Why you really need to cultivate relationships with Bloggers

I owe this post to Bob Lefsetz who covered it on his site.

But, it's such an important topic that I thought we should cover it here too!

Read Bob's post for sure, but the really interesting stuff is in the Forbes post that he refers to.

The Forbes article is all about how one writer (but also various others) had enormous boosts in traffic to their websites, spikes in sales and long-term fanbase growth by being mentioned on ONE authority blog.

In the cases talked about, these are what they call 'single author' blogs - and that's a key point. These are blogs where a blogger who has become a trusted source and authority in their 'niche' has a massively engaged following who react to their recommendations.

But, in music, this could easily be describing the leading blogs such as Pitchfork, but equally the leading blogs in much smaller niches. We have regularly mentioned Chris Bracco's eBook that explains how to target these blogs. It's worth $2.99 of anyone's money.

In short, the traditional forms of promotion (radio, TV and press) now regularly have a far smaller effect on building fanbases and sales than the backing of a leading blog or blogger.

Nowhere near enough musicians understand, believe or pursue this opportunity!

Here's the choice quotes from the Forbes piece, but I heartily recommend that you read it all.

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• There’s a big difference between being exposed to a large audience, and being exposed to a comparatively smaller (but still large) audience which is ridiculously passionate.The more effective way is to take a long-term approach. The real misfortune is that nobody else does it. So people will nod and say, ‘Yeah, I should really do that,’ and then they don’t.
• “You want to focus on the idea, ‘I’m going to add value to this person over time.’ The first thing you could do is leave some thoughtful comments on their blog. Next, you could send them some email saying, ‘Hey, that was really great, but I thought you may have missed this one point. Here’s an interesting article with a different perspective on it.’ If you thought it through and did some research, the author will think, ‘Wow, thanks very much!’ and you are not asking for anything."
• “All of a sudden now you’ve differentiated yourself first by adding value. You are not going directly for the kill. Eventually, you could reach out and say, ‘Hey, these are a couple of things I noticed you’re doing that I think that I could help with. I’d love to connect you to this person, etc.’ Then eventually, you can ask, ‘If it’s okay, I just want to ask you for about 60 seconds,’ and ask them about your thing and say, ‘Do you have any advice?’ and ‘Do you think maybe this might be interesting to your audience?"
• “No pressure. One mistake people make is they often have a ‘one shot and done’ attitude about this: ‘If I don’t get my pitch in, and they don’t like it, it’s over.’ Wrong. It’s really about building a relationship over the long-term. Sounds like a lot of work? Good! Because 99% of people will not do that."

Here's the link again.

 

 

 

 

 

Podcasting for musicians

I was talking to a musician a week ago about how he was going to focus attention on his solo career since he was about to move on from a band in which he felt he was doing all the work.

One of the things we talked about was creating a blog that centred around the scene he is in - either a local scene that covers all types of music played by local bands or a global scene defined by genre.

The blog would talk about that scene and he would be seen as a leader and have a platform to talk about his own music and to place it into the context of the genre / local scene.

I think this is a very powerful way for any musician to build an audience - and we wrote about it here - Why musicians should be bloggers.

Then we talked about adding podcasting to that blog.

Podcasting is a way bigger challenge than simple blogging but it is also a whole other way that people can discover you and your music.

The same idea of centring the podcast around a scene applies but this time you're doing it as an audio podcast that people can get from your site, or, crucially iTunes.

Make it good and people will discover you and you will build an audience.

I'd go as far as to say that any DIY musician (whose music is up to scratch) can build an audience by making themselves the centre of attention in a specific niche by using a blog, YouTube, Twitter and podcasting.

There's a great article on the basics of podcasting here.

And the man who knows everything there is to know about podcasting is known as Podcast Answer Man and he has six free video lessons that cover the basics here.

The first one is below.

6 ways to fail promoting music online

I have spent well over an hour today reading the two posts that this post on Hypebot links to. Re-reading, in fact, in the case of the first one as I'd seen it when Chris De Line posted it in April.

