Its a well-known concept that is drummed into artists almost continually by art coaches and marketing consultants – be consistent! But why really? Why not indulge your passions and embrace and show all your many artistic voices? Here are three simple reasons why consistency is king.

The first reason is all about FOCUS and it has to do with the concept Bruce Lee was referring to in his universally famous quote…

I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times. Bruce Lee

A lot of wisdom in that sentence! A simple translation for the emerging artist might be…

Instead of indulging yourself exploring lots of styles and not mastering anything, you should start by focusing on one style and mastering it to the absolute limits of your ability. A Well Intentioned Observer

Focus is an absolutely essential part of success for any artist, or any human endeavor for that matter. Its something we refer to a lot in our article, 18 Tips To Be The Great Artist of Your Dreams. Success is an alchemical birthing process that requires huge amounts of work and energy – not unlike The Struggle of The Butterfly. The talented and successful artist is a product of both innate ability and focused practice on a specific style and subject.

The second reason is all about marketing. We recommend that you should be able to universally describe your art in one short sentence. Its your elevator pitch and it makes it easier for art dealers and commercial art websites to profile you and explain you to their buyers. It makes it easier for buyers to “identify” with your work.

This came to mind many times as I visited the booths at Artwalk yesterday and I noticed that the really good consistent art could always be described in a short sentence. Some (fictional) examples:

Sarah Brown paints stunning American coastal images that evoke a sense of the post-impressionist era.

Bill Jeffries creates riveting abstract animal sculptures with aluminum wire and house paint.

Melody Jones specializes in hand colorized photographs of whales and dolphins in pristine oceans.

Now just to be really clear, there actually were also a few good artists I saw at the event whose work was not very consistent – extending across multiple styles and/or subjects. I found that while I could look at an individual piece of art and really appreciate it, when I stood back and looked at the complete booth with all the art, I felt literally dazed and confused. I didn’t really want to go into the booth because it was sending me mixed messages. From an art marketing perspective this is really bad news because to be successful you want to send the simplest and most coherent message to potential buyers and dealers.

The third reason that consistency is so important is because its essential to developing the business relationships that will make your art career successful. “No Man is an Island” holds true today more than ever and no more so than in the world of art business, whether we’re referring to a gallery or dealer, a commercial art buyer, or a collector. They all highly value consistency

….when asked what an artist should do to increase their odds of finding gallery representation and building long-term commercial success, consistency would be the very first factor to which I would point. That’s right. Even above quality and creativity, I feel that consistency is the key to long-term success. Jason Horejs, Xanadu Gallery

In an art business relationship, a gallery needs to feel confident that they can rely on you and that your work will sell quickly and consistently. This means that they need to know that they can expect consistent quality and style from you because that’s what their clients expect.

What exactly does consistency mean though? Artist David Kessler gives a good view in his blog post, “Artists Must Maintain Consistency in Their Work”. In the post he singles out four primary areas of consistency:

Consistency of Subject Matter. Example:  Don’t mix abstracts, horse paintings, figurative work, and landscapes in the same show. Pick one of those types of paintings and build the show around them.

Consistency in Image Quality. Images are all created by a similar process and have a cohesive look and feel to them.

Consistency in Presentation. Maintain a consistent framing or canvas mounting style for paintings and observe similar discipline with sculptures, video and other art forms.

Consistency in the Message. The message sent through marketing and branding is equally important. The look of the letterhead, business cards, postcards, flyers, emails, newsletters, social media and the artist’s website should all communicate the same message consistently.

Consistency truly is king, especially for emerging artists as they expand into the business relationships that will deliver ongoing success. Be sure to make a little time to indulge all your creative urges in the studio because that’s important for your growth as an artist – but keep your message to the outside world focused and consistent!

The post 3 Reasons Why Consistency is King For The Successful Artist appeared first on Art Marketing Secrets.

At the other extreme there is a broader context of success – one that goes beyond the personal into the universal and looks at the legacy we leave for those around us or who come after us. Would Van Gogh have considered himself a successful person? Probably not – and yet even a few years after his death his art was inspiring a whole new generation of artists unhappy with the status quo. And today? How many hundreds of millions of lives have been enriched and changed by Van Gogh’s work?

