Build, manage and promote your band/music website with these resources

I recently hooked up with a new company to start up something in the wine business, but continued to do some freelance work on the side. One of the projects I’ve been working on is for a guy who leads a band that just released a new album. They don’t have a facebook page, twitter account, and the website is in rough shape to say the least. I’ve been pouring over some resources and thought I should gather them into a post. I have zero experience marketing a band and don’t want to explore it too deeply but I can advise this client enough to get them pointed in the right direction.

Quick links:

Top picks for music/band templates and WordPress themes

Music players for your website

Intro videos for your band

Flyers for promotion

Themes you can use

Below you’ll find a collection of some of the nicer themes that you can use to create your music or band website.

Rockwell

Rockwell comes packed with great features to get your band or music site going. It’s simple to customize with the WordPress features it uses and you can modify it extensively to get that look you want.

Magzimus

Magzimus is a blend of lifestyle/music theme which could work for some. It’s definitely geared toward more informative type content though.

Stereoline

Stereoline comes with numerous layouts and colors to choose from out of the box and fits the blog/lifestyle/magazine style format.

Music Club

Here’s a great theme designed for a radio station or band that has a nice modern layout with a fullscreen image as the background. It comes with great features like a floating music bar that plays music and automatically pulls artwork from your album.

Jam Session responsive music theme

This theme comes packed with features and is fully responsive so it looks good on any device.

Muse theme for music/bands

This theme is a top seller and brings a lot of great features with it to help you manage songs, albums, concert dates and other media for your band. It’s fully responsive too.

Pendulum

A modern music/band template made with a lot of attention to detail and thought about the needs of a band.

Bolster

An easy to modify theme made specially for bands and music websites.

CLUBIX

Clubix is a responsive nightlife, music and events WordPress theme.

Muzak

Meet Muzak. A WordPress themes for bands, musicians, djs and everyone involved in the music business.

Ironband

IronBand is a complete solution for bands, with its built in HTML5 audio player, integration with Youtube, and other features to help manage your music.

Tuned balloon

Tuned Balloon works for anyone looking to get a basic site up to promote their band and can be extended to be as functional as you need.

Keronchong

Keronchong is a great choice for a band website and comes with all the basic features you’d expect.

Flycase

Flycase is a professional and easy-to-use music WordPress theme. It is highly and easily customizable, ready for all devices, simple to set up and e-commerce ready.

Party Night

Geared more toward night clubs and parties, this is a theme that could also fit the needs of a band.

Acoustic

This WordPress theme offers great flexibility for any solo artist, band, or group looking to pull together a professional looking website for themselves.

MusicPlay

Banda

A music magazine theme with a counter for events, a HTML5 audio player and video background, unlimited colors and light and dark skins.

Bandzone

Unlike the “friendzone” the Bandzone WordPress theme is something you might actually want and comes with everything you need to get a nice looking site up to represent your band.

Soundstage

You want to make a good first impression and this theme will help you do that. It’s a professional looking template that has everything you need to put your best foot forward.

Gig

Here’s a robust theme for your music that comes with features to manage your band members, your music, events, blog and even crowdfunding for your musical projects with support for the Ignition Deck premium plugin.

Music players for your website

If you already have a website and simply want something to elegantly display and play music, these plugins might help you out.

Responsive music player

This slick player lets you play any music you upload or selections from shoutcast. It has a neat feature that lets you drag the record to slow down or speed up the music, kind of like a DJ mixing.

Responsive HTML5 music player

This player has some great features that separate it from others, including an API that you can use and an XML database capability for dynamic streaming. It also hooks into Soundcloud and can be used for podcasts.

Audiobox player

This music player degrades nicely into older browsers that don’t have support for HTML5 by using Flash. It pulls image artwork and meta data perfectly and displays the songs and album covers beautifully.

Vinyl styled music player

This might be my favorite player simply because of how it looks. Much like the first one I linked to, it shows a vinyl record, the album cover, and obviously your music. It’s touch optimized and responsive so it works on all devices.

Intro videos for your band

If you want to pull together a short video to introduce your band to the world, these will get you started. Using Adobe Aftereffects you can make some simple edits to the file and easily swap your own images, text and audio into a slick presentation to show of your band. Upload it to Youtube, use it for marketing, and so on.