It was time well spent.

And then I left a 500 word comment on the latest one, which I have reproduced below as I don't want it lost in the mists of time. I think it's important.

The post on Culture Bully is excellent and points out some extremely important things that musicians do wrong when promoting themselves online.

I think everyone should read it.

How to fail at promoting music online

And here's the link to the first post.

Music bloggers are nice people if you give us a chance.

And, lastly, here's my long comment that sums up my view.

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Chris

I disagree about your point on the effectiveness of artists promoting themselves to blogs.

I recommend it to artists but with significant caveats, most of which line up with your points.

I've been on both sides of the fence as a blogger, and a manager and someone looking for PR for my artists.

In my experience the modern online marketing of music can be enhanced by intelligent promotion to music blogs.

But, the key is to have great music!

The problem you and every other blogger has is that 99% of what you are sent is crap. People don't tell these 'artists' that they are not 'good enough' and that they need to spend time perfecting their art before spamming every blog known to man looking for a break.

When their music is worth a moment of someone's attention and then a positive emotional response, they will find it easy to attract online attention.

This can and should be done in a systematic way with targeted blog promotion being one strand.

I encourage artists who do have material that is ready for wider attention to start with lower traffic blogs and ones that are not just about music (local sites, what's on, demographically related - e.g. skate sites if you make skater music).

DO personalize as you said.

But, often, don't email at all. Just read the blog, leave comments and be part of the community around that blog.

Every blogger I know reads their comments and so notices those from an artist and checks out their site (if they've linked it in the comment). If the music is good, often a blogger then approaches the artists and offers to cover them.

Do you have this experience?

Why focus on low traffic blogs? - because it's all incremental.

For the DIY musician the journey to sustainability of a career or superstardom (whichever is their aim) is about a growing process done in public which attracts fans over time.

To target high traffic 'name' blogs with your first EP is to welcome rejection and feelings of failure.

Start small and leverage your presence on a raft of smaller niche blogs over the time that you and your career develop.

This is a strategy that does work and is a very good reason why artists should bother to spend time cultivating a select band of blogs who may form a supportive base for the next step in their efforts.

How many? I'd look at any stage of an artist's career to be interacting on 100 or so tightly focused blogs (i.e. that are musically, genre and demographic appropriate). Some might think that's hard to do in terms of time or too much.

But, if you're a musician and in a scene, shouldn't you want to be involved in it, online and offline? I don't see why people would see contributing to their scene and getting promotion from it and within it as a chore.

Done right, reaching out to blogs works for musicians.

 

Tumblr Time

You need your own website - fact.

But, you might also benefit from a Tumblr site.

Less formal, a place where you can post thoughts, photos, inspiration, random stuff.

I'd still have a sign up form that goes to your same mailing list system (Aweber if you need help deciding!) on your Tumblr though!

You might be reading this on our Tumblr site - the way we use it is OK. It suits our purpose of quick posts pretty much every day (and we save our main site for larger, deeper posts), but it's not really best practice.

Still, people check it out....a lot.

You can make your Tumblr as simple or as complicated as you like. It can be styled or left very plain. The added advantage is that there is a community on Tumblr just like Twitter and Facebook and they reblog posts avidly - so it's genuinely a way that people can discover you and your music.

This piece in Billboard lists 30 great music Tumblr sites that will give you plenty of inspiration.

If you think it's worth adding to your network I'd recommend posting a little something about your life and how that fits with you being a musician at least once a day, saving deeper content posts for your main site, posting there maybe once a week.

That's a general 'rule of thumb'.

Here's the Billboard list again.

Music Blogs are great - but beware the hype

So, following the previous post about how a blog review can break a band, you also need to watch out about the hype.

There's a new artist breaking through right now called Lana Del Rey - I'll be surpried if you missed the buzz!

