How to Spot a Truly Influential Music Blog

If you’re a typical music blogger, you have probably found the process of researching the industry quite frustrating. You probably resigned yourself to thinking that you only need to look at a handful of choices to get everything you need to write a quality music blog and to be fully informed about the industry.

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I can’t say I blame you. While there is no shortage of music blogs out there, most of them flat out suck. I know it’s not polite to say it, and it may not be politically correct. But, this is the absolute truth.

Most of the blogs around dedicated to genres or even hyper-focused on one particular genre of music simply fall flat. I’m not just talking about badly written material that reminds you stuff you wrote in high school. I mean stuff that may be properly composed, but, contain worthless information; stuff that looks and reads like material was slapped together at the last minute.

You only need to read a few lines of these types of blogs for you to get instantly frustrated, depressed, and resigned. The resignation takes the form of you just visiting 5 to 10 music blogs, and you consider yourself a veteran observer of the music scene. The good news is you don’t have to take all of these factors lying down.

Figuring out how to spot a truly influential music blog by using technical or web-based considerations can get you to start accommodating your sense of curiosity once again. Due to the issues raised above, your time would be best spent reading just a handful of music blogs. Figure out how to determine indications of influence, and you can read a wide range of music blogs. This can lead to your mind being blown open with all sorts of exciting developments in the genre you’re covering.

Look for similar sites

The first step is to look for similar blogs to the mainstream and authoritative blogs that you’re already reading. Google has many search operators that will help you find these blogs. I suggest you use it to come up with a massive list of these. At this stage, your focus is on quantity and not quality. That will come to the next step.

Pay attention to social signals

Your next step is to pay attention to the social signals of these different blogs. Some blogs have a large following on Twitter or very popular on Facebook. Other blogs are simply not popular anywhere. Delete blogs from your list that don’t get much love from social media. This is a key indicator that its overall influences are quite limited, at least as far as social media is concerned.

Look for blogs with influential backlinks

Here comes the tricky part. There are backlink checkers available online. If you’re unclear or don’t know where to start, do yourself a favor and enter the phrase “backlink checker” on Google. You’d be surprised at the number of free tools you can use. Enter the domain names of the related influential blogs that you are considering. You would notice certain patterns once you see the backlinks.

Some blogs get a lot of backlinks from other music blogs that you haven’t heard of. Some are completely nasty because they get a lot of backlinks from gambling websites, casinos, and porn sites. Finally, there is a third category blog that gets a lot of backlinks from blogs you already know. This is the type of blog that you should keep on your list. Delete all the blogs with faulty backlinks.

If you keep all the tips above in mind, it’s likely that you would only be reading truly influential music blogs. This increases the value of the information you get about the musical genres you follow. The higher the chance that you won’t be wasting your time.

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