Your Calling Card
Whilst it is highly unlikely that you’ll be ‘discovered’ from a MySpace page, you should utilise it as your calling card. With such huge numbers of bands/artists on MySpace, it really makes sense to make it as good as you can and ensure it stands out from the crowd.

The team at the BritBus Tour have gone through so many thousands of MySpace pages over the last few years, we thought it would be useful if we wrote down some of our tips on making your page be the best it possibly can.

Many of the online resources you have at your finger tips cost nothing to use, just your time. So, if you want to really go places, invest your time and resources wisely. These are just a few examples of what you can do to give your band a head start.

Top Tips from The BritBus Team

• Make sure there are at least 3 songs on your player.Try to have the best quality recordings you can afford. It's probably better to spend your budget on 2-3 professionally recorded songs (your single choice) than a whole stack of poor quality ones.

• A brief biography, with key highlights: such as the date you formed the band, chart successes, notable support slots, radio airplay and competitions won etc. This should only be two or three short parapgraphs covering key milestones and success - keep it factual. Most industry folk don't have time to read an essay! Please complete the band members section of your MySpace fully - it is best to include pictures of the individual members with their role in the band.

• Please ensure you keep your gig listings up-to-date - a band with lots of gigs always looks impressive and demonstrates a great deal about the amount of work you put into the band.

• Make sure your blog is updated on a regular basis and is fun and informative. A hard working gigging band should be using it at least once a week to ensure their followers know what is going on. There’s no point clicking on a blog to find out about a gig you were playing six months ago or saying Happy Christmas in August! Make sure they are fun and informative, come up with ideas to make the blog interactive and provocate a response form the reader.

• Make sure you have some really decent photos of the band! Most of us have digital cameras now and these have taken away so much of the cost. Put some thought into where you take them, what you are all going to wear and the image you are portraying. Some shots taken at a gig really add lots of value, especially if they demonstrate a big crowd. Make them as professional as you can, even if you do them yourselves. If you are really serious about your band, investing in a professional photographer is always a good idea.

• Add some video - but only if they are good quality and add something to the page. Many venues will help you film a gig by allowing you take the a sound output directly from the desk. But think about videos clips other than just performance: Interviews of the band and fans at gigs, road trips, back stage or the after show party...!

• Make sure your site is active. This costs nothing and is only about the amount of time you put into it. PLEASE DO NOT bother hyping the numbers, it doesn’t impress anyone and certainly won’t help your development. Try and interact with your fans. Comments about the band are more impressive than showing you have two million fans and ten million plays! We all know there are websites that artifically hype numbers - it is very obvious when you are doing this and may result in your account being deleted by MySpace. It's the old addage, but you are only cheating yourself.

• It does add value if you put some design effort into the page. If you can’t do it yourself or can’t pay for it, try and get a fan who’s a designer or a budding graphic design student at your local college to get involved. First impressions really do count and you are more likely to keep a potential label or agent on your page longer if it looks great when they first visit. Take a look round at other pages to see what you can do to improve yours, some sites are brilliant in their simplicity, others are brilliant for their complexity of design. Ultimately there are thousands of ways to approach it, but remember from our point of view, if it looks professional and it’s very active it makes it stand out

• Include a fan registration system onto your pages - it is vital to build your fan database. When you release a single you need to ensure everyone knows about it! One very popular system that was still free at the time of writing is: http://www.fanbridge.com/

• Obviously your MySpace site is just a small part of what you’re doing, so make sure you add links to your website, Facebook and Bebo pages etc. Facebook is a great tool for communicating directly with fans and inviting them to gigs and events. Ensure you have a strong and effective web presence.

All the above points will help you interact with your audience as well as those outside your immediate fan base. Take full advantage of this and the other free online resources to give fans, potential fans and any others as much up to date information about you as you can.

Best of luck to you all!