Art Marketing Buzz » art marketing

Art Marketing: Five Days Five Tips, Number Five

Tim ONeill — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 21:13:49 +0000

Art Marketing Tip Number Five

As I was doing some clean up work on the blog I happened to notice the 5th tip was no where to be found. I never posted it. So here is the last piece of the 5 tips. This plugin is most likely the most important one. Once this is up and running it makes a huge difference specific to on page optimization if you use it properly.

All in One SEO Pack

This is one of my favorite plugins and the first one I use when optimizing a new blog. This plugin puts some extra fields in the posting area for you to fill out.

Features:

Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines
Generates META tags automatically
You can override any title and set any META description and any META keywords you want.
You can change the post title on each article
Autogenerate keyword rich descriptions of posts
Setup meta tags and descriptions for the home page

Download Here

Art Marketing: Five Days Five Tips, Number Four

Tim ONeill — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 17:12:36 +0000

Art Marketing tips day number four, Twitter tools

There are several posts about art marketing with twitter located on this blog. One way integrate your WP blog and your twitter account is a piece with this plugin by Alex King. It works very well and is simple enough even I can use it. (for us non-techies) You can pull your tweets into your blog as well as creating new tweets on blog posts from within WordPress. This is a great way to leverage your time.

By choosing a few settings to add your twitter username and password you can notify your twitter friends when you have a new blog post.

Features:

Automatically create tweets from your blog posts
Create blog posts from your tweets

There are a few areas in beta right now. The experiments are daily and weekly digests from your posts.

Download it a twitter tools

Art Marketing: Five Days Five Tips, Number 3

Tim ONeill — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 16:44:47 +0000

Art Marketing: Five Days Five Tips Plugin Three

Onlywire autosubmit plugin

This is a very cool plugin. It allows you to submit to many social bookmarking sites all at once, from one place. This will ensure you get your content syndicated; it is a very efficient way to market your art. http://www.onlywire.com is a free service*.

*The service is free if you include a link-back to the onlywire site. If you do not want to provide a link, you need to pay for the premium version, which is $2.99/month.

Download onlywire

link to http://www.onlywire.com/

Art Marketing: Five Days Five Tips, Number 2

Tim ONeill — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 15:49:58 +0000

Art Marketing tips for your wordpress blog

Sometimes marketing my art is a real drag. The tips in this short series are fun, effective and easily implemented. So WP plugin number two is…

digg digg

At the time of this writing digg digg supports Digg, Reddit, dzone and Yahoo Buzz. This plugin makes it easy for your readers to submit your articles to major social bookmarking sites.

There are no code change requirements to integrate it to your template.

Features: From the digg digg site. You can chose to

Display at Home page
Display at Static page
Display at Post Page
Display at Category Page
Display at Archive Page

Download Here

Art Marketing: 5 Days 5 Tips, Number One

Tim ONeill — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 14:24:59 +0000

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

Art Marketing With Twitter-Tweetdeck Setup

Tim ONeill — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 14:37:42 +0000

Art Marketing-Set Up Tweetdeck to Save You Time.

Marketing your art is tough, twitter is a great tool to help in the art marketing process. If you have followed my twitter posts or anyone elses, you know that there are a number of third party applications that will help organize the twitter side of your art marketing plan. Tweet deck is one of my favorite for a variety of reasons but primarily because I can leverage my time using it. Following is a 20 minute video that will show you some basics in using tweetdeck. Send us your comments. Art Marketing-Setup Tweet Deck Video The above link is the highest quality and will require the free quicktime plugin. If you have trouble or you prefer to watch the video here you can simply watch it below.

Art Marketing With Twitter-Tweetdeck set up part 1

Art Marketing With Twitter-Tweetdeck set up part 2

Business Suck? Artists Improve Your Business Skills

Tim ONeill — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 22:14:34 +0000

While I don’t have any data specific to the arts, the data I have is for businesses overall. As artist’s and studio owners we fit into this because we are small businesses. The SBA and USBank worked on a joint project surveying business owners of failed businesses. While there were a number of challenges and reasons noted from the 1,000’s of participants, there were some recurring answers, some common denominators. Here they are;

Business Owners fail because they
Lack vision and strategy to realize it
Lack system for marketing or sales
Lack system to monetize the client base
Try to do too many things at once (I am totally guilty of that)
No plan to invest profits for growth
Caught up in the day to day
Do everything as-hoc and no systems
Don’t create or stick to action plans

Do any of these apply to you? How many?

