Art Marketing Secrets » Artist Websites

12 Tips To Create An Artist Website: Part 2

Daniel — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 23:33:25 +0000

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon - Pablo Picasso (1907)

It seems like forever since we published the first part of this 12-Tips article! We’ve been in technology-land moving all our sites (including AMS) over to a great new webhost who will be helping us manage some of our traffic spikes. Its such a relief to be back to the business we love – art marketing!

Here then is part 2 of our famous 12-tips article. Just to recap, in part 1 we covered:

1. Decide if you need an artist website

2. Know who are you trying to impress

3. Your website must fit with your overall art marketing strategy

4. Know that there IS a real market for art on the internet

5. Have your own website AND use online-portfolio services

6. Know what collectors and art professionals look for in an artist website

Now for part 2….

7. Showcase your work beautifully
You need to have visual design skills to create a beautiful artist website. Here are some points to get you started:

Most Important: Use high-quality, professionally-photographed images. Excellence in, excellence out! (trust us – you don’t want the opposite)
Keep the website simple and elegant with the focus on the art.
Create multiple galleries to compliment the work – just as a good physical gallery would do.
Choose colors that compliment (not overpower) the work. Think of the colors you would use in a physical gallery to showcase your work – neutral colors like crème, white, gray, and good safe choices.
Think “minimalist” not “busy” for the layout.
Keep your copy (text) brief. Let the art speak for itself! The exception is on the bio page where you want to lavish a little text-attention on a great story

8. Bring collectors and galleries to your website
Its no use having that stunning website sitting in hyperspace. Make it work for you! Here are some ways to bring quality visitors:

Search Engines: If your website has been well optimized for search engines, a search on your name or your style of art should bring up your website in the first few pages of results.
Letters of Introduction: A letter of introduction sent to a gallery or dealer is a very effective way to bring a qualified visitor to your website. Better still is to include a brochure or postcard of your work with the letter.
Advertising online or in magazines: For example, if your art is minimalist and modern in style, a banner add on an interior design website focused on the same minimalist ethic could draw a lot of traffic to your site.

For a really comprehensive list of ideas check out our, 18 Tips To Bring Visitors To Your Artist Website article.

9. You need to be able to sell your work on the internet.
But there are many ways to do it! More important than anything is that you have clear and up-to-date contact information on your website. If a buyer likes your work enough to bring out their checkbook, they will normally be happy to call you to close the sale.

It’s also handy to be able to sell directly from your website, especially if you sell lower-cost reproductions. There are simple and cost-effective ways to do this.

10. Think again before designing your own website.
Have you really added up the total cost? Here are some questions to consider before you start designing:

Do you have visual design skills/training?
Can you wait several months for the site to be ready?
Can you afford to give up a month or more of your valuable artist time?
Do you have all the software and equipment needed to build a high-quality website?
Are you fully trained in your design software?

Can you answer “Yes” to all of the above? If so, you might think about doing it yourself. Otherwise, think seriously about hiring a professional designer. Artists love to do everything themselves, but you have to be careful of becoming a “jack of all trades, master of none” – seriously.

11. Choose your website-designer thoughtfully.
The most important thing here is to remember what you are trying to create – a beautiful online gallery space to elegantly show your beautiful work – this is very different from building a high-volume website selling printer ink cartridges and paper rolls!

Look for the ability to design a space to present your work. One way to do this is to find artist websites that you like and then contact the artist to get the name of their designer.

12. Know what you should pay.
Artist’s website development prices range from a few hundred to tens of thousands of dollars. Typically, bigger design firms have larger overheads and will be significantly more expensive. On the other hand, Joe down the street can probably build you a website for $200 – but you probably don’t want that website!

At the end of the day, most professional artists will find a great website solution in the $800 – $5,000 range. Follow the steps we’ve outlined above and you’ll have a much better chance of ending the process with a smile on your face!

12 Tips To Create An Artist Website: Part 1

Daniel — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 00:29:54 +0000

Still Life With Drapery - Paul Cezanne

Here’s the scoop on what you need to know when designing a website to showcase your art, impress galleries, and win over collectors. Learn how to avoid the mistakes most emerging artists make when creating their online portfolio.

1. Decide if you need an artist website

Any artist who is wanting to expand their market and sales will definitely benefit from having their own website to promote their work. It is important to be able to have a place where anyone in the world can easily access and view your work.

