One of the thing I love about working with artists is that the very best ones are unafraid to speak their minds, not only in person, but in writing and (most importantly), through their work. Such is the case with Gwenn Seemel’s blog post from yesterday, A Business Model for An Artist Who Does Not Use Copyright.

I don’t normally repost someone else’s blog post, but I think Gwenn’s post is so important, and so good, that I have to repost an extensive quote from it here:

The artist begins her-his career in obscurity, honing a craft and making work that few people see.  She-he is not making money from her-his work.

Slowly, the artist builds a following, showing more and more of the work publicly and beginning to make some money, either from selling work or from some other means related to the creative work she-he does.

One day, the following becomes a genuine fan base.  At this point, whenever the artist wants to launch a project, she-he first turns to the fan base and asks for support.  The fan base funds the project; the artist creates the work; the artist disseminates the work freely, without restrictions on use, commercial or otherwise.

The fan base that supported the project from the beginning still buys special edition versions of the media that’s being distributed freely because they love the artist that much.  Additionally, more people become fans because the work is so accessible that it reaches many new audiences.

The artist continues crowd-sourcing the funding for her-his projects.  She-he probably gets less exposure than artists who are promoted through the middle man of a media corporation (then again, only a very small percentage of creatives ever get the backing of those corporation and those who do are usually required to sign over the rights to the work to the corporations).  That said, she-he is nurturing her-his relationship with the audience, building much stronger ties than are possible through a corporation.

The artist works in this way until she-he tires of the creative life.

This is how Gwenn makes her living, so she knows whereof she speaks. it’s one of the things that I try to help artists understand here at The Abundant Artist.

Intellectual Property Law is a Huge Problem

Technology entrepreneurs and artists have a great deal in common. It takes passion, drive, technique, and a great deal of creativity to thrive in either case. If you don’t have an idea so good that it consumes your every waking moment, you probably don’t want to be an entrepreneur, or an artist.

Because of the huge investment in time and personal energy that innovation takes, it can come as a heavy, heavy blow when you find out that someone copies your work and gets credit for it. When they are receiving accolades, money, and prestige for something you did first, or something you did better, it can absolutely crush your spirit. I’ve seen it happen to artists, web developers, software engineers, and many others.

Contemporary Intellectual Property law doesn’t prevent this – it encourages it. In NPR’s piece When Patents Attack, the Planet Money team explores the world of Patent Trolls – companies that buy up large collections of patents just so that they can sue other companies who produce technology that might be covered under these patents. This happens because US Intellectual Property law is so convoluted that many patents often exist for essentially the same technology, and these lawsuits can drag on for years in the courts.

The story highlights how large corporations like Apple and Google spend Billions buying up patents to defend themselves from patent trolls. A startup technology firm’s biggest nightmare is a patent troll coming after them – there is essentially no way that a small company can spend the millions of dollars it takes to defend a patent case in court.

Artists Are Helpless to Enforce Copyright

Just like these small startup firms that cannot sue large corporations, an individual artist is often at the mercy of litigants and large corporations. In 2009, John Unger, a well known metal sculpture artist, had his fire bowl designs ripped off by another artist, who then sued Unger to break his copyrights, and John had to raise money via Kickstarter to defend his copyrights. Another artist, who goes by imakeshinythings on Etsy, got ripped off by Urban Outfitters. There was essentially nothing that she could do, so she took to her blog. She raised a big stink, and Urban Outfitters pulled the pieces.

What about those artists who don’t have a big following, who can’t raise a stink against large corporations or who don’t have enough money to sue thieves?

Artists & Entrepreneurs Can Work Together

I’m not exactly sure how it would work (I’m no legal expert), but it seems like artists and technology entrepreneurs have an incentive to work together to find solutions to working around copyright and patent laws.