There are a few areas in that list that I am guilty of. Its great news that they have discovered some common denominators of business failure, now that I know what I am looking at I can go the opposite direction.

It stands to reason that if I work on improving in those areas I will improve my chances of success. So I will begin tweak my business plan and make sure that;

I have a vision and strategy to realize it (done)
Have a system for marketing and sales (done)
Have a system to monetize the client base (needs more work)
Focus on what I do best (needs work)
Re-visit my plan to invest profits for growth (done)
Not get caught up in day to day (continuous improvement)
Systematize even more, no ad hoc (done)
Stick to the action plan within my business plan that I worked so hard to put together.

As I looked very hard at my business plan and my strategic plan I compared it against the above list and another five things that every sustainable business must have;

1-A strong value proposition is the beginning. That leads to strong/premium pricing which then leads to strong margins.
2-A lead generation program that provides new leads and business opportunities on a continual basis.
3-A consistent, cost-effective way to convert leads to clients
4-A way to fully monetize customers. A system developed to extract lifetime value from a client instead of selling to only once.
5-Be efficient and effective so people perform at the highest levels.

In the next few posts I want to focus on compounding, recognizing that small changes compounded, leads to big results.

Here are some area we will look at closely. These small changes listed below.

1-increase our gross margin by 15 percent
2-a 15% growth in the amount of money each customer spends with you
3-increasing our leads or the number of business opportunities by 15%.
4- increase your conversion rate by 15%
5-increase by 15% how much you get done

If we can do these things our business will double. Next post we will address how increasing our margin by just 15% can change things drastically. Its not as hard as one might think. Come see yourself.

A Creative Lesson in Branding Art

Tim ONeill — Thu, 28 May 2009 02:10:26 +0000

There are many ways to build your brand while marketing your art. As fine artists we have a difficult time, like many others, trying to stand apart from everyone else. Vocal artists have it even tougher…small acappella groups tougher even yet. I mean how do you separate yourself when you have the same music and the same parts to sing, or the same canvas and palette? That is what makes an artist an artist. Check out this uber cool vid. The vocalist do a great job of branding while adding some visual entertainment to a “audio” piece of art.

Voca People, A Lesson in Branding Art

let me know what you think.

Art Marketing Demands Sacrifice-Try Sleeping With the Enemy

Tim ONeill — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 21:23:59 +0000

Art marketing demands sacrifice. Try sleeping with the enemy. What!!? Here is a secret from an abundance perspective that has been a huge benefit in many different business niches. The world of art is no different. Part of marketing art is awareness, internal and external. When we see a threat or view a “competitor” as a threat we clam up, shut up, bare our teeth and generally attack or run. Right? Why is that ? I am not big on Darwin’s gig so I don’t want to open that can of wrigglers but… in most cases I think it is a knee jerk reaction. What else would we do? We survive with art marketing. That is what we always have done. We go into “protection mode” and become single-minded in avoidance or defeat of our perceived enemy.

I have seen this first hand and in fact have been the brunt of some seriously low, below-the-belt tactics from folks who view me as a competitor. Sad. I am a big boy so I know there really is competition out there and marketing our art is tough. If you have read me long enough you will know that I am a hardcore, old-school capitalist. A free enterprise guy to the core. But here is a thought. Lets do the ol’ compare and contrast thingy. What happens when we manage to run across anyone or anything that we perceive can help build our business, improve profitability, expand our market? We begin to salivate like one of Pavlov’s dogs and instinctively begin to think of ways to leverage that to our advantage. Yep. I know that is true. So do you.

Lets change our way of thinking about this just for a moment. Humor me here. In most cases we become protective because of FEAR. Really. What I mean is we view a competitor as someone who can potentially steal from us. Take away, make less that which we believe is ours. Market share is really what I am talking about. If we were not fearful of a “competitor” taking some of our business, we may have a different outlook. I submit to you that the fear in this case is coming from a bad attitude. Stinkin thinking. It stems from a core issue, a believe in scarcity instead of abundance.

