Growing your group and audiences

Online events listings can be a good way to way to reach new and bigger audiences, but you have to be willing to put in time, work, patience and a bit of creativity.

There are many options out there, and we'll outline the main types below. Also, before you venture deep into the web, did you know that you can list your events on the Making Music website?

Listings sites

In part 2 of this guidance on email marketing we'll cover what to include in your email, how to make a great subject line and how to measure success.

Part 1: Getting started and building a list | Part 2: Building a great email

In an era with more and more options available for communicating with your audiences, email remains one of the most effective - 99% of adults check their email at least once per day, and promotion via email is reckoned to be 40 times more effective than social media.

Many music groups choose to assess potential members in a variety of different ways – from a simple voice test, to a trial period or a full blown audition. The benefit of these approaches is that by ensuring certain levels of ability are reached, your group can aspire to a performance of a higher standard, and this in turn presents a challenging and rewarding experience for your members.

In the final part of our three-part guide on creating a website, we'll cover ways to increase the visibility of your website to bring in more visitors; something worth thinking about before you start to build your site, as well as when you're looking to make ongoing improvements to it in the future.

We'll start by looking at how to make sure your pages are appealing to search engines, move on to using social media and inbound links, then cover how you can apply for free advertising from Google and finally look at ways to monitor your progress.

Now that you've worked out what you and your users both need on your website (see part 1), you're ready to move on to what it might look like and how you might display your content to users. Whether you're creating it from scratch, choosing a ready-made template or paying a professional, these tips will help you evaluate your design options and make your site as effective as possible.

If you struggle to put together posters for your concerts, we've created these templates in Word to help you on the way.

A poster isn’t just for showing the details of an event (often it isn’t even mostly for showing the details of an event): it’s for enticing people into wanting to go.

Research published today by Making Music sheds new light on the obstacles amateur music groups face when attracting younger members.