Meet the band

Music band presentation

Flyers and promotional materials

Every band needs to promote its latest gig and what better way to do that than by printing out some flyers and posting them around town? These flyers were designed with a band in mind and can easily be tweaked to include your own photos, fonts, colors and so on.

Show night

A clean layout that could work for just about any musician, this flyer focuses on showing off a single photo of the artist with some other basic information about the show details.

Indie gospel flyer

This might sound like it’s only for indie bands that play at churches but this flyer could easily be used for any type of music to promote any band. It comes in a fully editable .PSD format with organized layers and is easy to customize.

Dirty rock

Here’s a flyer with a bit of an edge to it. Fitting for hard rock or alternative bands that want a grunge look and feel to their promo.

Other resources

These resources should get you started if you’re trying to build a website for your band and get some promotion going. There’s an entire world of services out there to help you and a new era of streaming music that’s dominated by companies like Spotify and Soundcloud. I recommend looking into CDbaby, a service that helps distribute your music digitally across a number of sites from iTunes to Spotify. It pays artists royalties on sales and they also have an informative blog that’s worth checking out. It’s a great place for emerging artists to place their work and get discovered by the general public.

The post Build, manage and promote your band/music website with these resources appeared first on Mike Meisner.

The Very Best Woocommerce Themes of 2014

Couture ecommerce theme

The Couture theme for WordPress presents an elegant look and fell that would work nicely for a jewelry or fashion store. It’s fully customizable and integrates perfectly with the Woocommerce plugin so you can get selling quickly.

Multishop responsive theme

This theme offers a clean look and feel with options to present the site as a blog, corporate style, or as a shop.

Room09 multipurpose ecommerce theme

This is a classy looking theme that comes with a versatile layout builder that you can use to present a store, a regular site, or a mix of both. It also has some built in features like a wishlist and zoom magnifier along with a product enquiry form.

PrimaShop flat responsive woocommerce theme

I really like PrimaShop because it brings together some modern design styles with versatile layout options and some other premium features.

Circolare mutiuse woocommerce theme

This theme takes a departure from the flat styles that seem to be dominating design lately and favors a 3D look in the navigation area, with an all-around more whimsical design that’s best suited for artsy, fashion, and makeup shops.

Digita woocommerce parallax theme

This theme id aimed at stores selling digital products, electronics, and mobile accessories. The layout is fully responsive and includes the popular parallax scrolling technique along with other great built-in features.

Shopster retina responsive theme for woocommerce

Here’s a very stylish theme that could work for a variety of online shops. It’s highly customizable so you can mix elements from a personal/portfolio site with your store. It includes the popular Revolution and Layer sliders, portfolio layouts and built in social sharing.

Vineyard winery/liquor store theme

I’ve worked in the wine industry for a few years and it’s nice to see some themes being developed specifically for wine shops. This is a brand new theme that was just released. It features the cloud zoom effect, a one page checkout, product reviews and several different pre-defined layouts so you can get set up with a good looking site right away.

Simplegreat premium wordpress woocommerce theme

This is one of the best themes I’ve come across lately. It comes packed with useful features like the visual page builder that lets you create all sorts of layouts which you can save for use later. That comes in handy when you’re creating a landing page, or a special version of the homepage for example. It also has 12 premium plugins bundled, including the Revolution slider and a drag-and-drop frontend builder that makes editing your site a breeze! It’s also built on the Bootstrap framework so you know it’s a reliable, well made code base.

El Grande – Multilayout woocommerce theme

Here’s another very nice theme that was just released at the time I write this. Elgrande features seven layouts right out of the box, and comes with some nice features including 500 Google fonts, lots of icons, and of course it’s responsive and retina ready.

Blaszok multipurpose theme

You won’t find many themes better than this one. It’s built by a great development team that frequently updates it and offers great support to its customers. This is a well documented theme, and even though it’s fairly new, it already racked up 500+ sales on Themeforest so you know there’s something behind its popularity. The demo page shows how it can be used for corporate, restaurant, dance, fashion, and just about any other style website you can think of.