Gwenn’s comments above are a great start. She has shown that artists can create the life that they want, even if it’s unconventional or outside of the normal way of doing things in the art world. I would like to imagine a world where artists don’t have to worry about companies ripping them off because even if someone steals from them, it just reinforces their existing brand. I’d also like to see a world where large corporations don’t have to spend billions of dollars defending their innovations because of poorly written law.

Entrepreneurs and artists are the creative engines that are driving our 21st century world. In the USA, at least, traditional knowledge work, which used to highly valued, is quickly becoming automated, outsourced, and commodified. Intellectual property law, as it exists today, stifles innovation. Those creatives engines should be able to find ways to innovate around these legal road blocks and come up with a new system.

How would you create a career without worrying about copyright or patent law?

image by caffeine and malice

Since I’ll be in Salt Lake City this weekend, I though I would share a picture of one of the most famous buildings in the Western United States, the Salt Lake City Temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. It’s an amazingly beautiful building, and, here’s the thing that gets me, it was built by hand. It took 50 years, including the time that they started over because they found out that the foundation was cracked.

Anyway. Things I love this weekend:

Tips for Selling Art on Facebook: A Success Story – Lori Mcnee’s blog is absolutely fantastic, for those who don’t know. Read about how Kelli Bickman sold 7 paintings in 48 hours.

INFOGRAPHIC: How Star Wars Change the World – I’m a giant nerd and I love Star Wars. It’s obligatory. What’s amazing is seeing how influential one film maker can be in his industry. George Lucas is responsible for THX (the loud sound at the beginning of all movies), Pixar (Toy Story, A Bug’s Life), Industrial Light and Magic (most of the special effects in Hollywood), and a whole bunch of other stuff.

The Business of Storytelling – If you’re an artist, there’s lots of opportunities out there. Storytelling is a big buzzword in corporate marketing right now. Check out this blog for more on how that works.

Kids, don't be like me.

I have a confession: I am about to become a woman without a website.

My current site, which I created through Other People’s Pixels and chose not to renew, is about to blink out of existence any day now, and then the only way to see my work online will be through my Vimeo channel, which is woefully sparse. How did I get myself into this pickle? A fatal combination of fear, laziness, and complacency. This is my cautionary tale- because in the immortal words of Joey Comeau, “If you can’t be a good example, you have the obligation to be a horrible warning.”

My first website…

was a Frankenstein monster spawned by Dreamweaver and created to showcase my (in hindsight) rather hilarious undergraduate portfolio. It took months to build (a semester of web design for artists 101, in fact) and was STILL pretty lame. And I don’t even want to TALK about how long and unintelligible the URL was! This was about five years ago, too, when Facebook was still just for college kids and Twitter hadn’t fundamentally changed the way people communicate.

When the time came for me to put together  my “official” artist site, I was about to present my MFA thesis, and the idea of putting in the work to build ANOTHER site was as daunting as the idea of paying someone to do it for me. I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but grad school is expensive! I saw companies like the aforementioned OPP as a happy medium- I’d be able to control content and some design elements, but the heavy lifting would be left to the experts, at a fraction of the cost. At the time, it seemed like my best option.

Times Change

Problem was, between 2006-2011 my work had fundamentally changed, and so had the world. For a newly-minted time-based artist such as I, prices for sites like OPP jumped significantly. By the time I figured out how to format and Flash-encode my videos for uploading to my site, I realized that the quality of said videos was sub-par, and that there were no analytics to determine if people were actually watching them. But I had paid for the full year up-front, and I wasn’t about to let that money go to waste. I resolved to do the best with what I had, and make the most of the customizations I was afforded.

In making my decision regarding whether or not to renew the site, I thought about downgrading to an image-based site and just linking to Vimeo-hosted works from within it. But media quality wasn’t my only problem with my online face- the frame designs and layouts offered by OPP were just not fit for the content I wanted to add! There is no way to upload art writings I wanted people to see, or list links to other artist sites, without annoying scrollbars built in to the frames. I’ve experimented with the interface so much that I might as well have built the silly thing from scratch in the first place. I didn’t like the blog/news format at all, either. I couldn’t add installation shots of shows I was in, for example, and people couldn’t leave public comments, so dialogue was impossible.

