Showcasing your music

There are loads of ways to get your music heard online. Here are some of the sites that allow you to upload your music for free; Bandcamp, Soundcloud, Bebo, Buzznet, MySpace Music, Last.fm, Reverbnation

Sending your music to established blogs is also a good move. If the people behind them like your stuff and give you a mention it'll help build interest in your music. Make sure to target specific blogs that cover the sort of music you make, if you read a particular one it's likely to be the perfect fit. The Hype Machine offer a list of the biggest.

It's important to use as many tools as you can online to get your music to people who can expose it even further. You can even send us tracks via the BBC Introducing upload tool. Once you submit your music it'll be passed on to your nearest local Introducing show and you can even pick which national show best matches your musical style.

Whatever site you decide to use, make sure you choose your best two or three tracks to show what you’re made of. If you're making your MP3's available to download remember to tag them up properly with their correct name; something called "track 1.mp3" on someone's desktop is useless.

Sign up to a range of sites. Each one increases your chances of being heard by someone new. Make sure that every page you build is easy to navigate; if the page takes a long time to download visitors could give up before they've even heard any of your songs. It’s just as important to keep each page up to date, if you don’t update pages with new and interesting images, blogs, songs or videos people will stop visiting!

A great way to drive new fans to your dedicated pages is via social media. Facebook and Twitter both give the option to link your accounts so that when you Tweet it automatically posts on Facebook and vice versa. You can also use sites like TweetDeck which allows you to schedule tweets as well as monitor and manage various accounts. Most Word Press websites and blogs have this ability too.

It's worth putting specific members of the band in charge of different parts of your online operation. If one of you is responsible for replying to messages and emails you receive while someone else writes your blog and looks after the Twitter account it's easier to keep on top of things.