Strangely enough, two of my songwriter clients have worked with her and they both think she's the real deal with real talent and vision.

But, that's not the point here.

The point is that in this Pitchfork article there is a very telling paragraph that you need to consider when you head down the route of pitching to and being loved by blogs.

As of 2011, the closest thing we have to MTV's old "buzz bin" is music blogs-- entities with the exact same vested interest in mainstream cool-hunting that your television once had. The only problem is that the people who read, write, and obsess over them are hyper-aware of what a tempting audience they are: They're sensitive to pandering and "fakeness," wary of being used to piggyback toward another audience. Appeal to them successfully, and long arguments about music-industry machinations and "authenticity" are more or less inevitable.

In other words, the bigger the blog, the harder it is to get them to take notice and the more you'll be accused of hype and style over substance if you succeed.

Nothing's ever simple, eh!?

Read the whole thing though as it's got a lot of insight into how an artist can come to attention in the web 2.0 world and also how the imagery and style can help send the mesage that the artist wants to get across.

Blog reviews REALLY make a difference!

I owe this post to @Lefsetz and to @iancr - one mentioned it and the other made it!

It's from Ian Rogers must watch weekly online TV show - This Week in Music - which is geting better all the time.

He's talking to Marc Geiger, web-head, tech bloke and long-time promoter about the power of the music blogs.

At the end, he says, "you can break a band off one review"!

Think it might be worth getting blogs to talk about your music?

Why musicians should be bloggers

A year or so ago a client asked me to help a friend who had started managing an artist from a remote island in the Atlantic.

The material was good but it wasn't at all mainstream - in fact it's very niche.

The task of getting attention for this artist through any traditional means was going to be difficult.

However, the genre of music did have a name, a following and one internationally acclaimed artist from 20-30 years previously, as well as a handful of other acts that people had heard of.

And there was no website covering the genre.

And a domain name that matched the genre was available.

I advised the manager to build a website all about the genre, to leverage the global interest in the older artist, perhaps even make the defining compilation for the genre and put her new artist on there.

But, the key was to build a web presence that was all about that genre and seamlessly weave her new artist into it. Not in a sly way but because he deserved recognition. And to make that website THE destination for anyone wanting to know about that genre.

We looked at what people were searching for on Google and saw that there was interest and this site / blog would definitely get traffic and readers.

There was a need for this information and this site and this was a massive opportunity to focus attention on the genre and then her new artist.

However, this is not a fast process. But then, building a presence as a DIY musician takes time.

In the end I think the manager ignored the advice and has tried a traditional approach - with no success!

The point is that blogging for musicians doesn't need to be just about you and your music. Building a site that focuses on something else - your genre, or local scene or some other random connected interest - can really focus people on you.

If that happens and your music is there to be discovered and it's good, you will get results.

I know people will read this and dismiss it, thinking that it's nonsense to spend time and effort building something that's not directly about them and their music. And somehow, it's not what musicians do, or it's 'cheating'.

But they'll miss the point.

Building interest in your music as a DIY musician is (for 99% of artists) very hard and takes a very long time. These days the artist development that you go through can be done in public on a website as you get to where you're going. Take fans on that journey with you.

Building a scene (offline works too) around what you do can be part of that process and can build very solid foundations for you and your band, and others in your niche / genre.

It's not something that everyone should do, but it is worth considering.

This post came about because of this on Hypebot yesterday.

But really read these two articles that it refers back to:

5 reasons you should be blogging.

How to blog to expand your audience - This is the one to digest!

 

 

How to make a blogger respond to your press release

This is an awesome post from a year and a half ago.

Eric who runs Evolvor tweeted about it earlier today saying how it was ahead of it's time - and it was!

In essence, his piece says that music bloggers will ignore almost all the press releases that they get simply due to the constraints of time.

