above). But always use your own web site as a hub that links to your identity to any and all of these services that you choose to use. Someone asks if you are on one of these other services just send them to your web site for the link. I’m a big proponate of not trying to reinvent the wheel. If someone has a great service that you can’t do just as well from your own site, use it!
7. Set up a store for your music and merch. There are a number of ways that this can be done. There are services like Sno-Cap that allow you to sell your music online, and of couse there is iTunes. And for merch there are a number of options. Café Press is very popular but there are others like Spreadshirt and GoodStorm. And don’t forget CD Baby. If you are really ambitious you can even set up and manage your own shop hosted on your own site. But if you have a lot of popular items you might have a problem keeping up with order fulfillment.

So that’s a start. But it’s mostly common sense. I’ll add more to this list in future posts as I think of them. I think my next one is what to put into an online press kit. But if you can think of anything else, or have questions please ad it to the comments.