2. Know who are you trying to impress

Are you trying to engage a Soho gallery to sell your $20,000 paintings or sell $5 prints to children? That Soho gallery might not be impressed when they see your online-store selling prints and art cards â€“ but on the other hand, you could make a very handsome living if you really knew how to market those art cards.

3. Your website must fit with your overall art marketing strategy

A website is most effective when it is part of a larger overall marketing strategy for your art. This includes mailings, lots of in-person gallery visits and presentations, regular (physical) showings of your work, and developing relationships with the art world. An effectively planned website can greatly compliment and simplify your other marketing efforts.

4. Know that there IS a real market for art on the internet

The internet is quickly becoming an accepted place to showcase your art to collectors and arts professionals. They might still want to see your work in person before they buy, but the fact remains: they saw it first on your website! Having an online art presence is very important at this time.

5. Have your own website AND use online-portfolio services

A website portfolio service (e.g. www.absolutearts.com or www.art-exchange.com is like an online slide registry. For a fee you can upload images of your work together with bios, artist statements, resumes, etc. They have many visitors and are a convenient way to make your work accessible to potential clients. The down side is that they generally donâ€™t display your work very well, and there is little flexibility in how the art is showcased.

Your own website, on the other hand will require more work to promote, but youâ€™ll be able to present the work in the most beautiful way. Remember the times youâ€™ve been taken into the dimmer room in a commercial gallery? How that art which looked fairly good on the main gallery wall suddenly became something you had to take home? Thatâ€™s how a good artistâ€™s website should showcase your work.

We recommend both options â€“ they are a perfect compliment.

6. Know what collectors and art professionals look for in an artist website

Here are some common elements which most dealers and galleries would agree on for your website design:

Keep the site simple and elegant with the focus on the art itself and donâ€™t overpower the art with a site that looks too busy
Avoid advertising such as banner adds or sidebar adds. If you must have them, put them in a separate â€œresourceâ€ section
Avoid complex effects like flash movies. In the time it takes to play your exotic entry page, your visitor may have moved on.
Include your bio, artist statement, resume, contact information, gallery(s) of your work, contact information, and a pricelist.

Check back soon for Part 2!

Stealing From Your Artist Website: Does It Matter?

Daniel — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 23:42:36 +0000

Etoile Trees - Josse Ford 2002

We’ve been having another big discussion at Art Marketing Secrets recently – this time about the whole issue of stealing images from artist websites. While we all know that it’s true that this is a fact of life, the big question is: Does it really matter? Will it significantly change your art career if someone downloads and re-uses an image from your website?

At first it’s tempting to go for the obvious answer – OF COURSE it matters! It’s just plain wrong to steal work from a website and to re-use it without permission – especially for commercial purposes. And those images could be used to make prints and art-cards, and could be licensed out to make all manner of things like coffee mugs and tea pot stands.

But is there a real risk of that?

On the other side of the fence one could argue: What can anyone seriously do with a small 72 dpi image? It’s not print quality so it’s not like it is going to be published as an expensive giclee image for example. And in some cases it misses an important point:

What if in making your images completely safe you make it more difficult for galleries and collectors to use your website? That would be like shooting yourself in the foot – right?

One example of this is the popular mouse-over image galleries where you can’t actually see an enlargement of a thumbnail image unless your mouse is hovering over the thumbnail. It probably protects your art but anyone seriously interested in your work is going to have their patience extremely tested – and that’s not really worth considering if you hope to sell some art or “be found”!

You can also add digital watermarks to your images, but in our experience they tend to look unsightly and take away from the quality of the viewing experience. This might be OK if you are focused in a very low-cost art-print market space, but if you’re into promoting your high-end originals we have yet to see a site that looks good with watermarked images.

Some of the do-it-yourself online portfolio services offer image protection as part of their service, but it is far from foolproof. Want to know why? I just tested two of them and was impressed at first that I was not able to right-click and download the image on the screen. But then I remembered the “Grab” application on my Mac – and in a few moments I had successfully copied images from both services – glad that I wasn’t paying them for that feature!

So, there you have it. We haven’t yet seen a fool-proof solution for protecting art online and at 72 dpi, we’re not sure that it actually does matter. There’s an age-old concept that wherever you put your attention, there you go…. Based on that, our honest feeling as we write today is that you should probably spend more time thinking about and planning how to get the RIGHT people to see your website than worrying about how to keep the wrong people away!