Emona multipurpose woocommerce theme

Emona is a simple yet clean looking theme with 8 color variations and it includes the visual composer tool which makes creating layouts a breeze.

Pets and Vets responsive WooCommerce theme

Here’s a unique theme designed with veternarian and pet stores in mind. Whether you’re looking to sell dog products, cat beds, or a little bit of everything pet related, this is a great choice.

Callisto Woocommerce responsive theme

Callisto is another great looking theme with a fresh design that deviates from some of the usual trends we find in Woocommerce themes. It’s ideal for any ecommerce site that needs a flexible layout, and includes the “quick shop” feature which allows customers to preview products without loading a new page.

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Creative Display Banner Templates for Remarketing Ads

I wrote about using Perfect Audience to set up an effective remarketing campaign in my “8 remarketing tips to get visitors back to your website“, and wanted to follow that up with this post that highlights some banner ads you can use. Remarketing works great when you do it right, and a hugely important piece of setting up a campaign that’s effective has to do with the look and feel of your banner ads. Not all of us have sick graphic design skills, but luckily there are plenty of templates out there designed specifically for banner ads. You can use these to get a jump start on your ad creatives and save a ton of time and money when it comes to designing a professional looking campaign.

When you’re running display ads, it helps to have a repository of good creatives you can refer to for various events, times of the year, products, or other styles that fit your needs. Larger companies and advertising agencies might have the luxury of an in-house graphic designer, but what about the rest of us? Designing a display isn’t really ad difficult as it seems, and perhaps the biggest hack you can use to save time is purchasing pre-made templates that you can customize fairly easily assuming you have some basic Photoshop skills.

I love Graphic River for their huge selection of very high quality products. For as little as $4 you can have a nice package of display banners in Photoshop format. All it takes is a bit of time on your part to decide what image and copy you want to use, and perhaps some color changes. You can then post a simple job request on Elance, Odesk or some similar site to get the design finished.

Vintage Web Banners in 15 Sizes

These banners have a vintage look an feel to them, and would be great for a bohemian clothing store or anything else where you’re trying to capture a clean retro feel without being too “out there”.

Retail Ad Banners

This set of banners offers a clean design that’s suitable for just about any ecommerce shop. For a few bucks you get 18 different sizes, complete with vector shapes.

Multipurpose Glamourous Banners

Here’s a set of banners designed with a slick, modern feel that might be better suited for fashion, makeup, or glamour stores.

Fashion/Multipurpose Banners

Another set designed with a whimsical look and feel that’s suitable for fashion, clothing or artistic sites.

Email marketing/Tech Banners

These banners have a clean look and feel that’s best for tech sites and B2B sites looking to get a few simple points across.

Multipurpose travel ad banners

Christmas ad banners

It’s always smart to design ads for the context they appear in, Although these come ready made and designed for Christmas, the layout can easily be modified to work for a variety of other holidays, winter sales, and so on. This set comes with 18 sizes so you have a ton of options for placement.

Professional display/product banners

In my previous post on remarketing strategies I touched on using product-specific ads to deliver the most relevant display ads to your customers. This set of banners would work perfectly for highlighting single products and the look and feel is generic enough so it could work for almost any site.

I recommend checking out the full collection of banner ads on Graphic River. There are plenty there to choose from and the ones I included above barely skim the surface.

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Content in Context: The Wine Industry

In this “Content in Context” entry, I wanted to highlight a presentation that I recently gave to a small group of people who work in the wine industry. A few months ago, I was invited to speak at Sonoma State University for the “State of the Wine Industry” seminar that eWinery and Shipcompliant hosted. I chose content marketing as the subject, and wrapped it up in the context of the wine industry, which has long been a slow adopter of technology. Every winery has a unique story behind it, but they don’t always do the best job at sharing that story – and there are some very good tales among these grape growers, winemakers, and everyone else who is part of the business. One of the interesting things about the wine industry is its eclectic mix of people – you’ll meet everyone from former console gaming kings to venture capitalists, and the many small families as you trek across Wine Country.

