“When the world zigs, zag” – Barbara Noakes, BBH Levi’s Ad 1982
Are you sick and tired of your DJ mix and mixtapes getting few (if any) plays on Soundcloud, Mixcloud or Hearthis.at?
Do you have little or no budget for marketing your mixtapes?
Are you looking for a free music marketing method that isn’t being abused by every DJ under the sun?
Then you should consider building a DJ’ing website using a free blogging platform.
This solution is great if you lack the money to build your own website. And these sites are free forever – meaning no hidden charges or fees!
But these website creator platforms do have limitations – limitations that make it difficult for distributing DJ mixes.
But in this guide, we’ll take a detailed look at these drawbacks. And I offer some advice on how you can work around these restrictions.
Moving on…
Table of Contents
Is it worth hosting your music outside of Soundcloud, Mixcloud and Hearthis.at?
“One good example is worth a tonne of bullshit” – Drayton Bird
Is it worth hosting your DJ mixes elsewhere? Simple answer: yes.
At the time of writing this article, my Mixcloud mixes have been played 3000 times.
I won’t even bother with my Soundcloud and Hearthis plays as they’re bloody awful.
By contrast, my mixes on this site have been downloaded a total of 201,393 times so far.
Nuff said.
Honestly, the figure would be much higher if I could include all my downloads since my website’s inception in 2008. But over the years I’ve rebuilt my website a few times. And with every rebuild, I lost my download numbers.
My last site rebuild was around 2017. So the 201,393 I quoted are only for 3 years (since my last website rebuild). Comparatively, my quoted downloads for Mixcloud are for 5 years.
What’s the best free website for DJ’s?
Free blogging sites have been around for a long time. Many years ago, before social media took over, these blogging websites were far more popular with DJ’s than they are now.
However, once social media came of age, running a blog went out of fashion. And many DJs and music blogs were abandoned or deleted.
The free blogging platforms I’m talking about are Blogger, WordPress.com, Wix.com, Weebly and Tumblr. There are more, but these are the most widely known.
One of the major benefits of these free platforms is that they are free forever! That means you don’t need to get your credit card out when you sign up. You won’t have to pay anything if you stick within the limitations of the free tier these sites provide.
Also, they can be a great way for DJ’s dipping their toes into the basics of web design.
These free website builders have all the features which are needed for building a basic DJ’ing website, which are:
- You have unlimited bandwidth. There are no restrictions on how many people can visit your website.
- You can embed external links and files on their pages.
- Some free blogging platforms have media players built-in which allow the streaming of audio files.
- You can create contact forms for bookings and other inquiries.
- Most platforms can embed Soundcloud, Mixcloud, Hearthis, and YouTube players into their pages and correctly render them.
- You can create nearly unlimited pages.
- They are indexed by the major search engines like Google and Bing.
- Most have built-in analytics. So you can track your popular pages and see how many people are visiting your website.
There are more features than this, but the above is probably the most important for DJs.
What are the limitations of these free blogging platforms for DJs?
“There’s no such thing as a free lunch”. Milton Friedman
It shouldn’t be surprising these free blogging platforms have limitations.
After all, if these free website builders solved every DJ’s online marketing problems, everybody would be using them.
Below are what I consider the major drawbacks of these sites.
You cannot use your own domain name
If you don’t know what a domain name is, let me explain.
A domain name is a name you type into your web browser to access a website. The domain name for this website is DJ Kippax.com. Other common domain names you will have heard of are: Amazon.com, Apple.com and Ebay.com.
All these websites use the.com domain extension. There are many other domain extensions like .net .co.uk and .us as well as many more.
But if you build a site using one of these free website creation platforms, you won’t be able to use a domain like mine.
For example, if I created a site with WordPress.com, my website name might be something like DJKippax.WordPress.com. Likewise, if I created a website with Blogger, my web address might be something like DJKippax.blogspot.com.
As you can see from the above examples, the free blogging platforms append their site name to the end of our web address.