Artist Website Templates Don’t Work

Meanwhile, I began reading more and more about the perils of “stock design” sites, how they fail to set artists apart due to their telltale template formatting, and how they aren’t set up for the kind of social media integration that’s so de rigeur these days. You can link to a Facebook page, but there’s no “like” button embedding, no “retweet this” options, and no way to build a feed into the home page. When I met Cory and started reading this blog, the WordPress option became more and more attractive, especially since I have used the WordPress format a lot in work for other clients. I’ve shied away before, citing time constraints, but I am officially out of excuses. It’s time to make the site my work deserves!

In the following weeks, I’ll be taking Cory’s WordPress for Artists course as part of The Abundant Artist Community and sharing my journey with you. Maybe my experience will convince some of you that the perfect site really IS within your grasp. If I can do it, after all, anyone can.

I recently returned to the City of Roses after a stint in the Big Apple, and although I was technically there to see my client’s film screen at the Museum of Modern Art, I also wanted to see how the galleries in one of the world’s premiere art cities use (or don’t use) social media to connect with their artists, customers, and communities. Since getting back to the Pacific Time Zone (just in time to spring forward, I might add), I also examined the galleries in Los Angeles, aka New York’s evil twin, to see if there were any parallels or divergences.

You see, by examining how the blue-chip galleries of an arts metropolis utilize social media and social networking tools, I thought perhaps artists who are represented by smaller galleries (or themselves) could glean some wisdom- after all, the galleries I looked at do a very brisk business and many have been around since before Facebook was even a glimmer in a Harvard student’s eye-on what should and shouldn’t be a part of their online marketing strategy. The results were very interesting, to say the least!

So, what can artists and galleries learn from the top dogs?

1. Social networking is a luxury for them and a necessity for you.

Galleries of blue-chip caliber often have decades under their belt, and in that time, they have built up a stellar reputation, close ties with their client base, and connections surrounding cultural infrastructure. They represent some of the heaviest hitters in the art world, and that frankly speaks for itself. That said, I was surprised at which galleries had Facebook and Twitter presence and which did not- for example, the Mary Boone Gallery doesn’t have a Facebook page or Twitter account, which I get. But Gagosian Gallery, which has been around for over twenty years and has multiple locations in New York, California, Europe, and Asia, also has over ten thousand Facebook fans and intense wall activity. By contrast, the LA galleries like Blum and Poe and Honor Fraser have a much more consistent Facebook presence across the board. Perhaps the proximity to Silicon Valley and Palo Alto has something to do with it. What can we take away from this? Well, first of all, if you’re a high-end, power-player gallery, enough people are already Tweeting about you that you don’t have to- how nice! For the bajillion galleries and art spaces below the upper crust, however, any hustle is good and necessary, and social networking is NOT an option, it’s a must. In a way, it’s even a great equalizer- if you can get your gallery’s Facebook activity booming, you’ll rise up in the news feed just as high as a an art space whose annual budget would make you cry!

2. Social media should be used to bring the gallery to the people.

I’m talking about everything from posting links to reviews to posting videos of artist talks. Post everything. Reach your content tentacles out far and wide! Part of what makes Gagosian Gallery’s Facebook presence so powerful is that they post often, and they post multimedia. It’s not enough to just create events and share photos of said events! If your gallery’s artists are showing elsewhere, let people know. If they win awards or get great write-ups, let people know! Record everything. While I was in New York, I had the pleasure of checking out Splatterpool Artspace in Brooklyn, which is a live-work gallery focused on emerging artists mostly in that borough. Not only does this gallery post YouTube videos of artist talks on Facebook, they also have a “channel” on their website for videos of artist interviews. The more you can put your demographics in touch with the work and the artists that make it, the better: That way, even if a fan can’t make it to the space, they can still feel connected to the shows and the artist.

