Z-Blog

Zemanta is a free blogging add-on that recommends you content while you write. This case study presents how bloggers who blog or mention musicians and their albums in their blog posts can increase fidelity of their posts as well as easily add affiliate codes for Amazon.com.

Benefits of using Zemanta while blogging about music and artists:

• We can recommend links and images for over 1,1 million Albums, Artists and Record Labels
• Automatic link recommendation to Artist Home pages and Wikipedia entries
• Amazon.com integration – linking to CD listing and one click cover inclusion in your blog
• Amazon.com affiliate support
• Automatically find other similar blog posts

How does it work?

1. Install Zemanta for free from http://www.zemanta.com/download . Zemanta supports WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, LiveWriter and 7 other platforms.

2. Log-in into your blog platform and start writing, you’ll see an extra widget right-side to your text editor, where recommendations will appear:

Zemanta recommending content for Supergrass

3. Start writing. Lets say you want to talk about an album by Smartgress:

Today I decided to listen to album Diamond Hoo Ha from Supergrass. They’re an English alternative rock band from Oxford and have been on the scene from 1993.

You just enter it into your blog and recommendations in above screenshot will appear.

4. Clicking on them will automatically make them part of your blog post:

Applied recommendations

5. After publish, you’ll have a blog post with hyperlinks, articles to others writing about the same album or artist. Besides album covers you’ll also get images of artists from different public appearances like interviews or concerts.

Published blog with Zemanta recommendations

6. (Optional). You can also set you own Amazon.com affiliate ID for all recommended links and covers (covers are hyperlinked to their Amazon.com CD)

Zemanta.com Amazon affiliate setting

Related articles to connect to other blogs

While you write your post, Zemanta finds related articles to your blog posts. This means that we’ll find reviews from other bloggers, blog posts from musicians and others who are fans or somehow involved with the artist you’re talking about.

For Music, Zemanta is tracking over 1000 different music related blogs as well as pages and blogs of artists.

On top of that, bloggers can also setup their own list of blogs to follow and we’ll make sure to recommend posts from there. This way it’s really easy to link to reviews of your friends, without having to search all of their blogs.

Related articles in Zemanta as chosen by blogger

Examples of posts from existing users:

Image via Wikipedia

[..] Next, George Thorogood and the Deleware Destroyers.  It was an all day music festival at Los Angeles Collesium headlilng the Rolling the Stones.  George came on after a long line of mediorce bands and livened us up.  After they played it was J Geils and then the Stones.  I don’t think I could  live through another one of those all day things again….. [..]
Source: Layla’s Classic Rock – What do Peter Frampton, George Thorogood and Elton John Have in Common?

Image by Sigalakos via Flickr

[..] I recognized the song Reckoner from Radiohead’s album In Rainbows in tonight’s episode of Life (Evil… and His Brother Ziggy).

I didn’t notice it in the first series of Life, but the music in this series is absolutely fantastic. [..]

Source: Wizard’s Blog – Radiohead – Reckoner