Welcome!
Pagan Song started out as a fan site for the Crow Women pagan choir. We opened up to other writers in 2021 and now we have an ever-growing group of pagan musicians contributing. The website is a resource for pagan folk who are interested in pagan music. Our central mission is to help our readers incorporate music into their spiritual practice. Why? Because, as Alec shows in one of his posts, music is magic. Want to help out with that? Become one of our bloggers!
Why write for Pagan Song?
Use your blog post to promote your own music. Link your post to wherever you sell your music. Invite readers to become your Patreon subscribers. Invite them to read your own blog or website. Link, link, link!
Of course, you also get to support the growth of pagan music in general, and to nurture the pagan community through music. Pagan Song has published well over 300 articles by more than 30 different writers. Those articles remain available on the website forever. We are a rich music resource for paganfolk, and you can be part of that.
What to write about
1. Songs for ritual
Our slogan is “music for your magic”. Your blog post could become part of our online Book of Shadows, our tome of magical music, being created one blog post at a time.
Feature one of your songs, and show how the reader can use it in their rituals. The more specific your instructions are, the better. Readers love getting practical advice direct from the songwriter. You can make up a spell or ritual for the post, or report on a ritual you or others did that used your song. You can focus on music for solitary ritual, group ritual or big rituals at festivals. Whatever your songs lend themselves to.
We always offer a blog post for each of the 8 Sabbats as that season arrives. Do you have a Sabbat song that can be used to celebrate the holiday? Alexian’s article Celebrating Beltane with Pagan Music is a good example. Our authors also write about the various rites of passage, such as handfastings and funerals, and the songs that go with them.
2. Story of the song, album or band
Share with the reader the background to one of your songs. What was the inspiration? What was your composition process like? How did you go about recording it? What’s it like to perform it? What does this song mean to you, and to your fans? How does it fit into the culture and beliefs of modern neopaganism? This category of post gives the reader the inside scoop about one of your songs. These posts are examples: Cast Away (Arthur Hinds), Crow Whispers (Louis Garou), and Last Tree Falling (George of Cernunnos Rising).
Some articles may cover more than a song or two. You can write about an album as a whole, or about what’s up with your band generally. An example of the latter is What Ever Happened to Gaia Consort? by Chris Bingham. We welcome album release posts, like Wendy Rule’s Meadowlark: Singing the Magic of the Land. Some posts are more focused on a person, such as the memorial post for PJ Seale, written by Spiral Rhythm. We also like articles that are interviews with pagan musicians, if you feel like doing an article about one of your heroes of pagan music, like this one about Diana Earthmission.
3. Music and Pagan Living
Pagans want to live a magical, spirit-infused life. You support them in this quest by showing how music fits into a pagan lifestyle. We’re creating an online pagan cookbook, with articles like Samhain Ancestors Chili. Our website is also a resource for home brewers, as in the post Babalon’s Blood Mead. You can link a song to a witchy crafts project, like the posts Mask Making for Pagan Rituals and A Lammas Corn Husk Dolly. If you have arts and crafts skills of some kind, these step-by-step articles can be fun to create.
You could write a post that explores how to live pagan values, how to connect with Deity, how to be a witch. Ritual activities may or may not be included, but a song is always featured. For example, Ginger Ackley has written a lovely series about incorporating the elements of air, fire, earth and water into daily life. Do you have a song that will inspire or empower readers? Write about it! A recent inspirational blog post was Alexander Adams’ Empowerment of Magic through Music. We invite you to write about what you’re passionate about.
4. Music How-to
For our readers who write songs, and for those who sing or play an instrument, we offer one-musician-to-another advice. Using your own music as an example, instruct the reader on the craft of music making. Examples: Celia’s article on using a looper and Gina’s article about performing.
5. Mix and match
Many of our blog posts incorporate more than one of these themes, of course. You’re welcome to do this, too. For example, the post Befriending the Dark Goddess explores the pagan worldview, gives the story behind a song, and gives instruction for a ritual that uses the song.
We publish a wide range of types of articles. Have an idea that doesn’t fit into any of the above categories? So long as it’s related to pagan music, we’re open to it.
Guidelines
To make your post fit with the style of the Pagan Song blog, please follow theses guidelines.
Write to our mission and audience
This website is about pagan music and magic. Most posts are focused on a specific pagan theme, and a related song or group of songs. Our readers are pagans of various traditions, so you’ll write from a pagan perspective to a pagan audience.
Follow Pagan Song’s structure and layout.
Here’s a suggested format. It’s ok to vary from this if you wish. If the flow of your writing takes you in a different direction, that’s totally ok. But here’s the outline if you need a place to start.
