Entries Tagged 'Marketing' ↓

Today I am going to make a departure from my normal schedule and talk about a new way that Diane Clancy and I have found to help all of you artists learn about art marketing and share your own experiences. We have been working and planning for the past month and are finally ready to announce our new art marketing forum, YourArtMarketing.com.

We have both received a lot of questions about art marketing and were becoming frustrated that we did not have a way to quickly help you and also keep all of these great questions and answers for others to learn from. Additionally, many of you have a lot of your own knowledge and experience in art marketing and we wanted to be able to draw on your wisdom as well.

YourArtMarketing.com will be the place where all of us can come together to help each other out. Diane and I will spend a lot of time there, answering your questions and doing what we can. We are pretty excited about this and have come to think of all of you as part of our larger family. Building a sense of community is important to us and we know it is important to you, also.

I ask that all of you go to YourArtMarketing.com and register and then introduce yourself in the “Say Hello” section. If you are unfamiliar with forums, just click on “Say Hello” and then click on the “New Topic” button to add your own post. After you do that, please go to one of the other sections and ask a question… even if you already know the answer! We want to get the forum populated with questions so that new artists coming to the site can benefit from our knowledge and experience.

I look forward to seeing all of you over there!!!

Peace,
Chris O’Byrne
OnlineArtsMarketing.com
www.YourArtMarketing.com

My target market is the person who wants to make some money from creating art. They may want to make a full-time living or they may want to merely supplement their day job or they may be a stay-at-home parent that needs to create art and wants to make some money from it.

Who is their target market?

A large percentage of the people in this country are NOT their target market. They are the people that work all day and come home to watch tv and go to bed. They live for the weekend and vacation and for buying more toys. If they read, it is only magazines or books that are primarily fluff and are for entertainment and escape only. If they buy art, it is to make their houses look better for company and is very standard.

Their target market is the person who is educated, reads, travels, identifies themselves as spiritual, has had a few different “jobs”, thinks a lot, is a creative themselves, and is concerned about the enviroment and politics (to some extent). With so few people falling into this category, you would think that it would be more difficult to present your art to these people. In fact, the opposite is true. If you were to try and appeal to the masses, you would have to pay thousands of dollars for television commercials, billboards, and radio ads just to reach that broad audience. With a narrower market, it is much easier to “meet them” where they go. If you are thinking about advertising, you can now focus on the magazines or newspapers or websites that this sort of person would read or visit. You can speak to them on their level with their interests in mind.

It is very helpful to imagine a specific person that fits your idea of the ideal customer. Create an actual person in your mind that has those characteristics and give them a name. Think of this specific person whenever you are doing anything to market your art. If you are creating an ad, write copy that would appeal to that one person. If you are writing a blog post, address it to them in your mind while you are writing. Believe me, how you are feeling and what you are consciously and subconsciously thinking will come through in your writing.

So far we have identified the very general market that would be interested in your art and created a specific person to address that fits the ideal, but we still need to talk about need. In a very general sense, here is how it works. There are two very broad ways to get somebody’s interest. One way is through their curiosity and this can be addressed through telling your story. This is not a very strong method, however, because satisfying their curiosity is fairly low on their list of needs. A stronger and more effective method is to make them aware of a specific problem that creates a need for them that your art can satisfy.

You know that your art has value and that it will satisfy some specific need or needs that certain people will have but what need is that? This is the hard part, the crux of the whole matter, and only you can come up with just the right answer. As an example, you might show your potential customer that art brings depth and layers to their life. It opens windows to deeper spaces within and its daily influence brings joy and lasting satisfaction. Remember, you don’t want to appeal to the general masses, you want to appeal to your ideal customer.

As I have said, this is the key step in the whole process, identifying what problem or need that your art solves or fills and then letting your market know about it.

Next week we’ll take this further and show how this ties into the past two posts about surviving as an artist. If there is a particular direction you would like me to take with this or a specific topic you want me to make sure I talk about, please let me know in the comments.

