The first and most important suggestion I can give to help you promote your band online is to collect names and email addresses of anyone remotely interested in your band, both from online and off line sources.
I’m not talking about collecting random email addresses either and spamming them!
Build up your mailing list
What you want to do is collect people who willingly wish to hear from you by way of them signing up or opting into your mailing list or band newsletter.
You can then stay in touch and communicate with them, letting them know what you’re up to and continuously promote your music to them.
If they don’t dig what you do, they can easily unsubscribe which is a good thing as you only want interested people on your mailing list.
Why build a list?
Simply because unless they are extremely motivated, they could see you live for the first time or bump into something online, think it was kind of cool but then completely forget about you.
Without a mailing list, you have no way of communicating directly to the very people that are interested in you.
Mailing List Software
PHPList is great, open source, newsletter software and best of all, it’s FREE.
Aweber is a powerful autoresponder service that works on a monthly subscription.
With PHPList, you install it on your web server and send out messages whenever you like.
Aweber differs in that you can write a predetermined sequence of messages which will begin to be sent out when someone signs into your mailing list. This is really handy if you wish each new mailing list member to receive messages that perhaps explain more about your band, your history, anything really.
Both allow you to send personalised messages so instead of them saying just ‘Hey’ or ‘Hey everyone’, you can say ‘Hey John’.
It makes it seem like you’ve personally sent your message to him which is much nicer than just broadcasting a group email.