That’s our view and it’s always subject to change if we learn something new. What do YOU think about this? Please comment below – we really want to hear what you have to say!

Sleep Soundly: Backup Your Artist Website Data

Daniel — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 04:38:56 +0000

Pablo Picasso - Sleeping Woman

Tanya Mikaela’s post earlier this week about an international art scam was one of our most popular recent articles and it got me thinking about some of the other perils that artists face in their careers.

Thinking that through I realized that with the current growth and importance in online marketing, one of the biggest heartbreaks would be losing data. That could be the data on your Mac or PC – or the content of your website. Don’t assume that its somehow magically taken care of – ASK!

10 years ago we had a major robbery in the office of an earlier business we ran – in video production. Thieves broke in during the night, disabled a very sophisticated alarm and security system, and made off with about $35,000 worth of Macs, Monitors, video and audio equipment. It was a real hassle and waiting for the insurance to process and then rebuilding all our systems took us off the market for about 6 weeks. But that was the easy part.

What absolutely killed us was the loss of 10 Gigabytes of custom motion graphics on one or our computers. We had insurance on our hardware, but we had never given the value of our data a second thought. Now 10 GB of data sounds like nothing today – but in 2000 that was one huge amount of work.

So, the first thing we did after replacing all the computers was to invest in a tape backup system. Back then a 400 GB tape library cost us $8,000 which was a big chunk of change for a small business, but we swallowed the cost because we knew we couldn’t risk losing that much work again. (Note for the curious: I tried selling that tape library on ebay last year and couldn’t even get a bid at $400!)

Today you have absolutely no financial excuse for not backing up the data on your home or office computers. I just bought another Mac 1TB Time Capsule – a combination wifi router and backup drive for $299, and that’s at the high end of the price range for backup systems.

You can control that – but what about your website? Is it backed up and how often? We recommend automated backups as a preference because they will happen come rain or shine. Here are some suggested guidelines:

If you have a static website that is rarely updated with new work or content (not good!) a monthly backup or each time you make a change (whichever is sooner) is a good idea.

If you update content regularly, you should consider an automated backup as often as you update your site. In the case of an active blog or article site you should probably consider nightly backups of the website files and the database.

Ask your webhost or webmaster where there servers are located and what sort of disaster recovery policies they have in place. For example, if your webhost has only one datacenter in a single location then a disaster in that location could take you off the internet for quite some time. Ideally they should have load-balanced mirrored data centers in geographically remote locations. If they don’t you should consider having your website backups automatically stored in a remote location using a service like Amazon’s S3.

You may think this is overkill but I guarantee you’ll be thanking me if your website data is ever corrupted or taken out by a natural or man-made disaster. It was this kind of careful data preparedness that allowed many New York financial firms to be back in business and trading within hours of the WTC attacks in 2001.

There’s an old saying – “I can sleep when the wind blows”. You can if you are prepared!

Is Your Artist Website Helping Buyers To Find You?

Daniel — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 02:03:24 +0000

Art Buyers want to find you – but your website probably isn’t helping!

If youâ€™re like most artists with a website, you started out with a dream that collectors would actually find you through search engines. But the reality for most artists is:

Your website floats alone in cyberspace with almost no visitors.

Thatâ€™s not good enough! Artist websites are not just great showcases – they should and can also attract a steady stream of potential art buyers for you to build relationships with and sell your art to. While search engines are just one method of attracting new visitors to your website, they are incredibly important because they:

Are a very low-cost form of promotion
Market your work 24/7
Market your art to a truly global audience

So, as much as we recommend that you also do all the other attraction marketing techniques like mailouts, personal networking, and social networking, ranking highly in search engine results on your style of work must be a serious part of your marketing strategy.

You can learn how to bring search engines, the most powerful economic force on the Internet*, to your artist website with the complete do-it-yourself SEO system, â€œ21 Days To Bring Search Engine Traffic To Your Artist Websiteâ€

Created exclusively for artists by our sister business Beautiful Artist Websites, “21 Days” is based on 5 years of experience building premium artist websites, together with BAW’s own success in consistently ranking #1 in organic Google search results. It solves the big problems that confront artists with SEO and delivers powerful results.

It’s very well done, informative, and easy to understand. I’m determined to be successful with it. â€¦. Donna Rossi, New York

I have spent a small fortune learning SEO from various experts. I wish I had found you first – it would have saved me thousands. Awesome value. â€¦ Tim O’Neill, Nebraska

Make a commitment to a new level of seriousness and success in your art career by optimizing your artist website for search engines. Learn more about the SEO System.