Chris O’Byrne
OnlineArtsMarketing.com

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Here is some information about art education:

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I just read yet another article about the “dos and don’ts” of art marketing and it has me in a tizzy. Why? Because it is about the same old thing, image instead of substance. Their advice is always the same and it is always about your brand or image and how people perceive you. They ignore the deeper and more important stuff which is how to really connect with people.

You cannot just advertise and get the word out about you and then sit back while the orders come pouring in. You may be able to sell a little bit this way, but it is without substance and skips the important stuff. You want… you NEED to connect with your potential customers. You have to be real, not just a storefront somewhere with cool stuff for sale.

How do you connect? I think you already know this. Have a blog. Write to connect with people, not to talk them into buying from you. Tell your story. Be alive. Your newsletters and emails and postcards should all be about connecting with people, not pushing sales. Your gallery site should tell a story about each and every piece of work.

So what place does advertising have? Use advertising as the means to get people to the places where you connect. If you put an ad in a magazine or other print medium, send them to your blog. Meet people online and really talk to them. The point is to connect with people, not sell, sell, sell.

Make sure, however, that people can easily purchase from you. Make it easy for someone reading your blog to then make one click and go straight to your online store. It’s not all about selling, but that doesn’t mean that you should make it difficult to do so. Encourage it, in fact.

Okay, enough ranting for one day. Thanks for listening and see you on Friday with my newest Featured Site!

Chris O’Byrne
OnlineArtsMarketing.com

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Here is some information about art education:

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Last week was a good introduction to the idea of surviving as an artist, especially the idea that you need to take control. But you need to do more than just take control and think of the business side of things. You need to think in terms of multiple streams of income and how you can make enough money to survive. Not very many people can make a lot of money from selling their art in galleries, but almost anyone can make a little bit of money that way. Not very many people can make a lot of money from selling their art online, but almost anyone can make a little bit of money that way. Think in terms of all of the ways that you can make even a little bit of money. There are a lot of them, are there not? Now if you add them all up, you can probably make enough to survive as an artist.

Let’s look at a few:

• Sell online
• Use Adsense to make money from your art blog
• Teach
• Do online classes and coaching
• Sell at galleries and shows
• Sell cards and prints
• Sell to businesses/offices
• Have your own show
• Add your art to other people’s projects and create joint ventures
• Create information products (articles, books, audio, video… )
• Create a community-based project that garners media attention
• Promote your own line of products
• License your work
• Take people on art tours (locally, nationally, or internationally)
• Live simply

These are just some of the multiple streams of income that you can create and use. Some of them may take some time up front, but most of them can be automated so that you have time to actually work on your art.

Next week I will start to look at some of these multiple streams and go more in-depth on a few of them.

Thanks for stopping by!

Chris O’Byrne
OnlineArtsMarketing.com

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Here is some information about art education:

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This question has been asked of me more times than I can count: How can I survive as an artist?

It is the dream of many artists to spend their day creating and not think at all about the business. I’m not sure if anyone is blessed in such a way and if they are, they must be extremely rare. Even the person who has an agent or a manager cannot just let the business side go completely, there are too many decisions to make.

I often hear the artist say, “I just need to get into a couple of decent galleries and they will do all of the work for me.” That only works if you meet a very specific set of criteria. First, your art must sell well to the target market of the gallery. If not, the gallery will not spend much effort marketing your work for you. Who’s art is featured prominently on the gallery’s advertising? The big shots, the ones that sell a lot and make a lot of money for the gallery. Second, the gallery owner must have decent business sense and understand marketing. Too many gallery owners just have this dream of owning a gallery and do not have what it takes to make it in business. They must be constantly marketing aggressively. Third (and this goes hand-in-hand with number two), the gallery must be successful. Even if your art fits the market and even if the owner is an aggressive marketer, if the gallery does not sell a lot of art, you are not going to make much money.

There are far more than three criteria for a successful gallery, but that is not the point of this blog post. This only shows that you need to take control of the business end of your art because no one has more invested in the business than you.

I cannot give a complete description in this post of how to survive as an artist. That could easily take up an entire book and is actually what this whole blog is about. What I WILL do, however, is give you a blueprint:

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1. Take control of your business.