1. Title
2. Featured image. This becomes the thumbnail image for your blog post everywhere on the website and on the internet
3. An opening paragraph or series of paragraphs, which is the only section NOT introduced by a header title. Let the reader know what the article is about.
4. Each of the sections of your article. We suggest 2 to 6 sections. Each section has this structure:
a. An image introducing the theme of the section. YouTube links work as images, as do photos and graphics.
b. A heading for the section
c. the content of the section. This always has some of your writing, and can also include lyrics, audio, video links, supplementary photos, charts, lists, etc.
—repeat for each of your main points. —
5. An image to introduce your conclusion
6. Concluding paragraph
7. After that, the editor will insert the link to your bio page, and the end-of-post text that concludes all of our posts, encouraging readers to join our Patreon. Don’t try to do this yourself, Alane will take care of it.
Here’s an example of an article that follows our preferred format: Coming Soon…New Crow Women Album!
Position your article to be read (Basics of SEO: Search Engine Optimization)
You spent all this time writing your blog post. Don’t you want people to read it? You have control over this! Many readers come into Pagan Song through Google searches. It’s actually pretty easy to get Google to send lots of readers to your article. Just put yourself into the reader’s mind and figure out what they would search for if they’re looking for the material you wrote about. These are your keywords and key phrases. Google pays the most attention to 4 things when deciding whether to send a reader your way.
- The title. Google prioritizes the title in deciding whether to offer your post to readers. One of our articles with the very highest number of visits is titled “Chants for Winter Solstice Rituals” because that is literally what readers type into the Google search bar when they want that information. And Google sends readers to that post. A lot of readers.
- Paragraph #1. After the title, your first paragraph is the next most important element for capturing search engines, so pepper it with words that readers might use to find the material your post is about. At the very least, try to use some relevant words that bring in our target audience, like “pagan” and “Goddess”. Google pulls key terms out of paragraph one much more than from the rest of your article. Don’t waste the opportunity.
- Headings. In WordPress, all headings are tagged as priority text for Google searches. If you structure your post with 3-5 sections, and start each one with a heading, you have these additional chances to pull in readers from Google searches. For example, Alexian’s article Celebrating the Spark of Life at Imbolg includes headings such as “The Feast of Brigid”, which is something readers might type into a search engine. That’s one of 2 reasons why we suggest you choose to use headings. (The other is for readability.)
- The keyword phrase that’s entered for the article within the WordPress Dashboard for that article. Alane enters this for each article, based on the article’s content. You’re welcome to let her know what you think that should be.
Specific information about the elements of your blog post.
Title
Please give your post a title of 6 words or less. (Long titles cause formatting problems on the website.) As mentioned above, if your title actually describes the content of the post, Google will send more readers to the post.
Your written article
Our average post currently runs about 1,000 words. Please write at least 600 words, and try not to exceed 1,400 words.
Because half our readers are reading on a cell phone, big blocks of text are bad. Short paragraphs are great. Breaking up text with photos, video links, quote or lyrics boxes, bulleted lists, etc. is good.
Please include 2 or more section headings in your post. This helps Google find your information, so please make headings reflect what readers might be searching for.
You are welcome to interview members of your band, or any other musicians whom you mention in your post. Quotes give texture to your writing.
Try to feature at least one song of yours, either an original or a cover song. You can also include songs performed by other pagan artists. We do this a lot. It makes us happy to support pagan artists. And sometimes, a song someone else wrote is perfect for the point you’re trying to make.
Please include links in your post. Definitely link to your own website. Readers should find it easy to buy your song and albums through the links in your post. You can also link to other pagan sites and organizations.
We like to address WIIFM (What’s in it for me?) In addition to finding your post interesting, it’s great if it provides tips, skills or instructions for ritual, magic or music, or a combination of the above. Please find a way to make your post useful to the reader. This is the mission of this website, so please think of a way to connect your topic with our readers’ needs.
Images and YouTube links
Each post has 1 header photo and at least 3 internal photos. Pictures of you are great, as are pictures that depict the theme of your post. Square or landscape format, please, not tall pictures. If you can provide around four photos, that’s wonderful. If not, just let us know and our webmaster will choose photos. We use either photos we took ourselves or public use photos. YouTube links show up as an image, so you can substitute them for photos.
Audio
If there is a way the reader can listen to your song, that can be embedded in your post, that is desirable. We use mostly YouTube links for this. Other options are an MP3 audio clip or a link to another service, such as Spotify or Bandcamp. While you’re getting readers interested in your song, it helps if they can hear at least part of it.
Patreon blurb
Your pay for your blog post comes directly from our Patreon income. At the same time as you turn in your blog post, also give Alane a short (~100 words) little greeting to our financial supporters. Only the patrons get to see your little love note. Instructions for your Patreon paragraph are here.
