Do you ever wonder why some artists are wildly successful and others can’t figure it out? Well, here is a valuable resource for all artists who are serious about becoming successful. I have participated in this course and it helped me learn the secrets to connections that inspire sales.
What if you knew how to demystify the whole buyer/collector connection conundrum and you could replace it with confident, strategic communication that has your buyers coming back for more?
Wouldn’t that up your game in 2012 and beyond? Move you into a whole new zone of confidence and sales, sales, sales.
Well, folks, there’s one place you can put this all together and move your art career forward–no excuses.
It’s the only professional development ONLINE conference for visual artists and artisans: the smARTist Telesummit 2012.
No traveling. No down time. And it’s all recorded and transcribed, so even if you have a day job, you miss nothing.
December was a very busy month as I am sure it was for everyone of my readers. Today was the first day I really had the opportunity to sit down and explore the new profile options offered by Facebook. After a bit of clicking and experimenting, I discovered there are some wows-er benefits for the visual artists to prominently feature their artwork on their personal profiles.
To begin with, you can feature a photo called a “Cover Photo” which acts like a banner across the top of your profile (way COOL), I decided to feature my newest painting and allow my funky self portrait to continue to be my Facebook icon. So right up front you get a taste of my dual personality.
There is a timeline on the far right that can transport the viewer to any month that you have posted something on Facebook. The quick information about who you are: work, school, education, etc is just below your profile picture.
The status update on the left hand side just below your stats has an added feature, “Life Event” which allows you to mark a very important event with time, date, story and even a photo! I’m thinking EXHIBIT FEATURE! or NEW PAINTING feature! This section stands out from the rest of your posts and presents a great opportunity for artists to show off to their friends.
This is what the “Life Event” feature looks like on the page:
Anyone looking at your profile will not miss that life event.
The third benefit is a little more subtle than the “Life Event” feature, it is the “Feature Post” icon. At the top of every post there is a little star, if you click on the star it will pull that post across the page so that it is larger and stands out as a post. Here is what this feature looks like on the page:
I would suggest using this feature occasionally to point to things important to your reader. Here I featured the blog post on my art website so that they can visit my artwork on my website. Can you see the potential?
These features are not available on the pages, and you shouldn’t abandon your art page featuring your artwork because your profile is still not search engine optimized like the pages. However, use these features on your profile to draw attention to your new artwork and events concerning your artwork so those important details are not missed on your profile.
Go check out the options on the new profiles for yourself and cruise on over to take a look at my personal profile and even become my friend (A little message with the friend request will make acceptance easier for me.) http://www.facebook.com/michelle.leivan. And I’ll get an opportunity to see what you have done with your profile page too.
We all have need for inexpensive materials, most of us have a good idea where we can get the supplies to create our art. But sometimes it is more difficult to find a place to get items such as offset clips, and acid free tape… Here is a good resource I’ve found: http://www.unitedmfrscatalog.com/home/index.htm. Go check it out.
The Mulvane Women’s Board is hosting the 4th annual “Mulvane Merriment” fund raising event. The date will be Saturday, December 3, 2011. There are some exciting changes this year. The event will be held in the Fairlawn Plaza indoor mall area. This allows for us to expand and gives space for more artists. This will allow for extended hours – 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.
Another change is that we will not be charging the 30% commission as in past years, but will have a flat fee for a booth of $125. Each artist will handle their own sales and sales tax collection. As always, the proceeds of the event will benefit the Mulvane Art Museum and scholarships for Washburn art students. While the new venue does allow for more booths, there are a limited number.
If you would like to participate as a vendor at this event, please contact Jeanne Cohorst at 785-286-3648 or email jrcohorst@aol.com. In order to have all names listed in the advertisements for the event, please let them know of your interest as soon as possible. Below is a link to the pdf with the contract for your convenience.
Artists: Does trying to promote your artwork have you feeling alone, frustrated, or unmotivated?
Join our FREE art marketing salon!
”A salon is a social gathering of artists and intellectuals hosted at regular intervals
by a patron in his or her home. Such convivial settings for the art of conversation
emerged in Paris at the beginning of the seventeenth century.”—Robert Atkins in ArtSpoke
Connections are invaluable to anyone’s career, but we’re here for more than that. Art Biz Connection art marketing salons provide a structure to help artists work together and support one another. It’s all about building artist communities where they don’t exist and strengthening them where they’re already in place. Join Us! We provide the organization and motivation.
How?Through a nine-session program that guarantees each and every participant a complete art marketing plan when it’s over. Better than that, you’ll have the support of your artist-friends each and every step of the way.
This is for you if you’re ready to take your career to the next level and realize you would benefit from support focusing or refocusing on your art business.
It’s Free! All of the materials on this site are provided free of charge. All we ask is that you commit to supporting your fellow artist participants in your careers and businesses.
You won’t reap the benefits unless you participate!
Weekly sessions start in Topeka at 10:00am on Oct. 15, 2011 hosted by Studio 831, 831 N. Kansas Ave., NOTO Arts District. Coordinated by Michelle Leivan – michelle@leivan.net keep up to date @ facebook.com/TopekaArtMarketingSalon
source: graphics8.nytimes.com | Credit: NY Times - The New York Times featured Joe Mangrum, a sidewalk artist in Manhattan, using Square.
One of my artist friends introduced me to SquareUp.com. You can accept credit card payments anywhere with your iPhone, iPad or Android phone. It uses a small and inexpensive physical reader (aka credit card machine) that plugs into the audio jack of you device. Very handy for your art business whether you are selling from your studio or at an art fair! You’ll be able to accept all major credit cards!
