Art Marketing Secrets

Just yesterday I had a call from a very successful and established professional artist – a man who has two studios in different parts of the country and exhibits in multiple galleries and prestige locations including the Smithsonian. He called to discuss artist websites…

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.

While we all know that stealing images from your artist website 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? And can you stop it anyway?

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!

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 using wireless or low-speed land-line connections.

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.

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. Want to change that? Join us for a live Webinar on Search Engine Optimization tips for Artists.

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. Its a huge gamble with your art career to allow another party to control your domain – lets look at an example of what could happen…

In reviewing Google’s recent webmaster updates we noted that their crawlers are now able to scan the text on many flash websites thereby rendering them much more visible to indexing and easier to optimize in search engine results. However, there are still potential issues with other search engines.

If you approached your art career as an Olympic athlete in training, have you really done everything you possibly could? Have you been up at 4am every day painting? Have you marketed your work for 2 hours every day? Have you studied the work of masters every day? Have you really gone for the gold medal?