Art Marketing Buzz

Kenny Kim has always been fascinated by the visual arts - and especially the connection between art & photography. His passion first led to the study of graphic design at the University of Illinois, where he also became a skilled web designer and eventually opened up his own design studio in 2003. It was during this period, he began to realize that the greatest outlet for his artistic expression and technical skills would be through his passion for photography. Incorporating his own vision into the technical elements of photography, Kenny’s goal with each photo he takes is to present each moment he captures with a subtle artistry that enhances the feel of the moment. With the launch of Kenny Kim Photography in 2005, Kenny’s vision for a photographer’s work instantly resonated with his audience and within a short period of time, Kenny Kim Photography has now grown into a nationally recognized studio. In just 3 short years, Kenny has been commissioned for over 100 weddings in locations throughout the United States and the Caribbean. He was also retained to shoot for the University of Illinois Menʼs Basketball & Tennis teams along with various celebrity events featuring David Foster, Andrea Bocelli, John Legend, Three Doors Down, Chris Tomlin, Michael W. Smith, and many others. Kenny currently resides in Chicago, Illinois. He is thankful to call his passion in life, his profession as well.

Kenny has made incredibly quick inroads to success in a very competitive area.  Find out about Kenny when we podcast…maybe we can pry some of the secrets out of him. Get his views on social media marketing, social networking, digital painting and a host of other fun questions.  If you have specific questions for any of our podcast interviews you can leave a comment with the question and we will get them answered. We will publish his interview in 7-12 days. Coming up next will be Marilyn Sholin on Thurs or Friday next week.

OK I know. We visually creative folk may shudder at the thought of boooring stuff like copy-writing.  It will be a common theme sung here though. We have got to get in the habit of self-education when it comes to marketing and copy-writing is a biggie.  Here is a piece written by a friend and expert marketer Ann Sieg.   I certainly cant communicate it better and I do subscribe to  the blog that is profiled.  AWESOME! So here is another free tool for you presented by Ann.

… Here’s a little secret for you: While investing money to expand your business and sales know-how is a necessary part of success that can’t be bypassed…

…it is actually possible to get a million dollar education
by consuming a lot of the free stuff that’s out there.

In fact, some expert’s free content and material is so good that it’s literally worth ten times what you would pay for others people’s products.

Which begs the question: If that’s the case, then why even bother buying any-one’s product anyway?

Well, there are some things that you’ll never learn for free. The stuff you have to pay for will always be more complete and more advanced. It gives you the whole story whereas often times the free stuff leaves a lot of blank spaces that need to be filled in. And if someone’s free content is really good, it means their actual products are that much more valuable to you. Plus, they’re usually laid out in a way that’s easier to follow and in a more “paint by numbers” fashion. As opposed to free content where you may have to go through a lot more of it to find the diamonds in the rough.

I can tell you though that many of the strategies I’ve used that have been crucial to my success were obtained directly from free resources. I’ve gleaned ideas, “light bulb” type inspirations and core concepts from these resources that have without a doubt been worth a fortune to me.

The right free content can provide you with much of the groundwork and building blocks with which to build your business.

And here’s why this is true: As more competition develops in any given niche, it means that in order for people to stay ahead, they have to give away more and more info that they may have previously been charging for.

That’s the beauty of competition. It forces people to stay sharp and on their toes. And the end winner of it all is the consumer who gets a better product.

As Marlon Sanders says - If you really want to have a killer offer, just take what your competitor is selling and give it away as a free bonus!

Anyways, one of these free resources that has been absolutely invaluable to me is Clayton Makepeace’s free e-letter ‘The Total Package.’ You can check it out at: The Total Package.

Clayton is known as the highest paid copywriter in America and every Monday he sends out an e-letter issue that’s crammed with some of the best marketing and sales advice you’ll ever read.

Did I mention it’s totally free? I don’t think I could even put a price tag on this if I had to. I attribute a lot of the marketing knowledge I have to reading his material.

His e-letter is geared towards copywriters and some of the issues specifically address how a copywriter can find work in the freelance world, but overall the brilliant marketing wisdom he dispenses applies to anyone and everyone who’s interested in making large amounts of money.

If you do decide to subscribe to The Total Package, be sure to go through all the back issue archives. There’s some 87 past issues at the time I wrote this and you can read each one of them at no cost whatsoever. Every issue is usually well over 10 pages of pure gold content and the whole archive is literally a book in and of itself. There’s enough reading material back there to keep you busy for weeks.

When you get your first issue, just look on the right hand side of the page and you’ll see the ‘archive’ menu button…..

OK Tim back here.  definatly check this out.  It is good information and well worth the time. It is one more component of marketing our passionate brushstrokes or shutter clicks.  

HardToFindAds.com

Agora Financial Sales Letters

HeadlineTips.com

The Total Package

HardToFindSeminars.com

The Online Copywriter’s Handbook

The Ultimate Sales Letter

This video tutorial may help clear up any confusion on the first Bluehost tutorial. In the first tutorial it actually covered buying a domain name and hosting. I dont think that was really clear. This second tutorial looks at buying additional domain names after you already have a bluehost hosting account. You can have as many domain names as you want and unlimited hosting space, 2500 email accounts, there is a free sitebuilder and best of all…free 24/7 customer service. They will help you walk through the things you need to get up and running if you are a newbie. So there you have it hopefully this video helps a bit

I left a post on the digital painters forum today about elevator speeches. I thought this post was already on my art marketing buzz blog but it was not. I wrote it on another blog. So here you go.

