How to Start a Music Blog from Scratch: The Complete Guide

Music has incredible power to move, unite and influence us in ways we can’t describe but, even more powerful is being able to start a music blog where you write, upload, share, create conversations about significant songs, bring other music enthusiasts together and even earn from it.

Platforms like YouTube, Tiktok, Instagram etc. has made it even easier for upcoming artistes and non artistes alike, to break into music blogging and promote songs to audiences around the world but imagine starting this on your own blog.

Many are also starting out on mainstream blogging platforms like WordPress etc thus increasing the need for creation of music websites where these new talents can be curated, published and showcased to the world.

Doing that will give you much more leverage to share, promote and even monetize your music website, with much more ease.

What’s more? With such opportunity and demands, a lot of entrepreneurs and bloggers are taking up the lead to set up music websites. And in this guide, you’re going to learn how to start your own music blog from scratch and with ease.

Why You Should Start a Music Blog?

Starting a Music blog means so many things to different people. To some, starting a music blog means launching their own dreams or creating a platform where they can start their own music career.

To others, starting a music blog means building a platform where they can create and promote music, grow an audience of music fans as well as get a chance to reach out and connect with music artiste, entertainers, celebrities etc.

Many others also see a music blog as an opportunity to build a formidable brand and make money online.

At the end of the day, no matter your motive for getting one, running a music blog can afford you the chance to make a lot of difference out there.

Of course, achieving a lot of success with your music blog will come with a price. But, these and even more are some of the things you can do with your own music blog.

Steps To Create A Successful Music Blog

The following are important step by step guide you’ll need to work with as you plan to create a successful music blog…

Set Your Goals

One of the most important recipe for building a successful blog is getting your goals right.

To get started with your blog, you want to know exactly what you want to achieve with the blog, the time frame it will take you to achieve that, the resources that will be needed etc.

Knowing this puts you in the right frame of mind to predict your success. It also gets you the needed expected outcomes to build into your blogging business plan.

Create A Model

Creating a blogging model involves finding a realistic blogging business template that will work for your blog, along side your goals.

Doing this does not mean you have to copy other people’s existing blogging models etc. Instead, you can use other successful music blogs as an inspiration to create a model that will work for you, based on your own realities and expected outcomes.

To get started with creating your own blogging model, you’ll want to ask yourself questions like; why do I want to do this?

Are there other successful music blogs in this niche? What’s working for them and what can I learn? Is there a specific kind of music I should focus on.

These questions will give you clues that will guide you on steps to set up a model that will work for your own music blog.

Get a Plan

Now that you have your goals and a model in place, the next thing you want to do is set up a plan of how you’ll go about implementing your goals with the model you just created.

Your plan does not have to be fully detailed and elaborate. It could be a collection of strategies you’ll use in building the blog to the heights you want at different intervals…

In whatever you do, you want to create a blogging plan that is realistic, dynamic and flexible enough because with time you may have to change things slightly.

Create a Brand

Branding is the next segment you to put in place as you get set to start a music blog.

This will have to do with finding a niche or music genre to blog about, creating a unique name and evolving a perceptive image that will identify your music blog.

Now, the first step to create a brand for a music blog starts with finding a niche.

Considering that the niche or genre of songs you want to blog about will shape your brand, you want to carefully choose your genre of music before working on the rest of your brand.

To do this successfully, you don’t just want to blog about the music genre you prefer personally because it might not have a large or profitable audience.

You want to blog about a genre that has a reasonable number of under served audience and one you are also passionate about.

Getting to find the intersection between this two will involve some back end research. With your research, you can then choose to blog on any of the niches including; Oldies, Pop, Afrobeats, Contemporary Music, RnB, Hip Hop, Afro music, etc.

Always remember that the kind of music you blog about on your blog can determine or influence the domain name you’ll use for the music blog.

For instance, if you’re looking at targeting a particular regional kind of music on your blog, let’s say African Gospel songs for instance, you might want to find a way to include the branding in your domain name.

Also, you’ll want to design your music website to reflect the music brand you plan to create, especially in terms of usability.

For example, the design you’d use for a Hip Hop music streaming website will be different from the one you’d use for a blog about country music.

Setting Up Your Music Blog

After evolving a brand for your music blog, the next thing you want to do is to set up the blog.

The following are steps you need to follow to successfully set up your brand online…

Get a Domain Name & Hosting

Regardless of whether you’re building a music website or not, to make the most out of your platform, you’ll need a domain name and a hosting account.

In most cases, purchasing a domain name could cost slightly above or even less than 10 dollars per year in most companies.

There are certain companies that will give you a free domain name for the first year, if you buy a web hosting account with them.

Choose a Blogging Platform

There are a handful of Content Management Systems you could use to design and develop your music website like Joomla, Drupal, WordPress etc.

When it comes to professional blogging, one of the best CMS platforms I usually recommend is WordPress.

The reason is because WordPress is not only the most popular Content Management System with a great deal of options, it’s also the simplest to manage especially for beginners.

So you want to go ahead, install WordPress on your website and go about setting your blog to meet with your exact needs or you can a hire us, to get it done for you.

After setting up your website completely, the next thing you want to do is to upload the songs you have permissions to upload on your blog in the right categories.

Creating Content For Your Music Blog

Content is very important. It is the whole essence of blogging and part of the biggest factors that will drive traffic for your blog.

After setting up your music blog, the next thing you want to do is to create content for the blog.

The following are the types of content and effective strategies you can use for your music blog…

Music Reviews

One of the primary content for most Music Blogs are Reviews. A review could be your own personal opinion or critic of a piece of music, cover or the creative works.