3. Facebook: The Final Frontier: These are the voyages of The Abundant Artist!

Was that just too nerdy for words? Bear with me! As I mentioned earlier, many of the most reputable and exclusive galleries in the world don’t utilize social media. Maybe it’s because they’re too busy selling more art than all of Etsy, or maybe it’s because it would affect their caché. Either way, even when they do take advantage of the utterly free marketing and enormous scope of social media and networking, most blue-chip galleries don’t do it like Gagosian. In fact, their Facebook pages are basically just extensions of the “news” section of their website. The sum of what I learned from these galleries and their networking habits is that by and large, the little fish still have this arena locked down. That’s the good news. But little fish have to swim twice as fast, and if you don’t have a reputation to precede you, you must put the time and energy in so that you can reach out. This generation of artists and cultural workers is so incredibly fortunate to have access to this technology, technology that was basically science fiction when many of the galleries I’ve named in this post were founded. You might not have “…a dealer in Tokyo…a rep in Paris, …an agent in cologne… a gallery in New York!”, as the lyrics to The Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Art Star” go, but you have the ability to shape your own destiny. These grand-dames of the art world don’t hold the keys to the castle anymore.

A gallery is both a cultural ambassador and a storefront, which is needless to say a unique position. In this series, Cory and I will tackle how galleries use (or should use) social media to make this duality work for them and not against them, how artists can network with galleries, and how galleries can help artists with social media.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: consumers want to be educated about the thing they’re interested in buying, and nowhere is that more true than in a gallery setting. But the fact is, many galleries struggle with the very basic challenge of getting people through the door.  You’d be surprised how many of my clients have shared that with me, along with stories of passersby who think they need to pay to even come in and look at the art! Why is that? Why, when art is such a universal gift to the world, do so many people feel alienated by it? For those of us with backgrounds in art history or studio art, the gallery is a place to be inspired and the conduit to connect our art with the public. We know that gallery staff are on hand to answer our questions and show us examples of what we’re interested in, even if we have trouble putting it into words. But if art isn’t a part of your daily life, it might be embarrassing to ask questions and not know the right terms for things. Beyond First Thursday, which is more about wine and socializing than actually looking at artwork, why would you make the effort?

Art Galleries Must Embrace Social Media

Online marketing and social media, for galleries that have been around for decades building up a loyal list of clientele, can seem like a strange use of time or a flash in the pan. But it’s these strategies that can break down barriers and make new customers feel more confident about buying art. If someone doesn’t feel the pressure to dress up, talk in artspeak, and buy what they see in front of them, they might be a lot more open to the process of building a collection. Consumers with disposable income that love to buy handbags and fashion online might also see a connection between commodity art objects and other high-ticket purchases.

However, the fundamental difference between selling art online and in a gallery is the lack of tangible education – you can’t physically see the work or hear from the gallerist about it. While some galleries are great about updating inventory online, it’s not enough to simply show what they’ve got. The key, just like with any other kind of online store, is to give as much information as possible.

A great example of this: You know how when you go to buy a piece of clothing online, you want to read all of the customer reviews to get an idea of fit and quality? Galleries can utilize the same principle through posting links to reviews, essays, and articles written about certain artists and works. Do people feel alienated by certain kinds of art, like abstract or minimal painting? Why aren’t there more gallery blogs that break down art history and theory for the uninitiated? Why aren’t there discussion forums on a Facebook page, so that people can ask questions with a step of removal and avoid embarrassment? I know I wouldn’t want to buy a car or a computer unless I knew all the features and stats and could explain them to my friends when they ask why I bought this particular model. I certainly wouldn’t buy artwork without the same information!

These are tough times for the art market, everybody knows that. The best way for a gallery to stay afloat is to find new demographics, and if those demographics won’t come to the space to see the work, the space has to be brought to them. Keep in mind, however, the aforementioned duality of the gallery. If social media campaigns are skewed too far towards the commercial at the expense of the cultural, a gallery can lose its caché as a representative of fine art, and then it might as well sell Picasso posters for dorm room walls. Again, the key is education. Taste can’t be totally changed, but it can be manipulated through information. If a gallery takes the framework of the cultural ambassador and uses it as the foundation of their online marketing rather than trying to super-impose it onto an online store, the sell will suddenly become authentic and genuine, and the customer will feel that radiating out from their screen.

