l-dopa

1. Post some music for free. Pick your three or four best songs, and encode them in mp3 format so they’ll work on whatever computer or device your visitor wants to put them on. But, don’t have your music play automatically when the visitor enters the site, as many people — I have heard — use the Internet to occasionally goof off at their day jobs, and if they go to your website during work hours and you start blaring your music out of their computer they will hate you, and they will be right to do so.
2. Don’t make an “intro” to your site using Flash. Nobody genuinely watches them, and visitors will simply skip over it. They also damage the ability of search engines (like Google) to find and index your site
3. Get a real domain name for your site; don’t be known as homepage.earthlink.com/users/jimmyandtheastronauts, be known as www.jimmyandtheastronauts.com. Domain names used to be fairly expensive, but these days, you should only have to pay around $10-$15 a year.
4. Sell your music online, and you can reach a lot more people than you could with a couple CD-Rs at Turn it Up! For example, you can use a service like CDbaby.com to make your music available on the iTunes Music Store and the like for a paltry $35.
5. Finally: please, please, do not use MySpace for your main website. MySpace is ostensibly “cool” for bands right now — but trust me, in a year from now the fickle finger of Internet zeitgeist will have moved on to florp-dot-floop.com or whatever, and you will look wicked lame.

~jeff