Note: We very rarely post commercial offers on Art Marketing Secrets however we believe that poor website search engine results are a consistent and compelling problem for nearly all artists and that the problem requires a serious commercial solution. That’s why we took the time to spend 9 months of our lives creating this new product! For FTC compliance, please note that Art Marketing Secrets and Beautiful Artist Websites are sister businesses that will jointly benefit from any sales of the product discussed in this article.

* Quote from Qi Lu, President of Microsoft Online Services Division

How To Make Your Artist Website Racy!

Daniel — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 23:00:08 +0000

We don’t have the fastest internet connection in our office – its a 3 MBit/s DSL service. For some reason, even though Santa Monica has Verizon’s FIOS fiber-to-the-building service everywhere, our street somehow missed out. Now – whoever heard of the phone company making a mistake like that? (Don’t answer that!)

Well – 3 MBit/s is actually OK and we rarely have problems. But many people still have much slower connections, including users of wireless mobile devices. Even though those TV ads for 3G wireless networks are compelling and will probably get you to purchase an iPhone or a Blackberry, the fact is that they are still much slower than most fixed network home or office connections.

It’s important to bear those users in mind when you are creating or improving your artist website. Some of your visitors may be on wireless connections, and lets not forget that a substantial number of web-surfers in rural locations and developing nations are still on dial-up service. So if your website is inefficient in its use of code or images, or if it sources live content from multiple locations (ads, image libraries, off-site video, etc), you may be making life difficult for some of your potential fans.

Even really large commercial sites suffer from this. I scan the New York Times online most mornings and sometimes it is incredibly frustrating waiting for the pages to load – the problem is that it is pulling content from multiple online locations, especially advertising. Sometimes I get impatient and leave. Now, they can probably afford to do that because they know I will probably come back later. YOU, on the other hand, can not assume that luxury with your artist website!

I could spend the next day researching and writing a great article on this topic – but someone beat me to it! Christian Hellman over at Smashing Magazine has just posted an excellent article on this topic:

Website Performance: What To Know And What You Can Do

You might find some of it a bit technical but the overall concepts will help you understand how your artist website performance can be improved. Christian’s article also introduces some great free tools to help you evaluate your website’s performance – YSlow from Yahoo and Page Speed from Google. “Page Speed” actually looks at your website code and makes recommendations about how to performance enhance it.

Jacob Gube over at Six Revisions also posted an excellent article on this topic in 2008:

10 Ways To Improve Your Web Page Performance

One really useful tip from Jacob’s article is regarding image types. He suggests using jpegs for complex color images and GIF or PNG for simpler images with well-defined color blocks.

At the very least you’ll find these articles an interesting read, and you might actually find something you can really challenge yourself or your website designer with

18 Tips To Bring Visitors To Your Artist Website

Daniel — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 18:08:37 +0000

Nafea Faa ipoipo? - Paul Gauguin 1892

Suffering from low-traffic blues on your artist website? Your number of visitors is only limited by you! If you have a big enough imagination, are willing to think outside the box, and don’t mind some serious old-fashioned elbow-grease you can bring in a nice consistent stream of art-hungry visitors.

Last week we talked about Attraction Phase online art marketing and bringing visitors to your artist website for the very first time is right in the heart of attraction phase territory. Once you have brought in a visitor the first time there are many ways to build relationships and eventually sell art – but getting their attention in the first place can often feel like fishing in a giant ocean but being unsure of the correct bait.

Apologies for the fishing analogy – I was a fanatical sport-fisherman as a teenager and the language still permeates my life!

Lets look at some simple but effective techniques to attract those art hungry fish to your website!:

Make a list of galleries that feature work of a similar style to yours. Send them a letter of introduction and invite them to visit and review your website. Include a postcard with an excellent piece of your work.
Pay to use an email marketing list focused on decorators, interior designers, or galleries. Send out a high-quality email invititation to visit your website. If you use this technique please make sure you are using or renting the list from a reputable art-focused organization
Join your local chamber of commerce and get your website listed in the business listings on their website.
Have a monthly open studio and promote it each time with adds in the free section (normally community events) of your local newspaper. Include your website’s URL
Send out regular online and offline press releases every time you have a significant event or achievement.
Contact your old school or college alumni and ask to be added to the alumni listings on their website.
Join 10 free online galleries, add a few pieces of your work and your profile information (including your website’s URL of course). Remember though – the point of doing this is to bring the visitors back to your own website where you have complete control of the look and the content. That means – give them a taste of your work – not the whole gallery! Artist Moshe Mikanovsky has a great listing of free and low cost listings.
Optimize your website for search engines. It needs to be optimized to have high-rankings when someone searches (separately) on your name and your style of work. There are lots of tips online about what to do – but if you get tired and want it all in one place you can buy our SEO Success System For Artists!
Take out small paid text or display ads in specialty magazines. For example, if you paint fish you could place adds in fishing magazines! Experiment with low cost ads and find where you get the best results. Be sure to include your URL in the ads.
Create a Facebook page for your art/art business and invite fans. Post regular updates on your events and achievements and also post samples of your work. Remember that the aim is to also have your fans visit your website to see the whole body of your work.
Join social bookmarking sites like Digg and Delicious and place their icons on your website so people can share with friends and online community
Do the same with Twitter and Facebook icons on your website – you will first need a Twitter account.
Join local arts organizations and ask to have your website listed in their resources section
Write a (keyword-optimized) article related to your art and submit it to Ezine Articles. Be sure to include your website URL in your profile.
Put your artist business logo and URLÂ on your car. People who like what they see will write it down and check your website.
Merchandise – put your logo and URLÂ on everything. When a customer buys from you at an open studio or event include your logo and URL on the packaging. Get some promo coffee mugs made with a piece of your art and your URL and send them out to friends, customers, local arts organizations, and local businesses. People talk and network a lot over coffee and you will be amazed how many people will see those mugs!
Add an email newsletter signup form on your website with a message encouraging visitors to leave their email address for updates on your events and new work. For safety, make it a double-opt-in version. Note: Don’t send unsolicited email to arts professionals or anyone. It’s probably OK if it is a genuine personal email inquiry – but don’t add anyone to an email list without them asking. We are amazed by how many artists add us to their regular mailings without asking. You will alienate the people you are trying to attract!
Personal Networking – This is the most powerful way to do anything but it’s also the one we seem to avoid at all cost! Here is a simple start: Go to a local art event – a gallery opening or show, or talk at least once every month (preferably every week). Make a point of talking with 5 new people each time and “be the artist”. Share your business card (which must have your website URL on it). Nurture the relationships and friendships that develop with artists and arts professionals. As an example, when we lived in New York most Friday evenings we would go to “Artists Talk On Art” at the Parsons School Of Design. Each meeting they would feature an interesting artist talking about their work and then afterward there was the opportunity to mingle and meet.It was always exhilarating to be amongst other artists and was also a great way to build community.

So, there you are – 18 ideas to attract art-hungry visitors to your artist website. Guess what – I bet if you use your imagination you can think of at least another 18. Try some of these and dream up some of your own. But remember to make the effort and do the work as well!

If you have some great ideas to bring visitors to your artist website please comment below..

Help Google Help You Sell Art: A Webinar Invite

Daniel — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 07:40:46 +0000

Art buyers want to find you – but your website isn’t helping very much!

If you’re like most artists with a website, you started out with a dream that collectors would actually find you through search engines. But the reality for most artists is:

Your website floats alone in cyberspace with almost no visitors.

Artist websites are great showcases and there are many strategies you can use to share your work with potential buyers – such as mailouts to galleries, email, personal networking, and social networking. All are very worthwhile, must be a part of your marketing plan, and require a big commitment of consistent effort.

But search engine traffic – the holy grail of online marketing that most of us dreamed of – eludes us still. Why is that when according to Qi Lu, President of Microsoft’s Online Services Division:

Search (engines) determine where users go online and search advertising is the most powerful economic force on the internet.

Are artists so radically different from other businesses that the most powerful economic force on the internet won’t work for them in some beneficial way?

We say no! While it’s true that search engines by themselves will not make your art career, they certainly can and should play a role in connecting you with some of the people who could help you make your career happen – people you could build relationships with and sell your art to.

Interested? Join us Wednesday December 16 at 6pm PST for a live webinar on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Success Tips For Fine Artists and learn simple powerful techniques to help you bring more quality search engine visitors to your artist website.

