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.

Artists are getting some love from the Google Wave Developer blog. Thanks to @DevonvSmith for the hat tip on this post.

If you somehow missed all the hype around Google Wave last year, then check out this post on Google Wave for Artists that Read, Write, Web picked up.

In Google Wave for Artists, the Google Wave Developer team gave a big shout out to the artistic community by showing how you can use Google Wave to share works of art, generate discussion, and collaborate in real time. There are several Google groups already going for artists, mostly centered around education or the discussion of artistic ideas. Poojas Rinivas has a Google group that is dedicated solely to the discussion of, and implementation of, Google Groups & Google Wave for artists.

After reading the blog post on The Google Wave Developer Blog, I was still wishing for a way that artists could easily collaborate on a piece of art together. Much to my surprise, later that day Google Docs premiered a drawing program with many of the essential functions of Google Wave – including the ability to collaborate together in real time – you can even see what the other person is drawing as they draw it. Pretty nuts!

The drawings are pretty rudimentary right now, but I look forward to the amazing technology that will soon have artists drawing together digitally, while being physically worlds apart.

UPDATE: I did a quick video with @getjackson to show how two artists can draw something together on Google Documents (check out his Picasa Web page). Note: I just purchased a copy of Screenflow, and apparently I forgot to unlock it – that’s why there’s the text across the video.

What do you think? Are these real-time collaboration tools as interesting to you as they are to me? Could you find a way to use them in your work?

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.

image via immike.net

Most Flash based image galleries are terrible – especially the free ones. Here’s why.

Your website crawls like a 6 month old. Google recently made a major update to their search algorithm. That update, called Caffeine, takes into account your website’s load time as one factor in your site’s rankings in the search results. Flash, as it’s normally used, is slow. On top of the search engines disliking it, how many times have you wanted to kill companies whose websites have load times measured in minutes?

Your landing page is more like a trampoline. If you are tracking your websites statistics, there’s a really important statistic called Bounce Rate. If your site has a Flash landing page, your bounce rate is probably really high. Flash landing pages were cool in the 90’s when they were novel, but now they just make web surfers annoyed and they click off to another site to find what they want.

Flash is like a file cabinet organized by Amelia Badelia. Most pages built on Flash are built as one solid website without individual pages. This is horrible organization for several reasons. Chief among these reasons is that each of your images will end up being on the same page as your home, contact, and artist bio pages. How will the search engines find your stuff if it’s so disorganized?

What does your page say? Ideally, you’ll have a short paragraph describing each piece of art on your website. After all, you’ll want each customer to know how big the piece is, what it was made on, and any other relevant information, yes? Unless you know how to work in Flash, you won’t be able to do this easily, and quite often, the search engines won’t be able to read it (note, with newer versions of Flash, the search engines can read text, but it’s still not easy to work in).

Flash is going out of style like your grandpa’s blue ruffle prom suit. It’s been building for some years, but Flash is quickly becoming a dated technology, and Adobe’s stranglehold on the market is being broken. Microsoft spent millions developing Silverlight, an alternative product that many companies are using. In addition, the iPhone doesn’t support Flash. With over 20% of the smart phone market share, that’s a lot of devices that don’t use Flash. Apple’s new iPad will also not support Flash. Using web standards like html and php will ensure our site plays well with newer technologies.

Shopping Carts. If you want to sell your work on your site, you’ll need to have it presented in an organized way with an easy button that allows someone to purchase your work right there on the same page as the art. Flash only makes this harder.

Do you want to hang out with awesome artists while learning how to sell your work better online? This time it’s live. Join me on Ustream on February 2nd at 6:30 PM for an hour long video chat session about what it takes to make a great artist Web site.

I promise you’re going to want to be there. I’m giving away free advice and I’ll take one or two artists and break down your site for you for free. It’ll be a great exercise for you to hear.

Oh, yeah, and we’re also going to talk about the IM4A project. For those of you who’ve participated in this before, you know what I’m talking about. Hint: IM4A stands for Internet Marketing for Artists.

