northern comfort

image by CarbonNYC from Flickr

We get a lot of emails for promotion at NC each week, and to be fair some of them I’m interested in and have posted up. However, some of the promo/press releases are getting on my tits a little, so here’s a few pointers, from me to you, on how to get your crap on my crap.

1.) Only send it to blogs you would *actually* read. Note that doesn’t mean you do, but that you would do if you had the time or whatever. If you would read the blog, with your interests and your band, then chances are the people who are interested in your music will do to. If you’re a PR company doing this, (then apart from strongly suggesting that you get a job that doesn’t involve trying to get posts on random blogs like mine) why not ask the band what sites they read? I know it costs nothing to send an email to everyone on a list, regardless of whether they’ll post your stuff or not, but there’s no longevity in it. The more irrelevant crap I get, the fewer releases I’ll actually bother to read.

2.) Don’t pretend to have read the blog.Please don’t. Because it’s annoying, and it virtually guarantees I’m going to delete your email. I got one the other day that started “Hi, really like your blog”, which was also cc’ed (not bcc’ed) into hundreds of other people. I got one a few days before that which said “Hi, really like your blog” and then went on to promote a band that was like ‘Coldplay/Franz Ferdinand’. I replied, ‘Dude, did you even read the blog? Which bit made you think that Coldplay listeners are our target audience?’.

3.) Post some comments on the blog. If you’re following rule 1, this shouldn’t be too difficult for you, as there should be something that you like on here. The chances are that if you post a comment, along with your band’s website, and the comment isn’t super-obvious spam shit then I’ll check out your site anyway. If it’s good, I’ll post something about you/your site. It worked for neko neko here.

4.) Have something good to promote. Please God yes. If I wish to promote something mediocre, I can find that myself quite easily. What I want is quality content for my readers – despite anything else, there’s little point trying to promote something crap in the first place. Be remarkable, and I’ll write about you, even if you’ve blatantly bulkmailed your content to 1000 other blog owners, and have never read or commented on my blog. All blogs want quality, relevant content – and if you send it to me it’s miles easier than us finding it ourselves, particularly because we’re very lazy people.

5.) Don’t be a dick about the whole thing Not being a dick goes a long way. If I write back and say it’s not for us, a nice response is much more likely to get me to remember you favourably, and maybe promote some other stuff of yours later, than no response at all. If you’ve bulk mailed 300 people, and one of them bothers to write you back, you should write them back too, right?

There you go. From now on I’d better get some good stuff sent through. Or you could just send me a load of free stuff, that’d work. In fact, if anyone wants to send me something massively expensive, they’ll get a mention in every post ever. I’m pretty shallow.