Stay tuned for the next installment of Galleries and Social Media, where Cory will delve deeper into how galleries can help artists in the digital age!

Last week, I led you through the essential criteria to consider when choosing a platform for crowdfunding a project. Now that you’ve done your research and made your choice, how do you bring home the win when the clock is ticking and you’re one of thousands and thousands of projects listed on the site? Fear not! Follow the five guidelines below, and you’ll soon be making those big dreams of yours a reality. I’ve compiled tips from a top industry insider as well as examples from all kinds of successful campaigns, and I’m passing this pile of wisdom on to you! Here’s how you raise the funds you need:

Be Smiling, Specific, Psyched, and Sympathetic. And Do it on Video.

-Slava Rubin, co-founder of IndieGoGo, shared a fascinating statistic with me: crowdfunding pitches with video content raise 112% more than pitches without videos. Let that sink in, and then go hook up your webcam. If you are a filmmaker, or know an A/V nerd who owes you a favor, then feel free to think big with your video pitch- just know that it’s not necessary to have a ton of bells and whistles if you can’t swing them. All of the projects mentioned below have fantastic pitch videos with a wide range of production values. You’ll see that what they all have in common is a clear and concise message. Not convinced yet? Here’s one more.

-In case we haven’t properly emphasized the importance of your message, this is another one of those “must-haves”, according to Slava. Any potential donor should get a very clear idea of the parameters of your project and what their money would be going towards. Clear and concise goals are the only way, other than your dynamic, from-the-heart pitch video, to inspire confidence in your potential donors.

-If at all possible, show rather than tell. Whether it’s examples of your past work or sketches, rough cuts, or other prototypes, you want your audience to be able to visualize your finished product. ESPECIALLY if you’re offering that product as part f the rewards program, you’re going to make people want it. Or at least, a piece of it.

Friends, Indeed (AKA, Cast a Wide Net)

-Slava has confirmed that the best strategy for crowdfunding a project is to reach out to your inner circle first. Establish validation to boost your product’s visibility, and then try to get your pitch out to every corner of the net! Are your friends and/or relatives avid bloggers or social media addicts? Enlist them! Get them to tweet and retweet, post links on their wall, and plug, plug, plug. It will only them take a minute or two, and they could open up whole new audiences and donation possibilities! Plus, it will momentarily distract your mother from tagging photos of your awkward stage.

- Network! With any luck, you have a built-in professional community around you, and while they, like you, need more money than they have to give away, they can give you exposure, both through social media and their various professional affiliations. All artists worth their salt look out for each other, so chances are, somebody’s going to look out for you.

-You may recall a recent TAA post on newsletters? Yeah. Singer Joy Ike wrote in a great post on crowdfunding for grassrootsy:

“My newsletter was the single most important part of letting people know about the campaign.”

There’s No Free Money (AKA, Give Great Perks)

-Name your donation levels in a clever and tied-in way (like The Loving Story, a documentary about the deeply personal side of the Civil Rights Movement that just reached funding on Kickstarter).

-Give the people what they want. Hint: It’s your product! If you’re using Kickstarter or another all-or-nothing crowdfunding site, then it is perfectly acceptable to offer samples of the finished product, ESPECIALLY if you offer them to backers before their official release, like Katie Zaffrann did with her debut EP! If you’re using IndieGoGo or another site that may not net you your total funds, then offering finished product is a bit riskier. However, you can always offer samples of your other work, or something equally personally invested. Stickers, 1” buttons, posters, autographed anything, even t-shirts with your project’s branding are all great ideas, like 100 Yen: The Japanese Arcade Experience and The Noun Project.

