The Single Most Important Thing

single most - tell people where you are and advertise outside of faa.

all the things you said have equal weight


---Mike Savad

I have, maybe, a dozen friends on FB, and they all have plenty of wall art.

I guess I need some fresh thinking...

you don't want friends, you want buyers. so you need to find people who you don't know. but it's easier to find them on twitter, there are more, and many say yes without issue. facebook is a place where people share what they see, and their friends see it. whether that leads to sales i don't know. but all the things you said - do those. revise old images, update words, descriptions, advertise it all. it's an every day thing. join many groups, enter all the contests. even though it doesn't make a lot of sense to be seen over and over inside the site, it seems to work. you never know who is looking over the shoulder of someone that should be working, but isn't, as they look through a group or a contest.

---Mike Savad

Mike—would you recommend promoting via Pinterest and Deviantart as well?

Twitter. Sigh. I guess I could start spending time there, certainly my keen wit and insightful observations would eventually attract a following of thousands...


I know next to nothing about Pinterest. You can create a page and post links to images on it, then show it to other people. But is anyone just browsing around Pinterest, looking for stuff they like? Does it have, for example, a keyword or topic search?

pinterest is garbage. i've used them but seen no increase in sales, activity and even my own pages that people have made about me - i don't even see those any more. it never hurts to try and it does spread you images - but not your name. pinterest is more about collecting. it's the neatest way to hoard things. on that site even if someone found you in google - will never find you because its some place on a looooooooooong page and you can't search it until you've gotten up to that part of the page.

deviant art is more of a hang out for artists, comic strip people and such. i don't use them. i don't see how it can help you. they have a bad search there. and its too easy to accidentally share your full size images. though you can sell there, but don't know how it works. some have better success. i never got into it though.

twitter isn't hard to use. i never read the stream, but i do send stuff there and seem to get sales from it. it takes a while to get followers and you do have a ratio to maintain after 2000 follows.

pinterest is a place where you can create families of images. its like the gallery here, but easier to do. you can collect your thoughts. plan a wedding, make a wish list, steal countless works to make it look nicer etc. you really can't browse that site well. its like counting grains of sand while standing in a waterfall. there are too many things. it's also too easy to have your image route to other people's websites, the links can be changed. i don't like that site at all honestly. but if i turn the button off, they will find me some other way and link to that.

---Mike Savad

That pretty much confirms my impression of Pinterest.

Many people spent a lot of time on Facebook and in the end decided it was wasted, because FB kept changing the rules, stuffing more ads, and generally turning people off. My own friends are using it less all the time.

I fear Twitter will go the same way and end up being a huge waste of time.

Of course nothing is guaranteed and nothing on the web lasts forever.

I was interested in a thread a few days ago in which someone made the case that FAA 'descriptions' are the key to being found by Google. Apparently the idea would be to stuff all the keywords into the description if possible.

go to outside art conventions.. artwalks.. local galleries etc.. Ive gotten my first 4 commissions just from local buyers..

I'm with Melissa -- real world and face-to-face is the most productive way to grow your business.

If you're talking online only, go ahead and join some of those social media sites, but be sure to seek out buyers: interior designers and decorators, especially. Also, I'm trying to train myself to ask for a 'share' or 'retweet' every time I post something.

So far, I haven't seen overwhelming results from social media, but I'm usually not sure where sales originate. It only takes one person -- the right person -- to see your work. You never know where that person might find you!

Also, showcase your work in a blog and share that blog through other social media outlets. My blog comment numbers are low, but views are high, and visitors use my links there to click through to my other sites. I don't care whether people stop to chat; I just want them to see the work!

Give yourself 30 minutes a day, maybe work one site each day, and see what happens. If you had a real world store, you'd probably take every opportunity to be seen. This is no different.

Good luck, Jim!

I almost forgot to add -- The single most important thing is to always carry a portfolio!

I carry an 11x14 portfolio almost everywhere I go, and have found 'show & tell' to be a great way to introduce people to my art. The impact of a real 11x14 print (as opposed to a small image on a digital screen) is not to be discounted! Of course, have business cards to follow up your mini-show.

I consider my physical portfolio of 20 images, which I rotate at will, to be my single most important marketing tool.