To join me for this live chat, visit this url

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/coryhuff

Want to be one of the artists that gets the full treatment at the Webinar? Leave a comment below telling me:

1. Your Web site URL

2. What you are doing to promote your site.

3. One thing you would change about your site if you could.

photo courtesy xiaming

Newsletters for artists are a bit of a rarity. How many times have you had someone tell you that they love your work but can’t buy it right now. What do you usually do? Tear off a piece of paper and give them your email address & phone number? Give them a flyer & a business card?

I would imagine that a lot of artists have the same experience, many times each week.

If you want to remind all of those people who loved you at one time to buy your work when they have some extra cash, you need to a do a few things. A newsletter can be your secret weapon for creating long-term residual sales and building a fan base around your work that sells your art for you.

1. Collect names, email & physical addresses.When your work is shown at art fairs, craft fairs, galleries, and other places, put out a sign up sheet for people to opt-in to your mailing list. Write something like this on the top of the page, “Sign up to find out more about my upcoming work and studio process. You’ll get an email newsletter once each month.” Then divide the paper up into three columns labeled First & Last Name, Email, and Address.

You should also collect names and addresses on your Web site. Notice on this site there is a big sign up box on each page. Next to that box there’s a link to a blog post about what people get when they sign up for the mailing list.

Develop a lead magnet. We’re getting into really useful, advanced marketing strategies here. Give something away to the people who sign up for your mailing list. I give away two recordings of interviews I did with Ann Rea and Jim Hart, two successful artist entrepreneurs. These interviews provide some really great, specific information on how to run a creative business. As soon as you sign up for the list, you get a link to the recordings. Musicians can offer a free mp3. Painters can offer a free postcard, or high quality screensaver or desktop wallpaper. Artists could offer a clip of voice-over work you’ve done. The ideas are endless. Give them something they’ll really like, and you’ll get people signing up for your list.

2. Use a mail management service. It’s easy to email from your Yahoo or Outlook email service. Don’t make this mistake. Email management services will integrate your Web sign up forms with your list for you, track the number of people who open your emails, and the number of clicks your email generates. That way you know whether the things you are writing about are generating interest. I recommend MailChimp.com as a free email management service for artists with a list under 500. It’s easy to use and creates high quality emails that really stand out. Plus, the creators of MailChimp have a great sense of humor.

Whatever email management service you use, you should make sure that you can generate a series of auto-responders. Auto-response emails go out whenever someone signs up for your list, making further offers, reminding people what you have for sale, or any other message that you might want them to have.

3. Start digital, go physical. If you have some money to put into a physical mailing, these are great. Put together a 2 – 4 page glossy magazine that will show off your beautiful work in all its glory. Add in some personal notes describing your experience with creating each piece and you’ve got an easy to create newsletter that lets your buyers know you have new work and how they can get it. Plus, they have something beautiful to put on their coffee table or in their office lobby.

4. Frequency. How often should you write? It depends on how good of a writer you are, and how much you have to say. Some artists write weekly. Some write a couple of times per month. I would recommend never going more than a month without writing your newsletter, and you should set it so that it comes out at the same time ever time. My newsletter goes out every Monday at 10:00 AM Pacific Time. As a rule of thumb, if people are reading your newsletter, responding well to it, and you are having fun, then you are probably at the right frequency.

5. What to talk about. This could be its own blog post. There are so many things you can write about. I hear a lot of artists saying they have no idea what they would write about, but then I start asking them about their work, what they’re doing, how they do it, and why they do it. They’ll talk forever, and it’s really interesting. That’s exactly what you should talk about in your newsletter. Talk about our work and how it affects you, your friends & family, and your community. Talk about your passion and your inspiration. Artists are inherently interesting. All of us have a little kid inside that says, “I wish I could do that.” It’s where our cult of celebrity comes from. I’ll talk more about this later this week.

So, do you have a newsletter? Post a link to it in the comments and lets share ideas!

When we want to learn something new, what do we usually do? We ask someone, right? That’s why I wanted to invite all of you to help me create a community.