-Don’t JUST offer great rewards, put your donation levels in concrete terms, like Stephanie Inagaki did when she funded her jewelry line on Kickstarter. She asked for people to donate the equivalent of cab fare, their daily latte, a manicure, etc.! Ex: “For the price of a pack of cigarettes, you could_______! I will thank you. Your LUNGS will thank you!

Get Into It (AKA, Always Be Hustlin’)

-As we discussed in last week post, being proactive pays off- especially with the GoGo Effect, which affects your project’s visibility and reach. Again, there’s no free money, and in addition to your rewards, you’ll also have to give of your time. Independent filmmaker Gary King, who successfully funded his musical How Do You Write a Joel Schermann Song on Kickstarter, wrote the following in his blog “Lessons Learned in the Land of Crowdfunding”, which is actually a fantastic resource in its entirety:

“I understood this commitment going in from reading about how others handled their campaign…but I still wasn’t prepared for the realities of it.  Working on gaining exposure and new eyes every day was extremely time consuming.  Think of it like placing a media ad and having it in heavy rotation — but you’re doing it yourself and not relying on an agency.  I spent at least 4-6 hours every day on the campaign — if not more.”

Space that time out throughout the day, both to reach different waves of online users and to avoid getting burned out on your own project. Believe it or not, exhaustion can be read between the lines.

-Keep your donors updated! Most crowdfunding sites allow you to write updates, and you can use this as a means to both drive visibility and make potential donors feel a tangible involvement in the process. The Heavy Meta Tour used the updates as a way to document the international speaking tour, screening, and documentary filming that their donors made possible. If you’re to raise some, but not all, of your funding, then keep your donors posted! Let them know if you pursue other fundraising opportunities, make something work with what you have, or start a new campaign. If you don’t give up on them, they won’t give up on you.

-Adapt. If donations go from a stream to a trickle, try something new. Up the ante with your rewards, record a video update that creatively re-iterates your pitch, and capitalize on, or even create, a sense of urgency. Which brings us to our final tip:

Use Your Time Wisely (Also, Your Lack Thereof)

-Folk singer/songwriter Tyler Stenson moved from Portland, Oregon to Nashville, Tennesee, and successfully funded his folk EP “Long Before the Wheel” on Kickstarter. When we asked him to comment on his experience, he wrote:

“My most successful day of fundraising (where I raised about 33% of my funds in 24 hours) was when I did a digital push that simply said: ‘I need $27 more dollars to clear the $2,000 mark. Anyone who donates $27 or more in the next 24 hours will get a free download for ALL of my previous albums.’ By naming a SPECIFIC AMOUNT, in a SPECIFIC TIME-FRAME, with a SPECIFIC REWARD, tons and tons of people stepped up then and there. Like I said, 33% of my total was raised in that 24 hours.”

It might be worth noting here that because IndieGoGo doesn’t hold back funding until the end of the campaign, offering this kind of instant gratification might be a bit more doable.

-Remember that many campaigns reach their goal in the eleventh hour. Plan ahead, and play both the long and short game! Diligent use of your inner circle, professional contacts and influencers, and existing fan base to build momentum throughout the duration of the campaign will pay off in the home stretch. The more people are involved, the more people will want to see it succeed, the more they will try to make it happen. You can even offer rewards to donors who refer new donors! It’s not over ‘til it’s over.

Well there you have it: This, for now, concludes our Crowdfunding Guide for Artists. Do you feel riled-up and ready to take on crowdfunding? Do you have other questions or concerns? Reach out! Make your voice heard, and I’ll consult my crowdfunder all-stars. That’s what I’m here for.

Kathy makes Walking Together Cards. She emailed me a couple of months ago to ask for some help with getting the word out about her line of handmade cards designed for fundraising campaigns. Kathy is a good friend of mine. She saved my bacon back when Lissie and I moved to Oregon in 2007.