How to submit your blog post
If you are an experienced WordPress user, we can give you “author” access to the website and you can enter your text, pictures, etc. yourself in the site Dashboard. If not, you can email all your materials to Alane and she’ll put them into the website for you. Sending the text of your article in the body of an email works very well.
Be familar with the blog
Please subscribe to the blog–you can do that on our homepage or at the bottom on this page. If you read the blog, you’ll get lots of ideas for your own posts, and develop a sense of our style. It’s a good blog, too!
Bio Page
Every author gets their own bio page. For your page, we need a good headshot of you, a bio description (you can re-use one you already have) and a list of links to your online platforms. You can click through to examples from here. Look in the “Invited Bloggers” section and you can see how other artists have done their bio pages.
Rights and Compensation
We pay $25 per post, paid upon publication of the completed article. As the site becomes more sucessful, we will increase the pay scale. Plus, writing a blog post can be part of your marketing efforts. We fully support you using us in this way.
If you mention a product, and you have an affiliate account promote it, you are welcome to use your own link so the potential pittance flows to you. If you don’t do affiliate marketing, we humbly ask that you let us link any products you mention over to our accounts. We currently have affiliations with Amazon and Etsy. Links to products on those sites help support the costs of the website.
You own the rights to your article. If you want to publish it again somewhere else, you can do that.
We want you!
You’re qualified to be a writer on Pagan Song if most of the following is true of you:
- you self-identify as a pagan musician
- you play music that has pagan/heathen/goddess content (you may also have other types of content in your songs)
- you are currently active in the pagan music scene. You play the pagan festivals or other pagan gigs. You maintain a relationship with the pagan audience and with pagan music media outlets (pagan radio, tv, magazines, etc). You have released some new pagan songs or an album within the past 5 years. (We’re also interested in pagan music pioneers of the past who are not producing anymore, if they are well-known and still alive and well and able to write about their music.)
- You have an active online presence. You have at least 2 of the following: A YouTube channel, a band website, a Bandcamp or ReverbNation page, a Twitter feed, a sales page on an online store like Amazon, an artist FaceBook page, a blog or vlog, an artist Instagram, a Patreon campaign, a Tik Tok presence, etc. You post on some platform somewhere at least once a month
- You’re are on the streaming services, like Spotify, Apple Music & Pandora.
- You are an artist or band that Pagan Song’s readership would be excited about
- You can write about pagan magic and music–your own and/or that of other pagan musicians
We sure hope you’ll become a contributor to the Pagan Song blog. A post from you will enrich our blog so much! We believe that writing about your music for our site can be a useful part of your marketing efforts. Let’s help one another.
The Editor in Chief answers your FAQs
When does this blog come out?
Once a week on Thursdays.
Yes, but when will my blog post come out?
If it’s seasonal, we’ll schedule it at the appropriate time of year. If it’s not seasonal, you and I will negotiate a date, usually a few months in the future.
Does anyone read your blog posts?
That varies wildly, depending on how many people share, link to and otherwise promote our posts. The post with the most views has 5,886. A typical viewership is about 350 people. If you use words in your title, first paragraph and headings that pagans are likely to use as search terms in Google, your post will get a lot more hits over time. Ask yourself what someone interested in what you wrote about would type into their search box, and then make sure those words appear in a prominent spot in your article. One of our most-read posts is called “Honoring the Horned God“. It gets a lot of views each year because that’s what people are Googling when they want that information.
How can I make sure lots of people read my post?
Share a link to the post in your feeds on Facebook, Instagram, Patreon—wherever you are. Put a link on your website. (Kellianna did a nice job with this.) Mention it in your live and online appearances. The more of us do this, the more everyone’s posts will be read.
What do you do to keep my post alive and being read by fans of pagan music?
Every post is collected on one of the pages of the website, and the link stays there permanently. So, if you write about Samhain, a link to your post is right there on the Samhain page forever. People do click through to the old blog posts, months and years later.
How many posts can I write?
You can write one, two or three posts a year.
I wrote a thing that was published elsewhere. Can I use it again for a Pagan Song post?
Possibly. If you have a blog of your own and would like to re-publish your blog posts on Pagan Song, discuss that with Alane.
Are you plotting world domination?
No, but when I sit in my hot tub with a glass of mead, I imagine that many of the most talented, popular and prolific pagan artists and bands from around the world each contribute a couple of blog posts a year. Pagan Song morphs from a Crow Women band site to a kick-ass site about the pagan music scene, written by the pagan music scene. A few years after its inception in February of 2019, Pagan Song is one of the top 10 pagan websites. That’s my dream and I’m willing to work to achieve it. Have ideas for how to get there? Come help me plot.