3 Tips for Building Relationships with Hip-Hop Bloggers
Building relationships with hip-hop bloggers and editors is an essential part of your music career. Bloggers can help get you in front of your audience and add credibility to your brand. As your music career and team grows, you’ll eventually assign this job to someone else – but until then, you'll need to build relationships with hip-hop bloggers. So, I’m going to give you 3 tips for doing exactly that.
Leave Comments on Their Blogs
Most hip-hop blogs don’t receive a ton of comments and yet, so few artists take advantage of that. Leaving a comment on a post that someone probably spent hours or days on is a subtle way to say “thank you” and build a relationship with them. Now, since you’re probably one of the only few people to comment on his blog, he’ll notice and appreciate it.
Think about it. If you post something online, no matter if it’s a status update, tweet, new music, or video and someone likes, retweets, or comments on it, you’re pumped! It makes you look good online and feel good. Just speaking from experience, I know I feel good when others comment and share my stuff.
Send Them An Intro Email
Sending a “cold" email to hip-hop bloggers can be tricky. They receive a lot of “check out my music”, “how to get on your site”, and “let’s work” emails every single day. Odds are, if you send them an email, it’s going to get lost in the pile with all the other emails.
So, how do you stand out? Let me show you how I do it.
First, I send a short professional intro email. This intro email includes who I am, what I do, and how I’d like to help them. The shorter the email, the better your chances are of getting a response.
I use a Google Chrome extension like MailTrack & Boomerang to track when the recipient opens the email and I also set a reminder to notify me in 7 days to check my email and see if I’ve received a response from them. If not, I reply to the message I previously sent them with something along the lines of: “Hey (insert name), I know you’re busy, so I wanted to send a follow-up email in case this message got lost in your inbox. Thanks!’. I usually continue to do this until I receive a response thanking me for following up or telling me to stop emailing them.
Typically only serious people will consistently follow up on an email. Since not many people do this in hip-hop (similar to commenting on their blog), you’ll stand out.
Promote Their Content
This one is simple and straightforward, promote their content. It doesn’t matter if it’s on social media, by purchasing one of their products, or by simply telling someone to check them out. Helping them grow their business/blog will put you on their radar.
Twitter Tip: By retweeting their tweets and adding your own comments in your retweet (usually compliments if you like the content), you'll start getting on their radar pretty quickly – especially if they don’t get a lot of engagement on Twitter.
To Recap:
Building relationships with hip-hop bloggers and editors is an essential part of your music career. Bloggers can help get you in front of your audience and add credibility to your brand. The 3 different tips shared in this post to build relationships with hip-hop bloggers involve commenting on their blog posts, sending them a short and professional email, and promoting their content. While that’s not the only thing you can do to get your music on hip-hop blogs, it’s part of the process.
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That’s why am leaving a comment here. Thanks for the ideas.
Thanks for reading Ben. Happy to hear you found this article helpful!
3 Tips from an artist that has seen it all:
1. NEVER visit a blog and NEVER leave a comment on their blog posts.
In this case, the blog will get one more visit from you (and probably multiple hits on their pages) and one more comment from you. What you will get in return is… NOTHING. NOBODY will ever review your newest release just because you visited their blog and left a comment.
2. NEVER send them (intro) emails.
No matter how many emails you send to a blog, NOBODY will ever review your latest release. If they want to review your music, they will review it whether you contact them or not. NEVER visit blogs that review music and never email them about your music. It is a total waste of time. Your emails (personalized or generic) will end up in their trash bin.
3. NEVER promote other blogs’ content.
You will simply lose your very precious time promoting irrelevant content. The blogs will get more traffic from you, and in return you will get… well, you know what… NOTHING.
Hey Sakis,
It sounds like you’ve had bad experiences with blogs and now have a biased opinion.
What you’re telling an artists to never do is exactly what someone in PR is getting paid to do for you (the artist).
Regardless if they’re new to PR or not, their job is to build relationships with people like hip-hop bloggers (using some of the tips in my post above and more) and then utilize those relationships in a ‘win-win’ situation to help benefit the artist that they’re serving.