My definition of success is more abstract. To me, each of us has a golden contract we agreed to before we arrived on the planet and success simply means fulfilling that contract. Some of us figure out what that contract is early in life, for others the contract involves a long journey through life seeking answers. It might be that for one person the contract involves learning the experience of fame or financial rewards. For another it may be excellence in business or mastering writing or art or motherhood. There are no boundaries or limits to what might be in your golden contract!

Lets say though that you’ve figured out that your golden contract involves success as an artist – be it with our without fame and fortune. How can you cultivate success in completing your contract and enjoying the rewards? Here are six secrets to nudge you along the way…..

Find Your Passion
If you’re an artist there must be passion for what you do. Finding and creating what you love is central to the whole idea of being an artist. All the other secrets to success are completely irrelevant without the passion to create.

Take a wander around any of the worlds great art museums and you’ll see passion everywhere. Getting back to Van Gogh – do you think those amazing wild works of art would have happened without a large helping of passion? If you want to learn what passion means I recommend “The Agony and The Ecstacy”, Irving Stone’s biography of Michelangelo. That novel is the definition of artistic passion.

Find Your Mentors
Mentors are one of life’s great gifts – the master principle in action where we learn from those with more experience. In Michelangelo’s day all the artists and craftspeople started their careers as apprentices to the great artists of the time. From those humble beginnings, with appropriate teaching and inspiration from their mentors some rose to become great artists themselves.

Seek out and learn from the best of those who have gone before you in the area of art you want to master. Artists, teachers, art dealers, etc – all can mentor you in different ways. And don’t ever think of them as competition – you’re running a relay race through life and at some point your mentors will pass the baton to you to take it further than it has ever been before.

Be Disciplined and Work Hard
Artists ride the cosmic seas of life and bring back beauty and passion that is largely hidden to the rest of the world’s inhabitants. A big part of your golden contract is to share what you bring back – it’s a sacred trust and it can’t be done if you are lazy and undisciplined. You start as a diamond in the rough and through consistent effort you may become the perfectly polished artist and create masterpieces.

Television and Social media play down the effort needed to be successful. In many sitcoms we see successful young people living in New York City and living in lovely upscale apartments. They spend their large amounts of away from work time at parties and in bars and their only anxieties seem to be about relationships and trivia.

It’s an illusion! I know because I lived there and I hung out with real artists and its really really hard work. There are so many gifted people and in a place like New York and is right in your face. The few who become successful have many things going for them, but the most important one is that they are completely driven to be the best they can be. And remember – I’m not specifying what success means here – it might be mastery of the craft or it may be financial success – or both.

Develop a plan for creating new work and improving your craft and work the plan. That means many hours a day! It’s ok and healthy to be intense!

Choose carefully what you put your attention on

Your mind and body are an incredibly sophisticated biological computer. When you consume information from television, the internet, movies, and stories, you’re effectively downloading programming information into your neural network that will get played out in the rest of your life. Don’t believe it? Then try reading something really depressing and see how creative or motivated you feel afterward.

If you want to have a successful attitude and see great results, put your attention on inspiring and stretching stories, movies, and art. When I lived in New York one of my inspirational treats was visits to the Met, the Guggenheim, and MOMA,

The same goes for music – everyone’s musical inspiration is different and you’ll have to figure out what works best for you – but you can never go wrong with Mozart as a starting point.

The last important piece of focusing your attention relates to meditation and prayer. You can choose how you do it but allow some time each day to go within and plumb the depths of the infinite. Listen.

Be Really Healthy

We are experiencing a golden age with health on the planet today. Sure – there are many challenges – but we’ve living in a time of unprecedented access to cutting edge health information and amazing food. This is important for the successful artist because our creative abilities and stamina are heavily dependent on a strong healthy body and mind.

You can choose to be lazy and eat junk food and pop medication while getting no exercise and feeling like $%#@ – or you can be conscious and eat locally produced natural whole foods, supplemented with super-food supplements, exercise, and natural treatment therapies like Chinese Medicine, and feel energized and creative for 12 hours a day!

Which will you choose? Are you motivated enough by success to actually change your long-standing lifestyle behavior? Your long life and success depend on it.