But, if you make it easy for them to use your content you'll jump to the head of the queue:

This is my battle cry for bloggers, and even more so those in music industry. We want to produce as much content as possible for our audience and want to help them discover as much new music as possible. And the labels and promoters of these acts need to wake up and understand how valuable our time is and that by providing us with pre-formatted rich media press releases, their success rate would jump through the roof.

Instead, send them a pre-formatted press release that includes pictures, videos, music widgets, and a link to a free download. If something like this comes through my email, I’m at the very least going to give it a look, and if the music is even mediocre, I still might just publish it for my readers to digest.

But, not only does the post explain this, Eric has also made a cool tool embedded in the post where you can drop in your headline, text, photos and links and it will give you html formatted code that you can send stright to a blogger.

This is a very cool tool and an insight that will help you get a LOT more coverage on blogs.

Combine it with the wsidom in Chris Bracco's often mentioned eBook, and you're set!

Read the whole post and use Eric's formatting tool here.

Music Blog promotion

We're on holiday!

But had to post this piece on the main blog about promoting your music to bloggers.

It's an update of Chris Bracco's great eBook - go and see what we think here.

How to blog as a musician

We've talked about the need to blog as a musician in several posts lately.

Now, Jon Ostrow at Mic Control has written a free eBook that sets out exactly HOW to blog effectively.

It's full of great information and I recommend that every musician gets it and implements his teaching.

Get it here.

Just click the big orange button on the right of the screen!

 

MicControl Consulting from MicControl on Vimeo.

How to find blogs and forums to promote your music

This might seem simple, but this video from @musicmarketingx has some great tips.

Chris sets out two places that you need to be looking to find promotional opportunities and places that can drive traffic to your artist website. His tip on the way he uses Google Reader to find blogs was new to me, and it's great.

If you click the link to watch it on his site, make sure to read the comment from Chris Jackson below the video too - don't just concentrate on the biggest blogs, look for ones with a niche focus that you fit with perfectly.

Here's a link to the post and video.

 

5 ways to crack writer's block

This links to a post that specifically deals with writer's block for songwriters and it's got 5 great tips.

But, the post is part of a set of posts from a group of bloggers all writing on the same topic on the same day - a 'synchro-blog' (in itself, a great idea that you could get a group of local or niche-related bands to do on a shared topic).

So, check out the post but the one's that it links to have some great ideas as well.

Here's the first tip:

1. Stop listening to music that sounds like yours.
This would seem like a no brainer. But it is not. When writing a song, if you want to sound like John Legend, don’t listen to John Legend.
Why?
Because your natural tendencies will ALREADY take you that direction. Let those tendencies flow while allowing other influences to seep in and make you unique.

Read the post and the other links here.

How to blog as a musician

It's very rare that we recommend something for our readers and followers to buy.

Although we're always buying training books and courses ourselves - and we believe that it's essential to invest in knowledge that can help you reach your aims - I guess that we'd feel a little uncomfortable if we were doing it all the time!

Plus, when we get the time and develop our own training products, you can bet that we'll be recommending those!

In fact, the last thing we recommended was ProBlogger's 'First week of Blogging' guide. Several people bought it on our recommendation and thanked us!

So, now, ProBlogger have released a new eBook called 'Blogging for your Business' and it is just as applicable to 'Blogging for your Music career'!

We learnt all the basic knowledge about using Wordpress and the ins and outs of blogging from ProBlogger (at the very least, it's worth digging around their blog)

So, this comes well recommended. What we like about it is that it takes the approach of seeing blogging as something that supports your efforts to market your business (or, in your case, your music). Yes, it deals with the technical side very well, which is always welcome, but it will help you understand how writing about things that are not just about your latest release will grow your audience.

Oh, and it comes with a money back guarantee!

So, you can read it, learn everything you need and then ask for a refund!

Expert blogging instruction with a money back guarantee that will help you build a bigger fanbase - we like this.

Have a look at it here.

How blogging can promote your music

Blogging should be a part of every aspiring artist's online activity.

With your own site as your online hub, you should be posting information about you, your music and how it is part of your everyday life - all of which will enagage your fans.

