Saturday, January 08, 2005
Marketing you art online
I am writing this article as a part of the marketing effort an artist should persue. I examined art shows, gallery shows in previous posts as the first line to gain market share in this very competitive field. There are tens of thousands of artists out there: some make a very good living and many do not. When in college, I had a professor who, on the first day of class, asked what made an artist successful. All of the students agreed it was the quality of the art that made the difference. He disagreed and said: "It is 80% business skills and 20% talent". We, as art students, disagreed very much. He proceeded to a slide shows of paintings and fine art photographs. Beautiful work from unknow artists who were friends of his was displayed together with art that was selling for a pretty penny by fairly well known artists. We could not tell the difference. The unknown artists were as good as the well known. What was the difference then? One of the factors is exposure: the more people see your art the more chances you will have to find someone who wants it. It is why marketing/advertising is essential.
Exposure is one of the most important weapons in the artist's chest and the Internet provides a great tool as an online portfolio and promotional medium. It is easy to have a URL of your website on a business card and it provides a way for people you meet to look you up later. Over 80% of web surfers use search engines to find products. Let' s say I would love to have floral themes in my living room. I go to a search engine such as Google and type "Floral paintings". The last time I did I pulled over 1,000,000 results. If I wanted to be more specific I could type "Oil floral paintings". In this case only over 240,000 came up. This should give you the first clue: make sure your website focuses on specific keyphrases rather tha broad terms such as "giclee". Focus instead on keyphrases like "California landscape giclee". Trying to rank high for extremely competitive words is almost impossible these days.
One of the factors that will boost your website rank is how many sites will link to yours. Search engines like popular sites and popularity is measured by how many relevant sites link to yours. Also, extremely important, you have the benefit of being listed on other sites.
Your HTML code must be clean to be read properly by the engines. Engines send out robots (spiders) to rank the web. These automated programs do not like proprietary and dirty code and will give up and move on if they can't read your site.
There are many onpage factors to consider when designing your site but at this time I will mention only a few which are most important: first, put your most important keyphrase in the page title. Don't name your page: "John Doe, Artist". Name it instead, for example "John Doe, Fine Art Floral Giclee Prints". Second, have a description metatag detailing what you are about. Third, make sure you are using your keywords in the text on the pages.
There is much more but these few pointers should get you started with designing a site that can be found on the Internet. If you have any questions, please post a reply. I will be happy to answer.
Exposure is one of the most important weapons in the artist's chest and the Internet provides a great tool as an online portfolio and promotional medium. It is easy to have a URL of your website on a business card and it provides a way for people you meet to look you up later. Over 80% of web surfers use search engines to find products. Let' s say I would love to have floral themes in my living room. I go to a search engine such as Google and type "Floral paintings". The last time I did I pulled over 1,000,000 results. If I wanted to be more specific I could type "Oil floral paintings". In this case only over 240,000 came up. This should give you the first clue: make sure your website focuses on specific keyphrases rather tha broad terms such as "giclee". Focus instead on keyphrases like "California landscape giclee". Trying to rank high for extremely competitive words is almost impossible these days.
One of the factors that will boost your website rank is how many sites will link to yours. Search engines like popular sites and popularity is measured by how many relevant sites link to yours. Also, extremely important, you have the benefit of being listed on other sites.
Your HTML code must be clean to be read properly by the engines. Engines send out robots (spiders) to rank the web. These automated programs do not like proprietary and dirty code and will give up and move on if they can't read your site.
There are many onpage factors to consider when designing your site but at this time I will mention only a few which are most important: first, put your most important keyphrase in the page title. Don't name your page: "John Doe, Artist". Name it instead, for example "John Doe, Fine Art Floral Giclee Prints". Second, have a description metatag detailing what you are about. Third, make sure you are using your keywords in the text on the pages.
There is much more but these few pointers should get you started with designing a site that can be found on the Internet. If you have any questions, please post a reply. I will be happy to answer.