Sleep and Dream

Good sleep is essential! During sleep we go through 5 distinct stages and in the process the mind-body supercomputer repairs and regenerates tissues, builds bone and muscle, strengthens the immune system., consolidates memories, and dreams.

A recently published study in “Current Biology” has also shown that the brain can be started on a task just as a person is dropping off to sleep and then, during slumber, take in new auditory information and then process it. Pretty incredible….

Amazing things are happening while you sleep – and we haven’t even started on the importance of dreaming. Depending on which school of thought you choose to tie your camel to, dreams are either an unconscious rehashing of the days events, deep insights into your psyche, or actual inner world travel in alternate dimensions accessing other levels of creativity and things not available on planet earth. Whichever school you subscribe to you there’s definitely value in dreaming for the artist.

To recap the 6 secrets for cultivating a success consciousness as an artist:

1. Find your passion.
2. Find your mentors.
3. Be disciplined and work hard.
4. Choose carefully what you put your attention.
5. Be really healthy.
6. Sleep and dream

Work with these secrets and you’ll have access to far greater creativity, success, and creative fulfillment than you ever dreamed possible!

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The question is – what have you done with all this knowledge and advice? Have you been successful building your artist brand? Have you worked on creating and marketing as if your life depended on it? Have you received the recognition you’ve been looking for? Have you sold your work? Are you able to spend more time engaging in your creativity because your business building efforts are starting to pay off?

In our lives we are subject to multiple influences from people, local and worldly events and trends, not to mention our destiny and spiritual purpose (if you believe in that). Sometimes we can even feel like victims of circumstances beyond our control. But above everything else lies our belief in ourselves and our will to succeed – in whatever way that is meaningful to each one of us.

What are you willing to do to be successful?

I recently listened to a business seminar in which the presenter talked about having worked 12 hour days consistently for years before he became successful. He had an intuitive sense that if he made that level of commitment, at some point the tides would turn and he would become successful – and sure enough he did. And he saw the same thing happen to many others he worked with.

There is so much mis-information around about how to be successful. So many articles, books, and CD sets want you to believe that abundance and success are yours for the taking for just a couple of hours a day. I wanted to believe that  for the longest time – but after many years I realized that its just a great message to sell books and seminars! Life rewards tremendous effort – it is a law of nature.

Go check out any self-made super-successful person and you’ll find that for most of them a twelve hour day was probably one of their shorter working days. And they weren’t standing in the corridors  shooting the breeze with co-workers – they were creating and building almost all the time. I’ve seen it so many times and I’ve proven it for myself as well.

So what am I saying here?

First of all, DO seek out and accept guidance from creative and business professionals. You can find this on a bunch of great art marketing and art technique websites and there are also lots of wonderful art and business coaches around who can inspire and guide you.

Second, become a master of your craft, whether it is original fine art or licensed images that make children happy at birthday parties.

Third, get a great artist website and promote your work continuously to your target market, whether it be galleries, tourists, hotels, or licensing agents.

Fourth, work as if your life depended on it. If your situation and health allow you to then do dedicate twelve or more hours a day. If you are working a job or have a family to take care of then decide on what you can commit to and make it happen. But not every day – be sure to take rest days to recover, balance the brain hemispheres, and breathe in inspiration.

Finally, learn to love working really hard as a gift from the universe. When you start to see results you will feel REALLY GOOD and will have that tremendous sense of accomplishment that all self-made people enjoy. AND you will be enriching the world with beauty and creativity, both of which are sorely needed.

The post Art Marketing – What Really Is The Secret? appeared first on Art Marketing Secrets.

Lets start with 1stwebdesigners 6 Reason Titles and we’ll add our 2c worth on why WordPress makes SO MUCH sense for artists! Oh – and just to be clear we’re talking here about the version of WordPress you host yourself (wordpress.org), not the hosted version (wordpress.com).

Here goes…

Flexible Open Source

In a nutshell this means that it uses a flexible open platform and that there are literally thousands of developers all over the world constantly making improvements and extensions which benefit you. It’s happening while you sleep! The framework is also free – you can put up a WordPress website with a number of different themes all by yourself at no cost. A designer can also develop a fully customized site with unique design aesthetic for you too – but still based on the WordPress engine for ease of updating and simplicity. Many of the customized sites we build at Beautiful Artist Websites are just so.

