In today’s fast-moving, digital society keeping completely on top of your online presence is absolutely vital to your success. This series of posts discusses how you can do just that and provides tips and advice on all aspects of your online image management, whether you’re in a band or a business.
Time for a recap. I began this series of posts where many bands and businesses do, by considering social networking before mentioning 4 important sites that can be used to spread the word in the early stages of your promotion. Next I moved on to consider the email list, the cornerstone of online promotion before considering some aspects of professionally networking (both on and offline) in the last post in the series. In the latest instalment I will be considering blogging.
Blogging is an incredibly easy way to gain an online presence from nowhere and can also serve as a handy hub to point to all of your other links (YouTube videos, iTunes listings, Facebook page etc.) and to promote any press you might get. The important thing to remember when blogging is that it must also be something good in its own right. You can’t just have short pages of text linking to some of your other bits of web presence, use a bit of time and creativity to cultivate an active and quality blog that will enhance everything else you do.
Blogging is an enormous topic and grows daily. I’ll mention a few ways you can get up to speed and stay ahead of the curve towards the end of the post, but first I want to list a number of things that you may want to think about whilst blogging:
Keep it regular
Post often or hardly post it all, its up to you; just keep it regular! If you post every Friday for 3 months people will expect a post from you on this day. If you then suddenly take a month off you will lose readers.
Make it interactive
Allow readers to comment on posts and make sure you respond to comments yourself if required. Also consider putting polls on the blog such as “vote for our best track” or “which of our new t-shirt designs is the worst?” Your readers will feel more involved and valued. A range of content is also important to keep readers interested. So embed your YouTube videos, show off your images and
Make it sticky
People use a variety of websites and browser services to save their favourite sites in one easy to use location. Make it easy for them to do the same with your blog. Put social bookmark buttons on the site and ensure they can sign up to your RSS feed and/or email updates easily.
Blogger vs. WordPress vs. Others
As you might guess, we prefer WordPress over all other blogging platforms. Its a simpler back-end and has a lot more functionality than Blogger. However, if this is to be your first blog then Blogger may be a good idea. There are other platforms out there that can also do a pretty good job but Blogger and WordPress are the big ones.
Get going but keep learning
There is so much to blogging that it can seem a little overwhelming. My advice is to make a brief plan (what do you want your site to feature, who do you want to read it, how much time can you spend on it, what do you want to call it etc) and then get going but commit to picking up information as you go along. Here is a great list of sites by Neil Patel that can teach you plenty about blogging and related disciplines.
So there you have it, a brief overview of things to consider for starting a blog for your band or company, I hope you find it useful. Don’t forget to stop back here and let us know how you’re getting on!