This is a mindset that I am talking about. You will know when you have it. I mean much more than just selling your art. To take control of your business, you have to think like a business person. Put your equipment away, dig out a pad of paper and something to write with and turn off the phone. It’s time to write a business plan.

(This next part was borrowed from another web site, but I can’t remember which one!)

Business means structure
Owning an art business (aka being an artist), means you must structure and supervise your working days. Many aspects of running a successful business are essential, notably marketing, administration, accounting and law. Learning these skills (through courses, books or even on the internet) is essential to be able to make a living from art.

Here is a list of some things you should be able to (or must learn to) do:

• Write a business plan
• Promote your artwork to potential buyers
• Effectively negotiate contracts / price your work
• Finance your projects (apply for grants & awards)
• Keep track of your income & expenses (basic accounting)
• Protect your copyright

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Come back next week for part 2!

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Chris O’Byrne
OnlineArtsMarketing.com

What is an online social network? An online social network is any site where you can communicate with other people online. (Yes, it’s that easy.) The first ones that come to mind are the big ones, MySpace and Facebook, but there are hundreds more. Do some Googling and see how many you come up with. Don’t forget places like Flickr and YouTube or any other site where you can add content, use tags, and leave comments. Did I mention StumbleUpon and Del.icio.us? There are also blogs, forums, chat rooms, groups, and many other ways to meet people online. You could spend 24 hours a day on nothing but social networking and still not get to them all!So, where to start…

Make Friends

You know, this should be at the top of any list. The “new thing” in sales (which has been around for several years, now) is what they call relationship marketing. You have to work at establishing a relationship with your potential customer. Act as if you really do want to make friends. I do not mean that you should be fake, but that you should develop a real concern for who your customer is and what their real wants and needs may be. You want this relationship to last and you do that by being authentic, honest, and helpful.

Making friends online can be a relatively easy task. Go to their blog and read it and leave useful comments. Join a forum and help answer people’s questions. Be friendly and be yourself and do not push your work. Simply use your web address in your signature and people will check it out if they like what you have to say. Go to Yahoo Answers where you can help people and leave a link to your site at the same time.

I have given this advice to artists before and they almost always nod in agreement and most actually get online and visit a few sites… and then most stop completely. I do not understand this! How could they possibly think that they could make one or two comments and expect anything to happen from this?

Have a Website that Grabs Their Attention

If you are going to make friends and send them to your website, you should have something worthwhile for them to look at. Have samples of your work, a gallery, and if you sell online, make it easy to buy from you. Have a detailed About Me page that tells your story. Have a blog that you update once a week or once every two weeks or, at the very minimum, once a month. You can definitely have an online presence without your own web site, but it is best to have one place where people can go to learn about you.

Do Not Spread Yourself Too Thin

At what point do you become too spread out and it becomes too difficult for people to grasp who you really are? If you try to send people to all of your websites and social media sites, it becomes too confusing and they will just shut you out of their mind completely. I would suggest that you have one website that is your main online home. This is the place where you send everyone that has an interest in your art. Now, you may choose to have one or two online stores, depending on which services best suit you, but you still send people to ONE site.

Your Online Store

Obviously, if you are going to sell your work, you need an online store. If you just have a store on your website that does not connect anywhere else, you’re missing out on some powerful social networking possibilities. With Etsy.com, you can put images from your store directly into your own website or blog and clicking on them will take people directly to your store. People often browse through Etsy.com looking at whatever strikes their fancy. You can add any store to your own list of favorites and see who else has added that store to their favorites. It’s a good way to build community and sell your art at the same time. eBay is also worth your while. Millions of people go to eBay to look for art and you can not only sell to them directly, but if you have a well designed About Me page you can send them to your website and capture their attention and hearts in many more ways.

The point, here, is that you can have any old store on your site, even just a few PayPal links, but if you ignore the more community based online stores, you will be missing out on the attention of thousands of potential customers. Take advantage of the social networking capabilities of sites like Etsy and eBay and accomplish far more than a few “Buy Now” links.

