Often artists will let a buyer test drive a painting by letting them hang it in their home for a period of time before making a buying decision.  However when you are selling online, this option is less practical.   Another option that is being used on art websites is to show the prospective buyer on their computer screen what the art would look like hanging in a variety of settings, be it a living room, bedroom or office.  The buyer would chose the artwork they are interested in and a sample room to “hang” it in.  The user is then able to drag the artwork to the desired position on the wall.  It’s probably better if you see for yourself.   Click  here to hang this Klimt print (above) in one of the rooms available at OverstockArt.com.

Generally the rooms you can chose from are not exactly what you have in your own home.  The furniture is different.  The wall colour is different, the lighting is different.  So to overcome this, some sites like OverstockArt.com allow a visitor to upload a picture of their own room!  Then the buyer has a much better appreciation for how the artwork would look in its desired location.  This is an impressive application.   It gives the purchaser more confidence that they are making the right decision to purchase the piece.

You will find this technique of allowing buyers to see the art in a virtual setting used on E-bay,  reproduction houses, and individual artist sites.  This is one way artists can distinguish themselves online and engage the customer in a different way.  Just imagine having your art in these pictures.

Left:  A Claude Monet hung virtually in my office.

 
Her approach to generating on-going royalties is to register her work with online firms that sell stock illustrations.  These online firms generally sell images to organizations, vs individuals, who want to include them in print advertising, displays, websites, brochures, greeting cards and so on.  Charges for the use of these images vary, depending on the application, the number of countries where the image will be used, the duration of use, and the industry. For example a painting of an orchid, for use in a movie circulated on 1 continent cost $849 on one site. A painting of a bird’s nest, used for product packaging for 5 years in 1 country would cost $1,213.   Sales revenue is often shared equally between the artist and the marketing company.  Examples of these companies are Stock Illustrations,  Illustration Works, and Illustration Source.  Lisa has been selling her illustrations this way since 2002.

Because customers of these services are often looking for something specific, Lisa will add many relevant tags to the illustrations so that her work will be found in the search facility of the sites.  If fact, she will often create art for a particularly popular keyword, such as “Christmas” or ”twitter” (see illustration on right), and sets of illustrations for keywords groups such as the “alphabet” or “zodiac signs”.  

In addition Lisa gets commissons when people use her images in greeting cards (see Greeting Card Universe) and in gift-ware (see Cafe Press).

According to Lisa, you continue to have rights to sell the image after the painting is sold.  One customer said he did not want to see an image of his work showing up anywhere else.  Lisa accepted the request provided that he pay double for the original painting.  He agreed.  In this case Lisa acknowledged this limitation on the back of the original work.

Fine art painters can use a similar approach and generate a revenue stream by offering their works on sites that print giclees from a digital image.

P.S.  Lisa also sells coffee and uses her art on the packaging.  See www.rocketfuelcoffee.com.

When you think of an artist website you generally think about a site that showcases an artist’s work, a portfolio site if you will.  With the exponential growth of blogging, many artists are now supplementing their portfolio site with a blog.  Blogging allows artists to share their art and life with the world in a very different way, one that lets people get to know the artist behind the art.  Portfolio sites and blogs are both websites, they just have a different purpose and function.  Portfolio sites tend to be like an online brochure, whereas blogs are more like a diary that allows artists to communicate with their audience. 

If you already have a website you may be thinking about adding a blog.   Artists who wanted to start blogging are faced with a question:  Where do I set up my blog?  There are 3 options:  

1. Set up a separate blog elsewhere
2. Integrate a blog into your current website
3. Build a new website based on a blogging platform

Let’s look at these options.

1. Set up a separate blog elsewhere. 

This is the easiest solution.   There are lots of places you can go to set up a blog.  You can even blog for free if you are willing to live with the design and usage limitations.  The main drawback with this approach is that the blog is not integrated with your portfolio website in form or function.    It has an entirely different look and feel and the format and navigation are completely different.  It leaves visitors with the feeling they are “somewhere else” when they are reading your blog.  Also there is no guarantee that someone who lands on your blog will take a link to your website.

