15 Minute Craft Website Tips

Commenting on blogs isn't just a great way to express your opinion. It can also be an easy and low cost way to promote your art to potential customers and bring your website to the attention of bloggers who may wish to write about you. On today's show, we'll talk about how to use blog commenting as a promotional tool for your art website.

If you're just getting started with building or redesigning your website, one of the things that will make the whole process go a lot smoother is careful planning of your art website. On today's show, we'll go over what you need to think about and how to plan your art website, whether you are starting a brand new site or whether you're redesigning an existing art website.

If you're ready to build your own website to promote or sell your art...you might have discovered that there are a lot of ways to do it. When it comes to building a website for your artwork, you'll want to choose a website building method that's low cost, easy to build and maintain, and flexible. One way that fits all of that is Wordpress. If you have you're own blog, you've probably heard of Wordpress. But this popular blogging software is good for more than just websites. On this show, I'll go over why Wordpress is a great choice for building your art website.

If you're thinking about building your own website to showcase and sell your art, you might have found that there are a number of options available to you. And as often with the case of having a lot of options, the more you have, the more confused you get, and most newbies don't really know what the best choice is. On this episode, I'll go over some of the things that you need to consider when you are thinking about building your own website and some of the most common ways to go about it.

Regularly blogging about your art and your business is a great way to promote your work and yourself as an artist. If you've already started and are posting to your blog frequently, you're already ahead of the curve. But are you getting the maximum benefit out of your blogging? Are there things that can get you more traffic, more potential customers, and more potential recognition? In this show, I'm going to talk about how to get the maximum benefit out of your art blogging.

A lot of attention has been given to social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. But there is another social networking site that artists often overlook. That overlooked networking site is called LinkedIn. Even if you already have a presence on Facebook or Twitter, there are a number of reasons why it makes sense for artists to have a presence on LinkedIn as well. On today's show, I'll discuss the advantages of using LinkedIn to promote your artwork and give you some tips on how make the best impression.

Just like there are a lot of things that you must keep control of in the offline part of your art business...there are a number of things that you need to be in control of if you have an online presence or if you're selling your artwork online. Unfortunately, a lot of artists give up a lot of control over their online presence simply because they don't know how certain parts of the Internet works or because they don't want to get into the technical parts of running a presence online. And this usually ends up in disaster for the artist who caught unawares. In this show I'll talk about how to keep control of your online presence and how to avoid some of the pitfalls that can take how your present yourself online out of your hands.

There's a lot of choices in services and software to start and run your art blog including Blogger, Typepad, Wordpress, LiveJournal, Squarespace and more. So what's the best choice for your blog? The service or software you choose for your blog depends on a number of different factors including cost, features, and ease of use. In this show, I'll talk about the different types of blogging services and software available and how to choose the right one for your art blog.

Despite what everyone is saying about the death of email because of social networking, email is still a critical component when it comes to marketing your work online. So are you putting your best foot forward in your emails? Or are you projecting yourself as unprofessional, amateurish, or even worse...rude in your email communications? In this show I'll give you some tips to make your email communications as professional as possible.

Twitter, Facebook, and now Google Buzz...social networking has certainly been the buzz on the internet for the past few years. If you have an online presence for your art, then you've no doubt heard that you need to be on at least one of these networks. Or do you? Do you HAVE to jump on the social networking bandwagon in order to promote your artwork online? In this show, I'll talk about 5 reasons you might want to avoid using social networking to promote your artwork.

Is your art blog the best that it can possibly be? Whether you have a blog on Wordpress, Typepad, or Blogger, there are things that you can do that will attract more readers, encourage more comments, and most importantly, help you promote your artwork better! In this episode, I'll name 7 ways you can make your blog be all it can be.

Fires, floods, snowstorms, hurricanes...all of these things can be devastating to your art business. Whether the disaster or emergency is as widespread and catastrophic as a hurricane or flash flood, or whether is it's as personally devastating as a major computer crash, illness, or house fire...any of these events can bring your art business to grinding halt if you're not prepared for it. In this show, I'll talk about disaster proofing your business...some of the things you can do to prepare yourself and what you can do in the event of a disaster.

If you've ever tried to purchase advertising in an art magazine or done co-operative advertising with other artists, you'll know that print advertising can be rather expensive. One advantage of the Internet is that you can experiment with advertising for your art and not break the bank...if you know what you're doing. In this show, I'll go over some of the basics of getting started with advertising your art online.

If you've been selling your art for any amount of time and had been very diligent about marketing it, you've probably felt "marketing fatigue" at one point or another. You simply felt that you can't send out another newsletter, make another phone call, write out another blog post, or send out another tweet. How do you continue to market when you feel that you're not getting the results you want or getting the results you need fast enough? How do you make marketing a continual process instead of something that you do when you're in the mood? In this episode, I'll talk about how to get out of art marketing burnout and how to avoid it in the future.

One of the most effective ways to market yourself and to increase sales on your art website is to have a mailing list so that you can easily contact people that art interested in your art. So how do you go about setting one up for your art website? In this show, I'm going to talk about what you need to know to set up your own email list online.