Great Content Management System

To understand this think simply as follows – you can change your own content – images, text, create new pages, create blog posts, add YouTube videos etc, all by yourself. This is really important because you need to update your website content regularly to keep visitors interested and coming back. And in our experience designing artist websites – if its not easy to make the changes it ain’t going to happen! (Not so often anyway)

Search Engine Optimization Friendly

This is really BIG. We wrote a whole book about search engine optimization for artist websites – and we just released a rewrite for WordPress. WordPress is great for SEO because it comes out of the box with a structure and page naming (permalink) methodology that is very simply understood and indexed by search engines. The ease of updating and adding new content is also important because search engines like sites that are active and adding new content regularly. Finally, there are some excellent plugins (extensions) that push the SEO envelope further – such as the Google XML Sitemaps Plugin and The All In One SEO Pack. That gets you at least a third of the way to great search engine results and that’s priceless.

Media Support

WordPress makes it very easy to add images, videos (e.g. a video artist statement), audio, maps, slideshows, google docs, google maps, etc. Adding appropriate media content can make your site really interesting and engaging – and a superior art marketing magnet. Not only that but it actually makes it fun for you the artist and website owner to experiment with new ways of promoting.

Extended Plugins

This is another big one and comes back to the Open Source pint above. There really are literally thousands of plugins (extensions) available for the WordPress Platform. You can check them out on the Plugin Directory. Most times you can find a plugin to do almost anything. Examples: Want to add a Facebook “Like” button to your pages and posts? There’s several plugins for that. Want to check how your Mailchimp email campaigns are affecting your Google Analytics results? There’s a really nice plugin for that. Want to automatically ping Facebook and Twitter every time you add a new blog post? There’s a plugin for that. There are plugins for almost everything and nearly all of them are free, gratis, – a gift for you from some unknown developer somewhere in the Cyberverse!

Easy To Use

The back-end user interface is extremely simple and requires no programming skills at all. You can setup an administrator level account for yourself for use when you need to make design or extension changes, AND you can also setup an editor-level account if you are just wanting to add or change content. The editor level account is really simple to use. You can also setup editor or author level accounts for other artists so that they can post in your blog.  The WordPress Forums also provide fairly good support – in our experience you will get a response within a few hours in most cases. And in several years of developing sites we can count the number of times we’ve needed support on one hand!

Conclusion

That’s the scoop. Think about WordPress seriously when contemplating a new artist website. We’ve tried a bunch of platforms over the years and WordPress gets our thumbs up for artist websites.

Also, this week we are having our annual “SEO For A Song” 30%-off sale which we’re extending to both the General and WordPress editions of our Artist SEO Success System. Enter Coupon Code SUCCESSFULARTIST in your shopping cart and click “Update” to grab the discount. It goes away for another year after Saturday October 15 so grab it while you can!

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1. Andy Warhol’s birth name was Andrew Warhola. Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1928, his parents, Ondrej and Julia were immigrants from Miková in northeastern Slovakia.
2. His very first movie was called ‘Sleep’ and it was 6 hour long never ending masterpiece of his friend sleeping. Nine people attended premiere. Seven of them stayed and watched the movie. Two of them left within the first hour. He created at least 60 movies including Kiss, Blowjob, Eat, Shoulder, Couch, Face, Kitchen, Horse, Suicide, Drink, Closet, Sunset, and Bitch.
3. Andy almost died when he was shot three times in the chest by Valerie Solanis. Valerie was an ardent feminist and one of many who thought Warhol was abusive and controlling. She thought that he deserved to die. Warhol was at one point pronounced dead, but was revived and slowly recovered. Valerie was a founder of club called SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) and she was the only member of the group.
4. He died in hospital on February 22nd, 1987 from a heart attack because hospital stuff overloaded him with fluids after his routine gallbladder surgery. Warhol is buried at St. John the Baptist Byzantine Catholic Cemetery in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. After his death the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts was founded.
5. Andy was the producer of the first record album by The Velvet Underground . He also painted the cover of their first album, entitled ‘The Velvet Underground and Nico’. Many of the songs were considered daring, shocking, and kinky.
6. In 1957 Warhol won the prestigious Art Director’s Club Medal for a shoe advertisement. Warhol went to New York City after earning a BFA degree from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, in 1949. He began designing in advertisements and went on to specialize in illustrating shoes.
7. Although he worked in a number of media his most famous works were created using silkscreen and lithography. When he had achieved some fame, Andy began to use silkscreen to create his art and to mass-produce images. His 1973 portrait of Mao is one of the best known examples of his use of this process.
8. After Warhol’s death a music album was made titled, “Songs for Drella”. This was a nickname coined by his music friends which was a combination of Dracula and Cinderella. After Andy’s death, Lou Reed’s band dedicated the “Songs for Drella” album to Andy, that he would never be forgotten. Bob Dylan’s song, “Like a Rolling Stone” is reputed to have been about Andy. Dylan blamed Warhol for drug use by Edie Sedgewicks, a love interest of Dylan’s at the time.
9. Andy would claim, “If you want to know all about me, just look at the surface of my paintings and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.”
10. In addition to creating art, Warhol started Interview magazine, opened a night club and created two cable TV shows-Andy Warhol’s TV and Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes- for MTV.
11. Warhol had an interesting sense of style; he wore silver wigs and eventually dyed his hair silver. After having been told he had lazy eyes, he wore opaque glasses that had a tiny pinhole for him to see through.
12. In high school, the art club excluded Warhol because he was better than the other members.

