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| Western Landscape Painting by Jill Hartley |
Blogs are great for being found on a search engine such as google. There are ways to increase the likely hood that your blog will be found. A major aspect of increasing traffic is referred to as Search Engine Optimization or SEO. Some simple SEO tips include post often, use text and specific words relevant to your work, and use images. Search engines like new content and posting often allows more opportunities for Google to find you. Search engines see the text that you use. If you are a landscape artist in Wyoming you can use word such as western, landscape, paintings and Wyoming several times in a post. You do want to switch these words up from post to post. Using photos allows you to be found in image searches, but also encourages people to read your blog.
Link Link Link
Placing links to your website and portfolio is wise. Links to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and any other social media sites you have can also benefit your art business. This will show people that you want them to go to your website, portfolio or ETSY shop. If they like your blog, they may want to see more work.
Getting your Work Seen
It is important to get traffic to your site or store and you should place calls to action along with links to any sites or images that you want people to find; however, if people do not visit your other pages (especially right away) it is not a huge problem. The ultimate goal of you blog should be exposure to your work. It is fine if people stay on your blog and read about your work rather than go to your other sites. Many businesses rely on people finding their websites, however, I would argue that the first step for an artist is getting people to see your work and a blog should do that. If people are interested they will view your other pages. Patience
It is unlikely that you will have instant results. You will need to be patient. Post consistently and as often as possible. Short quality posts will pay off.
WOW is located in Suite 271 of the Laramie Plains Civic Center. Visit us for more information about blogging.
As you may have noticed Social Media Marketing Tuesday/Thursday is coming to an end. There will still be posts on this topic, but they will be spread out to meet the suggestions of our readers. Thanks for your input!
I am going to chime in here. As a social media marketer and web developer, I must stress it is very important to have your own specific, dedicated domain name for your blog. The reasons for this are numerous. #1 if you blog at wordpress or blogger, you have no control over the archiving of your contents. Also, there is also some debate over who actually owns your content when using a wordpress or bogger HOSTED site (where your blog address is something like myblog.wordpress.com) You are also very limited in using custom themes to customize your site look and feel: a must if you are marketing yourself as an artist. Using a canned WP theme is a really big red flag if your goal is to look professional. Also your SEO is severely limited with the stock themes. If SEO is a priority for you, a custom theme with advanced SEO integration is a must. That is just the tip of the iceberg. If you purchase a domain name such as yourartname.com everytime you hand off your site name you are marketing yourself and not wordpress or blogger. Also, your email is then site specific: ie: artist@yourartname.com -- in effect you are marketing your site everytime you give out your email address. There is so much more to consider, but I would say it is a must for anyone marketing their work via the web to begin by purchasing a domain name (very inexpensive) and hosting their own blog (again, very inexpensive) Lisa @ www.lisadesigns.com -- just moved back to Laramie and loving it!
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