Writing a review about songs gives you the opportunity to share your own perspective about the particular music or genre of music with your audience.

To get this to work for you, you need a good deal of knowledge about the industry or the particular genre of music you plan to review.

As soon as this is in place, you may want to consider reviewing a song or an album holistically or you might want to focus on a certain segment of the creative work.

For a review content to work very well, you want to be as objective as possible. You can be controversial if you have a good number of the audience on your side. But be mindful as controversy might as well be a double edged sword.

Interviews

Another type of content that will really help your music blog will be interviews.

With your music blog, you can work on interviewing musicians, artistes, top music influencers and getting their opinion on important industry related issues.

This could come in handy when artistes release new albums, singles etc or where there are topical issues that needs an interview.

To get this done effectively, you can start with new artistes and then as your blog grows in traffic and influence, you’ll then expand to interviewing established artistes on the blog.

Opinion

Do you have a strong opinion about an industry related topic you want to share with your audience? This kind of posts can come in very handy as part of your opinion posts.

Creating a series of convincing opinion posts can help you towards becoming a thought leader in your niche must faster.

It can also create a pathway where you easily become a leading opinion figure in a particular music genre.

Artiste Profile

Another kind of content that can help you grow your blog really fast is publishing artistes profile on your music blog.

Instead of publishing their songs alone, at specific intervals during the week or on monthly basis, you can work on publishing bios and profile of popular artistes on your blog.

You can also feature both new and up coming actors or actresses as your personality of the month, year etc.

How to Promote a Music Blog

After setting up your music blog completely, the next thing you want to do is to work out strategies that will help you promote the blog effectively.

Your strategy can focus on Online Advertising, Content Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Brand Collaborations but primarily, you also want to get your meta tags right and optimize your website for the search engine.

Create Great Content

There are many ways you can really get the word out about your music blog but most of your promotional strategy is going to be centered around content.

For this reason, you’ll need a robust and effective content marketing strategy that will help you achieve these goals.

You will need to work on evolving a consistent flow of high quality content that will be useful to your audience.

Create Social Media Handles

As part of your marketing strategy, you need to build social media handles on all popular social media platforms relevant to your blog.

This will help you build a new fan base and relate with your fans on those platforms.

Your social media handles can also serve as a place where you can share your posts, create engagement and generate traffic back to your music blog.

From your social media handles you can also promote targeted content, run competitions and create other posts that will increase the exposure of your brand to a wider audience.

Join Online Communities

Online communities like Facebook groups, Web Forums, Quora, Reddit etc. gives you the opportunity to contribute, build relationships and establish your brand authority.

You can start with joining similar and niche related groups on these platforms, contributing, engaging and growing your brand.

This in the long run will help you in attracting a new audience while building some traffic back to your music blog.

Paid Marketing

You can also use paid marketing and online advertising to promote your blog.

This works best when your music blog is relatively new. It helps you attract more traffic to the blog. And sometimes, such traffic can be faster than building organic traffic through content marketing.

Where you have a decent budget, combining paid advertising like Google PPC or Social Media Advertising with Content Marketing and SEO can drive steady traffic to your blog.

Besides the strategies listed here, there are many ways you can really get to promote your music blog including Guest Posting, blogging collaborations or outreach, converting your written content to different formats etc.

It is most likely that you are not going to be able to use all the blog promotion strategies listed here so you want to work on strategies that drives the biggest results for your music blog.

How to Make Money With a Music Blog

As an entrepreneur, one of the major reasons you set up your music blog is to make profitable income from the blog

Now besides the general strategies i listed out here on how to make money with a blog, the following are practical ways you can monetize and make money with your music blog…

Sell Music Items on your Blog

As a music blogger, one of the major ways to make money with your music blog is to sell your own items on the blog. This has been one of the leading money making strategy for many music bloggers over the years.

With your music blog, you can work on selling things like your own songs, other people’s songs and other songs you have distribution rights on.

With appropriate legal rights, you can also sell other things like branded merchandise, band posters, t-shirts etc.

Explore Affiliate Marketing

Another way to make money with your music blog is through affiliate marketing.

With affiliate marketing, you get a commission from sales when you promote other people’s product or services on your blog.

You can get this done by including direct affiliate links in your content, writing reviews or making sponsored posts for brands like music coaches, teachers or other brands with products and services closely related to your niche.

Use Featured Ads

You can make money with your music blog by selling featured ads on the blog.

This can come in the form of direct ads where brands in a related niche can place sponsored ads on your blog.

You can also offer an opportunity for artistes to promote their songs on your blog, for a fee.

Sell Your Product

Besides being a music blogger, as part of your money making strategies, you can also create and sell either digital products or music related services on your blog.

You can also set up a subscription-only area where your audience will pay to access content on your blog.

These are some of the most popular strategies you can use to make money with your music blog.

It is important to note that, the major thing that will determine your ability to make e money with your music blog is going to be the traffic you have on the blog.

The more traffic you have, the better results you’ll get as you work on making money with your blog.

With this in mind, you’ll want to work on promoting and getting a decent traffic to your blog then you can gradually start monetizing the blog.

Final Words

Regardless of who or where you are, It’s possible to start a music blog that thrives but one thing is important, you must use the right strategues alongside the right amount of effort.

Using the strategies in this guide, you’ll be equipped to build a successful music blog. But, to get started on the right footing, reach out to our team to build your blog now.

Where you already have your blog sorted out, lets get you started on content marketing and how to create content that repositions your blog very easily here.

Now, its your turn! What’s your biggest challenge when it comes to starting a music blog? Drop your comments below.