Square is simple to use. After setting up your Square account, you just need to do the following:
- Set up the menu on your device with your product selection
I am always seeking new sources of social media marketing information. My blog here is intended to be more than my knowledge, it’s about a gathering of information that is useful for artists to promote their work. I have found many resources online and I do my best to share what is relevant to art marketing. Social Media is about sharing and getting the word out and maybe my filter alone is not enough for every artist wanting to take advantage of this new tool. If you are wanting to explore, the place I would start is by checking out www.MariSmith.com website. Mari Smith has been dubbed “The Pied Piper of Social Media” and the name is well deserved. If you are interested in knowing all there is to know about Social Media, or just seeking out enough to get you by Mari is one of the best sources available on the web. I have been following her for a while and she is on top of everything worth knowing about Social Media Marketing.
So please go visit her site where she has a blog, a book and even training seminars to harvest her wealth of knowledge. An excellent resourse for general Social Media Marketing. If you find anything useful for the artist please share it with us here. Mari Smith’s Site
Here is a wonderfully inspiring insight to the workings of your right side of your brain. I found this video online several months ago and it hasn’t been too far from my mind since. Dr. Taylor’s “Stroke of Insight” talk brings the realization that there is much more to us than we “think” there is. Or rather that there is much more than our rational left side of the brain cares to let us know. Society is set up to revolve around the rational left side of the brain and our right side is often a silent partner that is ignored yet is aware of the interconnectivity of us all.
“Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor is a Harvard-trained and published neuroanatomist who experienced a severe hemorrhage in the left hemisphere of her brain in 1996. On the afternoon of this rare form of stroke (AVM), she could not walk, talk, read, write, or recall any of her life. It took eight years for Dr. Jill to completely recover all of her functions and thinking ability. She is the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey (published in 2008 by Viking Penguin). In 2008, Dr. Jill gave a presentation at the TED Conference in Monterey, CA, which has become the second most viewed TED Talk of all time.” –http://drjilltaylor.com/about.html
Watch this inspiring description of her experience:
Just like naming your website, your user name and page name on Facebook are important parts of your online marketing and branding strategy. Use the same name on your profile, fan page and your website because consistency will make your art easily discovered online whether through your website or through a social media network.
When studying art history we learn the names of individual artists not the names of their businesses. Since your art is part of who you are, the name you use for your artwork should be synonymous with your artwork. The idea is to distinguish you from commercially made art that can be found in nearly any big box store.
If your name is common add your middle name, initial or simply change it. There is no reason an artist can’t have a stage name. Actors do it all the time. The actors guild and associations insist on a unique identity to distinguish themselves from actors who have come before them. For example: “Singer Katy Perry, born Katheryn Elizabeth Hudson, released her self-titled album under the name Katy Hudson, but later changed her surname to Perry to avoid confusion with actress Kate Hudson.” Wikipedia has an interesting entry about use and history of stage names: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stage_name.
Whatever name you use, keep it constant throughout all of your online identities. How do you want to be remembered in the art history books?
Easily direct someone to your User Name and Page by setting a username for it. You will not be able to edit or transfer this username once you set it. http://www.facebook.com/username/
“If you don’t get noticed, you don’t have anything. You just have to be noticed, but the art is in getting noticed naturally, without screaming or without tricks.” – Leo Burnett
The number one form of marketing has always been word of mouth. You find something fun and exciting or useful and inexpensive, you tell your friend and they tell their friends and suddenly you find yourself seven deviations from Kevin Bacon and there are people all over the world who know about you. Traditionally this took forever! With the dawn of the internet and today’s technology however, it takes moments for someone from the other side of the world to see content posted on the internet. This is called viral marketing.
As quoted from wikipedia.org “The buzzwords viral marketing and viral advertising refer to marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness or to achieve other marketing objectives (such as product sales) through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of pathological and computer viruses.”
As an internet user or a news watcher various videos people have created can not be miss and that means they have gone viral. There is an entire show called Tosh2.0 that is dedicated to viral videos. Maybe you remember the dog saying “I Love You” there is but one video that as of today has over 55 million views in the last 3 years!
You can use your website, Facebook, Linked In, MySpace, and YouTube to name just a few. 1 out of every 8 internet users is a member of Facebook. YouTube is ranked among the highest for matching search terms on a web browser query.
Just imagine what would happen to your art career if you utilized several aspects of this technology to get your artwork out to all of those users?
One fantastic example of viral marketing is www.valsartdiary.com. I have watched her Vlog (Video Blog) weekly videos for years. Many of her videos have more than 1 million views. She is entertaining while masterfully marketing her work to a worldwide audience. She offers her insight on why she paints what she paints in her videos and has been interview for USA Today, Forbes, Chicago Tribune, ABC and Fox News. I can only guess her sales are remarkable. Oh, yeah! I celebrate her success; this is what it’s all about!
What is even better is that everything she does is easily recreated in your own style. You too can create your own videos about your work and develop your own personality for internet users.
I have to admit, this is much easier said than done, as several years ago I made an attempt to create my own weekly Vlog. I was pressed for time and not so skilled with public speaking, (I swear I have a disability that affects me when a video camera is placed in front of me, my mouth brain connection just fails) despite my concerns this is definitely on my agenda to start again. This is such a powerful opportunity that it is worth conquering my fears and exploring options.
As with everything, it takes dedication and some skill to pull off a weekly show. However, that doesn’t mean that you can’t create your own simple video, show your personality and let the world know who you are and why you create and upload it to YouTube, Facebook and anywhere else you can find.
Many new computers have video editing software such as Microsoft Live Movie Maker and Mac has iMovie. Your cell phone probably has a video recorder. You are all set to start creating your videos. Take it on like any other creative process and think through your message, do a little research as to what other artists have done then grab your video camera and get to it. Use that technology and show me what you can do!
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Brand new version March 2011.
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