This presentation looks at popular types of content that forward-thinking wine brands have created and shared, and showcases concrete examples that you can easily translate to your own business. It also explores complementary strategies to attract more eyes on your content through social media marketing; learning how to find, connect with, and leverage your audience to spread the good word. Going forward, in 2014, the push for authentic, genuine, and useful content will continue to grow among smart brands. Now it’s up to you to generate you own relevant material.

Content marketing strategy for wineries from Mike Meisner

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How three wineries use Instagram to grow their brand + 5 useful tips

As I write this, it seems like the popular social network is ripe for exploitation by wineries, and other markets as well. Many brands have yet to focus on Instagram as a viable option for social media marketing, despite reports that “Based on median increases in subscriber growth, user engagement and sales effectiveness, Instagram has been crowned the best-performing social platform of 2013, according to analytics firm SumAll.” It is, after all, the fastest growing social network of the year. Each day its 150 million users upload 40 million photos.

The instant sharing nature of Instagram makes it a popular choice for brands that want to showcase their business, products, and lifestyle connections. In the wine industry, many brands are slow to adopt social networks, and that’s certainly the case here. But there are a few that have been making solid headway, and using the platform to grow their brand.

Red Cap Vineyards

Followers: 807

#redcapvineyards: 414

Total posts: 97

Red Cap Vineyards is young winery, born on the hillsides of Howell Mountain alongside other big names like Dunn, Outpost, and Robert Craig. In 1998, the owners purchased 10.5 acres of property in Angwin and planted the first vines in 2003. They craft an amazing Cabernet Sauvignon, the first vintage of which was released in 2006, and a Sauvignon Blanc as well. Out of all the wineries I’ve looked at, they seem to have the biggest correlation between their presence on Instagram and the growth of their brand.

As a new brand with no marketing budget, they joined Instagram in February 2013 and quickly amassed a devout following of fans. They networked with fellow wine enthusiasts, influential users, and owners of wine bars across the country to spread the word about their brand and it seems to have paid off. To date, they have more than 800 followers and 400+ photos with the hash tag “redcapvineyards” have been shared. Not a bad show after only nine months on the social network.

Jordan Winery

Followers: 1329

#jordanwinery: 433

Total posts: 625

No surprise to see Jordan as the top of the list of most active wineries on Instagram. They’re a hip, fun winery known for being on top of their game when it comes to social media and online marketing. Earlier this year they created a parody music video for Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” song, which got huge amounts of shares and has 32k views so far. What I find interesting is that while they have a huge amount of followers, relatively speaking, there are only about 400 photos tagged “#jordanwinery”. I notice they don’t always comment on or share photos that others post using the #jordanwinery hashtag, which seems like an obvious opportunity to increase engagement and gain more followers.

Whitehall Lane

Followers: 498

#whitehalllane: 212

Total photos: 103

Whitehall Lane has a strong presence on social media, and their efforts were recently highlighted in great article on Social Media Examiner. They joined Instagram late in 2012, and have started to grow a solid foundation of followers and shares. They take a slightly different approach than other wineries that use the social network, posting a lot more humorous photos meant to create brand loyalty and awareness. Of course, they still promote their wine with crisp bottle shots and images from around the vineyard and tasting room. Taking a cue from the tips below, Whitehall Lane even partners with other brands like GoVino, to promote sponsored contests. They’re also very good at cross-pollinating their social media accounts by sharing across networks, retweeting others’ content, and liking photos from similar brands around wine country with audiences that align with their own.

5 ways brands can use Instragram

1. Create, use, and monitor hashtags

If you post lots of pictures of wine on Instagram, then you probably use typical hashtags like #wine #napavalley or #cabernet for example. But creating your own can be much more useful because it gives you an easy way to search for and track images that use your hashtag, especially from fans and followers. To give you an example, the tag #dirtybands and #thewinepoor have both gained huge usage among “true” wine connoisseurs who routinely share pictures of their Ridge Monte Bello, Colgin, and other small production favorites.

2. Sponsor contests



When Castello di Amorosa ran their “Create the Castle” contest, they asked for fans to post a picture of the castle or their wines, along with the hashtag “#castellodiamorosa”. So far there have been more than 9,000 pictures shared with that tag. Think about the exposure that generates for a brand, when nine thousand people actively share and promote their product. The only reward they offer was the chance for your photo to be shared on their website, so the cost to run a contest like this was next to nothing.

