If you talk to any music marketing guru at the moment they all seem to agree that blogging is now a very important step in your road to world domination. But I think there is a lot of confusion out there amongst musicians about why they should actually take the time to set up a blog in the first place.
In a short post the other day I laid out the main reasons why DIY musicians should be blogging.
- A blog helps build your brand and lets people know what you stand for.
- It gives a platform on which your fans can comment and add their own opinion which is essential for building a proper tribe.
- The final and most important point is, if you blog about bands and music that your potential fans might be into, it can bring a steady stream of new people to your website.
So if the main reason to blog is to get hits you might be asking why your own blog is only getting 4 visits a day?
Check out the five points below and make sure that your blog comes up to scratch.
1. Your Songs are not connecting with people yet
You have probably heard me say this before but as a DIY musician it’s your job to focus 80% of your efforts on writing great music and then use a simple system of steps to get it out to the fans as quickly as possible.
Once your music reaches the tipping point of quality, your fans start to promote and spread it for you, and you will see your hits going up automatically.
So if your blog is not getting a lot of visitors the quality of your posts or your music have not reached that stage yet.
Keep at it and get your 10,000 hours in. (Malcolm Gladwell says that 10,000 is the price you have to pay to be considered a genius. Think about the Beatles playing 8 hours a day in Hamburg.)
2. Google does not love you
The great thing about a blog is that it’s already set up to be google friendly, but if you are just blogging about anything that pops into your head it’s hard to get google to send you a lot of traffic.
So from now on you need to base some of your posts around low competition phrases that music fans are already typing into google.
For this you can use the google keyword tool, and you should try and find terms that have three of four words in them because they will be easier to rank for. See my podcast for how to do this.
3. Are you a music marketing junkie?
A lot of people fail to get hits to their blog because they spend too much time trying to learn everything they can about music marketing before they get started.
It almost becomes like an addition…
So remember that you are only going to build new fans if your log into your site and make a thoughtful post.
Reading 2000 words a day of music promotion content is useful, but only gets you halfway there! There is such a thing as over preparation – make sure you’re getting to the point of actually posting.
GET TO WORK!
4. Frequency matters
This really freaks me out…when was the last time you wrote a blog?
Goodness gracious, 3 weeks ago!
This is not going to get you any traffic because the whole nature of a blog is that people see you regularly and start to build a relationship with you.
Even if there is nothing much going on in your own career at the moment you should still make a post every day.
Once you get into the writing habit this is easy, just find some relevant news in your music scene and fire off 500 words. Leave it alone for a day then edit the post into some literary magic!
5. There is no magic bullet for success.
Increasing your blog’s visibility relies on good content, frequency of updates and good google love. If you believe that there’s a certain kind of magic spell to do it for you, then wake up, you need a strong coffee!
People will come along and tell your that you can be an overnight star and then they will usually try and sell you something.
The fact is that for most musicians it takes a lot of work and persistence to build a blog into a fan-generating machine.
The biggest piece of advice I can give you is that you should make blogging a habit and just show up everyday with the best content you can.
You will reach the tipping point soon, and then your music marketing will become automatic.
Reality Check
You’re probably not going to be an overnight success and trying to achieve massive worldwide stardom is like trying to win the lottery.
Forget about luck in your music career and focus on WORK!
Little daily actions can move mountains after a couple of years.
Listen to the audio version…
Tags: Blogging for Musicians
Leave A Reply (3 comments So Far)