Hosted services are available from TypePad,  Blogger, and LiveJournal.  Duane Keiser is an example:  Website,  Blog

2. Integrate a blog into your current website.

Adding a blogging function to your portfolio website addresses the problem described above.  Visitors could see a consistent design in terms of headers, navigation, colours, etc.  In this case, your blog would appear as a menu item on your website, and when you click on it, the blog looks like it belongs on this website.  Your portfolio header and navigation bar carry through to the blog page. While it  is technically possible to integrate a blog into an existing portfolio site,  these types of projects can be a challenge because of the coding, style and format of the existing website.  This means that most artists would be dependent on someone else to make those changes and the cost of making them could be prohibitive.

An example of an integrated blog is Marilyn Fenns’ website.

3. Build a new website based on a blogging platform.

A blogging platform is a software solution that allows people to easily create and maintain a blog.  Blogging software is getting better all the time.  You can now create a blog that looks like a portfolio site, yet provides the flexibility to also blog.    It all hangs together as one cohesive site.  On some artists’ websites you would be hard-pressed to tell that it was created using blogging software.  Platforms you could consider for a self-hosted blog include Movable Type,  WordPress, and Textpattern.

Becky Joy’s website and blog is build on WordPress.   Says Becky, “I had a website with another company. I quit that and went with WordPress. It gives me more options in my website and blog. I think it is better to have the blog integrated with the website.  Ultimately, I want people at the website.”

This week an artist asked me for some advice about her website.  I checked it out.  It looked pretty good, frankly.  The design was attractive, the navigation well-structured, the galleries appealing.  So what was the concern?   The website had not been updated in 10 years!   Why?  Because the original website developer had long-since moved to a far-away land leaving the artist with no capability to update the site.  As a result, the site has remained static for all these years and the artwork on the site is completely different from what the artist’s work looks like today.

This is not an unusual case.  I have heard many stories from artists whose website was created for them some time ago by one of their children, a friend, or a professional developer.  But now they are stuck with a site they are no longer pleased with, and the person who developed the site has moved on to other things, has moved away, or is for some other reason, unavailable to provide the needed support. Worse, many of these sites were created using raw HTML programming, a skill few artists have.  

In my view it is very important that artists are able to update their websites themselves.  When you are not dependent on others to make changes to your website, you are much more likely to keep your site current.  You can put up an image of your latest work in less time than it takes to compose an e-mail to your developer.  You can promote a new show on your website without paying a dime for someone else to put that information up for you.    It’s faster and cheaper to maintain your website yourself.

So should you put your brushes down and enroll in  some serious computer  programming classes?  Oh no!  Not unless you are so inclined.  Today it is not necessary to develop that level of  technical expertise to be able to manage your own website.  There are some excellent solutions for artists who want to manage their site but do not want to become programmers (more about this in the new year).  If you can edit a text document, transfer pictures from your camera to your computer and crop them,  you are well on your way to being able to manage your own site.  Moreover, you can create and manage a site that you would be very proud of, one that compares well with expensive customized websites.

If your site is locked in limbo because you can’t edit it, or your budget is limiting changes you can make to your website, you should seriously consider taking advantage of the new self-management options available to artists.

One strategy to increase your visibility as an artist is to advertise online.  Some artists and galleries buy ads on Google to increase traffic to their websites.   When you perform a Google search, the search results page displays ads on the right side of the page.  The ads that appear relate to the search results you were looking for. For example, if you Google “Toronto artists” you could find an ad for Toronto artist David Crighton.

The advertiser only pays when someone clicks on the ad.  To place an ad, you select keywords appropriate to you and your art.  Google will provide you with keyword ideas and information, based on your website or a keyword you provide.  For example,  when I input  ”abstract collage” , Google suggested 100 keywords I could buy.  ”Abstract collage art” was one of them,  but only 210 people searched for that term in a month.  However there were 450,000 searches/month for “modern art”. Google will also tell you how much competition there is for a keyword and what the trends are in the popularity of that keyword.

