Last year while I was in Sydney on a holiday, I met up with Liz Steel and we talked for hours on blogging and social media.

Liz told me that some artists don't see how blogging can help their career as artists. Indeed, there are artists that I know and admire who don't even have a website, much less a blog, or any form of presence online.

If you're an artist and don't have a blog, you're missing out big time. There's a huge opportunity cost that you're not seeing.

Blogging is one of the most powerful tools for marketing, and with the internet it is now so affordable and accessible to any artist.

Let me give you the reasons why you should blog as an artist.

You grow with your blog

Whether or not you're a professional artist does not matter. If you're someone who's a beginner at art, it will even be more beneficial. By posting your work online, you'll be able to keep track of your progress and grow from there. It's called practice. The more you draw, the better you get. When you use the blog as a record, you can see how much you have improve and where else you can improve.

If you've afraid of posting your so called crappy work online, then join a forum where there are those work-in-progress pages where you can post your art to. Or you may want to start two blogs, one for your rough sketches (maybe on Tumblr) and one for your more professional looking work.

When others see your work, they give comments like how you can improve, or give you ideas you have never thought of. Like when I post my sketches, sometimes people ask me about my techniques, or even correct some of the things I say.

Let people know that you're still in business (aka put your art out there)

How on earth are people going to buy your art or commission you if they don't know you exist? If they don't know you exist, they won't even being to type your name in the Google search box. That's why it's important to update your blog with new artworks often.

This is how advertising works. They basically plaster print advertisements everywhere on the streets, public transports and in shopping mall, and also run online and TV campaigns. They all do these so that the more you see the ad, the more you'll remember their brand. Same applies to blogging online.

Your blog is different from your online portfolio though. The blog is meant to be like sort of a visual diary of what you're doing, basically to tell people what you're up to. You can post new artworks on your blog, but collect them into another portfolio page so that visitors can easily see your curated gallery.

A blog helps to promote and sell your art

As you post regularly, you'll build up an audience. Some of visitors might turn into leads and buy stuff from you, or commission you.

I don't know about you but for artists who I follow, whenever they release an artbook, I feel compelled to buy and support them. That's just how it works. You support the people you like.

One important thing is to make sure you say somewhere that there are things for sale. For example, Carol Marine updates her blog everyday with paintings for sale. Mattias Adolfsson would post news of his new artbooks in the posts or by the sidebar. And when Pascal Campion launched his Kickstarter campaign, he got $106,000 in terms of response (below). All these artists have build up their audience over the years by updating blog regularly and connecting with their audience. You want a good online presence, just follow what they are doing, post regularly.

Your audience want to connect with you

If your audience somehow knows that you exist, they will seek you out online. They like to know what you have been up to.

When someone follows your blog, they are actually following you, the person, because they like your character or who you are. It's actually less about the work.

Audience wants to feel connected. With a blog, they can be updated with what you do. Guess what happens when these followers find out you have a gallery opening or new book coming out? They will support you at the gallery or get your book. I have seen this been proven over and over again. See some of the comments below for Steven Reddy's first Kickstarter campaign for his book.

I hope you did not miss the part that says "I don't think I have ever been this excited about an impending credit card charge!"

If you post your artworks on the blog. That's good. If you write something about your process, about how your day when while you're sketching, that's great. Check out Shari Blaukopf's blog where she blogs daily and her audiences respond with many comments.

If you don't know, it's difficult to get people to comment online. And she has 60 comments?!?! And that's for a post where she talked about the new video course that she's doing with Craftsy. Guess how many of her audience signed up for the course. Go see.

It is SO MUCH EASIER to sell your art or whatever you're selling when you have an audience that you have been building up for years.

It's incredibly difficult to sell stuff if you don't have an online presence. If you have an artbook you want to launch in a few weeks times, do you think a lot of people will know about it if you don't promote it?

This applies to Youtube channel too. Artists like Mina Petrović, Alphonso Dunn (above) and Mark Crilley are sought by publishers to publish book because of the huge audience they have on their Youtube channels.

Speaking of Alphonso Dunn, Go check out the reviews on Amazon for his book and see how many of those got to know of the book through his Youtube page. This applies to blogs as well.

A blog gets your more web traffic

That's assuming you write something together with the art you've just uploaded. That way, Google has text to index, and when people search for that text, hopefully your website shows up in the search results.

If you just have a static website, basically an online portfolio that you update occasionally, then it would be difficult for people to see what you have updated on your website.

If you update every quarter, then people only have to visit your website 4 times a year. If you update more frequently, you give people reasons to come back and check out your stuff more frequently.

If people know that you've a static website, they may not want to come back again. After all, they have seen everything. But if your blog is constantly evolving, you can build an audience from those who keep coming back.

A blog makes you an authority

Let's say if you use markers for all your artworks, people will then start to associate you as someone who's good at Copic markers, assuming your art is decent. And guess who they will think of when they have questions relating to markers?

An authority is something that you establish over time. People start to notice the tools you use, or even stuff that you write. If you write tutorials on digital painting, then over a period of time, you'll grow into an authority on digital painting.

