Mouprise.com

Manage a drummer’s blog

As business owners, we periodically take the time to evaluate our 5-year business plan, and based on our findings, we then rewrite a 1-year action plan. This action plan works as an organized guide that we can follow as we move towards business activities and project development.

I open with this statement, because it was this plan that brought us closer to expanding the scope of our Angle Hill Studio services while striving to reach our future goal, which is to open an e-shop for the percussion accessories I invented.

Starting the Drum It With Brummet blog in January 2021 was one of the tools we are using to gain more exposure and create a hub for networking with other musicians, and offering support to those working in the music industry. In particular, we encourage my students to visit the blog, as there is so much useful information for them to explore.

My wife and I are not new to blogging, we have a popular blog (Brummet’s Conscious Blog) that we have been running for over 17 years. This experience made the choice to create a second blog less daunting than it might have been.

We knew it was important to choose images, profile content, font, theme, and colors to match the focus of this part of our business. We also make sure to have ample content available to fill the first 9 months or more. Scheduling releases so far in advance was part of our plan – you see, we released 2 more books this spring (2021) and it was necessary to allow flexibility in our schedule for book release promotional activities.

In designing this blog, we made sure to use the sidebar area to share our profile, blog calendar, and various links to other places we can find each other online. There is a second page on the blog called A Passion For Drums where we share information about my experience in the field of music.

Our business keeps us pretty busy, but we found a way to take advantage of a few stolen hours here and there, which allowed us to complete the entire initial setup in a month. After the blog was up for a few months, we started the initial promotions. The delay regarding promotions was on purpose – we did it for a number of reasons, including to be on the lookout for glitches or issues and to address any tweaks that became apparent to us. Having several months of published content available meant that when a visitor came to view the blog, they would see it as a fairly established site rather than one that had just opened, with very little content to explore. We feel this would make our promotional efforts more effective.

Like any commercial service, blogs must be promoted if we hope to have readers. As I write this, we are in the 10th month of the Drum It With Brummet blog post and the readership is slowly increasing. My wife and I have a long list of promotional activities that we are tackling whenever time permits.

I have personally been a part of many music groups and bands, worked with theater groups, connected with numerous groups online, and made connections with people during my 40 years of working in the music industry. I plan to contact each of them to let them know about the blog and how it can be useful to them. This will also give me a reason to reach out to all these connections, strengthening our relationships.

There are plenty of ways we’ve already started basic blog promotions. We created a special page on our main website dedicated to our social media projects, including this blog.

The blog URL is included on our social media profile pages, often mentioned in direct communications, and in posts within gender-specific online group communications. Whenever appropriate, the URL is shared during media appearances, article signatures, and email signatures.

My wife has signed us up on dozens of social media sites and occasionally takes extra time to share special blog posts and appropriate social media groups.

I mentioned earlier that we actually run 2 blogs, and each has a link that references the other. Additionally, we encourage our guests and their agents to promote their appearance on our blog.

My wife manages most of the content we publish on this blog; searching for quotes and discovering articles, dealing with comments, and handling most of the behind-the-scenes activities. She tends to schedule posts well in advance, often working 5 months in advance. However, I have a long list of article ideas and content creation projects that I work on whenever I have time. So far, the amount of time to manage this second blog has been minimal, but we expect it to increase as readership and networking with others in the industry continues to grow.

We welcome inquiries for article submissions, product reviews, and interviews. We publish poems, articles, product reviews, and interviews aimed at musicians and music teachers. Anyone interested in working with the Drum It With Brummet blog should remember that it has a strong bias towards drummers and percussionists. We definitely plan to do more interviews with people from the music industry as well.