Many galleries are now using Adwords for promoting their artists and their gallery.  The 6000  square foot  Crescent Hill Gallery in Mississagua believes strongly in using the Internet for marketing.  Owner Michael Havers spends half of his marketing budget on AdWords and they have used AdWords extensively for over 3 years. They continue to invest in this method of advertising because it has produced results for them.  I discovered the gallery searching for “Montreal Fine Art”.  I found an AdWord for artist Marie Claude Boucher, with a link to Cresent Hill who represent her.  The gallery usually buys keywords for artists who have developed a brand, but also bid on over 1000 keywords related to subject, style and geographic area.  The ads have attracted local visitors to the gallery, telephone calls and sales as far away as England and Kazakhstan.

The cost of the ads could vary from 10 cents/click to $1/click, depending on the popularity of the keyword.  One of the gallery’s artists shares the name of a famous musician.  As a result of the competition for the name, the bidding is high.  The gallery contracts with an expert in placing Google ads.  He has experience in how much to bid, and when to bid or not.  They learned quickly that choosing a geographic area for your ad is important.  You can limit your ads to your local area, your province, Canada, North America or the world. 

You can specify your daily/weekly/monthly budget to Google, so that you can control your costs.  Once your budget has been reached, the ads stop running automatically.  Kelowna, BC, artist Keyhan has been budgeting $150-$200/month for AdWords for the last 2 years.  He says, “If you’re are not out there, you are not available, so you can’t expect sales.”

Right: Work by Keyhan

First, let’s go straight to the horse’s mouth.  Here is an excerpt from the Facebook Help Centre FAQs:

Do I retain the copyright and other legal rights to material I upload to Facebook?

Yes, you retain the copyright to your content. When you upload your content, you grant us a license to use and display that content. For more information please visit our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, which contain information about intellectual property, as well as your privileges and responsibilities as a Facebook user.

Taking the referenced link we find:

2. Sharing Your Content and Information

You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook, and you can control how it is shared through your privacy and application settings. In addition:

1. For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (“IP content”), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (“IP License”). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.

So Facebook  does not claim ownership but that you grant them license to use whatever they choose without compensation or acknowledgement.  Would Facebook grab your images and sell them on boxed Christmas cards?  I think not.   In fact, Facebook’s license only permits it to use user content “in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof,”  indicating that they do not plan to make the site profitable by selling giclees of your work on Ebay.

The policy is consistent with other services. For example when you post a video on YouTube  will find a statement in their Terms of Service which is almost identical.  Apparently these policies are only in place to prevent nuisance law suits.   If they did use your  images in a way that was deemed inappropriate, there would be a backlash that would not be in Facebook’s interests.

Facebook is growing at a phenomenal rate and it offers great opportunity for exposure for artists.  I don’t think you should let the Terms of Service scare you off.

Recently Deb Kirk asked if putting underscores between the words in Alt tags would increase search engine visibility.   I performed the following test:

I googled “algonquin park painting”,  “algonquin_park_painting”, and “algonquinparkpainting”,  clearing my history before each search.  All searches returned 59,400 search results, but when I googled “algonquin-park-painting” and got 64,700 results!   This would suggest that underscores between the words produce no advantage, but dashes might. Artist Joseph Pearce  managed to be rated #1 on the 59,400 results.  Looking at the HTML code for his homepage (Click View-  Source,  in Internet Explorer)  reveals more.  Nowhere in the code do you find an Alt tag with the words “algonquin park painting”, “algonquin_park_painting”, or “algonquinparkpainting”!      You will find the individual words scattered throughout the page however, which means that Google is clever enough to map the overall page content to my search words.  
 

Morning on Opeongo Lake by Joseph Pearce  24″ x 48″

I asked Dave Achtemichuk, a software developer who has created an online service for art organizations and artists called ArtistQuarter to explain these results.