The belief is that there are 1000 customers and I have 800 of them. If you take one now I am down to 799 and so on. The proverbial pie is only so big and you need the largest piece possible so 3 year old Johnny can have the newest zipideedooda in every color so he can be entertained when not playing his Nintendo Wii on his 42” plasma. (another rant for another time) The fangs come out, hackles raise and kitty cat becomes a lioness.

Why don’t we try a different method to market our artwork? Wouldn’t it be the coolest thing ever if you could milk your competitors, figure out how to make money from them…how about with them? Awww…. run Forest run. I am only saying, stop trying to divide the same freakin pie. Stir the pot, (I love that …it’s what I live for) combine, collude, and compliment. Then make a new pie. Joint venture or become an affiliate.

Heresy, I know. Just check it out for a minute though. What would happen if you transformed the pickled grey matter into fostering an ethos of abundance instead of perpetuating the lie of scarcity? Don’t ya think there may be a tad of wisdom in utilizing our competition, leveraging that relationship into a positive instead of the same ole thing. I know it hurts. But consider this, if you can figure out how to compliment what they do, how much nicer and less stressful and more profitable would things be? And further …keep your eye on the prize. What are you in business for anyway? To earn capital to fund the dream, I would guess. I hope you have the why figured out already, if not go to “starting with the end in mind”, and come back here later.

If you are just in business to compete I would suggest another arena, maybe WWF or UFC, there are a ton of places to get your butt kicked. In business you can still compete and I submit we always will, it’s a good thing. If however, we can begin to work in a synergistic nature with a perceived competitor a few things will happen.

First you will definitely become a contrarian. That is a good place to be because we all know that what most people do, i.e. the masses, doesn’t work. Doing what everyone else does is a sure ticket to the mindsuckin-dreamstealin-state of mind and way of being… average. Cream of the crap. Mediocre. So step out, receive the tomato or egg in the face and become a contrarian. I promise it will positively affect your bottom line.

Next, you will find a breath of fresh air in your business life, your art will reflect it, your home life will be transformed and you might even smile…and on occasion accidentally forget to stifle a earth shattering belly laugh. Be sure to have your cell phone with you always because your family could in fact mistake this new (real) you for a dissociative identity disorder and ship you off.

Another serendipitous change from all of this blather is you could re-create your business, find new direction, or even find the air speed indicator edging closer and closer to redline. Sweet!

So instead of listening to chicken little and tuckin’ your horns in, I suggest opening yourself up to sleeping with the enemy and finding out what’s under the sheets that may be mutually beneficial.

Until next time…live, love, laugh.

tim

Marketing Your Art: How to get more done..

