Promoting a gig from your bio page

Nearly everything on a bio page is timeless. Your music, your shop, your newsletter: all still true next month. A date is different. It is the only thing that gets steadily more urgent and then, in one evening, becomes actively wrong.

That is a maintenance problem disguised as a design problem, and it is why so many artists' pages advertise a show from six weeks ago. Nobody decided to leave it there. Nobody remembered to take it down, which is not the same failure and needs a different fix.

The same show wants a different page at four different moments. Almost nobody changes it more than once.

1. Announcement week. The date, the city, the venue, and the on-sale time if tickets are not out yet. The job here is to be remembered, not to sell: most people who see the announcement are not buying today, so the mailing list matters more than usual this week.
2. The long middle. Weeks of nothing much. This is when the page should go back to normal, with the date present but not shouting, and the music at the top where it earns new listeners. Leaving the announcement banner up for six weeks trains your regulars to ignore it.
3. The last ten days. Urgency becomes true rather than manufactured. The date goes back to the top with what is left: last tickets, doors time, support acts. This is the phase people most often miss entirely.
4. The day itself. Doors, set time, address, and how to get in. Nobody arriving on your page today wants your discography. They want to know whether they have missed you.

Four changes per show, times however many shows. That is the honest maintenance cost of doing this by hand, and it is why the middle two phases are the ones that get skipped.

Or let the order move on its own

The alternative to remembering is measuring. As a date approaches, the proportion of your visitors who tap the ticket link goes up, and it goes up before you would have thought to promote it. A page ordered by what people are actually tapping surfaces the show at roughly the moment it starts mattering, and drops it back down afterwards without being asked.

In the order somebody needs it, which is not the order most listings use.

• The city, first. Not the venue. People scan for their own city and nothing else, and a list that leads with venue names makes everybody read every line. This is the single most common mistake on a tour list.
• The date, in a format that is unambiguous. "Fri 12 Sep" rather than a numeric format that means two different things depending on which side of the Atlantic somebody is on.
• The venue. After the city, because it only matters once somebody has found their city.
• The status, in plain words. "On sale", "Sold out", "On sale Friday 9am". A sold-out show should say so rather than being removed: it is evidence, and it makes the next announcement land harder.
• One link, to tickets. Not to a tour page listing every date again. Somebody who has found their city should be one tap from buying.

Two moments that are worth more than they cost, and both get skipped.

On the night, your page gets more traffic than at any other point in the cycle: people checking set times, people who just watched you and want to find you, people in the queue. That is the highest-intent audience you will have all month, and most pages meet it with a ticket link to a show currently in progress.

Put the mailing list and the merch at the top for that one evening. The people standing in the room are the ones most likely to say yes to either.

The week after, remove the date and put something in its place. An empty gap where a show was reads as nothing happening. The next date, or the record, or a thank-you: anything, as long as the page is not a page that used to have something on it.

For the whole page rather than just the dates, the page for musicians covers the ordering, and collecting emails covers what to do with everybody who came to the show and then disappeared.