internet marketing for artists

Here's a video that's related to internet marketing so I'll tag it under the series.

The speaker is Jeff Parrott, a game industry environment artist with more than 10 years of experience. In this talk, he covers the importance of personal branding and how you can market yourself more effectively, build a better website, and in general just give your work more visibility.

My suggestion when watching or listening to the video is to take down notes on what you can do to improve yourself or your website.

There's a lot of useful information. I'll write some articles to elaborate on some of the topics mentioned.

Not having your contact information online is one of the key mistakes some artists make.

There are times when people, such as clients, who want to contact you for whatever reasons or even to commission jobs. It would be a wasted opportunity if they are unable to contact you because they don't know how to.

You should at least have your email contact clearly visible on your website, preferable on the Contact page or About page. If you're uncomfortable about leaving your email address online, some blogging software will have contact forms that visitors can fill out - use them.

You can also list other avenues of contact such as through Twitter, Facebook, G+ and other social media sites. For Facebook, make sure you check the Spam folder because sometimes messages get filtered there.

If you don't want to leave your contact information online. Then at least put a notice saying so to let visitors can know that your contact information is left out intentionally.

PS: I'm writing this because I've tried to contact a few artists for interviews and their contact information is nowhere to be found.

Can you make enough money from your website as an artist?

Yes, but...

It depends on how much traffic you have.

To monetize a website, you need either to sell a service or a product. That would be illustration services or products which like prints, paintings, t-shirts, books or other physical merchandise. The other way is to sell advertising space on your website.

The larger your audience, the more leads you'll get, and also advertising dollars. And with more reputation, you also get to command higher salary. That's why web presence is important. The quality of your work is still of utmost importance since that's what's going to get you visitors in the first place.

At the start of your career

When you're new online, a big portion of your earnings will come from commissioned works. Think $100 commissioned jobs vs $1 puny advertising you get from Google Adsense.

Online advertising earnings will be insignificant unless you're already a superstar illustrator. Even if you're a superstar illustrator, it still takes a long time to build up and maintain a sizable audience.

When your website is new, you have no web presence, potential clients will not know you exist. That's when you really need to build up your portfolio online by posting regularly, early on in your career. This is the stage where you have to look proactively for clients instead of them looking for you. I'll talk about where you can look for them in a separate post.

All these monetization tips or programs below will not work until you have at least some sort of following online.

Selling merchandise

Selling merchandise is great but you have to work out the right price. The usual things to sell would be prints, original drawings, paintings, t-shirts, books, and if you're into making crafts, that would mean other art and craft accessories.

You've to take into account the time, effort and cost of materials you spend to create the merchandise.

Remember to factor in shipping cost too, which can be significant for heavy items or when shipping to faraway countries. Postal companies usually have a chart that list the prices of shipping based on weight and location. Always look at that before pricing your product.

After calculating the cost, sometimes it might not be worth your while to produce physical items to sell because the profit margin just doesn't make sense. Do some research and see how other artists set prices. Check out places like Etsy where artists sell craft items, DeviantArt where prints are sold, or individual artists' websites where they sell prints and other items.

By the way, you should create a variety of items to sell if you want to go the merchandise way. At least if the customer doesn't like prints, he/she can still buy t-shirts.

Carol Marine and Duane Keiser are two examples of artists who sell their paintings online. They paint small and paint daily, built up a following of readers and potential customers, and now do quite well from selling their paintings. I also recommend checking out Duane Keiser's blog to see how much he sells his paintings for. Some artists, like Carol Marine, also submit their works to other websites, e.g. Daily Paintworks, eBay, etc for sale. If you're a craft maker, you can join the many others on Etsy.

Creating your own webstore

The two big ones are Big Cartel and Shopify.

Check out the fees they charge before signing up with them.

I'm not familiar with them but I've seen many artists use these two services to sell their art and merchandise.

