How Do Clever Musicians Come Up With ‘Fan Getting’ Blog Posts On Demand?

CChris Rockett is a musician and music marketing consultant from London who uses Direct-to-Fan marketing tactics to help level the playing field between DIY musicians and major label artists. Feel free to follow along on his Music Marketing Blog

Picture the scene…

You go to a gig one night to watch a friend’s band play but as the support act hits the stage you know something is different.

credit: arvindgrover

Their songs hit you right away and seem to connect with you on some deep mystical level. Before long you are dancing around like a mad man and have fallen in love with them.

They are now your BBF (Best band forever!)

As soon as they finish you rush over and buy a CD and sign up for their mailing list…and all this while your friend plays his heart out unnoticed in the background.

A Little While Later…

You get home feeling a little bit wasted but still excited to find out more about your new music discovery. You jump on Google and notice that the band have a blog.

Whoopee! how exciting…

You press the big blue Google link and you are taken to a very snazzy website with a nice moody picture of the band, and some posts which seem to have been written by the lead singer.

The titles of the blog posts are as follows:

• Our new album is out next week.
• We are playing a show tonight.
• Get tickets for our latest tour.
• Listen to us on itunes.
• Join us on facebook.
• Follow us on twitter.

And on and on and on….

Boredom starts to set in as you realize that your new favorite band’s only contribution to the web is a bunch of promotional links about how you can spend money on their stuff.

You close down your computer and go to bed with a sour taste in your mouth.

In the morning you forget about your new favorite band as you listen to the new “Lady Gaga” track on the radio and just like when a child says that they don’t believe in fairies, another fan dies before your love ever got the chance to make you into a superfan.

(If you don’t know why I’m talking about fairies watch Peter Pan damn you!) ;-)

So what’s the solution to this all too common problem?

Well I was reading a great post the other day called 10 Ways For Musicians To Blog Without Being A Self-Promotional Douche.

And I wanted to go into one of my favorites in a little bit more detail and show you exactly how to do it.

The Google Music Alert Method

It’s all about writing up the latest news in your music scene.

This is a great tactic because if you can track and comment on what people are already talking about in music that is similar to your own, then you will get natural Google traffic from avid fans who are searching for information on the topic.

Once they are on your site they will be interested to learn more about you if your writing is good, and you can offer a free music download at the end of each post if they join your mailing list.

So how can you do this?

It’s simple really, you just use a couple of free Google tools to make it work.

For this tutorial I’m going to use the example of a young rapper trying to build a fan base.

The first thing you need to do is go over and sign up for a Google account if you don’t already have one.

Now you need to search for Google Alerts in Google.

Google Alerts is a great service that will allow you to track information on any topic that you might be interested in. So for our example I’m going to track the word “Snoop dog”. It’s important that you put the word in quotes otherwise you will get a whole bunch of stuff that is totally unrelated to what you are looking for.

You should set the alert to track everything and set it up to send you an rss feed.

Now you just need to press the “view in Google Reader button” and it will take you over to Google Reader which you will be checking each day for news.

Google Reader is great and is a whole other topic but for our purposes just think of it like a website collector that lets you read articles and news all in one place.

Very cool…

So now that you have set up the alert anytime someone mentions “Snoop Dog” online it will show up in your Google Reader.

You can add other words to Google Alerts but try and keep it quite focused at the start otherwise you might get overwhelmed.

The last part of this is to make a commitment to post to your blog once every day with Sundays off. This might sound like a lot but consistency is the only way to build a blog following and after all not every post needs to be 500 words. Sometimes you can just post a 100 word news snippet.

The key is to write in an interesting an exciting way and this will come with practice if you really commit to writing everyday.

If you need advice on setting up a blog you can read my tutorial here.

All you need to do is log into your Google Reader account every morning and see what is having the most buzz in your area of music.

You can tell which stories are really capturing public attention because they will show up multiple times in Google Reader.

Then you just draft your post and add it to your blog.

Getting Real

Don’t expect the fans to come right away or that you will be top of Google in one second. The reason that this process works is because you are constantly adding to your blog and the traffic comes over time.

You will get the odd Google ranking here and there at first and hits will come from all kinds of weird places.

Just make sure that you focus on quality and consistency – these are my two secrets of blogging.

And please don’t talk about yourself all the time because if you did that at a party you wouldn’t make any friends and you might get banned from drinking the keg!

The web is just the same…

*Advanced tactic* The other thing you can do is to track your band name and the titles of your album to see what people are saying about you on the web, and jump into the conversation if necessary.

Good luck,

– Chris