Getting Local Bloggers to Pimp Your Tour

photo by comicbase

Every once in a while you come across one of those no-brainer ideas that can help you exponentially. This is one of them. To all the bands going on tour, looking for free promotions to a built in audience. Bloggers are the journalism that you should be looking for and more specifically, you should be looking for local bloggers, that write about their community and what is going on there.

How do I find these Bloggers?
Google Blog Search- In the screenshot below you can see that I searched for "Orlando Blog" and got 500,000+ results. Not all of these are going to be relevant but there are some diamonds in the rough. The related blogs give you a few options to look at right away including Downtown Orlando Blog, Ultimate Orlando Blog and Living Orlando.

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Placeblogger - This is the MacDaddy of local based blog tools. Once you have your target city or state, just drill down till you find the info you need. Drilling down to Orlando, FL gave me 10 blogs to look into. The other great thing is that knowing an area well, I can also see 1 blog in Sanford, FL, 1 in Altamonte Springs, 2 in Lake Mary and 1 in Lakeland. You can see in the screenshot below the data is represents when you get to your final place destination. Placeblogger is also a community driven site, meaning that if you know of a great location based blog, you can submit it into their directory.

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Which Blogs Do I Reach Out To?
Not all bogs are created equal and your time is extremely important, espicially if you are contacting sites while on the road. You want to be sure that you are getting in touch with the most relevant writers with the largest audience.

By going to these pages you can assess things like Google PageRank and Compete Traffic for the site to see their reach. Even those PR and Compete Data are not 100% accurate, it gives you a clue as to how many readers and how big their influence is. For instance, Living Orlando has a PageRank of 3 and Compete Traffic at 5,400+. As a small touring band I would attempt to reach the author and give him a reason to write about your show, your band and a story to get people interested.

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*Music Marketing Tip* If you browse with FireFox, there is a plugin called Search Staus that gives you all this data and a whole lot more everytime you visit a page. Download it now!

Musicians using bloggers to their advantage with ultimately spark their total music marketing package. This tactic is time consuming, but getting 3-4 press mentions online, to go along with any street teams, mailing lists and on site promotion will only increase you bottom line and allow you to continue rocking out for fans all around the world.

-Greg Rollett