I go a similar way like Wendy. I always have one of my latest calendars with me. Especially when I´m shooting at night, I often get asked, what I´m doing here in the middle of the night. I make sure to give everybody who talkes to me a business card with qr code on the back. This way I haven´t sold on FAA yet, but quite a few calendars in August :-). http://www.colinutzphotography.com/calendars-kalender/

Jim, do you participate in any online forums besides this one? If so, there's significant potential for reaching prospective customers through those forums.

I don't market my photography directly, but I do so through a community-oriented website I own. I drive traffic to my website by posting a signature with my website address on every forum I participate in (if the forum rules allow it - I'm not sure about this one!).

I post Monterey Peninsula travel advice on Trip Advisor, comments on news articles on local newspaper websites, and a few other places now and then. At the end of each posting I sign off with

-Mr. Toy
www.montereypeninsula.info

I'm careful to post only legitimate and useful content that positively and respectfully contributes to the forum discussions, not just filler and a signature because that would be spamming. Readers are always curious to learn more about their fellow forum members, so they click the links quite often. I get a huge number of visitors through those links. You could use your FAA or AW links as your forum signature and over time generate quite a bit of traffic. And once other forum members get to know you, they may also start recommending your site to others.

Also, if you comment on blog posts, many blogs let you insert a website address with your comments which makes your name into a link to your page.

This is the most effective and least time consuming way I know to drive traffic to a website.

Great info! Thanks

James B, I don't do a lot of online forums and the couple that I do visit are just more photographers like us.

Realistically, there's no way I'm going to become a big presence on social media anytime soon. At this point I guess I'd just like to improve my chances with FAA and Google search, based on keywords and/or descriptions.

I'm also thinking about doing more greeting cards with sale-able subjects (cats, flowers, local landmarks, you know the list) and looking for places I might be able set up a rack.

Hi Wendy, just to respond to your post....at 76, I am still looking for Mr.Right, aka Prince Charming, aka....avid patron.....lol......Cheers from OZ.....

Someday I hope to get just one thing right, too.....

you don't need to be a big presence. you just need to be there and to get strangers looking at your work. according to that panda page, they want to see people have link tie ins back to your site, using social links as one of the places. so having those links should help you. but it takes a while to have them sort of collect.

---Mike Savad

@Viv -- you never know. Where there's life, there's hope! ;-)

"you don't want friends, you want buyers. so you need to find people who you don't know."

That is horrible advice. Since the dawn of commerce, it is easier to do business with people that know and trust you. If you don't build relationships you cannot leverage the power of referrals, repeat business or have a crack at cultivating a beginner relationship into a solid business relationship to reap ever larger sales and/or commissions.

Without relationships, you will be forever involved in the chase, forever looking for fresh meat, forever playing the search engine game, and forever settling for first-time scraps from people who found you online instead of inking substantial deals with a single phone call.

"pinterest is garbage."

That is the opinion of someone who has no clue how to leverage the power of Pinterest. I have (so far) inked three substantial deals directly from my Pinterest boards. My boards are a reflection of me, an extension of my tastes, nothing more. In other words, for me, it's not a store or social media. I have used it to close deals with people when taste becomes part of our conversation.

Put another way, it is a simple, effective, quick way to say "I like these sorts of things, how about you?" You can build bridges to the sale very quickly with Pinterest.


Dan Turner
Dan Turner's Seven Keys to Selling Art Online

no dan that's not horrible advice, it's common sense. if you want to hand hold every sale, then by all means. but to reel people in and not have them buy from you will only waste your time.

offer your advice, don't put the other advice down.

so far this method has worked well for me.

pinterest is garbage, and it has not been proven the wonder of the world that it was announced as at one time. and many businesses are seeing less hits to their stores, because they end up in that site instead.

if you have a method to direct people to that site, then fine - but not everyone can find these people - where do you find these people - you never mentioned this ever.


---Mike Savad

"offer your advice, don't put the other advice down." "pinterest is garbage"

Leading by example again, are you? :-)


Dan Turner
Dan Turner's Seven Keys to Selling Art Online

A thread like this just naturally evolves into a general "how to sell" discussion. But In my original post I was trying to get at something more specific.

Marketing campaigns via Twitter, FB, Pinterest etc. are long term plays, the effects of which are difficult to measure. I was wondering what I could do, now, in the near future, that might have more immediate payoff in terms of search hits from FAA and Google. Was everyone convinced by the recent thread claiming that image descriptions are the key to being found by Google?