3. Bring authenticity to your brand

Sharing photos makes for a great way to showcase different sides of your brand and business. For wineries, this might mean taking a picture of the sun rising over a misty vineyard, or the freshly harvested grapes flowing out of a bin and into a destemmer, showcasing bottle shots, and visitors who enjoy their time at the winery. Be sure to tag those visitors and encourage them to share. Beyond the winery itself, it means sharing behind the scenes pictures of the family dinner, the vacation to Breckenridge, and a dinner at RN74 in San Francisco. Connect with people based on the lifestyle that’s associated with your brand.

4. Connect with Facebook and other networks

Use the “find friends” features that come with Instagram to connect with existing fans on Facebook and other social networks. Send an email announcement to your mailing list and encourage them to join you on the network, possibly even to participate in a contest to gain some extra momentum. Use a website or service like Statigr.am or Web.stagram to search for relevant hashtags and browse followers online, which makes it really easy to follow new users and like photos. The more users you follow and photos you like, the more fans will reciprocate the favor.

5. Discover and partner with influential users

I don’t see many wine brands doing this, but it’s a common trend among larger brands using Instagram. For example, Paypal hosted a series where each week they would invite a prominent figure from some lifestyle or market to be a “guest Instagrammer” who shares their adventures in a certain context. What you need to realize is that while a winery might consider 500-1000 followers a pretty good number, there are users out there with 500k+ avid fans. Check out @alice_gao who shares her passion with 500k+ followers and you’ll see what I mean. Use a service like Nitrogram to find influential users, measure their reach, and monitor your audience growth. Another hint – if you find a user who seems influential in your vertical, scan the list of people who follow them to find more fans who might align with your brand. Do the same for the people who your influencer follows, and you’ll discover the people they admire.

There’s still plenty of room for early adopters on this social network. With the recent advent of Instagram advertising, it will be interesting to watch how brands take advantage of the platform in 2014.

The post How three wineries use Instagram to grow their brand + 5 useful tips appeared first on Mike Meisner.

24+ Essential Woocommerce Plugins

1. Email Cart

What it does: You can send any customer a pre-populated invoice that’s ready to checkout. All they need to do is follow the link and they’ll land on the checkout page with the products you put together ready. This is a great way to offer custom quotes and product bundles. Combine it with a robust product inquiry feature, and you can add an effective level of customer service.

2. CRM Manager

Woocommerce Curstomer Relationship Manager – Using a CRM platform brings tons of adantages when it comes to understanding, managing, and catering to your customer base. And while you can certainly integrate Woocommerce with Salesforce or other larger CRM tools, sometimes those solutions are too robust. That’s why I like this lightweight CRM plugin, which offers great features for a low one-time cost. You can segment and filter customers, then send an email message to them easily.

3. Woocommerce Product Search

If you tried the native Woocommerce search feature, you know it’s fairly limited. This enhances the search parameters to include all sorts of extra product information and delivers accurate results.

4. Display Product Multi-Layout



If you want to display your product listings in a column format, or switch it up and have them tiled top to bottom, you can use this plugin to do just that. It helps you adjust the way products display across your site, from the category listings, to the single product page itself.

5. Paypal Pro Gateway



Everyone needs a quick and easy way to get setup with a payment processor on their site, and that usually means setting up a Paypal Pro account. You can use this plugin to easily integrate your Paypal account to your website’s checkout for seamless transactions.

6. Table Rate Shipping



If you offer a lot of different products that ship from multiple places, using a few different carriers, then you know how complicated shipping can be. This plugin is a lifesaver when it comes to constructing a sensible, rule-based shipping setup for your store.

7. Social Coupons

8. UPS Shipping Method



You can integrate a lot of shipping methods into your Woocommerce store, and UPS is one of the obvious popular ones. You can get real time rates, create custom shipping quotes, and more with this handy plugin.

9. Product CSV Import Suite



Importing products isn’t hard when you have only a few, but try adding a few hundred or more and it becomes a serious chore. This plugin lets you easily bulk import products to your store. Woothemes also has a great version that’s worth checking out (although considerably more expensive).