Editor’s Note:

This article was researched from a number of online resources. If you would like to learn more about the chronology and details of Andy Warhol’s life there is a fantastic resource at warholstars.org. Flipping through this gave me a great background on some of the 60’s and 70’s art and music legends and how their lives intersected.

The post Andy Warhol: 12 Interesting Facts appeared first on Art Marketing Secrets.

How can I increase traffic to my website? Everyone I have asked have said that they think my art is really good. I just need someone to give me a chance.

You’re in great company Zachary – most artists start marketing online with a dream of a great website that will attract many visitors who buy buy buy! The reality mostly ends up a little differently – their beautiful website typically sits online with only a handful of visits from people – many of whom are not even particularly interested in art. Family and friends visit for a while to offer support – but they aren’t buying and after a while even they lose interest. Yikes!

What to do? Here are 6 proven tips which will help you bring quality visitors to your artist website…

Focus On Attracting Quality Visitors: After being in the online art and art marketing business for several years now I can tell you something really important! I would rather have 5 visits a month to my artist website from seriously interested potential buyers than 50,000 visits from any old “traffic”. Now to be fair this advice also depends on whether you are wanting to build relationships and sell higher-value artworks – or whether you want to sell low cost reproductions to the gift market. If you focus on low-price work you might actually like those 50,000 visitors because that could translate into a consistent revenue stream.

Integrate Your Artist Website With Your Art Career Strategy: Don’t underestimate the importance of physical shows in your local community. Host an open studio, group show, or solo show in your community regularly – at least 6 times per year. Have show visitors sign up for your mailing list and email them regularly about new work, upcoming shows, etc. Be sure to regularly update your website with the same information – upcoming shows, latest work, etc and include links in your emails so that people can click through to the pages which tell them about the new work or events. This way, you are training your art community to visit your website regularly to see what’s new. We have a great article series called “How To Stage A Successful Artist Open Studio” which will help you with setting up for regular local shows.

Optimize Your Website For Search Engines: Search Engines, like Google and Bing can help a lot to bring new potential buyers to your artist website. This is especially true if you sell lower cost small artworks or reproductions in the $50 – $200 range which can attract gift and tourist-market buyers. Example: Mary and her husband just came back from a great vacation in the Caribbean. After a week or so, Mary is pining for the Caribbean and decides to buy a piece of art as a reminder. How might she find such art? An obvious way would be to google “Caribbean Art” or “Caribbean Paintings”. If you paint Caribbean scenes and your site shows up on page 1 of the Google results you may have a potential customer. You can read more about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in our article series, “SEO For Artists: Share Google’s Love For Art”. If you’re really inspired you can also check out our “Artist SEO Success System”.

