While spending time writing for my band blog, I’ve been constantly monitoring whats been working with increasing our unique visitors. The weekly blog writing and social bookmarking has worked wonders seeing a continuous increase in monthly visitors and social networking is adding a great marketing attack. One key stat was seeing the number of external links bringing in visitors to the website, due to commenting. The mission is simple: share my opinion and give my blog an identity.

The more time I dedicated to commenting around the web, the better the results. The key here was breathing life into every article by promoting each individual article, not just the home address of my blog. Professional bloggers around the web have mentioned this technique as a way of keeping older articles in the mix and keeping them from reaching the search engine graveyard.

Little Step, Big Footprints

Since I dedicate time to writing articles and socially sharing them and bookmarking them, I owe it to my hard work to promote each article, it is a representation of your blog. Here are some important things to note about commenting:

• Keeps music posts alive
• You are actively pursuing Targeted Visitors and directing them to specific content
• Open the door to networking: (bloggers love comments)
• Creating more entry points to your blog

I am constantly adding sites to my Google Reader that would aid my efforts. Be picky and find sites you enjoy visiting. If you haven’t done so yet, get a Gravatar to make your comments stand out: This will associate an image with your comments, which is great for your branding.

Disqus is also a great service and tool for web comments. I use Disqus on this blog and it is great for making comments easier and more interactive, and its free. Its great for tracking and managing your comments and replies.

One useful feature from Disqus is you can import the RSS feed of your latest comments into other sites such as Friendfeed and have your comments spark more discussion. For example, the other day I received a comment on a post that was about 3 months old and I replied to it. This conversation was imported into my Friendfeed room showing both the comment and reply and the link to the old article. This way my Friendfeed subscribers can join the discussion and visit an article that was 3 months old.

Take an older article and promote it. Find other sites with relevant topics and leave your opinion. The days you are not writing like a newsreporter can become great days to leave comments and introduce the web to your blog. Make your articles work for you!

My recent marketing quests had me organizing my time according to different tasks to address. The main thing was promoting Fried Roots with a consistent social media approach. Writing articles for our band and giving away free music has been helping increase our unique visitors. We found our way back on to Youtube and updated with a video for “Calling Lost Angels“. With so many updates, Friendfeed always keeps my marketing working for me.

Friendfeed acts as a aggregator for your social media profiles and imports your activity on those networks. If you are familiar with Twitter, it definitely has a similar feel. Your friends can comment on the things you share and you will see their replies in real time.
It’s great not hitting the refresh button.

You can create your own profile and import blog feeds and many social networks like Youtube, Digg, Twitter and the list goes on. Once your profile is setup you can subscribe to other users and vice versa.

Create a room and establish your brand

People now can see your activity on various networks. This is great. For instance, you create a group around your band name, import your blog rss feed, your Youtube videos, your Last.fm feed, and your Twitter. Customize your group with useful information, don’t flood rooms with useless, unrelated activity. Let people know more about you, and let them know where they can find you. Remember, some people only use specific networks, so you can cover your ground in reaching more fans.

The main reasons I like Friendfeed are its viral possibilities. For instance, someone is subscribed to you and they comment on an article link you submitted about your blog. That comment is now on that user’s profile and being shown to his/her subscriber list. Great way to get more free promotion and exposure. Secondly, I like the fact that you can create a group and let users submit their thoughts and content into your group. It gives me the feel of a real time forum.

Friendfeed is also great for your search engine ranking. When I do a search for this blog in Google for “hip hop distribution”, the Hip Hop Distribution Friendfeed room shows up at #9, complementing my other top articles listed. That is great news for musicians. Imagine a fan does a search for your band name and finds your Friendfeed group on the first page of results. It can give them a great summary of where to find you in this social confusion called Web 2.0.

Feel free to share some music marketing ideas, thoughts, articles or even music in the Hip Hop Distribution group Introduce yourself and lets begin the real networking.

There is a great article on Mashable describing ways to optimize your Friendfeed experience, if that is of interest to you. Organize your social media campaign and see what needs to be addressed.