Elbows Music Blog Community

if you have 5-10 regular readers, you're already doing better than most.

best way to get your blog "out there" is just to keep at it, and take advantage of blog aggregators and social networking (elbo.ws, hype machine, facebook, etc.)
but i'd start by posting a link to your blog on the forum so the rest of us can check it out.

Have you incorporated a Twitter account? Posting a headline and link for each blog post boosted my numbers. There are ways to automate it to tweet each post. We have a work account (Team Clermont, the PR I work for) and try to periodically post links to blog posts about our artists. Hopefully that helps boost their traffic.

Hypem, Elbo.ws, Facebook, Twitter, Google Search. You might also look into contributing on other, more well-established websites. For example, I've got three guest blogs that occasionally post on my site, which brings them a little bit of attention.

- masthead image looks low quality. It's misaligned too.  Looks cheap. (flikr has a lot of images you can use, similarly themed image you can change and rotate. Try to be consistent in branding/look tho'. People don't like change that doesn't make sense.)

- there are too many "text" in the masthead. Looks crowded and busy. Sharp punch. people need to go "uuuuuhhh this is interesting", when looking at masthead.

- there are too many buttons clumped together everywhere. Need to organize and visually control it.

- don't be afraid of well thought out gimmick. (that "clever you" which distinguish your blog from other blogs.)



- title, date, time stamp are too scattered. make it all uniformed for all post. It's easier on the eyes.



(template design is pretty big deal, cause most people skip, blog that looks like any other blog. make it appealing to your target audience. Add as much design crap as you can, then organize them carefully, after that, toss out all the useless to bare essential. Those minimal items are all you need. If you can get it to one or two design elements to display same amount of information, you are there. Think of your readers, they have to look at hundreds of blogs a day. Don't torture them.)



- Need more regularly schedule content. since you post about 2 a week. Make one definitely for first thing monday viewing, and the other somewhere late weekend.



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The rest is exploration (visual, text, image design), learn from blogs you like, talk to people, connect with your blog peers.

The first 100 posts/3 months are like that. Don't let go your meat and potato type of post while trying some new things. the next 3-400 are even harder, when you drained yourself out of small ideas, then you need to figure out some big ideas for yourself.

- youtube has some crazy tutorial videos. (I never learn anything in there tho' since my ADD always make me watch other crazy vids.)

- web pages. the few bookmarks I have are all dead since I don't use blogspot anymore.

- there are also several good ebooks on the net. (google the .pdf rar)



otherwise, get a second hand books or date a hot programmer....

Also, you may want to put the URL to your blog on your account info on here.