Use Social Networking To Increase Visits: There are a myriad of social networking sites online today. In our experience focus first on building a presence on facebook. Setup a Facebook page for your art business – this needs to be in addition to your personal Facebook page. Post your latest artworks and updates there regularly. Invite others to visit your website. Twitter is also very useful however in our experience a much larger number of potential buyers are using Facebook. Lori McNee and Tara Reed are great resources for using Social Networking to build your online art presence.

Join Free Or Low Cost Online Galleries: Your own artist website should always be the place where you bring people to see your work. This is because it is here that you have the most control over the presentation and information flow. That said, online galleries can be a great way to get your flag out in places that people can find you. The most important point is to ALWAYS include links back to your own artist website so that visitors have the option to visit your artist website. This strategy has the added benefit that it can help you with search engine rankings by building incoming links to your artist website. Moshe Mikanovsky has a great article listing some of these gallery and resource sites.

Personal Networking: This is the most powerful way to do anything but it’s also the one many of us seem to avoid the most. 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.

These simple tips will take some effort! But everything good in life requires us to exercise and grow – that’s the point really. One final point:

Consistency Is King

It is much better to do a little consistently every week that to do a handful of mad-dash all-inclusive efforts each year. Rome wasn’t built in a day – it was build brick by brick. So it is with your art career!

The post 6 Tips To Bring More Visitors To Your Artist Website appeared first on Art Marketing Secrets.

Hello. I am from a little town in Wyoming and I am wanting to ask a pretty simple question, Well my wife is a painter/sculptor. She is the best I have seen in my eyes but not only mine, my family, her family all our friends – and she has won art shows throughout Wyoming. She moved to California and tried the art program there but she had no luck. I am contacting all art areas to ask how I can get her work out there to be seen/ sold/ and admired by a massive verity. I know she has a chance at success but she has not taken the steps. If there is a chance you can e-mail me back to let me know I would be so thankful.

A couple of things struck me about this message. Firstly the love that this man has for his wife and her talent – this kind of moral support from friends and family is just priceless as one navigates the often challenging path to commercial success as a professional artist. In most cases it is a marathon run and your warm circle of friends cheer-leading you on may be the one thing that pushes you over the finish line.

The second thing that got my attention was how well this email describes the real challenges of how to get started. There is SO much advice around in many great books, blogs, forums, etc, but if you’re really starting out with art marketing what do you do first?

When I answered this email I pointed the gentleman to a number of articles on our site, in particular a collection of our best art marketing articles from 2009 which covers some important bases. But several days later his email was really bothering me because I didn’t feel I had addressed the core question.

Here’s what I honestly think – there is enough information online today for anyone to research any art marketing question that they could possibly think of between now and the year 5,000. A lack of information isn’t the challenge. What is typically lacking is an understanding of the overall process or a system to implement it. But there is something way more fundamental that this:

To sell art you need a market to sell to. To some extent there is an existing art market that can be tapped by emerging artists – but probably the bigger piece is the art market that you create yourself. And how do you do that?

A few years back while driving from New York to Los Angeles I listened to a truly fabulous audio book called “The Ultimate Anti Career Guide” by Rick Jarow. I won’t digress into its message here except to say that this book is a great inspiration with some very practical tools to help you find your life’s work. The reason I bring it up is because Rick mentioned something very powerful which hit me like a bolt of lightning. Here is what he said:

Another name for a Community is a Market

Sounds simple right? But think about the power of this statement. What Rick was referring to was that when you build a community around being yourself and doing the work that inspires you, that community can become the market that finances and fuels your ongoing career growth – a true symbiotic relationship in its most positive sense.

So, in  practical sense what does this mean for you, the artist seeking artistic and commercial success? It means to take the regular steps to nurture and build a community around the art that you create. One way I really encourage artists to get started with this is to have monthly open studios. One of my favorite articles on this subject is a 3-part series that I wrote myself called “How to Stage A Successful Artist Open Studio“. Encourage friends to come along – even if they’re not excited about art. Ask them to bring friends and send out postcards and written invitations regularly to galleries and other arts professionals.

What you’re doing is watering the little plant which is your art community and f you do this consistently every month it will grow into a big tree and eventually it may become a mighty oak. This is your art community AND your art market. When you have this foundation in place, all the other marketing steps and tools, and systems fall into place because you’re applying them to your known and trusted market.

