Ever wanted to start your very own music blog? It’s something a lot of budding music journalists would love to do but most just don’t know where to start. Having your own blog is a great way to get your foot in the door of the music industry, gives you somewhere to show off what you can do, and can help you gain experience to move up the ladder; or like HTF did, build our own ladder!
HTF thought we would give you a helping hand, so here are our top tips to help you start your own music blog!
So get your pen and paper at the ready and let’s get cracking!
1. Think of a good name and grab it!
Before you do anything you need to come up with a name for your blog. You want something catchy, easy to remember and something that sounds professional. If your looking to write about a certain genre of music, maybe tailor it to fit as well. Avoid names that are either too long, too hard to spell, or too hard to say. Think simple! After all you don’t want to have to spell the website out to everyone each time you tell them your site is called antidisestablishmentarianismmusic.com.
Once you have thought of a few unique names you want to register a domain name for your site. This is sometimes the most difficult part as almost everything under the sun has been thought of. I’d advise getting a .com address where possible as this is the most popular and what most people will try when searching for your website.
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2. Set Up Your Blog!
Once you have your name, you want to set up your blog. There are three options we would recommend:
1) Set up an account at blogger.com
2) Set up an account at wordpress.com
3) Self-host WordPress.org on your own webspace (This is for the more tech-savy of you)
The first two are as easy as clicking the link above and just signing up. It will automatically set-up your blog for you within a few minutes. Once set-up you can play around with the various features and layout’s available until you come up with something you like. We would recommend at minimum you have your comments turned on and social network sharing enabled. There are plenty of tutorials around so if you get stuck just search for help.
Once that is done you will want to connect your domain name to your blog. For help on this you can use the following links – Blogger – WordPress.com – or ask the company you registered the name with to help you.
Your blog is now ready to go!
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3. Set Up Social Networks
A great way to promote yourself is through social networking so it’s advised that you make accounts for your new blog.
We would recommend signing up to the following
Twitter – www.twitter.com
Facebook (Page) – www.facebook.com/pages/create/?ref_type=pages_you_admin
Instagram – www.instagram.com
Google +- www.plus.google.com
Youtube – www.youtube.com (If you want video content as well)
Now each time you write an article for your blog you can promote it using your new social networks. At first, it’s a great idea to encourage all of your friends and family to follow you to build up your numbers. Also make sure that you link to your networks from your blog so that new readers can follow you as well. There are plenty of widgets available on both Blogger and WordPress that will insert this feature into your site.
Also remember on most social networks you can tag/@ people so if your writing about a particular bands or person then make sure to tag them. They may share it with their followers and that’s going to get you more views and more followers.
Social networks are a bloggers best friend so get stuck in!
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Photo Credit: Håkan Dahlström via Compfight cc4. Write awesome content
Now you have your blog set up, and your social networks ready, it’s time to get down to business!
Here is where you can finally get creative and start writing. You could report on the latest music news, review albums and gigs, maybe contact bands and ask if they want to do an interview. The main thing you want to do is concentrate on writing good, original content. Think what your readers would like to see and work to that. Look at what your friends share with each other, what content seems to get the best reactions?
There are no set guidelines here, just go for it and see what works and doesn’t work along the way.
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5. Promote! Promote! Promote!
You have the site, you have the content, now it’s time to promote everywhere you can. You could set up a launch party at a local club, get business cards made up to hand out to people, post on forums and let people know about the site, even hunt people down on the street and give them flyers if you want to. The more people who know about your site, the more readers it will get, and the bigger it will grow. Have fun with it and hopefully we will see you in the press area next festival season giving us a run for our money. Good luck!
