Last week I had a client email me because her artist website was a mess. The company that she was with had made some changes to their websites and she didn’t like the changes that were made. In addition, the company was keeping her mailing list hostage – she couldn’t export her mailing list if she switched websites. It was a bit of a mess.

Artist Website Templates are for Amateurs

If you are serious about marketing your art online, you need to own your own website and not use one of those templates that so many companies are offering. Here are the reasons why.

Non-flexible features. Even if the company just launched and they have every bell and whistle in their current templates, the Internet changes fast and you need to be able to adopt new technologies into your site as they come along. Most artist website companies shoehorn new features into their sites in ways that are awkward and unwieldy. Also, some artist website companies try to be all things for their artists and they end up not doing anything very well.

It makes you look cheap. If you are selling $2000 original pieces of art, why do you have a website that looks like it cost $30? Your image has to match your market. Since most collectors are wealthy and educated, they are probably going to expect something a little more sophisticated.

Outdated & repetitive design. If you’re using a template then your site looks like hundreds or thousands of other websites. People expect artists to value creativity and originality. Your site should differentiate you enough to make you stand out. Also, most artist website templates already look like they were designed in 2000 with no updates since.

No custom URL’s. If your website is something like www.YourName.TemplateCompany.com then you are leaving a lot of opportunities on the table. A real domain name (www.YourName.com) costs about $8 – $10 on GoDaddy. There’s no reason to not have a custom URL. In addition to it looking more professional, you will do better in the search engines.

No access to the html of your site. In order to make real customizations to your website, you need access to the html files. If you don’t have access, you can’t change borders, colors, sizes, and where page elements are placed. In addition, if you ever decide you want to move your website to another hosting provider or another company, you’ll have to start over from scratch.

Search Engine Friendliness. This is a tough one for most web designers. Quite often, if they are good at making pretty designs, they’re not too good with making sure the search engines find your site. If you want to be found online, then you need to make sure that your site can easily be optimized for search.

How Do I Get A Good Artist Website?

I recommend hiring a professional website designer. I can give you referrals if you want. Expect to pay $500 – $2000, depending on what you want.

I also highly recommend Wordpress as a way to get a high-quality website up and running. Wordpress is a free website building software that can have a site up and running in literally minutes. I put together a quick video talking about using Wordpress to build an artist website here.

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.

Happy Monday! I wanted all of you to know about my guest post at LateralAction.com. Mark McGuinness is one of my favorite creativity bloggers, and I’m honored to do a guest post on his site. I wrote about how artists need to not be afraid of numbers, and how easy it is to start looking at your website data and learning from it.

Click here to check out the post over at LateralAction.com.

Amazing thing – there are a lot of companies out there that offer websites specifically built for artists – buy most of them are pretty awful.

If you’ve every used one of these services or have been thinking about getting a website, then do me a favor and click here to take this four question survey about websites for artists – should take you about five minutes.

Thanks in advance!

For the last few weeks I’ve been asking all of you, dear readers, to tell me what you’d like to see included in the Choose Your Own Adventure group coaching course that I am leading. The course starts April 6th, and registration opens today. Click here to go to the registration page.

I’ve run courses similar to this several times before and it’s always been a lot of fun. There’s a lot of laughter and ‘ah-ha’ moments on the conference calls, and I’ve received some great feedback from some of the artists who have participated.

Using Your Ideas

I’m happy to say that I was able to incorporate most of your ideas into the course. Your suggestions have been some little tweaks to an already successful course that I am really happy to share with you.

There’s only 10 spots, so there’ll be plenty of room for questions and some individual attention. Because there are only 10 spots, however, they’ll go pretty quick. Registration closes this Saturday, but I expect the spots will be taken before then.

FREE STUFF!

I’m offering some great freebies as well for those who are taking the course, including:

• Free audio recordings of the sessions for you to listen to over and over because you love the sound of my voice (and because you’ll WANT to review the info).
• PDF transcripts so you can read over the info. I prefer reading over transcripts to fast forwarding and rewinding on my tape deck CD player.
• A copy of my forthcoming ebook. (What, you wrote a book? Cool.)
• Some video how-tos (ooh, video. this guy is all multi-media ‘n stuff). You’ll learn how to do things like set up Wordpress, Adwords, Facebook ads, and some other nifty Internet marketing tricks. You might even get to request a custom made video…

Once again, the registration page is here (click). Let me know if you have any questions about the course. Did I mention there’s a money-back guarantee?

UPDATE: Several of you have asked me some questions about the course. I will be online on Ustream tonight at 6 PM Pacific Time to answer any questions you might have about the class. Visit this link to chat with me live on Ustream.

image by Kristen Faulkenberry Mack

I have a pretty good idea at this point of what we’re going to cover in April’s group coaching session. Here’s a run down of some of the good suggestions.

• The basics of selling - how do you go from selling in real life to selling online? How do you get your website to sell something for you without being obnoxious?
• What makes a good website? How do you display your images in a way that is beautiful without using Flash?
• How to use social media in a way that makes money and doesn’t just result in having a fan base full of broke artists who are never going to buy your work?
• Newsletters: What to put in them, how to get people to read them, and how to make money from your email list.
• Search Engines: how do you get Google to list your stuff? how do you use Adwords without spending a ton of money?

I’m going to whittle them down over the next few days and announce the course content next week. I’m really excited about building the course this way. It’s a lot of fun.