I’m big on building strong foundations for success because to reach your objective may take every ounce of inspiration and energy you can muster for a long time. If you build those foundations strongly you’ll make life much easier for yourself in the future – and have a more meaningful and fun time of it. Your art community is a BIG foundation!

The post Want To Sell Your Art? Build A Community appeared first on Art Marketing Secrets.

To give you a GIANT boost we’re offering $287 in extras FREE when you order one of our Espresso Artist Websites this week. That’s right – Order an Espresso Artist Website by January 7 and you’ll bag these great presentation and marketing features completely GRATIS!

– Home Page Slide Show (Normally $95)
– Email Management System (Normally $95 Setup Charge)
– The Artist SEO Success System (Normally $97)

That’s $287 in free bonuses not to be repeated after January 7. Simply place your order and we’ll include these bonus features.

Why Espresso Artist Websites?

Selling Art is a system and many artists don’t succeed because they only stab at isolated parts of the process instead of consistently working the full system. If you want to understand what we’re talking about, grab our free report, “7 Steps To Sell Your Art Online”

We created Espresso Artist Websites to actively support you through the three critical aspects of selling art:

• Attracting New Buyers
• Impressing them with your beautifully showcased art
• Building relationships with them that lead to sales

We do this with powerful search engine features, fully integrated blogging and email marketing, Social Media Marketing, and, of course, our trademark beautiful showcasing. All of these wrap together into a solution that we call our “21st Century Art Marketing Machines”!

So – here is your one-time chance to grab one of these fully featured websites with $287 in bonus features at no additional charge. Order by January 7th to receive this special offer. Simply place your order and we’ll include the bonus features for you.

Happy 2011 from all of us here at AMS, BAW, and Espresso. Now go get those art collectors!

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Do you have questions or concerns about artist websites, email marketing, search engines for artists, social networking for artists, hosting open studios, building relationships with collectors online or offline, closing sales, selling art online, or any other art marketing, art business or art sales topic? Now is your chance to ask.

In most cases we’ll be able to give you some great guidance based on our own experiences selling art and working with clients at Art Marketing Secrets and Beautiful Artist Websites. If we don’t have an answer, we’ll do our very best to find someone who does.

If we think your question will help a group of artists we will post an answer it in our Ask Art Marketing Secrets Section and we’ll link back to your artist website, if you have one.

To ask your questions, simply visit our Ask Art Marketing Secrets page, fill in the form, and submit. Easy!

Note: We don’t guarantee that all questions will be answered. Our focus is on topics that will benefit artists who are serious about building art business success!

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I’m normally fairly thick skinned on the odd occasion someone unsubscribes from one of our email lists – but this time I felt different. This was a person who had received some really great free information from us that would really help them to promote their art career if they actually used it. I wouldn’t have minded if they had simply clicked the “unsubscribe” button displayed visibly in the email – but to go the extra step of adding a rude little snipe like that really surprised me.

This got me wondering – do some artists really think that they should get everything free? Is it really too offensive to them that amongst all the free articles and information we and many other great art marketing and art career websites publish that we occasionally promote something we believe in that has a price tag? Surely not! But apparently so!

So, just for the record, here are a few thoughts from me on this topic. In a perfect world I would probably spend a good part of my weeks writing art marketing articles and books and teaching art marketing seminars. I have a genuine interest in helping artists bridge the gap that often exists between art and business and helping them to bring more beauty and creativity into the world. This is a world that really needs it!

That said, I and all the other art marketing writers out there run businesses – not charities. We have to run our businesses successfully because we need to eat and support our loved ones and communities. Money may not buy happiness but you can’t do a whole lot in this world without it. And I for one am several decades past being able to sleep on the sofa at my Mum and Dad’s place!

So, amongst all the volumes of free information we and many others provide, occasionally we promote products and services we believe in that are not free – and we make no apologies. If you as an artist are offended by a commercial offer then by all means feel free to unsubscribe. But before you do, think about what this might be telling you about your own relationship with art career success – because if you are uncomfortable with receiving an occasional promotion from us, how are you going to feel comfortable about asking for the sale with a new art collector? And you most certainly will have to do that!

Money is not a god to be worshiped but it is a big part of the world we live in. If you are uncomfortable with it, then it it will almost certainly feel uncomfortable with you. Think about that!

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