I always hear artists talk about how they can’t get the hang of technology, can’t blog, can’t do this or that. Often I hear age as an excuse. Let’s just say Kathy is ‘of a certain age,’ and that hasn’t slowed her down at all. She’s always had the attitude that she can do whatever she sets out to do.

Her website launched last week. I’m so excited for her. I know she’ll say that it’s not perfect and that it needs work (it does), but take a look at her blog and read her blog post We Did It Right. That simple, short blog post is powerful and if she had an existing following it would sell the **** out of some handmade cards. Guaranteed.

Don’t let anything stand in your way. Make your art. Get the word out. The only thing that can stop you is you.

image by moufflets

Several times over the past month I’ve asked my friends on Twitter and Facebook for examples of artists who have built their websites on WordPress. I only received a handful of examples.

I’m not talking about hosted sites on WordPress.com. I’m talking about a self-hosted website built using the Open Source WordPress software – there’s a big difference. WordPress.com is like Blogger (okay, slightly better than Blogger, but you get the idea) – it works fine for what it is, but in the end it doesn’t have near the flexibility that it needs to have in order to be a real website where you can sell your work and establish yourself as a brand.

The WordPress software is free, open source, and there are lots of tutorials around the Web to learn how to use WordPress effectively.

Artist Websites Built on WordPress

Below are some examples of Artist websites built on WordPress. They’re really quite good, and took just a couple of hours to put together.

1. Lensartwork.com – Chris Horner’s photography site is a free template built by Bizzthemes.com (though he says that full Flash gallery is a custom piece built by a friend).

2. TenEveryDayPainters.com

3. ZachReddy.com

Why Don’t More Artists Use WordPress?

As far as I can tell, the reasons artists have not widely adopted WordPress are the following:

They’re not aware of it. Most artists don’t spend a ton of time in the online world – well, probably not as much as me, at least, and may not have heard of WordPress. The thing is, hundreds of organizations from the very small to large companies like Wired, eBay, and CNN use WordPress.

They think it’s too complicated. WordPress is easy to use. There’s a famous video that shows how to set up and install WordPress in just 5 minutes. Here it is.

Displaying images. This is a legitimate obstacle with WordPress, but it can be overcome with minimal effort. Since there is unlimited access to the CSS & HTML, you can hack together whatever you want. In addition, there are a plethora of plugins that manage images.

Personally, I’m a big fan of using ecommerce plugins to display your images because you can add Buy Now buttons right along with your images. WP-Ecommerce is a free plugin you can use to set up your ecommerce. There’s also the popular NexGen Gallery which will create a Flash gallery for your images.

No time/Laziness. Some artists are legitimately busy with making and selling their art and don’t have time to learn how to build a site. If you feel like you are too busy to do it yourself, then hopefully you are also making enough money that you can afford to hire a developer to build a real website for you. If not, well…

So, if you aren’t using WordPress for your artist website, why not?

image by cambodia4kids

If you have a website and a blog as two separate places online, you may be wasting a lot of valuable opportunities.

Easy blogging services like Blogger have done a great job of encouraging thousands of people to start their own blogs. Artists who don’t know better will pay to have some sort of templated website created, then they’ll start a Blogger page for their blog. This is an easy solution to hit blogging on your art marketing check-off list.

The problem with this approach is that you’re going to get the most visitors on your blog, not your website. Why? Because your blog will have tons of writing about your art, with constantly updated new content. In addition, the comments will generate more new content and discussion, which encourages more people to come back to your blog over and over. While this is great for your blog, it generally means that your art gets ignored because it’s not right there along with all of your content.

Your blog and your website should be one and the same, both visually, and on the back end (they should live on the same server in the same directory). This helps not only your visitors, but also the search engines like Google. This can easily be accomplished with tools like WordPress. There are other options out there, but for the purpose of this post, we’ll just discuss WordPress. If you are using a different solution for your artist website and want to know how to merge your blog and website, then leave a comment below and we’ll see if we can help you.