Monetizing by advertising

There are two main ways to get advertising dollars for your blog. First is to sell ads via some other programs, e.g. Google Adsense. Second is to sell advertising yourself without the help of any middle-man.

Earning from advertising is a numbers game.

The larger your readership, the more you can charge for advertising. I've to warn you first you need a lot of readers, like in the thousands per day and even so you'll only earning a few hundred dollars. When you have that kind of web traffic, realistically speaking, commissioned works or selling your own products will still form a large part of your earnings.

Using Google Adsense

Google Adsense is a program where Google would run ads on your website, and pay you for the clicks those ads generate.

You can sign up with Google Adsense to run their ads on your website. After signing up, you copy and paste their code onto your website and the ads will start appearing automatically. It's hassle free. I make about USD $100-150/month for 10,000 pageviews/day, more than enough to pay for my expensive web hosting every month. You need A LOT of web traffic to make a living off advertising.

Using third party ad servers

Two good ones come to mind, Project Wonderful and Blogads.

Basically, you sign up with them as a publisher. Those companies will list you on their directory for their advertisers who then have the option to place ads on your website. These ad serving companies are the middle man that handles payment and sourcing for advertisers. The advantage is the ads you get will be more related to the context of your website because advertisers usually choose to advertise on related websites.

How much you can earn again depends on the amount of web traffic you have. Actually, you can sign up an account with them to see what prices other publishers (bloggers) are charging to get a sense of how much traffic you need to make a living.

You can also check out who are the other publishers are (like you) from the directories provided. Just for reference, Urban Sketchers and Lines and Colors use Blogads. RemindBlog and Hark a Vagrant use Project Wonderful.

Selling advertising directly without middle-man

To attract attention of potential advertisers, you can create a banner ad or link asking for advertisers. The information you should provide to advertisers would be the number of visitors and pageviews you have per month, and more importantly the rough demographic of your readers, e.g. what type of art they like, age group, etc.

Be specific about the type of advertisements you're looking for. For example, as an art related website, it makes more sense to accept art related advertisements such as for art products, art courses, links to other art blogs or websites etc. By accepting advertisements that are a good fit for your blog, it will be more relevant to your readers who will be more likely to click on the ad and visit the advertisers' site. If your advertisers' business does well because of the ad, they are more likely to continue advertising with you, and the virtuous cycle continues.

When you work with advertisers directly, you don't have to pay middle-man fees that you normally would with other advertising programs.

How much should you charge advertisers?

Use other websites as a reference when coming up with the price to charge your advertisers. Visit popular websites and check out their info page on advertising. Sometimes they will list their rates and the number of pageviews or visitors they serve per month. Calculate backwards to come up with a rate for your website based on the pageviews you're serving.

You can also use the information of other publishers provided inside Project Wonderful and Blogad's directory. Or if you have Google Adsense going on, you could use that too.

Using Patreon

Patreon is a relatively new website that helps creatives get subscribers who will pay for their content. It's like selling a magazine subscription. E.g. ParkaBlogs could sell you a subscription where you have to pay $1 for every article I publish. Subscribers can choose the amount they want to pay for every article/video/artwork you create.

Patreon does not promote your work. They just handle the logistics of payment. You still need to promote your own Patreon page. Patreon however does list and group creators by the type of work they create. You can use that list to see the potential of paid subscription.

Here's an example of comic artist Jason Brubaker's Patreon page.

Affiliate Marketing

This is the salesman model. When a reader buys a third party item from a link on your blog, you earn a commission. You get no money for clicks. Earnings only come after orders are shipped. Industry average commission rate is around 4-10%. E.g. If you sell a $20 brush, at 5% commission, you earn $1.

Affiliate marketing makes sense only if your website is geared heavily towards products. You just have to insert a few related links into your post. For example, if you draw a sketch with Daniel Smith watercolours, you can create an affiliate link to Daniel Smith watercolours.

How much can you earn? Let me do the math for you.