Tim ONeill — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 21:47:54 +0000

How can we bring some of the passion and energy to the marketing of our art that we bring to creating our art. Both skill sets are creative. Although art marketing may be considered by some to be mundane, it does require some right brain thinking to be efective. This article hit my desktop courtesy of google reader (which we will be covering very soon). It was a hit from one of the over thirty marketing newsletters and blogs that I follow while I am growing as an Art Marketer. Followng is the article, the attribution stementis at the end.
————————————
Is There One Skill That Earns You
More Than Others?
Fellow Business-Builder,
Is there truly a single secret to small business success?
Or is the idea that there is one single secret a joke?
Having worked with some of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs, I think I found it.
There are many secrets to growing a business and remaining profitable and sane throughout the process.
Why are they secrets?
Because if they were well known, more entrepreneurs would be more successful … earning more and working less.
Here is the most valuable skill you can master …
… Massive implementation mode
The ability to make many things happen simultaneously sounds good in theory … but is it feasible? And if it is, what can the average business owner do?
SIMULTANEOUS vs. SEQUENTIAL EXECUTION
Many people fall for the systematic planning idea that is taught in many circles. While it is very important to use templates and formulas to make this happen as they should, it can also severely limit the results you get.
Unless …
You can find ways to make things happen in a sequence, but systematically making multiple projects and initiatives happen all at once.
A rapidly growing business requires an owner who can hold it all together, while riding the momentum they have already built.
This is where many people fall down – they get a winning marketing campaign put together – and they ride the wave, loving every single deposit in their bank account. But they typically forget to continue to grow it – while it is already growing like gangbusters in other areas.
When the momentum slows or dies (which it always will, unless you have other things going simultaneously) … they are lost and completely confused as to where their money and success went.
Here are some of the most important tools I have found for building massive implementation into my business:
• Constant motivation. This best comes from a combination of external and internal sources. First, you MUST have a big vision on what you will do – and how it will feel when it’s done. If you don’t know where you are going – you will never get there! External motivation comes from mastermind groups, coaches and mentors. I personally belong to 3 mastermind groups – each one provides me different areas of support, ideas, and expertise. You can swap ideas, problems and discussions. If you do this right, this will push and stretch you to highly uncomfortable levels in very short periods of time.
• You are better to do 10 ideas than 1 [I do not mean 10 different business ideas here – I mean 10 different marketing efforts]. Do not put all your eggs in one basket. It will be much harder for the average small business owner to get 1 idea that makes you $100,000 than to get 10 ideas that make you $10,000 each … right?
• You MUST do the things you read here in The Total Package newsletters! It is not about amassing this great storehouse of knowledge – it IS about implementing what you learn on a massive scale.
• Get other people working for you – for free. Who in the heck wants to work for free? As I showed people at the Wild West Wealth Summit, LOTS OF PEOPLE WILL WORK FOR FREE … if you position it properly so there is an upside. Think about it: Joint ventures (free until they sell something), commissioned sales reps, affiliates, volunteers, interns, barter, etc. The list is long, and gives ample proof that there are those who will work for free up front. Having multiple parties helping you grow your business, without upfront capital, can provide you with immense leverage and momentum.
• Get one key assistant to help you manage everything you have on the go. This may take time to find – but they are out there. The best thing you can do is figure out the hourly income you SHOULD be making. Then factor in what you can hire an assistant for … the difference is the profit margin you make from having them do the little things for you, while you focus on your most effective and profitable tasks.
• Keep track of what works so that you can do them again, and again, and again. Use the numbers to push you. Constantly be looking for new and more creative marketing ideas. Track and measure everything – how it worked, how many people, how much they spent, what they said, who they referred.
• List out 10 things you would love to get done in the next month. These are 10 MAJOR projects. How can you ‘re-purpose’ the time, effort, and content you put into each project? If you lay it all out on paper, there will be areas that duplicate efforts – THOSE are key areas for massive implementation. Do the projects that have a common tie-in all at once. Stick to a timer and set aside at least one hour of uninterrupted time (see the point below for more information on this). Work on just one project per hour.
• Shut yourself off from distractions! Last week I wrote about my one and a half day hideout in a remote location. Are you interested in what I got done?
Rather than checking e-mail 27 times and answering the phone 14 times … I did:
• 2 newsletters from start to finish …
• 3 blog posts – written and posted when I got back to “The Internet Zone” …
• 3 speeches written, polished and rehearsed …
• New product written for Wild West Wealth Summit …
• New coaching and mentoring program designed, written and released …
• Quiet time to relax and visualize my success at the summit …
• A lot of little things – more micro-managing rather than macro …
• Steal other ideas from those who ARE doing what you want to do …
You know what’s really interesting? While I did all of this – I had a team of people making sure the day to day stuff was still happening. AND I AM HOOKED! I am not needed doing the things I was doing – I can be much more productive (and profitable) when I do what I am good at, and what I enjoy doing).
This is not going to happen overnight – you will not master this tomorrow. It can take months to find the right system that works for you … but when you find it, you will get more done in an average day than you used to in a month.
Learn how to become
a massive implementation expert.
Get those projects done and out there – without worrying about them being perfect every time (you think shoddy products, full of bugs, are a concern of Microsoft? You know as well as I do – they are the model of massive implementation without concern for trying to be perfect each time.)
THAT is one of the greatest secrets of those who reach the top of their game and industry.
This is a rare skill
– but one that anyone can master with practice.
Aim for a new sales party once a month – all leads from existing clients who wants to learn more about a continuity program are invited to a party, teleseminar, etc. to learn more about the program.
To your success,

Attribution Statement: This article was first published in The Total Package. To sign-up to receive your own FREE subscription to The Total Package and claim four FREE money making e-books go to www.makepeacetotalpackage.com.