Basically the elevator speech or pitch is the first volley from the standpoint of self promotion. It really isnt a “speech” per-say it is basically an introduction. It is a short description of what you do or the point you want to make given in 30+60 seconds and is the first impression of your business. Thought out, planned, and practiced.We all have heard the ol’ “You dont have a second chance for the first impression” saying eh? Trite perhaps but true. The purpose can vary but here we will look at introduction. As entrepreneurs or infopreneurs we need to be diligent about marketing and self promotion. So here is the target, to write a clear, concise Elevator Speech so people say “Wow! You do that?! I want that! When do we get started?”

Your Elevator Speech tells (1) who you are and who your clients are, (2) what you do for people — the results you get, and (3) the value you provide — what’s in it for your clients.

Here is a short blurb I use when I am prospecting for Portrait clients. When someone introduces themselves and i am responding, “Hi I’m Tim. I help VIP families retain there visual heritage by providing heirloom commissioned portraits in timeless mediums.” Not extremely compelling and needs some tweaks but it works because usually they say, “what?” That is an open door for me to say, “I am an artist that specializes in blending cutting edge techniques with the masters proven quality control processes specific to heirloom portraits.” It is a way to start a conversation and they ask questions. It is far better than saying, “Hi I am Tim…I am a photographer or I am an artist”

Here is what I use in the investment world. “Hi I’m Tim. I help people make smart decisions about money, I facilitate the creation of strategic financial plans for lifestyle.”

Here is an another example of an Pitch from my day job. This is from Robert Pagliarini he is the CEO of SeekingCapital.com. You will get the idea, it is 60 seconds and really what we want is more in the neighborhood of 15-30 for a quick intro. So this is too long for my tastes but will work for some specific things.

“Here is what I’d use to “pitch” SeekingCapital.com:

SeekingCapital.com is changing the future of private equity investing.

Private equity is a $100 billion a year market, with over 400,000 entrepreneurs aggressively seeking capital at any given time.

SeekingCapital.com offers entrepreneurs and investors an efficient and uniquely interactive method for obtaining or investing capital in pre-IPO companies.

SeekingCapital.com is not an “Internet only” company, but supports its online community with local franchises in the United States and internationally.

Our team has decades of experience in the securities industry, investment banking, private equity, and executive management. My partner and I have worked together side by side for several years co-managing and running the entire Internet operations of a publicly traded brokerage firm.

Our competitors such as XYZ Corp. and ABC Capital have had much success-ABC Capital was recently valued at $550 million . . . despite several limitations.

SeekingCapital.com isn’t just a listing or matching service, we offer a community that breeds interaction, education, and discussion. We work with companies globally, through all stages of funding, and across all industries.

We are anticipating $XXX million this round to be used for employee building, increased office space, and marketing.

We have a compelling two page executive summary that I would like to send you. Can I get your address?”

About the Author:
Robert Pagliarini is the CEO of SeekingCapital.com-an online and offline community that offers entrepreneurs a cost-effective, efficient, and uniquely interactive method for obtaining capital while offering qualified investors access to select pre-screened, pre-IPO investment opportunities.

Okay, so again for me to long and to salesy but…it depends on what you are trying to accomplish. For an intro something short may be more appropriate. The big thing is do something.

Hey guys! Just popped this on the ol’ utubster. We will be doing a workshop in the fall. Details to come in a bit. This will be digital painting for non-traditional artist. Of course if you can paint or draw traditionally you too are welcome. We will be producing paintings from photographs. We will primarily be using corel painter, you should be familiar with Adobe photoshop or other image editing software. We will also talk just a bit about marketing your work. Join the fun. You can sign up for the newsletter where it will be announced later.

Pinging.  What is it and why is it important?

 Ok,  hopefully you are convinced you need to be blogging.  I will spend some time coming up reviewing some resources and helping those who want to start blogging do so.   I will have the first training vid up next week.  But this is for those who already have a blog up…and are adding solid relevant content for your target market.  

Pinging just means you are going to contact several sources and let them know you have added fresh content to your blog.  When you “ping” these companies they in turn will notify the blog directories and let them know you have new content. 

This was adopted from Wikipedia….

 “In Blogginghping is a push mechanism by which a weblog notifies a server that its content has been updated. A specific signal is sent to one or more “ping servers,” which can then generate a list of blogs that have new material. Many blog authoring tools automatically ping one or more servers each time the blogger creates a new post or updates an old one.

Open ping servers, like VeriSign’s Weblogs.com, let other web-services subscribe to a list of blogs that have recently pinged them. Blog search engines can provide fresh results very quickly by polling only the newly-updated blogs. Similarly, aggregators use results from ping servers to tell subscribers which items on their subscription lists have fresh material.

In addition to open ping servers, there are an increasing number of proprietary ping servers that gather information only for their own applications. Most of the major blog search engines operate such ping servers.”

Unlike open ping servers, proprietary servers with their own subscription applications have no incentive to share their received ping data directly with other servers, which may offer competing services. As these servers do not share their data, bloggers have to ping a large number of individual servers to receive the desired publicity. As a result, bloggers have turned to services such as Pingoat or Ping-o-matic, which pings multiple proprietary ping servers.”

Cool names huh?  Ok, so lets take a look at a service called pingoat.  Pingoat is a service that pings services for you.  Rather than you submitting your awesome new blog content to a bunch of ping-servers one by one you decide to leverage your time and have pingoat do it for you.  So you go to pingoat.com, scroll down past the opt-in box, where it says, “get started”, put in the name of your blog, the URL of your blog, (you can skip the XML feed if you don’t know what it is), click on the “general” category and you will see that it checks all of the boxes in that category.  Check the appropriate categories for your  blog.  Then at the bottom click on “go pingoat”.  That’s it.  Pingoat just sent each one of those servers a blurb saying hey “your blog” just updated with fresh new content.  Cool huh?  FREE! I love tools that allow me to leverage, usually I have to pay for them.  Check out the short video tutorial on how to use pingoat…it’s under videos.