If you’re in the music business, one of the best tools available to you is the humble blog. It’s one of the easiest and most effective ways to communicate with your audience in a way that builds profile, increases loyalty and encourages word-of-mouth marketing.
Here’s why:
1) It provides your fans / customers / consumers with up to date information about what you’re up to. Regularly updated information gives the impression of regular activity – and you’re in the impressions business. A busy music figure is a successful music figure.
2) It gives people the sense of a personal connection with what you do – and hence more reason to care. People really seem to like narratives and characters that they can empathise with, cheer on and support. You should be one of those characters. Something funny happened on the way to the gig last night? On the verge of signing a big deal? Have a good rehearsal? Let them know.
3) Google loves regularly updated content. If your site is active and has new stuff on it all the time, Google will favour it with higher page rankings. You want to be found, right?
4) Blogging sets you up as an opinion leader. Don’t have your own album review column in the Guardian? Say insightful things here instead. People will start coming to you for recommendations – and if they’re reliable, your taste as a music producer will also be respected and heeded.
5) Blogging is a cheap (often free) and easy way of getting your message out there, and linking to your various activities. You don’t want to make it a regular series of product advertisements, but by the same token, you don’t want to waste the opportunity to encourage people to engage with your professional music services in an economic fashion either.
Finally (your free bonus 6th reason), people don’t just read blogs, they subscribe to them. That doesn’t mean they pay you money, but through the magic of RSS feeds and email subscriptions, they can automatically find out about what you’re up to without having to remember to come back to your website. It’s like you magically turn up in their computer whenever you’ve got something new to say, just because once upon a time, they clicked on a subscribe link.
So where to get started? Well, this page you’re looking at was created with WordPress – a free blogging tool. You could begin there. Blogger is another popular tool and – again – free. However, you definitely want to be using your own URL rather than the less impressive, less professional and entirely generic ‘myblogname.blogspot.com‘.
More on that soon.