SXSW is over, which for a music blogger means the email inbox will be a lot lighter. The weeks leading up to Austin's music festival left some of us with a barrage of press releases and concert updates.

The flurry of emails inspired Coolfer to lay out some tips to labels and publicists, to help them better and more effectively reach out to bloggers. These are suggestions that should be viewed as constructive criticism intended to help all parties, not negative attacks on how some labels and publicists communicate.

• Know the music interests of the blogger. This is pretty simple but not everybody appears to know who they're emailing. Of course, there's a fine line to walk. Most bloggers are pretty open minded and like to discover new music, but if you read a site for just a few weeks you should know whether or not your music is a good fit. Many bloggers I've talked to bemoan being sent music that they feel should be obvious they won't like.

• Make the information easy to read and the important information easy to find. Just like some one-sheets and artist bios, emails from labels/publicists can be a torrid mess of information. Choose whatever format you want, but the important information should be clearly visible and as close to the top as possible. If the purpose of the email is to send links to a download, for example, make that clear up front or the blogger may not make it further into the email to find out what you've sent.

• Make the emails personal. You don't have to address each blogger individually – though it would help. At the very least your emails should have a personable tone. Being terse isn't necessarily bad, but because of the impersonal nature of email and the tendency for the reader to misinterpret the writer's intentions, it can sometimes be misinterpreted by the reader.

• Be sure to include these links: Artist page, MySpace page, label page.

• Put the markup in emails. (Suggested by Information Leafblower and wholeheartedly seconded by Coolfer) Nobody yet has done this, but it would be a huge help. The labels and publicists would be wise to give page-ready markup to bloggers as a time saver. By this I mean an email that contains audio and video links should include the HTML for those links. Bloggers would have to just copy and paste. It would be a little extra work but a blogger would be more likely to post the link if the markup was already done.

For example, instead of sending a URL for an MP3 file, write it as:
<a href="http://www.yourband.com/songtitle.mp3">Your Band's "Song"</a>.