I love music blogs, they've been awesome for me as a music fan and for Prote-J's career. However, I understand where they stand in a budding artist's career. Music blogs are an important and necessary layer of your promotion, but they are just one layer. Not the only layer. If used properly, blog posts can really help an artist's career. Here are a couple reasons why blog posts shouldn't be your entire online promotion vehicle...
Blog posts have a short shelf life. Bloggers have so much new content to post daily that your blog post will most likely only be on their front page for a few hours.
Visitors to music blogs aren't necessarily looking to hear new music from artists they are unfamiliar with. Most are scanning through the posts and will stop when they see an artist's name they're interested in. Just because your music or video is on a blog does not mean people are listening or watching it!
Universal Music Group recently stated they will be looking to go to war with over 2,000 music blogs (many of them hip hop blogs). What if the major labels no longer allow their music on independent blog sites? Music listeners would then no longer look to the blogs for their favorite artists and their reach would then be decreased dramatically. I definitely hope that doesn't happen, nor do I think it will, just a thought.
Ok, so what can you do to make your blog posts more impactful?
One thing you can do is make your artwork with the blogs in mind. Create curiosity driving artwork that makes people want to hear your music. Whether it be through text, photos, or anything else, get creative and make the visitor curious to hear what your music sounds like. For example, you could create cover art in different shapes other than the traditional square to catch people's attention or create a moving .gif. This mainly would apply to single cover art that will only be seen online. This does not apply as much to a cover that will be printed physically.
Another thing you can do is
create a description of your content that will make people interested, include it in your e-mail to the blogger and politely ask them if they can include your description in their post. Some will post your description without asking and some won't. Your chances increase if you ask them of course. The blogger including a blurb about the content will help with visitors that have never heard of you.
You're looking for new fans. The more people see your name, the better chance you have at them listening to your music or watching your video.
Get on the blogs that support you, as much as you can. Create varied content around your song, mixtape/album, or video. Create a video, a behind the scenes for the video, a making of video for the song, etc.
Blogs are an important part of your promotion strategy, but they're not the only thing. Hope this helps you get the most of your blog posts.
Sidenote, I use Google's blog search all the time for different reasons, extremely helpful.
www.Google.com/BlogSearch
