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Blog feeds are one of the most essential and elementary tools you should have in hand when you start marketing your music online. They are easy to setup, easier to check on a daily basis and full of invaluable information that will quite literally make you more successful.

The only two things you need are a blog reader – something you can get for free from Microsoft Office or Google – and an internet connection to access those feeds. When you visit a blog that you think will provide you with a solid stream of regular information, simply click on the “subscribe”, “add rss”, or “add feed” links that you will find at the bottom of the page (here at maxlowe.net they’re just to the right of this post. Click and try it out!). Automatically, you will now receive every post from that blog in your reader whenever a new post is added. You won’t need to remember to visit a dozen different blogs every morning. Just open your reader and look through the new posts that were made.

The First Feed on Your List

If you are even partially considering making a name for your band online through social networks, you must subscribe to Mashable.com’s feed as early as possible. The site, which features information on essentially every aspect of the social networking scene, constantly provides new tips, websites, and links to get in on the ground floor of powerful new marketing tools.

For example, last year Mashable posted their 90+ Essential Music and Audio Websites. The list, which includes a heavy combination of radio directories, social networking, music discovery, music marketplaces, and plenty of other kinds of sites, is exactly the kind of resource that can be exactly what you need when getting started. There are millions of sites online that claim to provide good content for the aspiring musician, but only a few actually do – and sites like Mashable gather those links and lay them out nicely and with plenty of information to help you decide where to go.

You might be wondering why a site solely devoted to social networking is vital to your blog feed though – and this goes for any website you come across that provides social networking news and updates. The Internet is an incredibly dynamic interface. Every day, there are thousands of new services created and thousands more that fail. To keep track of everything that is going up and what it can offer you is an incredibly hard process.

Mashable and its social network tracking brethren come in at this point and provide you with constant, uninterrupted updates on the social networking world. If MySpace changes their musician pages, you will know here right away. If Facebook adds a new service for artists, you will find out here. And on top of it all, you get the added benefit of lists such as the one above, providing endless resources to help you keep expanding your social networking and spread the name and purpose of your band.