How to Set Up a Sheet Music Web Site Business

1. Establish a business plan. Research your competition and come up with a plan to offer something different or better. Decide whether you will be charging for your sheet music or offering it for free, in which case you will need to put your main focus on advertising. You can sell banner space, advertise affiliate programs or pay-per-click (PPC) programs such as Google AdSense.
2. Purchase a domain name and select a hosting service. A domain name is simply your website address. A host is the company that provides you with space for your website. When choosing a host, consider factors such as reliability, access speed, bandwidth, maximum space, technical support and advanced features. If you choose to charge your clients for the sheet music, you will need a host that will provide you with features such as shopping carts and file transfer protocol (FTP) service.

3. Build your website. Add important business information for your visitors such as an FAQ page, an 'About' page and an easy way to contact you. Give your website a professional look using HTML code or a web design software. If you don't have experience designing websites, you can hire a professional to design it for you.
4. Upload your sheet music. If you will be sharing or selling your original sheet music, add a copyright disclaimer on each document in order to protect your work from being sold or used for purposes you do not approve of. You must verify that you have the right to sell any sheet music that is not originally yours. It is highly advised to contact an attorney if you are not sure. If you have contacts with artists or record labels, you can ask them for permission to share or sell their sheet music on your site.
5. Market your website. Advertise your sheet music business on social networks and ask websites with relevant content to exchange links with you; the latter will also give you a higher rank in search engines. To further optimize your website for search engines, include targeted keywords, powerful title tags and meta tags. Title and meta tags are HTML codes inserted into your website to provide search engines with information about your website content.