An Art Blog and Artist Website on the Same Site

A self-hosted WordPress installation can easily be configured to look like a full-on website and not just a blog. Simply go to Settings > Reading and then select Front Page Displays > A Static Page. There, you can choose a single page that you create, and that will be the home page for your site. Then you can make your blog posts appear on a different page (I recommend creating a page called Blog and pointing them there). It’s that easy to create an artist website with WordPress.

Use Feedburner. Whether you are using WordPress, Blogger, or some other service, I recommend using Feedburner as a way to control your blog’s RSS feed. Just sign up for the service, drop your blog’s RSS feed into it, and follow the directions.

If you have a standalone blog that you’d like to merge with your website, there are a couple of tutorials that will show you how to merge your other blog into WordPress.

Problogger has a great post on migrating a WordPress.com site to a self-hosted WordPress.org installation.

Digital Inspiration has a tutoriall on how to move from Blogger to WordPress.

Merging Art Blog & Art Website = Overwhelm

Don’t let yourself get overwhelmed by all of this technology. There are tons of tutorials out there to learn how to do these sorts of things. In fact, in the very near future I’ll be creating an online community for artists who want to get serious about learning their online marketing. I firmly believe that the Web is the future for artists and for the art world. If you’d like to get a sneak peek at that community, you’ll want to make sure you are on the mailing list.

You’ve seen buttons like the ones above on websites all over the place. If you don’t use them, you are part of a rapidly shrinking group.

The rising generation of Internet users understand that these social bookmarking buttons are there to make it easier to share content.

What is Social Bookmarking?

It’s a fairly simple concept: see something you like, share it by clicking on a button that sends that content to other people. Among the millions of websites out there are sites that are specifically devoted to sharing interesting or useful tips for certain communities. There are sharing sites for all sorts of interests, and each one has its own culture and own set of rules (written & unwritten).

The shared content arrives in different ways, depending on the site. Stumbleupon has a toolbar you can install on your browser. Twitter has a real time scrolling page, as well as dozens of third-party applications that deliver your Tweets to your mobile device or computer. Other sites send you an email or text message. Facebook made a big splash at the beginning of February when they surpassed Google News as the biggest traffic source for breaking news.

How to Promote Art with Social Bookmarking

Really any increase in traffic is a good thing, so adding these buttons to your site will give you an opportunity to have people referred to your site. There are a few things you can do, however, to give your work a better shot at getting in front of the right audience.

Promote to the Right Audience. While it’s great to share your art on Deviant Art and Flickr, there are other social bookmarking sites that may be more productive for you. Find some sites where your target collector is hanging out. If your ideal client is 35 – 45, high income, and is really into technology, then Twitter or Digg might be good places. If your target audience is mothers over 40 then you might check out CafeMom.com. There are endless sites that you can specialize in. There are social sites for just about any demographic.

Make the sales pitch. Just by putting these buttons on your site you are making that invitation. You can take that one step further however, by asking your readers to bookmark a blog post or a particular piece of art. You can email friends and ask them to bookmark something for you. You can also ask your followers on Twitter, Facebook, or other popular networks to bookmark your stuff.

Monkey See, Monkey Do. If you are an active contributor in a community, people will begin to know, like, and trust you. They’ll be more likely to retweet, bookmark or Digg your stuff if they know you. Comment on other people’s content. Share really good things you find. As you make friends you’ll see more success.

I don’t have time for this!

Believe, I understand the need to focus on your work. You can be an active social media participant without too much effort. Schedule 15 – 20 minutes in the morning and again in the afternoon. Don’t let anything distract you. As you do this, you’ll eventually build up a respectable following and see some great traffic to your site. Remember what I said about Facebook? They are sending more traffic out than Google! This is the trend of the Web. This is how information gets shared. If you aren’t participating, you’re missing major opportunities.

Protip: Promote your artist newsletter through social media. You need to get people from the social sites to your list so that you can promote to them regularly.

Do you have any favorite niche networking sites where you’ve had success promoting your art? Let us know in the comments.