Artdomain Art Marketing Blog

Photo by Davic

What to choose….? The ideal, I think, is probably both.  A blog for posting artwork as it becomes available for sale, or showing work in progress, and an art website for displaying your art professionally and coherently.

I’ve been looking at what artists who are successfully selling online are doing.  One strong trend is posting your art as it becomes available for sale onto your blog, with a link to an online auction of that same piece.

Some artists using this format are Duane Keiser , Daniel Peci, and Julian Merrow-Smith. The first two artists use eBay to handle their auctions while Julian Merrow-Smith uses a custom made auction site to handle his daily auctions.

All these artists are ‘a painting a day’ artists, posting small art works daily for sale on their blog.  This works really well with blogs as search engines regularly visits to see what’s new.  Subscribers to your blog can regularly visit and find the latest art at the top of the page.  In addition blogs give each new post an individual name based on the title of your post, so search engines are constantly picking up new keywords that can help people find your art in online searches.

Even if you are not a daily painting artist, blogs provide this same search engine friendliness to your posts that static websites do not offer, namely fresher content, better use of keywords, ability for viewers to leave comments and subscribe to your feed or subscribe by email, and ease of use for the artists to update.

When linked to an auction site, such as eBay, you have a powerful combination.  EBay handles the payment processing side as well as exposing your art to a larger audience than your static website could provide.

If you would prefer not to use an auction format to sell your art, you can use eBay’s ‘Buy it Now’ format or not use eBay at all and simpy insert Paypal buttons into your blog to provide an online selling facility.

Some artists use their blog to show work in progress or their process of creating the art.  This is also a fantastic way to engage the viewer. It can be very useful if you do commissioned work.  Check out The Painted Cat - Cats on the Easel blog to see how artist Denise Laurent shows some of her commission work develop.  Rather than posting lots of similar images of the artwork being transformed Denise also uses Flickr to create a slide show transition and posts the slideshow into her blog.

‘Well if blogs are so good, what do I need an artist website for?’ I hear you ask.  An artist website allows you to present your artwork in the order you want it to be shown, rather than in chronology of posts, as in blogs.  This is good for giving viewers an overview of your artwork and you as an artist.  Also for grouping the artwork into themes.  If you were approaching an art gallery you would want to direct them to your website in the first instance.

Here’s the websites of the same artists mentioned above :

Duane Keiser , Daniel Peci, Julian Merrow Smith, Denise Laurent

Of course your blog would be linked to your website and vice versa.  Artists have remarked that they get much more web traffic from their blog than their static website, therefore to interconnect both makes sense to increase exposure.

To start blogging you can try Blogger, Wordpress, or Typepad - All are free.

Related articles:

Why Artists Should Blog

9 Reasons Why Every Artist Should Have Their Own Art Blog 

Blogging for Artists - Resources for Artists