Now, depending on how critical you are about your branding, you might not like this. But the only way you can gain your own nonbranded domain name is to either:
- Upgrade to a premium package by one of the free blog providers
- Build a self-hosted website and register your domain name with a domain registrar
Costs vary for these vendors’ premium services. But if you’re considering going with a paid-for service ensure you compare their prices and services against other hosting companies.
For DJ’ing websites, monthly bandwidth and disk space limitations are your major concern. Because these will be your most widely used resources.
It’s easy to find web hosting with unlimited disc space and bandwidth for around £5 per month. So shop about if you decide you want to go down the premium or self-hosted route.
No branded email addresses
You cannot create your own branded email address with these free blogging sites.
For example, if you’re on my mailing list, you’ve probably noticed that my emails are sent from [email protected]. I can do this because I’ve bought and paid for a domain from a domain registrar.
Once you set up the required Domain Name Server (DNS) records with your registrar, you’re able to send/receive email using a custom domain name.
The free blogging platforms don’t give you access to things like the DNS records, so you won’t be able to set up a custom email address.
Lack of backup and export tools
Most of these free blogging platforms lack good backup and export tools.
If you want to convert your free site to a self-hosted solution, it can be difficult exporting your content to your new platform. You can copy and paste pages and content, but when you have many pages to do this can be a time-consuming task.
Out of the above free blogging platforms, only WordPress and Blogger allow you to export your content.
And it’s easy to export free WordPress.com content to a self-hosted WordPress website. Both tools are made by the same company (Automatic) and they include import/export features in both types of WordPress sites.
However, none of these free blogging platforms allows you FTP (File Transfer Protocol) access. This means you can’t mirror your site’s internal file structure to another server.
For example, let’s say you have built a WordPress.com DJ website. You’d be able to export your posts, pages and tags using the built-in export function. But you wouldn’t be able to recreate all the file paths to your mixes. You’d have to re-upload all your DJ mixes to your new server and manually recreate all your download and media player links.
This is fine when you only have a couple of pages and a few DJ mixes. But the more mixes on your site the more painful and time consuming this task is. Remember this if you’re planning to build a big site containing lots of mixes.
Incompatible with 3rd party code
You may not be able to embed HTML forms – like a mail chimp mailing list subscribe box – into pages and sidebars on your free DJ blog.
Some of these platforms strip the HTML and JavaScript from the embed codes which makes it impossible to embed 3rd forms in them.
Restricted disc space
Probably the biggest problem with the free blogging sites is the limited or restricted disc space.
Wix only allows you 500Mb of upload space. You won’t be able to upload many DJ’s mixes on something so small. And this limited space must also be shared with any images you upload too.
WordPress seems to offer much more (around 3 gigabytes). But upon closer inspection, you’ll find you can’t upload audio files with the free tier. To upload audio files, you must upgrade to a premium account – which is a monthly fee.
The other platforms restrict the file size which can be uploaded. You’ll be fine uploading an audio file the size of a music single, but you won’t be able to upload a large file like a DJ mix.
Lastly, none of these sites will provide you with any download statistics. But most of these free sites come with some form of page analytics – so you’ll be able to discover what your most popular pages are. This is one way of figuring out which are your best performing DJ mixes.
But with a free website, you won’t have exact mixtape download numbers. So if you want those stats you’ll need to upgrade to a self-hosted website with a database.
How to get around the file space limitations
One way around these disc space limitations is to embed links from a cloud storage service – like Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, etc.
These services allow you to upload files and then generate what’s called a public link. A public link is a URL location to a file that can be downloaded by anyone – no permission is needed to access it. These links can then be added to the pages/posts of your free DJ blog site.
What’s the best free template for DJ’s
You might be wondering what’s the best free template or theme for a DJ’ing website. There isn’t one. Because every DJ’s branding demands will be different.
However, I will offer you some advice from the viewpoint of a web designer with a few years of experience.
WordPress themes look more modern than Blogger themes. Most of the Blogger themes look dated by today’s standards.
Try to pick a free template that looks clear and is easy to read. Anything with black body text on a white background is a good choice.