You might also decide to start a blog on your niche, or your local music scene or some other topic that will help support your efforts as a musician. Being the person who writes the best blog on music / entertainment / going out in your town will quickly make you a key player in your local scene, which in turn will advance your music career. As will building a blog on our genre of music to attract global fans.

I'm not saying that you have to build blogs as well as your own site, but it is a good strategy.

And, even if it's just your site for your music, unless you're a techy, you'll need some solid advice.

I did when I started Make It In Music.

And I turned to Darren Rowse - the owner of ProBlogger - one of the authority sites on how to be a blogger.

Before I launched our site I read his book cover to cover and it helped me a great deal!

Today, he is launching a new book, at a 50% discount for this week.

It's called ProBlogger's Guide to Your First Week of Blogging and if you haven't built a site or if you have, but you're not blogging, it will help you a massive amount and give you the kick start you need to make a difference.

The book I read was his 31 Days to Build A Better Blog, which I wholeheartedly recommend, but as it's on offer and is for beginners, start with his new one first.

Get it here.

 

 

The right way to get music bloggers to write about you

This is a great post that EVERY artist should read.

It's a detailed look at why music bloggers are now very important to your success, how to approach them and what not to do.

I have added my own rather good (if I say so myself!) comment in the thread below the post that sets out how we approach bloggers when promoting an artist release. It's a handy, short 'how to'.

But, I thoroughly recommend you read the whole thing.

If you want someone to blog about your band but can’t be bothered past the point of spamming a collection of mailing lists, you’re wasting everyone’s time including your own. Whatever you do though, don’t give up. That next email you send or blog you read might lead to you finding your biggest supporter. It’s always worth a shot, but unless you’re sensible with your expectations and are willing to be at least a little bit honest with yourself along the way, you’re not likely to make it past a single blogger’s delete button.

Read the whole thing (and my comment!) here.

And Chris Bracco's free eBook on getting written about by blogs is essential reading too.

 

The right way to get music bloggers to write about you

This is a great post that EVERY artist should read.

It's a detailed look at why music bloggers are now very important to your success, how to approach them and what not to do.

I have added my own rather good (if I say so myself!) comment in the thread below the post that sets out how we approach bloggers when promoting an artist release. It's a handy, short 'how to'.

But, I thoroughly recommend you read the whole thing.

If you want someone to blog about your band but can’t be bothered past the point of spamming a collection of mailing lists, you’re wasting everyone’s time including your own. Whatever you do though, don’t give up. That next email you send or blog you read might lead to you finding your biggest supporter. It’s always worth a shot, but unless you’re sensible with your expectations and are willing to be at least a little bit honest with yourself along the way, you’re not likely to make it past a single blogger’s delete button.

Read the whole thing (and my comment!) here.

And Chris Bracco's free eBook on getting written about by blogs is essential reading too.

 

Blog reviews sell digital media

Very quick redirect to @Lefsetz's blog.

His piece talks about how interacting with influential bloggers helped to break an author.

Read it here.

It works with music too.

Chris Bracco tells you how. I love this free Book.

Online music promotion overview

Good little article on the basic steps you need to take to get the most out of your online music promotion.

I'm a massive fan of the approach talked about here in approaching blogs as part of your promotional foundation (don't forget @cbracco's brilliant eBook on this).

Think of your online media campaign as equivalent to gigging. Playing in front of lots of small audiences will build up to a larger fanbase. This in turn will get you gigs in front of bigger audiences and so on. In the same way, start with the smaller, niche blogs and e-zines to gain the exposure that will make larger sites take notice of you.

Be prepared to give stuff away. This will remain true for the whole of your career, but particularly at the beginning. People will only pay for stuff if they want it. If they’ve never heard your music, they won’t know if they want it yet.

The internet is brimming with free tools and opportunities for promoting your music, in a way that just wasn’t possible with traditional media. A little bit of know-how (and a lot of time) can get you a long way.