Let's say you earn $2 per sale. Based on my own experience, about 5% of readers will click on ads (actually much less because people nowadays have ad blindness). After clicking, about 5% of people who visit the website (e.g. Amazon) would buy something. To make 5 sales (or $10), you will need 2,000 readers. To make $1,000 monthly, you need 200,000 readers/month or 6667 readers/day! WHAT?! Yes, you need that many readers. Those number fluctuate on good and bad days.

Popular afflilate programs are Amazon Associates, Commission Junction, and for art products I would recommend UK merchant Jackson's Art Supplies. Commission Junction has several advertisers and the one I recommend you join are Dick Blick Art Materials or Jerry's Artarama if you're an art related site.

Affiliate marketing requires more effort because you have to create individual links to every product you mention. Definitely more hands-on compared to simple display ads.

Work backwards to see how many readers you need

Back to the question of whether you can make money online as an artist, you can actually work backwards and calculate how much readers you need to make a decent living.

As mentioned a few times already, you need a huge readership, in terms of thousands per day. If you have other sites like DeviantArt, Facebook, Twitter, you should always drive traffic back to your website.

You'll also probably notice after calculating, advertising is not going to form a big portion of your earnings. It's still good to put some advertising though, especially for Google Adsense, Project Wonder or Blogads because they are relatively hassle-free. Earn a few extra dollars per month is not bad. Just don't plaster your website with ads because they will irritate your visitors especially when they can't find what they are looking for on your webpage.

Conclusion

Each income stream will contribute a bit to your total earnings. Don't worry about them when you're starting out with a new website. Focus all your time and effort on creating content and putting them out. After you have hundreds of readers each day, then come back here to read this article again to try some of these programs.

What are your experience of monetising your art website

Share them in the comments section below so that we can all learn.

Brand yourself online

To brand yourself online effectively, you need to have a website.

Your website is where people can find you and your work online. When clients want to commission work, they need to find you and nowadays people do the finding online. If they can't find you, they can't see what you're capable of and they can't send work your way.

Getting your own domain name

You may want to create a blog or a portfolio site. Either way, it's highly recommended that you get a dedicated domain name and web hosting.

For the less tech savvy, domain name is the name of your website, the string of text people type in the browser's address bar to get to your site. E.g. Google.com. And web hosting is the service provided by a company to store your files and run the software that will present web pages on the screen.

There are several advantages to getting your personal domain name and hosting.

1. Your domain name will be shorter and easier for people to remember and type. E.g. Parkablogs.com vs Parkablogs.blogspot.com

2. You can backup your work easily for backup purposes or in case you need to switch web hosts in the future.

3. You have the freedom to build more functionality into your website. E.g. run ads, install a forum under the same domain, create an online store.

I started out with the free Google Blogger until I switched to Bluehost, a web host. I remember paying about US $10 per year for my domain name, and US$ 5 monthly for their hosting services. If your website can reach a point where you serve 500 pageviews daily, based on my personal experience, advertising revenue will be able to cover the monthly hosting fees.

Bluehost provides a simple and good service that lasted me until my website reached about 10000 pageviews and loading starts to slow down. I was forced to switched to a more powerful server hosted by a local web host called Vodien in Singapore. However, Bluehost now also offer more powerful web hosting services via their VPS hosting. If they had VPS hosting back then, I would have continued with them. Because I had personal hosting and backup during my Bluehost days, I was able to switch web hosts relatively quick and effortlessly.

Getting your own domain and web hosting is not expensive and well worth the money. In the long run, your website will earn enough to pay for the web hosting fees which are not too much to start with. I'll talk about various ways to monetize your website in a separate post.

If you're tech-savvy enough to know about SEO, well, there's not much advantage over personal domain names or those free domain names like Blogspot. Whether your website will rank well in search engine results depends on the quality and consistency of your work.

How about those free art communities?

Free art communities or blogging services usually will use a combination of their domain name and your username, such as peterdeseve.blogspot.com, seokim.tumblr.com, artgerm.deviantart.com, www.flickr.com/photos/gerard_michel, www.facebook.com/AlvaroCastagnet, www.behance.net/ISEDieeis, etc.