Okay, this post has gone on long enough. I know I barely scratched the surface here, but it gives you an idea of how to get started using social networking to sell your art. Good luck and feel free to ask questions.

Chris O’Byrne
OnlineArtsMarketing.com

As I stated in an earlier post, I believe that 2008 will usher in the age of the personal social network. Every method of online communication (email, bulletin boards, instant messaging, blogs, etcetera) has had that initial period where only the early adopters used it and then it suddenly gained widespread exposure and exploded into use. This next year will be when that happens to personal social networks.

The real question, though, is WHY would you want your own personal social network? Or, why would you join a personal social network? The reason is because they provide a new tool to facilitate the gathering of a smaller, niche group of people. We have always had these niche groups. Families are a niche group of people. The company you work for is a niche group of people. Your artist friends are a niche group of people.

A personal social network uses the technology of the web to help form these niche groups of people and then help them communicate easily.

Let’s look at an example.

There is a small group of painters that get together once a month to talk about what they are doing and learn from each other. They are all watercolor painters and they usually each bring a recent painting and share techniques, etcetera. They all have friends that would love to join the group, but a lot of these friends do not live nearby. They decide to form their own online social network and invite all of their friends.

Now anyone can join the group and easily share with anyone else. They can form sub-groups that are based on location or interest or anything else they can think of. They can easily stay caught up on what everyone else is doing and easily set up their in-person meetings. They can hold live, online meetings or they can make them time-delayed so anyone can contribute at a time that works best for them. There are many different ways that people can communicate through social networks and therein lies their real power.

Social networks combine many different forms of communication into one package. Because several forms of communication are combined, there is a synergy that takes place which creates entirely new ways of communicating based on those combinations.

A Deeper Explanation

The online world is changing and growing FAST! Because of the nature of the underlying structure, the web grows geometrically. What this means is that when you look at the change from one year to the next, it’s not a doubling of information and new technologies that you see, but a quadrupling or… well, whatever 8x and 16x and 32x is called.

And what is our interaction with the web mostly about? Two things: information and socialization. Think about it… at one time people completely downplayed using the telephone because it just wasn’t the same as meeting someone in person. Yet the telephone is much more personal than email as a means of communication. The early days of the web were truly less personal than talking to someone on the telephone.

No longer!

A social network combines text, photos, video, voice (e.g. Skype), and so many combinations of those that the interaction can actually become overwhelming. And this is just the beginning of this trend. We can guess from past experience that at some point in the very near future, social networking will seem archaic. Imagine when we start to use virtual reality and can interact “physically” with each other. Have you ever read “Snow Crash” by Neal Stephenson? That is not as far away as you might think.

And yet we have only thought in terms of re-creating the reality we currently live in. Even virtual reality will only emulate the experience of actually meeting someone in person. The truly amazing part will come after that when we start to imagine completely new ways of interacting.

When I first heard about virtual reality, I was a chemical engineering student. The first use I thought of back then was to imagine physically interacting with atoms to combine them in new ways. With virtual reality, I could be in the same room with the atoms which would now be large enough to handle, perhaps the size of Legos. As I tried putting them together in new ways, they would either fit together or not based on what we knew about their properties. These new molecules could then be played with in this virtual setting and new emergent properties would be seen on a macro scale.

I also imagined streams of data from a chemical process (or any process or system, for that matter). If you could virtually insert yourself in that stream and start guiding things into different patterns, you could go back to the sources of that stream and figure out which sets of input would produce the desired results.

The real point of all of this rambling is that 1) things are changing fast, and 2) we will see benefits arise from these changes that we never expected or imagined.

Immerse yourself today in a social network. Come to understand it as only an involved insider could. Use it to tell your story and connect with more people in more ways. Let go of the idea that you are there to sell. More than that, you are there to connect and build relationships. If you have something to offer that is wanted by your connections, they will buy from you. Don’t hide the fact that you have something of value to offer, if you truly believe that it is of value you will make sure that people know about it and will make it easy for them to acquire it. Just don’t come into a new relationship doing nothing more than pushing your product.