Lastly, don’t get too hung up on trying to perfect your design. You’ll never be able to craft the perfect site using just free templates.
Concentrate on producing lots of good content for your website. Because the more content you have the more visitors Google and Bing will send you. And when people visit your website, try to get them on to your email list.
What’s the best free DJ site maker?
If I had to recommend you two out of this list, choose WordPress.com or Blogger.
Although you get 3GB space with a WordPress site, you’re limited to what you can use it for.
Both these platforms allow you to export your data too, which is handy if you plan to move it.
Free WordPress.com sites contain adverts, but most people these days are using ad blockers, so they won’t see them. Blogger ads are optional.
If you’re looking for my top choice for a free DJ site, it would be WordPress.com. Why? Because it’s easy to upgrade a WordPress.com site to a full self-hosted WordPress website.
So if you outgrow your WordPress.com site, and you want more space and features, the migration process will be easier.
Another great thing about WordPress.com is it has an excellent phone app. And the WordPress app will work with either the free version of WordPress or its self-hosted cousin. You can also run multiple websites with the app.
I’ve used the app myself, and it’s decent. You can create edit and delete posts using your phone. And you can upload images too. And you can set the application to edit the images before posting (meaning the images are correctly scaled-down to suit your site’s page dimensions).
At the time of writing this article, Blogger still doesn’t have a web app.
Free DJ websites and security
If you are going to build a website then take security seriously. Because even small unknown websites, with little or no traffic, are continuously probed by bots.
You’re limited to what you can access when using a free blog platform. From a security perspective, this is good because it means hackers have fewer ways into your website.
When you run your own self hosted website, you need to worry about things like database security, site backups, plugin and theme updates, and zero-day vulnerabilities. As well as other things.
The biggest risk to your free website is someone guessing your passwords and then taking over your account. So secure all your sites and your account with strong unique passwords.
Some free blog websites allow the use of two-factor authentication. This significantly hardens your websites’ security. And it can even prevent a site takeover even if someone successfully guesses or acquires your passwords.
For managing and generating secure random passwords, consider using a password safe. KeePass, LastPass and OnePass are all capable of this task. A secure password should use random letters, cases, numbers, and symbols. All your passwords should be at least 21 characters or more.
Conclusion
These blogging platforms aren’t the most elegant thing for building DJ’ing websites – but they’re free.
And they’re not replacements for Soundcloud/Mixcloud and your social media profiles. These sites should be used in conjunction with music hosting sites and social.
These sites are great for DJ’s who have no budget but want another way to share their mixes – a way that isn’t being abused by every other DJ.
Lastly, it’s still difficult to build a DJ’ing site with these platforms. But as I’ve said often before on this blog: the easiest marketing methods are always the first to become abused and they quickly become over-saturated with needy DJ’s hawking their mixes.
It will take you time to create a DJ website. And it will take time to build up your audience and traffic. Don’t expect it to be an overnight success.
It may take you months (maybe years) to build a successful website. But because it takes so much time and effort, many DJ won’t consider doing it themselves. So their loss could be your gain.
Do you have questions about anything I’ve mentioned? Have you any experience with these sites? Then why not share your thoughts in the comments below. Thanks.
Keep on scratching
James DJ Kippax
Hey man, excellent post, really appreciate the effort and information!
Ive been looking into this myself for a while, ive been DJing for over 30 years and am pretty fortunate in that i’m not looking to make money at all, and I dont DJ out in the wild either anymore so im not looking to get gigs, I just want to create a site where I can host my mixes (and accompanying artwork and articles for each mix!), talk about music, production, share related articles, discuss the culture and really just share some great records and love for the scene, if it costs me 20-30 bucks a month to run i’m also fine with that as its been my passion for over 30 years.
I also need to get off Mixcloud…its just so limiting for what I want to do.
So with this in mind (paid options) what would you say is the best route?
Mix Storage and access for listening or downloading, and presentation / creative possibilities etc are super important. Ive built a wix site in the past and have very strong Graphic Design capabilities so have experience in these areas which is obviously a bonus.
Cheers, and happy new year!
Adam