10. Woocommerce Zapier Integration



Zapier is really cool service that acts as a middleman between two applications. Their aim is to automate the web using these “recipes”. For example, you could send new subscriber information to Mailchimp or Zoho CRM when a new order comes in.

11. Coupon Shortcodes

12. Free Gift Plugin

13. Video Product Tab

14. PDF Invoices

15. Woocommerce Ebay Lister

Now you have an easy way to export products to Ebay. With just a few clicks, you can select the products you want to post, and create full ebay listings.

16. Price History/Price Drop Notifications

17. Image Hover Preview



When shoppers are browsing product categories, they can only see small thumbnails of your products. This lightweight plugin lets them hover over those images, and see a larger preview, which helps improve their shopping experience.

18. Custom T-Shirt Designer



Here’s an interesting plugin for Woocommerce that lets users create their own t-shirt designs. But it’s not limited to just t-shirts…you can offer custom iphone case designs, cakes, and other items using the custom design interface that it layers onto your store.

19. Amazon Affiliates Plugin



This powerful plugin gives you everything you need to create a fully functional Amazon affiliate store on your own website. You can import hundreds of products from Amazon to be featured, and allow users to checkout on your own site.

20. Braintree Payment Gateway

21. Automatic Checkout Discounts



Sometimes you want to have an automatic discount applied to every product in your store – for example, on a Cyber Monday sale you may want to offer a 10% storewide discount. This plugin lets you do just that, and automatically applies the discount to the shopper’s cart.

22. Product Enquiry Form

23. Advanced Notifications

When a new order comes into your store, chances are a few people need to be notified. If you’re using a drop-shipper, they need to get a copy of the order, along with anyone else you might need in the loop. The Advanced Notifications plugin lets you set up order notifications based on product categories and other filters, ensuring that everyone gets updated as needed when a new order comes in.

24. Bulk Price Edit



If you want to edit prices in your Woocommerce store, you can either export the products to a CSV, adjust them manually, and then re-upload the products to the site or you can go through one by one and do it from the Admin. Both options are time-consuming, and instead, you can use this plugin to make bulk price edits to multiple products from one screen in your admin.

Do you have any suggestions for Woocommerce plugins that you like to use? Post them in the comments, and I’ll update the list with any good ones.

The post 24+ Essential Woocommerce Plugins appeared first on Mike Meisner.

10 Tumblr Wine Blogs to Follow

I’m a believer that it’s better to be an early adopter than to jump on board a crowded ship. The wine industry has largely avoided certain social networks like Google+, Tumblr, and Instagram. As consumers turn to alternate sources to share their experiences and gain insight into the things they like, brands need to understand how to expand their own exposure and interaction across the web.

As more consumers voice their opinions and share tasting notes on sites like Cellartracker, Wineberserkers, and various other forums and blogs online, the value of one or two critics’ opinions becomes further diluted. We look to our peers for advice and exposure to new wines. For example, I found out about Red Cap Vineyards on Instagram. They’re a small producer up on Howell Mountain, where I know they make magical Cabernets, and now they’re on my radar. I know they have a 2008 Cab that goes for $60 and already reached out to the owner to set up a visit.

Tumblr is one of those sites that has flown under the radar when it comes to wine, and yet it has a huge amount of users. There are a few wine-centric tumblr users and brands, including some very educated Master Somms, wineries, and normal folks who like to share their favorite selections.

Here’s my suggestions for the top ten to follow:

1. Wine all the time


2. Living room wine school


3. Cool things you see in wineries


4. In search of terroir


5. Master Sommelier Dustin Wilson


6. Corkbuzz


7. Local vine cellar


8. Dirty and Rowdy Winery


9. Master Sommelier Laura Maniec


10. Beneduce Wines

Don’t limit yourself to building a following of strictly wine-related users either. Think broader, and explore the lifestyle; all sorts of subjects, from food and recipes, to local and organic farming, luxury goods, and travel intersect with wine.

The post 10 Tumblr Wine Blogs to Follow appeared first on Direct to Consumer Wine Marketing - Blue Dog Solutions.