Marketing Your Art

You have a website and a blog, great. Now comes the hard part. How do you market your work? Just because you site is published does not mean you will be getting hits right away. Promoting yourself takes some work. One way is that you can advertise on either Google, or Yahoo, or any other search engine, but it will cost you. Fortunately there is the free way of doing that. First post your portfolio on as many web galleries as possible, as most of them offer free membership. Add a link to your website on each one of them. Some examples are ArtWanted.com, Artq.net, MosaicGlobe.com, and as I'm sure many others. Another great one that will get you noticed is leaving comments on forums or other blog entries. Every time you comment on something leave the link to your website in the signature. Some of these forums are Yahoo Answers and About.com. Make your e-mail signature your website.
You should also consider more traditional ways of promoting yourself. Make business card, and you don't have to pay for this, you can make them yourself, you're creative. Also make fliers to which you can attach your business card and ask local coffee shops or restaurants if you can leave them there, most of the coffee places are OK with it. Also one last one is Flickr photosharing. Display your art there with a link to your site so you can get picked up on Google image results.

Visit ArtWanted.com!

Online Portfolio

Online portfolios are great if you do not have a website. There so many to chose from. They are a great exposure. They let you have your own mini website and a portfolio web address. One the best ones I found is ArtWanted. Not only can you display your art, but you can sell it through their site and not just the originals. You can set up your account so they can sell prints for you without you having to print them out yourself. It is also fun because you get other user comments and views. The exposure from this website is huge especially to the audience willing buy your work.
Visit ArtWanted.com!

Some other well known portfolio sites are ArtQ.net, MosaicGlobe.com, Deviant.art (for edgier works), and ConceptArt.org.
These are all great tools and they are free.
Tip: Use your portfolio url as a signature in your e-mail and forums

Publishing Your Art part II, The Power of a Blog

You've probably heard this before, but having a blog is a great tool and search engines love it. Sometimes it is not enough to to have one, usually within your website. This is important because it a great promotional tool for your main art site. Whenever you post a link back to your website it becomes more important to search engines. The more you post the better your ranking becomes. Posting new articles once or twice a week will do it. Some of the great ones are Blogger, Hub pages, and E-zine articles. I highly recommend E-Zine due to its importance. Whenever you write something include a link to your website. Search engines love rich content so write as much as possible. The only way the search engine will pick up your site is through content. Also adding a small paragraph to images helps.


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