I have some other questions that I need some help with too, though. Like how big your ideal group would be and how much money you’d pay for a course like this. I’ll take all of your suggestions and come up with something that is a good fit. It’s a grand experiment!

Big Group:

Advantages: cheaper for you, you get to meet more amazing artists like yourself

Disadvantages: less one-on-one time from me, more technically challenging (so there’s more chances that phone calls can go wrong), you may not be able to ask your specific question

Small Group:

Advantages: More one-on-one time. Get your questions answered.

Disadvantages: It’ll cost more per-person.

Length of the course.

Previously my group coaching sessions were four weeks. A one hour conference call each Tuesday night, along with homework and individual follow ups throughout the week.

Price:

What would you pay for a course like this? Seriously? Any price that you put down is good feedback.

Leave a comment below, find me on Facebook, Twitter, or email – cory at TheAbundantArtist.com.

I can’t wait to get this going!

Ever looked for a comprehensive guide that you can use as a checklist to know what you should be doing to sell your art online? Here you go. This is a living list. As new techniques are added this post will be updated. Be sure to bookmark this post and come back often to make sure you’re covering every aspect of online marketing.

Keyword research. Before you build your website do some research to see what people are typing in to search engines when they’re looking for work like yours. You should be able to build a list of ways to describe your art that will attract buyers by matching what they’re searching for. Check out this post on how to do keyword research using Google’s Keyword Tool.

Pick the right domain. When starting out, most artists are only going to be known by their name, if known at all. You should pick a domain that matches your name exactly or is a close approximation to your name. If the .com version of your name is taken, you might try the .net, .me, or a country variation.

Write descriptions of your images on your site. I see a lot of artists who put their work on their site but don’t put up any descriptions. People want to know how big your art is, whether it’s on canvas, whether it’s oil, watercolor, and any other description you can give them. If your site is built on Flash you’re going to have a hard time doing this. In addition, the text on your page will help search engines know what your images are all about. Take advantage of image titles and Alt tags. Before you upload an image to your website change the name of the file to some sort of descriptive text. If you can edit the Alt tags of your images make sure you use descriptive keywords there as well. Here’s an in-depth guide to making your images found on the web.

Use high quality images that download fast. This is a slight oxymoron as high quality images have larger file sizes and take longer to load. You’ll have to experiment with what works best. If it takes longer than a second to download your page, however, be aware that potential buyers will move on to another site. Attention spans on the web are fickle. In addition, Google announced last year that they are taking load times into account when determining which sites come up in the search results.

Put up prices. This is especially true if you are selling reproductions. Everywhere you display a piece of art you should display a price. Even if your shopping cart lists a price after someone clicks through you’ll find that you get more sales by helping customers know everything they need to know before they click. Here’s a guide for pricing art prints.

Be social w/ social media & bookmarking services. Social media is the best thing that ever happened to art marketing. I know I sound like a raging fanboy, but I firmly believe it’s the truth. Art is sold on emotion and the more people you can form connections with the more opportunities you’ll have to affect them. In addition search engines are using social media to decide what ranks high in search results. Check out this post on how to sell art on Facebook, Twitter, Digg & more.

Create an email newsletter. I’ve written about email newsletters a lot. Your list is the most important thing you have as an artist. They’re the ones who care about your work. They’ve already told you so by signing up for your list. Contact your list each month with your progress on new work and potential opportunities to buy your stuff.

Blogging & guest blogging. Writing about your art helps you get clarity on how to present yourself, and it also gives you a place to talk about who you are and why you do what you do. In addition, if people like your stuff (or if they hate it) it will get shared around the web, giving you a wider reach and voice. Guest blogging on other people’s sites is an amazingly effective way of reaching a new audience. My email list increased by 30% by doing a guest post on IWillTeachYouToBeRich.com. Check out Why Are Artists Bad With Money.

Advertise (online and offline). This is obviously for artists who have a little bit of money, but advertising can be potentially lucrative if you have the right product and you know how to position it. Knowing what makes your art different and interesting is key to advertising. Investigating pay-per-click on Google, Facebook ads, or banner ads on niche sites are all methods I have seen work for different artists.

Tell them how to buy (Paypal, credit card processing). This may seem dumb, but telling your audience what to do is really important. If you get someone to your page, they need to know where to go. If you want them to buy your art, tell them to click here and state that they can pay via Paypal, Visa, Mastercard, or in some other way. Simply adding those buttons can increase your sales, even if you don’t change anything else.

Contact information. If people have questions about the payment process or about a specific piece of work then they’re going to want to talk to you or to one of your representatives. Make sure that your contact information is on your home page, a footer, or that there’s a contact page in your navigation.

Try lots of different websites. There are literally hundreds of websites where you can sell your art online. I see new galleries cropping up every week. Find the one that fits your personality and makes you feel comfortable – but don’t get attached. Different art sells well on different sites, so test for a few weeks and if it doesn’t work, move on to another site. Here are 15 sites that you can use to sell art online.

Team up with other artists. Just like guest blogging, teaming up with other dedicated artists is a great way to extend your marketing reach. Do shows together, host a web video series together, share each other’s work via social media & newsletters. It’s often easier to promote someone else’s work than it is to promote your own. Check out my blog post on Imagekind about forming mastermind groups with other artists.

Persevere. Sometimes you may be doing everything right and it’s just not working…yet. Your marketing takes time to mature. Your reputation will grow. Sometimes things that didn’t work before will work better at a later date or done in concert with someone else.

Did I leave anything out? Let me know in the comments.

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.