What if I pick a single image and start firing off tweets, every day, with a link to the image, and a whole bunch of relevant keywords as hash tags If I see any increase in views on that image, it will tell me that some people, somewhere, searched Twitter for those tags as a way of finding content they might be interested in. My prediction is that I could do this till the end of time and never see any traffic. But it's an easy experiment to perform.

Wendy and Melissa are right. You have to interact in person with local people and businesses and hope the business that comes your way isn't overwhelming! I also hate to agree with Mike because I like Dan's advice. Unfortunately it may be due to my personality but social media sets me up for horrendous failure. Doing business with people I know destroys relationships for me. You need buyers not family members who feel you should do this or that. Friends are equally entitled to a degree. I need more than compliments when people demand my work; they can take it off my wall and pay, but I'm not being commissioned as slave labor only to find I didn't quite get their perspective on things. Good luck to you, Jim.

he still didn't answer the question where the customer comes from.

if you run a retail brick and mortar store. you might have a few good shoppers that you coddle and take out to lunch and such. but for the most part the meat and potatoes come from strangers coming in from the outside. and that's what i'm talking about.


there are no immediate. name recognition takes a long time. and it's a build up over a long time, over many places. just look how many places coke has to advertise to get us to know about their brand or not forget about it - its everywhere. if there was one thing that worked fast - i don't think i would reveal it. i doubt anyone would. usually its you get lucky with the thing you have people want due to whatever reason. like you have pictures of a coast that was just removed in an earthquake. all you can do now is polish what you have, advertise, add more stock. always adding new stock.

twitter will send 20-40 bots over at any one time, so those views will be hard to track. you'll only know if someone replies to the tweet or shares it. its best to tweet things each day. i don't do too many, 3 or so, you don't want to fill the stream with your stuff. but it's constant. many think that all you have to do is sent 1 tweet and let it sit. but in reality it's a build up. using different hashtags each time so it will categorize differently. and eventually bots pick up on them and spreads them out.

---Mike Savad

you can like both pieces of advice without hating one or the other. he's right. i'm right. it depends on your business, what you sell, etc. i don't have a physical presence, i'm online only, and i don't do commission work. i don't have a personality that works well with people. people going online usually don't want to be bothered, they will order when they want. if they want. so far all the people i coddled, and i thought i coddled them well - didn't want to buy anything even after a discount. people i don't know bought things. there is no wrong way, more or less.

---Mike Savad

Mike, I'm laughing hopefully with you about the personality. I don't have a personality that works well with other people either!

i can talk to people sort a... but sealing the deal, nope. i've lost a few due to potential glare issues. one for a commission i didn't want to do. i'm still wondering where that one person is i sent a code too. some people have the personality to bring people in. and some don't. there are no wrong methods. i think its really slow to have to deal with 1 person who may or may not buy something. they may pay off huge. or they may be wasting your time. it's best to get strangers in. and talk to them directly. you have to play your strengths.

---Mike Savad

"he still didn't answer the question where the customer comes from."

Mike, they come from wherever they are at the time.

All of my large clients were once small clients. Here's how most of those relationships started: "Hi." Sometimes "Hey."

I handle everything remotely via email and phone. I see my largest client once, maybe, every two years or so. Some I have never met in person. Occasionally my fine art sales surpass my commercial art sales, but not often. That's where I'm at in life; commercial marketing and graphic design still pay me more.

You do not need to be overly outgoing or "slick" to make sales. You only need to be really clear about what you want and *how* to get your prospect to reveal what she wants. From there it's a match or it isn't. No coddling necessary.

Building relationships means you don't have to go out and get a whole new set of clients every month. You can relax, make budgets, make plans, go on vacations, enjoy your hobbies and live your life without the underlying financial insecurities and perennial desperation.

Some clients last a long time, others come and go at a casual pace. Learning how to keep your clients is every bit as important as learning how to land them.

If you are not up to building relationships, and you are not up for hiring someone to do it for you, than stock and search engines are all you have. Did you notice how cold and impersonal those two terms sound compared to what I've been talking about? By all means use them (I do) but understand they are only the tip of the marketing iceberg.


Dan Turner
Dan Turner's Seven Keys to Selling Art Online