A Song A Day

It’s a given that, if you’re an unsigned band looking to build your fanbase, you should be blogging as part of your promotional activities. But let’s face it – and as my recent 5 month hiatus proves – producing regular content can be a drag. It’s essential, though, that your website is constantly updated so that fans keep engaging with everything else you’re offering – music, merchandise, tour dates, etc.

For those of us who want to make music first, and be bloggers second, here’s some tips for making the whole process a lot easier.

1. Create an automatically updated MP3 blog

Check this post to find out how you can (very easily, no coding knowledge necessary) link up your Last.fm page, Pipes, the Yahoo Music Player and Tumblr (note: Tumblr is in itself a very efficient and effortless way to add content to your site) to create a music blog in 10 minutes. It automatically updates as you listen to tracks and scrobble to Last.fm – so basically, you’re adding content just by listening to music. It doesn’t get much easier than that. I’m trying this out here, and will be looking to integrate it into my official website soon.

2. Use Zemanta to add extra content instantly

Zemanta is a free piece of blogging software that scans your blog text and suggests links to other relevant articles on the web that you can automatically add to the bottom of your post. I was sceptical at first, but I’m trying it out (as you can see below), and it seems to work pretty well (it’s a demo at the moment, so it’s a bit glitchy).

3. Get your community involved

Over at the always interesting and ever expanding New Music Strategies empire, Andrew Dubber has just launched Music Think Tank, a group blog publishing new articles on ‘music 2.0’ from digital music luminaries like Derek Sivers of CD Baby. MTT in itself is an interesting idea – but we’re not all friends with high flying web 2.0 types. Within MTT, however, there’s another hub of music chat activity, called Think Tank Talk, where Dubber invites anyone to start their own discussion that can then be commented on by readers and the blog’s writers alike. It’s a small step away from being a simple forum – but sitting in the context of MTT means each discussion and its subsequent comments feel like mini blog posts in their own right. This could be a strategy worth trying on your own blog. If your music is political, get your fans to talk about issues that interest them. If you’re a tech-head and you attract tech-head fans, encourage conversations about new gear or software you use. Maybe you just make music in a very specific genre, be it folk or death metal – again, get some chatter going. Presenting these kinds of discourses as content, rather than just hiding it all away in a forum, is a great way of keeping your site regularly updated, and also keeps the whole thing interactive - vital in this user-gen era.

One final tip: RSS is your friend. Even if you have absolutely no time whatsoever to spend on your blog, you can let others do the work for you. Using Netvibes, collate RSS feeds from your favourite websites to produce your very own Netvibes Universe, and link to it from your homepage. The web will do the rest. Here’s mine.

Popularity: 31% [?]