I spent the better part of the last decade in the music industry honing my marketing skills and when I switched over to web marketing, I wondered how many of my skills would transfer over. I was happy to see that promoting a blog is really no different than promoting an independent band. It takes time, hard work, a little know-how and most importantly, good content.
Blog vs Song
The number one factor in band marketing is a good song. Image, fan base, web presence, and stage performance are really secondary when it is broken down. A good song is a good song, and THAT is what makes a band worth while in terms of financial success. You may not like a band like Fall Out Boy, but you cannot deny their ability to write musical and lyrical hooks. The exact same thing could be said for a blog. Regardless of topic, the content has to be thought provoking, well written, and the blog layout needs to be smooth. Just like a well crafted song. If you have this, you have the first element needed to have a successful blog.
Radio vs Digg
Before the time when the internet ruled music, there was a lovely medium called radio. When I first start doing band promotion, in the late 90’s (the ice-age), the key to marketing your music was to get it on the radio. You would start small, maybe trying some local high school or college radio stations, and hope that you could get your music played on one of the local programs on the bigger stations in town. The key determining factor was the listener base. If the song was good it was requested more often. The more a song was requested, the better chances it would make it into regular rotation and therefor, earning more royalties. The exact same thing could be said for a blog. Services like Digg are similar to the old radio. You have an article published, and if it is good enough, it will make it to the front page, or ‘regular rotation’ of Digg. When this happens, you will have a lot more traffic to your site and you will begin to see your profits increase, just like how radio impacts a song.
Promotional Photo vs WordPress Theme
Promotional photos are usually the first thing noticed about a band after their music. It might be on a flier, poster, website, advertisement, or countless other places. As the old adage goes, Image is everything if the content is good. Bands that look like bands tend to have more fans, garner more attention, and present a great ‘first impression’ for those people who are trying to learn more. The exact same thing could be said for blog marketing. You could have the secret to eternal life, but if your blog has a million and one advertisements, horrible spelling, and a color scheme straight from a Commodore 64 it will not be a popular blog. And popularity is the key to revenue. So even though content is king, the image and presentation is right next to content as far as importance goes.
The Plan
One key element that I noticed working in the music industry is that you might meet the best songwriter you have heard in years, and he has no idea what to do to make his music heard by large amounts of people. He has the look of Harry Connick Jr, the guitar skill of John Mayer, and he languishes in a basement club playing to 20 people. This happens in the blog world all the time. Someone has exceptional content and a great layout, but they have no plan on how to promote their blog. Or, if they have a plan, they usually set unattainable goals. Brandon Boyd of Incubus once said if you make small goals and reach every one of them, you will make it to the level you want to be at. Make small goals and succeed.
Hard Work
Once you have the content, the image, and the plan, blog marketing and band marketing become the same exact animal. It is all about the hard work. There is no such thing as a one-hit wonder. Even the musicians who have ‘one-hit wonders’ had to make a calculated effort to get to that level. The equivalent to that in the web world could be a website such as Elfyourself.Com. Even though the website came out of nowhere, generate huge volumes of traffic and delighted millions of people, it was a well-crafted idea and the plan was executed perfectly. Some bands work for 10 years to get their one hit. Some work 2 months and have 10 hits. Either way, they had to have the content, the image, the plan, and then executed the plan with hard work.
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