You may have a page on those art communities or blog services. They are great for exposure because the community. It's like at a market. If you have a booth in the market, people are bound to pass by your booth and notice your goods.

You should still have your own personal website in addition to whatever pages you have at those art community websites. Those websites have their own terms and services, in rare occasions, they have suspended users who violate their terms and conditions, thereby destroying all the work hosted there without any way to retrieve them. The other more significant reason as mentioned earlier is you get more flexibility when it comes to putting content or functionality on your own website.

Lots of artists use Google Blogger that uses the blogspot.com domain. Nothing wrong with that. I started out with Blogger and I really like their simple blogging interface. With Blogger, you can actually use your personal domain name and still use their blogging interface.

What's Wordpress?

Wordpress.com is a website that provides free blogging services. You can start a free blog with them but they don't allow advertising.

Wordpress.org is a website that provides the blogging software you can install on your web host.

If you want a personal website, domain and hosting. You should sign up with a web host and install the software downloaded from Wordpress.org. Because Wordpress is so popular, many web hosts actually have automated installation for the software. If you don't know how to do it, just ask your web host to set it up for you.

Picking a domain name

Many artists use their personal names as domain names. E.g. Cliochiang.com, Gabrielmoreno.com/, Tony Cliff etc. Those are quite a good choice because they can be very unique, unless when your name is more common.

If your own name isn't available as a domain name, you can append other words to your name. Such as Vivianswiftblog.com, Artofpcraigrussell.com, etc. Artists may append "art" to the end of their domain name. This smart trick separates the artists from others and tell people the type of work you do. You hit two birds with one stone.

Or you can come up with a new brand to represent yourself. E.g. Bearskinrug, Idle Minutes, etc.

Your domain name could be something that reflects what you do, such as World Sketching Tour or They Cook and Draw.

It's best to choose an unique and memorable name, something that's short and simple to spell.

If you don't use your personal name as the domain name, make sure to have a profile page that mentions your real name. Say you use your nickname for your website, people may still look for your website using your real name instead, such as when they get your name from past work you've done for other clients, or interviews.

Shocker

Even in this day and age, there are still artists with no websites. Zilch. Nothing. Not even a website on DeviantArt or Blogspot.

They are missing a very big opportunity when it comes to marketing themselves.

The reason why people search for those artists' website is because they want to find out more about them, and see more of their works. If people can't find their websites, they just move on, and you've missed your chance to interact with them.

The internet is a very convenient medium for people and potential clients to interact with you. And you should take advantage of it.

Next week

I'll talk about the different ways to monetize a website. Follow IMFA at https://www.parkablogs.com/tags/internet-marketing-artists

The key is internet marketing success is consistency

To market something, you need first to have something to market.

You could be offering your services as an illustrator, selling prints or crafts, or promoting your free web comic. In short, you need to have a product or service to market.

Hopefully, you already have a body of work to represent what you can offer. If not, then you need to start creating them now. Every little bit adds up. There's no such thing as overnight success. Almost every successful artist I know spent hours each day to practice, to perfect their craft.

Posting your work online regularly will contribute significantly to your success online. It's going to get you more fans, customers and clients who are going to commission you with paid assignments.

On my blog is a page of my sketches. I don't update that page as frequently compared to my book reviews, but over the years I've people asking me to draw for them.

There's this theory that says that you can make a living with 1,000 true fans. I believe that to be true. So start attracting fans with your work now. I've bought books from artists' whose blogs I follow. Have you?

How does posting regularly really help?

Think about it this way.

If you update your website once a week, the reader only needs to visit your website once a week to keep up to date with what you're doing.

So the more content you put online, the more reasons you give visitors to come back to see what you've got or planning to do.

That's one reason why creators of web comics put out content regularly or state very clearly what their publishing schedule is like. Some artists post a drawing a day to challenge themselves.