Chris O’Byrne
OnlineArtsMarketing.com

It is now possible to build your own social networking site, one that goes beyond a mere forum and has the functionality of Facebook and MySpace. The following list comes from Matthew Sherborne’s site.

1. Ning - http://www.ning.com/

Ning will have your social network site up in running fast. Similar to a Blogger blog, free Ning sites are all linked to the central hub. This can be a blessing or a curse depending on how popular your Ning site is. The most popular sites are featured most prominently. As of this writing there are over 6500 Ning sites in operation.

2. CrowdVine - http://www.crowdvine.com/home

Similar to the Ning network, Crowdvine is easy to set up. Crowdvine can even allow you to incorporate RSS feeds to update from your blog, other social network sites or photo stream.

3. KickApps - http://www.kickapps.com/

KickApps offers users a vast range of features including Widget support, guest books, video feeds and a lot more. One of the more feature laden of the up and coming social networking platforms.

4. GoingOn - http://www.goingon.com/

GoingOn allows you to set up an interactive blogging platform with many features such as blogging search tagging and feeds.

5. Me - http://www.me.com/

The Me.com concept gives you the tools to create your own social network site around your passions and splits 50% of the revenue your site generates with you.

6. CollectiveX - http://www.collectivex.com/

With CollectiveX you can create an online community around you product, blog, interest or publication.

7. PeopleAggregator - http://www.peopleaggregator.net/homepage.php

The PeopleAggregator site was created in order to allow you to edit store and share all of your digital information in one place. You can use it to manage your friends, groups and content.

8. Elgg - http://elgg.org/

Elgg is an open source social networking platform that brings together some of the best resources commonly found on popular social networks. With Elgg you can create communities of specialized targeted networks.

And an additional one:

9. Vostu - http://vostu.com/

Why would you want to create your own social network? Funny you should ask, we’ll be talking about that next time!

Chris O’Byrne
OnlineArtsMarketing.com

This last year has been the big year for online social networks, especially MySpace and now Facebook. The trend this next year will be towards smaller, more niche-based social networks. I can see a social network for artists. I can see a social network for painters. I can see a social network for painters that do plein-aire. I can see a social network for painters that do plein-aire in the Pacific Northwest.

Get the idea?

This is not a new idea. There already exists such organizations. Many of these exist online as forums or email groups. I went to Yahoo! Groups and within seconds found the Pacific Northwest Plein-Aire Painters Group. Imagine a format like Facebook where you can add friends, easily email or write on “walls”, join sub-groups, and all the many other services these provide. Online social networks are about getting together with your friends, sharing, communicating, seeing what everyone else is up to… everything you do with offline social networks.

On Monday we’ll look at some of the tools that are available right now for building your own social network.

Chris O’Byrne
OnlineArtsMarketing.com

Social media is supposed to be the cornerstone of Web 2.0 and with this I agree. I’ve been dipping my toes in the social media waters for over a year, now, and I’m just starting to get a clear picture of what roles each piece should play. (How’s that for mixed metaphors?)

I still think that blogs are the most powerful forms of social media and communication out there. They are so flexible and can be customized in so many ways, that often you do not even know you are looking at a blog. Blogs have also become mainstream and that has increased their power and reach several-fold. Whatever you do, you MUST have a blog. You can see my personal blog at PeacefulBirder.com.

Tumblelogs are a form of mini-blog, a way of sharing various forms of media (text, photos, video, and more). To get an idea of what these look like, you can go to the Tumbler home page or to my own Tumblelog.

Twitter is even more streamlined, 140 characters of text per post. I can see many uses for Twitter that go way beyond the traditional “here’s what I’m doing now”, although even that serves its purpose. Here are some of the more unusual ways of using Twitter and here is a good guide to Twitter. You can see my own Twitter feed and even follow me if you wish.

This is just a brief introduction to some of the means of social networking available. The next post will talk about some of the really big social networks, like Facebook and MySpace and what changes I think we’ll see in the next year.

Chris O’Byrne
OnlineArtsMarketing.com