Building Blog Buzz

Blogs are very difficult to PR to but can provide significant impetus to the initial stages of a PR campaign.

How to find out what blogs are saying about your artist or similar artists:

There are two big music blog ‘aggregators’, that collate 1,000s of blogs together and show which are the most popular and also rank the most blogged about bands and most blogged about mp3s. These are Hype Machine (www.hypem.com)  and Elbows (www.elbo.ws). It’s worth regularly checking them out to see what bands and blogs are popular.

To find out who is blogging about your artist, try doing a Google ‘blog search’ by going to blogsearch.google.com. Also use your regular checking of Hype Machine and Elbows to see what blogs are writing about very similar artist to yourself and approach them. If no one is yet blogging about your band try searching for similar artists and begin to approach these sites.

If people are blogging about your band already or if they do so after you contact them, place a link on your website and social networks directing your fans to read it. Bloggers are often very keen to increase the traffic coming to their sites and may be more likely to write about you again if they see increased visitors as a result.

Contacting Blogs

Blogs are near impossible to PR to with a blanket email approach. A better manner of approach is to send personal emails to each individual blogger, referencing artists that they’ve blogged about before and giving them a free mp3 to give away or inviting them to a gig. The relationships that are built with bloggers are important and in most cases need to be built slowly and gently. Bloggers write because thye enjoy music and want to have their own voice based upon their own taste…

If you have the time yourself becoming a ‘blogger’ will give you a great insight from the ‘other side of the fence’, write about the music you like and think about why you write about certain artist, analyse your communication and use this to better approach other bloggers about your own music.

Tracking blogs

Once you have started working on getting blogs to write about you, keep track of it by setting up a Google Alert for your artist name. To do this go to www.google.com/alerts put your artist name in speech marks (i.e. “Rolling Stones”) as the search term, change the ‘type’ field from ‘comprehensive’ to ‘blog’ and input your email address. Once a day from now on you will receive an email from Google with links to any blogs that mention you.