My friend Eva post her Singapore vs Japan comics every Monday. MegaTokyo updates twice a week. xkcd publishes more than 10 times each month. Mattias Adolfsson has new watercolour sketches up more than 20 times each month. Pascal Campion draws every day. Jason Brubaker had a day job and work his nights to publish comic pages of ReMIND online regularly and now has two books out.

I'm sure you know of other web comics as well. Go to their website and see how often they put up new comics.

If your work requires more time to create, like Zen Pencils (twice a month), then you won't be able to update that frequently. That's fine, but update whenever you can.

I've followed the above mentioned websites for years. Some of them started out with less traffic and Facebook fans than my blog. Many have since overtaken me. It goes to say that good content will attract its fair share of audience.

The more you draw, the more you can draw

Even if you think your work is not good enough, you should still post something. If you feel like it may affect your image, join a forum and post your work there.

There are forums for all genres of art. Just to name some that I know, there are ConceptArt.org, WetCanvas, the many Facebook and Google+ groups out there, and many more forums for matte paintings, 3D modeling, sculpting, or crafting. DeviantArt has a scrap section where you can just post your rough sketches and scraps.

I join several Facebook groups where I post my sketches, the same sketches that I post on my blog. I don't not spend a lot of time cross-posting my work because it's just copying and pasting. Just be sure to make sure you post work that's relevant to the forum.

Regardless of where you post, make sure there's some way to revisit your past works. E.g. In Facebook of Google+, post your works into albums instead of just posting them as status updates. It's very difficult to scroll through status updates to look for a particular piece of art.

When you can look back at your old works, you can see how far you've progressed. That's the other advantage of posting regularly. You'll progress. The more you draw, the more you can draw. Practice makes perfect.

'We all have 10,000 bad drawings in us. The sooner we get them out the better.' - Walt Stanchfield

You need discipline

Posting regularly requires discipline.

Regardless of whether you're a full-time artist or hobbyist, you need to establish a schedule. Plan on when to put new works online. Write it down on a Post-it note and stick it to your computer.

I tried one-sketch-a-day once and failed within a week. I've started other blogs and didn't follow up. However, I'm always working on ParkaBlogs. When I'm not at my full-time job, I'm working on ParkaBlogs. When I'm not writing, I visit Amazon, publishers' websites, other blogs and local bookstores to find out what new artbooks are coming. My schedule's already in my subconsciousness.

Here's what you should do now

1. Scan your work now and post it on your website. Write something about it, your inspiration, tools or the story behind the drawing.

2. Register for an account at an art forum and post your work there and ask for critiques. Look at what others are posting. Ask them about their techniques.

3. For inspiration or motivation to get going, check out this thread on ConceptArt:
https://www.conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php/138102-Need-Motivation…

I'll be starting a series called Internet Marketing for Artists (IMFA) to show you the strategies and actions artists can use to market themselves and their work.

I've often met artists who asked me how they could promote themselves online, how they can get their work out there, how to get web traffic and is it possible to earn money online. I'm going to answer all that and more. I'm also going to tell you what you're missing out if you have no idea what marketing is and how it can help you.

This series of articles is specifically for artists, designers and craft makers.

Each article will feature an actionable tip that you can use and apply.

I'll share what I've learned from years of blogging and books on internet marketing, social media and self promotion. I'll also interview other artists who have web presence and a bunch of loyal readers and followers. Find out how ParkaBlogs can get 4,000++ readers each day, which webhost to use, what's SEO and what you should write on social media, and more.

How to follow IMFA articles

Follow all IMFA articles at https://www.parkablogs.com/tags/internet-marketing-artists

You can also subscribe to these articles via RSS using this link: https://www.parkablogs.com/taxonomy/term/2762/feed

If you have any specific topics you want me to cover, or any questions, let me know in the comments section below.

And of course, it won't be about internet marketing if I didn't ask you to share it with your artist friends.