Saving Money as an Indie Artist. Stretching Your Cash.
CMA Music Festival is over and time to get back to blogging on a regular basis. We're about half way through the year music sales are down another 13% and the economy is sputtering so what is an independent artist to do? Personally nothing more than you're doing now; using new media and spending your limited money wisely. Best thing to do is review what you are spending on new media. Here's a few things to review if you feel the inflation pinch.
Hosting
Are you paying too much for the space where you have your website? There's
a glut of hosting companies that offer inexpensive plans for as little at $5 a month. The hosting company I use Site5.com always has great deals. Best if you can pay up front and get several years locked in.
Email
Are you paying for email like Yahoo or another? I would say 99% of website hosting companies include email with their plans. The advantage of this is you don't have advertising at the end of emails you sent with the free services like hotmail or yahoo. Other advantage is you can have what ever name you want at your own domain. It looks professional and usually you can check is via the web just like the free services.
Web Design and Updates
As a web designer I have found out two things. Our services are not inexpensive and most people that want them can't afford it nor think its worth it. That's why you see most artists switching over to MySpace or Facebook instead of having their own website. In the past I have explained why it isn't a good idea for several reasons. Design is important but if you just can't afford it there are other ways to get a fairly good looking site without using MySpace or Facebook. Google has just released another good tool called Google Pages. They have taken the GeoCities crap from the 90s and brought it to the new century. It's easy and if you know html you can drop you're old website code right in. (with a few changes of course)
[Update] Google Pages is no longer avaliable and has been replaced by Google Sites. It's slightly different but also allows social networking. If you have a Google Page you still can use it but new people need to use Sites.Google.com from here on out. Read more about this at WebMonkey.
There are other ways to save in a tight economy which I will explore in the next several posts. If you have suggestions make a comment and we'll explore it some more.
