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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.

Tagged as: artist websites, blogging, wordpress for artists