A couple of weeks ago I did a presentation as part of the New Communicators conference. Some of the people at that presentation wanted to keep the conversation going, and I wanted to facilitate that. I started a Yahoo Email Group for anyone who is interested – the topic is Internet Marketing for Artists. We’ve had some really good discussions so far, and some really great information has been shared by everyone in the group. So far, we’ve discussed how to:

- Set up a Wordpress blog
- Find the right people to follow on Twitter
- Fears about online marketing and how it affects our work.

Here’s the link – http://groups.yahoo.com/group/TheAbundantArtist/

This group will exist as an email list for now. Eventually, if we grow large enough, I may move it to a forum or some other platform. In the mean while, enjoy this short video clip from the conference where I talk about what it really takes to sell art online.

Do us all a favor and share this post with people, and invite other artists you know to be a part of The Abundant Artist Yahoo Group.

Last Friday night I attended 10,000 Invites, an event that was part of The New Communicators un-conference. Here’s my recap of the event, with some of my thoughts on what we discussed.

I’m sharing this not only because The New Communicators organizers asked us to share, but also to share with the larger art community and to help with the discussion of taking advantage of technology to promote the Arts.

The panel consisted of representatives from several major arts orgs in the Portland area. Please keep in mind that these are my observations only and not representative of anyone but me. They videotaped the whole thing, but I don’t know if they plan on sharing that video.

Major takeaways:

Personalities Rule. Portland Center Stage not only has individual employees Tweeting, but they also created a @FakeScrooge and @PCSGhost account which have been very popular. One of the museums created an @MC_Escher account on Twitter that recounted Escher’s entire life over the length of an exhibition. That was so popular that they were asked to do it again. PICA employees have lots of followers on Facebook. The individuals within the organization make real connections with their audience. Company accounts, not as much.

Crowdsource & give up control. PICA has had an all volunteer blog since 2004. They mentioned that even though they don’t have editorial control, they’ve had a great experience with creating context for the work they present. Flickr was mentioned multiple times as a source of pictures created by staff & audience members. Staff was able to incorporate Flickr pics into their presentations, and audience & media outlets used these same photos on blogs & in major media outlets.

Spread out the implementation. Every org mentioned that they have multiple people Tweeting, Facebooking, and blogging. Those reponsibilities were shared around to minimize the heavy load. Reluctant participants in the org became very enthusiastic (maybe a little too enthusiastic) after they saw results of the ‘free’ advertising social media brings. No formal plans to incentivize fans to evangelize the brands, but it is happening in a scattered sort of way.

Tracking & reporting is an issue. No definite benchmarks were discussed in the measurement of social media. While everyone felt that they had been successful, no one cited traffic driven, sentiment measurement, or other technical analysis. A couple of people even expressed that they were not aware of what technical tracking tools were available, besides Google Analytics. Interestingly, one survey PCS did said that 46% of their audience used Facebook, 11% use Twitter, and 24% use blogs. Their top referral traffic sources were: Facebook, Twitter, Travel Portland, and OregonLive.

We are changing people’s relationships with art. The social media efforts that these orgs have made have created safe, casual environments where people can experience classic works of art in new & powerful ways. People feel more comfortable attending theater & knowing how to dress. People can have conversations with others who are on their same level of knowledge about the art, as well as learn from those who are more educated.Social media creating context for people to understand the art.

Relationship with the press. Press releases still go out, but they are mostly full of links to the appropriate information. More reviews are being done, but they are usually appearing in the paper’s online versions, or on local niche blogs. PR employees are treating bloggers like regular press agents, offering them free tickets and inside access to the actors & staff. Bloggers are generally more open and enthusiastic about getting cozy with the staff than journalists are.

My thoughts: Learning how to formalize and use technical tracking tools can go a long way towards helping this group develop their social media strategies.

Arts organizations have always run on very tight budgets, but they’re doing an amazing job with the limited resources that they have. There is a real danger of employee burnout because of workload, and several of the orgs have individuals who are cults of personality. If that key employee decides to leave, the org could suffer because of that.

Creating a planned strategy for brand evangelism by audience is a major opportunity.

