Artists must show their work to collectors and potential buyers in order to get sales, status and continued exposure. Artists of the past had to rely on galleries, auctions and art fairs to get this kind of exposure. Today any artist can show images of their work and provide information to many interested viewers with an internet website.
The value of a website is that for minimal cost an artist can exhibit work and provide information 24/7 around the world. Getting visitors to your website is another matter. Of course there are many people who will read the website address on your business card and take a tour of your website. And this website has saved you the cost of designing, printing and updating a full-color brochure as well as postage and the time it takes for any artist to get these brochures into the right hands.
Galleries have websites now for these reasons and many more - it makes very good business sense. Galleries and artists have also learned the value of getting traffic to their websites. Getting this traffic can be accomplished in many ways besides your business card and expensive brochures. The most effective ways to increase traffic to your website is to have your website address appear in artist directories, to have links from other websites to your website, to have interesting articles appear in related websites of the art community. Collectors and gallerists increasingly use these convenient methods to locate interesting art and artists.
Internet search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN and Bing are another important way to bring viewers to your art images. When your website appears on report page of a search engine you are receiving free advertising. The person searching for "oil landscape paintings" will find page after page of listings, each showing a webpage with articles and images of oil landscapes. If you are a ceramic sculptor working in figure studies you can make sure your work appears in these search reports. This is done with "links", "keywords" in searched articles, and your name.
One example of important keywords can be illustrated by a water color or pastel artist who does sketches of nature - still life and landscapes. The keywords needed to bring such an artist to the search report pages of Google or Yahoo could include any or all of the following: "art", "pastel", "watercolor", "artist", "sell", "the artist's name". And there are many more keywords that can be used to sell the art on search pages.
An artist can benefit greatly from articles and interviews that announce the value of their work, explain the artist's original style, give reasons that the art is worth seeing and buying. Getting the artist's name out into the public is only one value of these articles. The other main value is providing the links in the article directly to the artist's website. Then a reader can see many of the artist's works, read more information and find out how and where to buy the art.
By Arthur L Browning
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