Art Marketing Buzz

Art Marketing, Five Days of SEO Tips

Following are some cool tools to help get some traffic to your blog. They are for Wordpress users. The first tip can make a huge difference in getting organic search engine traffic. In marketing your art more eyeballs viewing portrait art, abstract piece or latest oil painting will translate to more sales. So here we go.

1) XML Sitemap Generator

What is a sitemap and how does it help me with art marketing? Sitemaps are one of the best ways for webmasters to let a search engines know there are pages on their sites available for crawling. Basically, a Sitemap is an XML file. That file will list the URLs  and some metadata about each URL. The metadata may include when the site it was last updated, the URL’s relevancy to the rest of the site and how often the site changes. This information helps the crawl the site more efficiently and intelligently.

The way pages are located by the web crawlers is by referral. New pages are discovered from links within the site and from links in other sites.

The XML site plugin generates a dynamic site from each blog post which facilitates a faster crawl rate from the major search engines

Features: These are copied from the XML Generator Site

• Available in many languages
• Generates automatically a sitemap for all types of WordPress pages
• Calculates a priority for each post, based on the number of comments
• Notifies Ask.com, Google, Bing and YAHOO about changes via ping
• Includes a WordPress filter for other plugins which can add their pages to the sitemap
• Generates a static XML file as well as a zipped version

Download Here

I am sure most of the readers here have seen the amazing art of Italian Artist Guido Daniele. You can see more of his art at his site Guido Daniele dot com.

Listen to this episode

I love the presentation of a piece that is gallery wrapped. Wraps may not be the proper scenario in many cases but…for taking things on the road for street fairs and other venues like that, I think they are great.

Some of the great  things about gallery wraps for me as an artist are;

1-They save me money when I am putting together a show. High quality framing is expensive.

2-They save me time, time in production, packing and unpacking.

3-I can easily protect my paintings. Custom made boxes are very inexpensive and I dont have to worry about glass.

4-A nicely wrapped canvas presents a “neutral” piece and keeps the focus on my work.

Obviously there are some challenges as well. I can hear the moans, groans and gnashing of teeth. You really have to cater your presentation to the location and the show. I am not thinking that a show made up of 50,000 dollar pieces, and hosted in an Antebellum home would be the proper place for a gallery wrap. On the other hand a high end show in a contemporary home a gallery wrap will work great.

Another thing to point out is that you don’t have the opportunity to make a back-end sell on a nice frame. If you have developed or want to develop a nice back-end income framing is one way to do it. I personally work with a professional framer for my clients. I know I leave some money on the table doing that but…I don’t like to frame, I would rather paint.

So for my work, most of the time a gallery wrap is good for an initial presentation. Even if you don’t want to use wraps for your large upper end pieces you might consider using them for smaller less expensive pieces or even for a print series.

So if you are interested in a very cool inexpensive way to wrap your images, check out Hahnemuhle Fine Art. They have been a favorite of mine for the high-end paper for some time. This new system for putting together canvas wraps is awesome.

Here is a video from Hahnemuhle’s PR office. This original video didn’t have sound. Kari from PR informed me a new video will be out in September.

You can get this wrap system from your local art supplie shop or you can contact Hahnemuhle Fine Art directly for the nearest vendor.

Are you one of those folks that come across stories or articles that likes to share that knowledge with others? If you are why not consider submitting your article or musings for publication on the Art Marketing Buzz website?

If you have been a reader for any length of time you will kind of know the format of what we publish.  Advice or information that may help artist in the areas of marketing, business, creativity….. you get the drift.

You have heard me talk about the most popular and ever present WIIFM (what’s in it for me). Well in answer to that, your article will be permanently archived on the site and also will be viewed by a ton of people. We will ad your link which will give you those all important backlinks the search engine spiders love so much. You can potentially pick up some readers for your blog or site….maybe even find a new raving fan for your artwork.

If you have any interest shoot the article to tim@artmarketingbuzz.com.