I’d love to hear from some of the other people that were there in the comments. What were your big takeaways, how can we help the Arts community grow? For those of you outside of Portland, let me know if I can clarify any of this for you or if you want to get in touch with anyone who said any of this stuff.

Google Wave is about to crash on the Arts scene. For you artists out there who have been wondering when you are going to get a peek at this innovation, here’s your chance.

I’ve got 20 invites to give out, and I’m only going to give them to artists with good ideas on using technology to collaborate. What kind of things could you use Google Wave to collaborate on? That’s completely up in the air, that’s why I want to hear from you!

Some potential ideas:

• Collaboration ideas for Art marketing.
• A real time painting app that allows visual artists to work together on a new project.
• An event planning tool for Art events.
• An app for voice lessons.
• An app for play & screenwriting.
• Get more ideas from the community at Lifehacker.

Looking forward to hearing from you. Leave a comment below with your idea and I’ll email invites to those with the best ideas.

Also, if you are part of a Google Wave that involves the Arts, please let me know and invite me! I’d love to be a part of it!

I recently had a great phone call about how to sell art online with Tim Aldridge and Leyl Black.  Tim is a painter and avid Imagekind user, and he was kind enough to share with me some of his top money making tips for Imagekind.  Here’s what he had to say.

Sell art online with Imagekind

ImageKind offers an easy way to sell your art online.  You can set up a regular web site yourself, but if you donʼt know how, don’t want to spend the time and money, or deal with managing an e-commerce operation and dealing with shipping and framing, ImageKind could be a great solution for you.

Imagekind selling tips

Promote yourself! Imagekind won’t magically sell your art. Include your ImageKind store URL in email signature lines, Twitter bio, FaceBook info, and on your business cards.

The Marketing Tools page in your account administration area has Google marketing Tips, ImageKind web Banners, Sample Kits that show off the different papers that ImageKind uses and the quality of their printing.

Check out the Forums as artists are sharing tips how they are selling their art.

Categorize & Tag correctly and add keywords for your work.  You should, at the very least, include the main colors in your keywords as there is a search tool for customers that searches based on colors:

Holidays. Work w/ Imagekind Promotions around holidays, ie. Mother’s Day:

-mark down selected pieces that are relevant to the holiday.

-combine your reductions w/ ImageKind free shipping/ reduced framing offers.

-send out mailer announcing timely deals and new art (most of my sales have come from this method).

-Being able to sell prints at a lower price point will help sell to an audience that might not be able to afford original art. This way you donʼt have to discount your original art to make a sale.  You can even set up an Imagekind kiosk at your art shows so people can order prints of the originals on the spot.  Everyone who comes to the show has an opportunity to walk out of the show having bought something, no matter their price point.

Read the FAQ. An easy one that a lot of people forget.

Image Sizing/Prepping for Upload:

Read the Imagekind instructions. Make sure you have enough pixel resolution for the largest print dimensions that ImageKind offers. Once I photograph or scan my artwork. I keep a high resolution image (TIFF or PSD) locally and use Photoshop action droplets to automatically convert the large files to an ImageKind ready (correct sizing and resolution)
JPEG w/ an embedded color profile.

There is an image uploader (only available for the PC at this time) that you can use as a desktop application.

Pricing Strategies/ Markups:

- The artist gets 5-15% ( depending on their membership level) of any custom framing purchased with the print.

-You can set a default framing for your pieces; a good frame and matting can really enhance the presentation of
your work and make it more attractive to purchase.

-Cruise around and look at other artists on ImageKind and figure out what their markups are.

-Of note, if you mark up your work over 100% beyond the base price, they tack on extra 5% fee for the buyer.  UPDATE: This simply means that if the artist marks up their price more than 100% beyond the base price, then Imagekind retains 5% of the markup overage as a fee for processing the transaction.  Thanks to Nate from Imagekind for the update.

New ImageKind Storefront:

-3 style templates offered but there is customizable CSS code  and more control for power web designers.

-Google Web Analytics and Google Adsense tie-ins

-Basic Mailing List ( for Newsletters, Updates)