If you are a musician then it’s a good idea to start writing a blog. It’s pretty easy (and cheap) to get started and if you are sensible with your planning then you can blog in such a way that it doesn’t take up too much time, energy or head-space and can actually even be fun.  Of course the main reason that you should start blogging as a musician is to engage your fans, whether that meansjust keeping their interest in some way ( keeping the proverbial kettle on the boil between releases and shows for example ), or whether you are using it as part of your direct promotion. It’s worth mentioning at this  point that you should probably be thinking in terms of both of these ideas, that is both engagement and promotion.

What is a Blog / Blog Definition

If you don’t already know what a blog is then here’s a simple description. A blog is like a diary on the web that your fans can read. Your latest entry usually ends up at the top of the page, displacing your previous entry into second place and so on. Blog entries are called posts and they are usually made up of a title, body or content ( which is sometimes cut off by a “click here to read more” link ) and a section sometimes at the end of the post showing other information such as the date, the number of comments, a link allowing the reader to comment and a section which allows the reader to share the post on popular sites like Facebook, Twitter and the all important Digg……..finally there would be a feed button (RSS) in each post and also for the entire blog which allows the reader to subscribe to the full blog or to a particular post using a blog reader – this alerts them to any new posts or comments.

Things to consider

In starting a blog the first thing to get right is a place for your blog. You may be able to do this on your website depending on what system was used to create your site, and if not then it would be possible to install a blogging platform like wordpress.org in your webspace and use that via a subdomain eg blog.myband.com. This is probably the “best” way to do it but a simpler approach requiring very little technical skill would be to get an account with wordpress.com and set your blog up that way. You would then put a link and/or setup a subdomain or redirect from your main website to your wordpress.com blog eg blog.myband.com OR myband.com/blog pointing to your wordpress.com blog URL. ( a subdomain or redirect has the advantage that you can publicise the blog URL itself on flyers and posters etc ).  A third way ( and there are others ) is to use one of the many social networking sites to run your blog. This is similar to wordpress.com but even simpler. Sites like Facebook ( facebook notes) , Reverbnation and Myspace to name but a few will allow you to run a blog.

Integration

If your blog is not “designed” by a designer then the chances are that it isnt going to look like your site, or have links back to your site. With the first option above you have the best control ( basically total if you have the know how ) over this and the other two options have less progressively. It’s not that important to have the integration perfect, however it’s good to try to investigate how you can match colours, headers etc to let your fans know they are still technically on your site, and of course if you could even provide a link back to your homepage then it would be much better than expecting them to figure out that they need to press the back button.

Content

What to write? Content need not necessarily be just text. Photos, videos, etc are sometimes even better. In general it’s probably a good idea to have a “band meeting” to discuss exactly what sort of things are good and bad to put in. Some band members may ( quite reasonably ) be more private than others and you don’t what to cause trouble blogging about what your bandmates may consider private. Blogging style is also a key image generator so it’s important to get right. At the same time it’s not good to spend too much time considering “whether or not to blog it or not”, ( unless of course it’s a big deal in it’s own right ). In general – if in doubt leave it out – there is plenty to blog about without putting in something that you might regret. Here are some ideas to get you started.

• What you’re doing ( recording/practicing/on a day off )
• New instrument/equipment purchase
• Some well chosen band photos or video ( even from a camera-phone depending on your image requirements )
• New release, media spot, concert etc
• You can make your blog audience feel special by giving them early previews like song snippets/ album covers etc

How often to write? There are probably plenty of opinions on this. It all depends on what you are trying to achieve. If you listen to typical “bloggers” then you would feel like you need multiple entries per day, and if you are up to it then that’s great, provided the content is good, but then if you’re that good you should probably go start yourself your own dedicated blog. Music fans are probably more interested in hearing from you a few times a month than several times a day, but you know your own audience. Ultimately what you want really is some degree of consistency. Decide that you are going to post twice a week, every two weeks, every two months or whatever and then try your best to stick to it as a general guideline, what you don’t want is an obviously abandoned and unloved blog on your website. ( If you have one of those then either immediately restart it or else get rid of it – it’s like having a bad song in your set. )

Linking your sites

This is tricky and it can take a bit of thought and investigation etc, but to give one example of what can be done….. A blog hosted on a wordpress.org platform on the musician’s website can use the “socialte” plugin to automatically re-post this content onto Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. Putting this together with last.fm and reverbnation, it is possible to add your blog rss stream into your music manager in last.fm and it is possible to pick up on your twitter feed in reverbnation…….. with this particular setup you can post a blog post to your site blog, Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, Reverbnation and Last.fm all in one go. There are probably lots more out there but you sometimes need to be careful that you are not instructing eg your blog to post to facebook and also the reverse, which could end up in a sort of feedback loop.

Band Members

Another idea is that you can have your blog setup with multiple user names ( eg not just yourband but yourdrummer, yoursinger etc ) so that if there is more than one person in the band who could blog then you could have posts from multiple members. This could be very rewarding for many reasons but remember that when you post on your blog in this way, it’s almost like you are on stage together so you need to certainly set down ground rules first [ and perhaps even do a bit of practice   ]