Art Marketing Online – An Introduction
I see a lot of budding artists trying to harness the power of the internet for their art – but what really is the best way to go about it? The artistic approach says to make a solid resume for your work, boast your previous experiences, and show the world your expertise – something that works fine on paper and in person, but on the internet we have moved towards the age of personality over work. Work is still important, art is just as important as ever, but a simple resume website isn’t going to do the trick so much anymore.
So I thought I would share with you all today, from an internet perspective, some tips on marketing your art through the internet – slightly unconventional in nature to the traditional artist, but many of these publicity tactics have been in use on the rest of the internet for quite some time! I plan to do several of these posts as time goes on, so I’m just going to start you off with the basics today. I hope some of you budding art celebrities can put some of these tips to use, and by all means – leave suggestions in the comments as far as what has worked for you.
So what has happened in the world of the internet is that the “Personal Webpage” has expanded from this silly thing you can do to make your mark on the internet into a machine for making yourself known. When it comes to being an internet personality, you don’t want to show the world just your art – you want to show them the artist behind it. Having a personality is crucial – people who get a feel for what you’re about are more likely to make a purchase and tell others about your art.
Our example for this purpose is award winning author, John Green. John and his brother started video blogging over YouTube on January 1st, 2007. I started following them only a few months after – a couple hundred of us eagerly awaited John’s latest video. Not because he wrote books, but because he was interesting. It actually took me a few weeks of watching his videos to even realize he wrote books, and awhile after that to find one on the shelf. Now John has hundreds of thousands of youtube followers along with his brother, who’s gone from a simple eco-blogger to having a couple CDs produced with an online record company he founded through the same Brotherhood 2.0 project with his brother on YouTube – a record label that was voted the “Best Online” in 2009 by Mashable.
While John’s books are good in their own right, his stint on YouTube has clearly shown the power of social networking – his latest novel debuted at number five on the New York Times bestseller list after his brother asked that the “Nerdfighters,” their community, help make that happen for Johns birthday. The book is phenomenal – but because John opened up to the world and showed them that he’s really a person behind the pages, it made us all the more eager to read it.
So something to consider for yourself after this introduction is – how can you market your personality? How can you show the world what you do? Try making YouTube videos with demonstrations of your craft, open an Etsy store with a few knick-knacks you’ve made quickly to draw attention to your more complicated works. Use twitter to get up with other artists and notify folks of shows that you’re participating in. Most importantly – can you start a blog? What can you write about? Do you have other interests beyond art that you could share and use to gain a friendship with your audience?
Let us know in the comments – what are you going to do in 2010 to help market your work online?