Youâ€™ll learn:

The 4 stages of the online art marketing model and in which ones search engines can really show their marketing power.
The 3 essential elements that contribute to Search Engine marketing success and why you need all of them.
3 Simple Tips to quickly improve your search engine rankings

This presentation is limited to a small group so please register now in the form below or on our Events Page and be sure to join the webinar a few minutes before the scheduled starting time. Weâ€™re looking forward to seeing you there!

Note: If you can’t see the sign-in form below please refresh the page in your web browser.

The Perils Of Not Owning Your Domain Name

Daniel — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 08:10:22 +0000

Do you own your own domain name for your artist website? If you don’t you’re taking a huge gamble with your art career.

Last night we received a frantic email from an artist in Mexico. She had her work displayed on a portfolio website for several years only to suddenly find her service had been discontinued by the company that operates the portfolio service. A web visit to her domain name displays the message that her portfolio is out of service.

This wouldn’t be a huge problem except – her domain name which is in the classic FirstnameLastname.com format was registered by and is owned by the portfolio website company – not the artist.

Can we help? No – not really. All the traffic that comes to her site and all the promotion she has done using her domain name is now basically lost. That could be years of effort.

Maybe you think it’s obvious that you should register and own your own domain name. But for many artists who are newbies to the online world it just seems so much simpler to have someone else take care of it for you.

Here is my one big piece of advice for you on this topic:

You can outsource almost any aspect of your online art marketing – except your domain name registration. Make sure you own it and that there is no question of this if you ever end up in any dispute with your portfolio service or hosting company.

Think of the risk you take when you don’t have control of your domain – lets illustrate with an example.

You’ve had a website and have been marketing your work online for 10 years. You’ve established good rankings in search engines and have promoted your website URL extensively. You have a steady stream of repeat buyers and new visitors coming to your website. You’re doing well!

Then – your portfolio website company (who registered your domain for you – but in their name) decided that they don’t like you anymore – or maybe they can sell your domain name for a nice price. They shut down your website and you have no access to your domain name. You can’t even access the domain control to point it to a new domain name – because you have no access or control.

All your branding is lost, your website traffic is lost, your SEO and incoming links which you spent years building are lost. Your whole online art business has just been hit by a tidal wave and will take years to rebuild.

I’m not suggesting that any webhosts or portfolio website providers are bad businesses – I’m just making the point of what could happen if you don’t have ownership and control of your domain name and you find yourself with a less-than-honest operator.

It’s simple and fast to register a domain name – there are thousands of domain registrars where you can go and get it done in just a few minutes.

Do you own your own domain name? If you don’t, do something about it today!

What Is “Attraction Phase” Art Marketing?

Daniel — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 07:21:35 +0000

We spend a lot of time in the art marketing world focusing on relationships. Relationships sell – just ask any business. It doesn’t matter whether the business sells clothes-pegs or 747 aircraft – the fact is that a great number of sales deals close on a golf course or a yacht or in a bar or a restaurant over great food and some good humor and conversation.

People love to find excuses to interact with people – no question.

But the question arises – how do you find the people to build relationships and play golf with? How do you do that when you are a beginner in a new market or industry – just as some of you may be today?

The answer is called “Attraction Phase” art marketing. A regular business would call it something much less glamorous – finding sales leads.

As an interesting aside, if you would like to grasp the importance of leads in the marketing and selling process you have to see Glengarry Glen Ross – a fabulous movie with a stellar cast including Alec Baldwin, Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon, Alan Arkin, Ed Harris, and Kevin Spacey. If you think your life is hard, wait until you see what these guys go through. I worked in sales for several years and it was compulsory viewing as part of our training!

Attraction Phase art marketing is all about finding potential sales leads for your art. We like to dress it up a bit and call them “collectors” and “art-buyers” but they are leads that may one day grow into buyers and collectors. How we build a relationship with them is another phase of the art marketing cycle – right now we just want them to find us!

In online marketing terms, we are mainly trying to “attract” potential customers to our artist website or portfolio. If the website is great and your work is amazing and your story shines through there’s the potential to build relationships and make sales. But only if people can find it.

The single most important thing to take home today is this: If you donâ€™t attract interested visitors to your website in the â€œAttraction Phaseâ€, the rest of your online sales process is a waste of time. Bringing in a regular flow of interested visitors is critical to achieving success.

How do you do that? We’ll be sharing several powerful techniques in coming articles – stay tuned!

P.S. I don’t play golf but I would love to sell some art on a yacht!