Today we’re going to talk about increasing your music website’s conversion rates. By this I mean making on-site changes that will give you more results, even if the same number of people visit your site. We’ll also be looking at an example of how conversion rates work, and why increasing them can mean a much more profitable music career for you.

So without dragging out the intro, let’s get to the good stuff.

Conversion Rates for Musicians – An Example

Let’s say you get 100 visitors to your site per month. For every 100 people, you sell on average one $5 digital EP download. That’s a 1% conversion rate, as that’s the percentage of people that took the action you desired (in this case buying your EP).

To make more money from your music, you have two options:

1. Get more visitors, or
2. Make more money from the visitors you have.

While you should aim to do both, doing the second one is a lot easier. If you could get two people buying your music for every 100 visitors to your site, that’s a 100% increase in conversions. You’ve just doubled the average amount of money you make from each visitor, and now have a 2% conversion rate.

But how do you increase the conversion rates on your site? Use the following three tips to get more results from each visitor.

1. Set the Aim of Your Music Website

Before taking steps to increase conversion rates for your site, you first need to define what action it is that you want your visitors to take. Do you want to get more people on your mailing list? Perhaps you want to sell more music?

Once you know what your main aim is, it becomes easier to lay your site out accordingly.

My suggestion is that you make obtaining mailing list subscribers your main aim, and increasing your song and merchandise sales as your secondary aim. While both are important, if you try to sell to potential fans straight away, you’ll often be ‘cold selling’ to them. By this I mean you haven’t given them enough time to grow a bond with you, or have any real connection to your music.

If, however, you get them on your list and email them something interesting, say, once a week (done automatically with your autoresponder), over time they’ll feel more comfortable with you and be more open to buying something you’ve produced.

If, on the other hand, you had sent them straight to your shop page and they didn’t buy anything, chances are you’ll never see that person again.

So, aim for a means to contact these people again in the future (mailing list is best, although Facebook and Twitter are also good as secondary platforms), then sell to them after.

2. Minimize Distractions

When it comes to getting your website found on Google and the other search engines, having a lot of good quality content can help you get a lot more visitors. That said, if you’ve got a load of pages with a load of info about all different aspects of your music career, how are people going to know which are the important bits to take in? Furthermore, how are you going to get people to take the action you want with so many different links to click on?

One option is to ‘minimize the clutter.’ In your sidebar and on your main page for example, you’ll only want to display the most important things. You’ll want your sidebar to include the sign-up form to your mailing list, a link to your shop page and ‘featured single,’ small links to your social sites… And that’s possibly it.

While you can change up what you have in there, if you want, the point is this:

You only want to give visitors a few options that will not only benefit them, but that will benefit you as well. If people click on and take action with any of those things, you’ll either get their contact details or you’ll make a sale. Not bad, right?

Any other links like one to your blog or contact page should go in the top navigation bar so they’re still visible but not as tempting to click on. That’s how you minimize distractions and guide fans to the good stuff!

3. Give Your Fans the Option of How to Buy Your Music

When it comes to buying your music, people will have different preferences. Some will be happy buying directly from your website if the ‘buy now’ button is there, but others may prefer to buy on a platform they know and trust. Giving a choice of buying options will mean you keep more fans happy, and in turn mean you make more sales.

At a very minimum you should get your music on iTunes and Amazon MP3, and present these buying options to fans on your sales page. You can get your music on both of these stores and others using TuneCore’s digital distribution service.