I'd actually recommend interacting with the blogs that you find using theirs and Chris Bracco's methods for a while before emailing them, but the principle is a key one that all artists should be embracing.

Read the post here.

What to say to your fans

Don't dismiss this post as being off-topic. It's not.

In my advice to my management clients (but it also applies to readers of our music marketing blog) I am consistently finding myself talking about 'content strategy' and what they need to plan out and then pass on to their fans from their various online profiles.

That will be music (free tracks, DJ sets, covers, demos), videos (rehearsals, gigs, backstage, on the road, messing about), and......information.

That information will often be about them, their music, their releases, but it's also about other stuff that they're in to, their scene, other bands they like.

We try to plan out when things will be posted and released, but we also like to be able to react to what's going on in music and comment on it and be involved.

This is very powerful for an artist as it places them in the fan's sense of an overall love of music.

And, here's the point - we encourage artists to use tools to follow and discover things that they might want to Tweet, mention on their Facebook wall or blog about.

In order to be at the forefront of things happening in your scene, you need to monitor what's being said online and then get involved.

The best way to do this is to monitor keywords in a variety of ways. Once you have your keywords (things like 'London music', 'London Gigs', 'Post Rock', 'Post Rock London', 'Post Rock UK', 'Sigur Ros' - might be some of the things you'd monitor if you were a London, UK-based post rock band, for example).

You can then monitor these words using tools (Google Reader is the one everyone talks about but I'll show you a better way another time!) and regular searches on Twitter and pass relevant things on to your fans. That way you're not always talking about yourself!

In my example, if you pass on good and timely news about Sigur Ros or a new post rock band playing in London, your fans will appreciate it (as will the new band) and they will start to see you as an integral part of that scene.

This non-music post by a marketer talks about the same thing and gives some suggestions on using tools to keep abreast of your searches.

It’s a cliché, but the early bird really does get the worm. In this case, the quick and sly Internet marketer gets the traffic and the conversions.

Staying ahead of the competition in terms of social media presence is often an underrated weapon. However, in a world where there are potentially thousands of competitors, doing the little things often separates the leaders from the rest of the pack. Beating everyone to the punch and staying in the forefront of the buzz can take a website from obscurity to Internet prominence in a hurry.

Oh, I know – it’s physically impossible for you to monitor each blog, forum and social network 24/7. We’re not going to do that.

We’ll pick our spots so that even the upstart Internet marketer can do things that will move him forward.

Read it here.

10 things for musicians to blog about

MicControl delivering the goods again on this one.

I advise my clients to write at least two posts per week on their site and, usually, to email their list once a week pointing them at those two posts (and perhaps something to buy as well). Sure, some artists think once a week is too much email, but I think once a month isn't enough - so pick something between the two that you feel comfortable with. See my posts on building and using your fan email list for more on that.

Whatever you decide, they key is to have really engaging stuff on your site for them to read!

Jon Ostrow has come up with some great ideas of things that you can talk about in this post.

However, the very real problem that many musicians run into with blogging is that they misinterpret their need to blog as just another form of self-promotion. 

But creating a blog as a musician does not inherently mean it needs to be about yourself. In fact, it's actually more beneficial for you if you avoid writing about yourself... people tend to hate narcissism more than anything else in the world.

So what SHOULD you write about then? Well, why not write about other aspects of your passion for music. You are a fan right? You are exploring the inter-workings of the music industry right? You have tried and failed a bazzillion times right? Well write some of that down! People are always on the look out for new blogs that tell it like it is. This could be a great way for you to expand your networking into the blogosphere and establish meaningful relationships with those who can actually help you build a credible name!

The following are a few ideas to help you get the brainstorming session started, but please feel free to add more ideas below in the form of a comment:

Read John's list of 10 tips here. 

I'd add that it's also important to be actively involved in the comments on the site too - discussing things back and forth with your fans is great engagement!