“In the specific example you mentioned, different punctuation gets different results, I guess because it processes the search in slightly different ways. With dashes, it might first try to find hyphenated words that match your query, and when it doesn’t find any, it looks deeper and separates the query into the individual words. When you type the words all together as one string, it probably does the same thing– first tries to search for the single word, then intelligently breaking it up into its component words and re-runs the search to get the proper results (also note that capitalization has no effect on the searches). This is also how Google can give the proper desired results even if you spell a word wrong in your query.   I believe that what is indexed is not affected by the punctuation– just how you enter your search term determines what subset of the indexed data is used. The indexing seems to use the same fuzzy approach to infer meaning and component words regardless of what punctuation is entered.  It may have been that at one point years ago, adding dashes to ALT text had some effect on searchability.  However, the searching algorithms have gotten more and more ‘fuzzy’ and punctuation is often ignored.”

“Google releases a new indexing mechanism every few months on average, after which old SEO methods can become irrelevant. Given Google publishes very scant information on how their indexing methods work, it’s mostly trial-and-error.  There’s lots of books and tutorials about SEO out there, but most are outdated. Even those that aren’t too outdated involve a lot of guesswork.  Modern-day SEO  is largely founded on hunches rather than hard data.”

“Google Image Search is a good example of how intelligent the searching has become– you can search by topic and even if that text only appears NEAR the image as text, the image is still shown as a result. Google is smart enough to infer captions and descriptive text related to an image in the content.”

“There are a few core concepts to SEO when trying to optimize for a certain search term or search terms:

1.  Provide relevant (text) content
2. Update that content whenever possible to improve ranking. Updating the front page with the latest news of your artist site remains a good thing to do to get strong rankings.
3. Have other people link to your content from their own content (but only when the link is coming from a page with related content).

The basic point being that as along as your pages have words that describe what they’re about, they should be indexed by the search engines and come up ordered by their relevance to the specific search term.  Search engines are now very good at determining the true relevance of pages to the search terms, even at a very abstract level– very little has to be spelled out for their benefit.”

For example,  artist Janet Nelson has a blog called A Planet Named Janet.  She grows blog followers  by regularly offering a draw for free original art. She has been giving away her art since the spring of 2009.  She offers a couple 5 x 7 acrylic paintings at a time.  Rules are simple. Visitors leave a separate comment for each painting they would like to win and they can enter as often as they like within a 2 week period.  Janet numbers the comments and uses a random number generator and pick the winners.  Janet even ships for free. She  considered giving away a variety of artwork in stock just to reduce inventory.  Instead she chose to encourage collecting by offering similar paintings as part of a series.   The series features a pair of items (2 peaches, 2 birds etc) painted on 5 x 7 backer boards. Winners also receive a blank notecard of the same image which she hopes will be sent to someone else.

As a result of the give-aways, her blog followers have doubled.  In addition, some winners have blogged about it. To produce that result she discovered that it was necessary to promote the giveaway, which she did on Facebook, Twitter and Etsy.  Unlike some other Etsy giveways, she made entry simple: just leave a comment.  Some artists require entrants to become followers to enter.

Janet also has a weekly give-away at a gallery where she is represented.  This has resulted in “a large fishbowl of entrants” whose e-mail address will be a valuable asset for marketing.

Other artists who have achieved a high level of exposure also use giveaways. Over 1800 people have joined the Facebook group, d’art Lottery for a weekly chance to win a piece of art by Val’s Art Diary.

I, myself  tried a little experiment on this blog last month.  I offered a chance for a  free  website analysis with every comment posted during October.   I was curious to see if the offer would encourage people to make more comments.  It did.  The average  number of comments per article jumped from 1 to 9.  Significant.  That does not include people who commented by e-mail.  Adding in those comments,  the comments per article jumped from 1 to 16!  The other interesting thing that happened was  a conversation among artists began.  I like that.  I see this blog as a place where artists can share their experiences and ideas about marketing online.  I encourage you to engage in the converations.

And the winner of the free website analysis is………. Ron Vickers!

 Add Your Comments for a Chance to Win!