A blog helps you diversity your earning avenues

A blog helps you diversify your earnings avenues.

You can earn money from selling original art, prints, crafts, or even your service as an illustrator or tutor. Some websites sell T-shirts, books, mugs and other merchandise. Every little bit adds up.

You can also run some Google Adsense ads to earn some passive income. The ad revenue from Google is not going to be a lot, but after a year, it's likely you will be able to buy some art materials with the money, assuming you have been updating your blog regularly.

Or you can write sponsored posts. I know some blogs do that. Manufacturers send them art products to review. Most of these gigs aren't paid. But you get the web traffic when people look for reviews for those art materials.

My parting tips

Focus more on your blog than social media. The blog is where you have control over what your audience will see. You can even put payment plugins to automate purchases which is something that social media sites can't. Also, you don't know when social media sites will go away, or fade in importance. It's also easier for people to do a search on your blog than on social media pages.

Success comes to those who work for it. When it comes to art, there's really no such thing as overnight success, whether you're talking about techniques or creating a career.

Start a blog. Update it regularly. You can do so very easily with Bluehost web hosting (with automated blog setup) and Wordpress. Want to know how to go about starting an art blog, read this guide that I've written: https://www.parkablogs.com/picture/how-start-art-blog

Happy New Year everyone!

Check out the 8-min video of the fireworks for the New Year 2016 in Singapore!

Happy New Year!

Thanks for participating in the 2015 favourite artbook contest.

The winners are..... Coven and Domi. Please contact me at https://www.parkablogs.com/user/3/contact

They each get get to choose any artbook(s) from the list of books reviewed or the list of upcoming books worth $40.

2015 was a busy year and 2016 is probably going to be busy as well.

The end of the year is a good time to reflect on what has happened last year.

I did not set any new year resolutions or any goals for 2015 for myself or the website. I just sort of drifted along. There are no targets to meet, no stress. Works well for me so far.

Below's a list of things that happened in addition to the usual artbook and art product reviews I've been publishing.

Urban Sketchers Symposium

The most exciting thing that happened for me was the Urban Sketchers Symposium that was held in Singapore in July 2015. It was a fantastic experience to be able to meet many wonderful sketchers from other countries. Sketching outdoors is my favourite hobby and the energy I felt during those few days was exhilarating. I also made a series of posts and videos covering the event as a correspondent.

2016's symposium location is going to be in Manchester, UK. I'm not sure if I'm going. I'll apply as a correspondent as see what happens.

Patreon

In March, I set up a Patreon page for Parkablogs. That was able to provide some funds to the website and it was great. But from amount pledged by generous supporters, it's clear that it's going to take decades in order to make a full time salary. It's certainly not easy asking people to donate money! That's a reality check #1.

Youtube

After the positive feedback on the Youtube videos I put out during the Urban Sketchers Symposium, I decided to focus some time on creating videos on Youtube. The main motivation was to try something new. That has been going well. The sketching and art product videos are well received.

The most interesting part is most of the audience on Youtube has not heard of Parkablogs before. So I'm getting a whole new group of audience with Youtube. I also learned a bunch of other interesting stuff too.

The other motivation to get on Youtube is to explore whether it is possible to make money on the platform. It does make money. Look around online and you'll find that the industry standard that ads pay out is about USD $1-2 per 1,000 views. Most of my videos have only 500 to 1,000 views with only a handful of exceptions.

To make a full time salary on Youtube is going to take a long time and I have to make a lot more videos going forward. Making money through Youtube ads is just not the right strategy. Reality check #2.

While studying Youtube's potential, I found this website called Socialblade where you can find out how much any channel is making approximately (it's a wide estimated range).

Anyway, I've been spending quite a lot of time on creating content for Youtube. Like a lot. Before I started creating for Youtube, I usually spend the day reviewing books, looking for new books. With Youtube, now I dedicate the morning to coming up with ideas on what videos to make. Book reviews are written in the afternoon, and by evening time I leave for work (I work at night for a newspaper). So I basically spent less time looking for new books and also surfing Amazon and Facebook. In a sense, time is now more productively spent.

E-books

I made a few e-books from my travelogue sketchbooks as rewards for my Patreon supporters. They are also available for sale. The whole e-book idea was not as successful as I had expected. I think people still prefer a physical copy when it comes to an artbook. I know I prefer a physical copy as well.

Internet marketing for artists

This is a series of articles that I wrote to help artists with internet marketing. I still think it's one of the more helpful artists on the blog. You can find the articles at https://www.parkablogs.com/tags/internet-marketing-artists

Video courses

Going forward into 2016, I plan to make some sketching video courses. I looked at the Craftsy courses that I've featured so far and they are doing quite well on Craftsy. There are courses launched within a year that get more than 1,000 students.

The best part about such courses is they don't incur much cost after they have been made and should continue to provide a source of income as long as you market them well and let people know they exist.

Always be creating

As artists, you should always be creating art. That's what I intend to do, on top of putting out content on the blog.

What were you goals for 2015? Were you able to achieve them?

Happy New Year!