FeedMy creative business and the Internet
June 29, 2009 in Small Business Insight Tags: creative businesses, internet user, marketing
The Internet has become many things to many people. To some, it’s a newspaper to the world. To others, it’s a huge jukebox, a shopping mall, or a library. To many business owners, the Internet is a place to market to and connect with potential customers.
MySpace and the vast number of other social networking websites often attract creative people that what to showcase, market and sell the product of their creativity. It’s a great way to create friends and get information out to a large group of people.
The challenge that I observed with many ‘creative’ people, is that they have a hard time viewing themselves and their art as a business. The moment you decide to create income from your art, it becomes a commodity and requires you to approach it as business.
So, you’re an artist in the business of selling art (namely your art).You are obviously, aware of the ability to connect with people via the Internet, well, cause your reading this and your probably have accounts with MySpace, FaceBook, etc. Now it’s time to approaching what you do on the Internet with your business in mind. This takes us back to seeing the Internet for what it is. If you grasp this broad view of the Internet it will help guide your approach to marketing, promoting and selling your commodity online.
The Internet, in simplest terms, is the large group of millions of computers around the world that are all connected to one another. These computers are connected by phone lines, fiber optic lines, coaxial cable, satellites, and wireless connections. Even simpler, the Internet is not much more than a world-wide web of connected information, in the form of links. People find these links based on keyword searches, links from other websites, print media, word of mouth, etc.
What does this have to do ‘creative’ people in the business of marketing and selling their art? Well, if the Internet is just a collection of links, then the greater number of links you have the greater number of people likely to find your art and maybe buy it. It is the law of averages, the more links to you or your art (your business) increases the opportunity of a new customer discovering your business.
This is easier said than done, but not as hard as you may believe.
Start with all the relevant social networking sites, join them and create profiles. This is where the work comes in… you want theses pages to be interesting enough for people to read and get some information about you and your business, but not over-done because it can become time-consuming. Now include links to each site on each of your profiles. This creates synergy between your social networking sites and creates connections that a visitor can easily follow to your various profiles. Try to have some activity on each of the social network sites, just to let people know you are there. Short blog post, new pictures, new music, event dates, and any other relevant info works well for this purpose. Most people want quick hits of information with the option the search deeper if their interest is piqued. Don’t waste time on writing novels or extensive posts, unless you really have something to say.
Some social networking websites you may not be aware of:
Next create a blog. I recommend using Google’s free blog service Blogger. It’s free and it is very easy to incorporate some free Google ads into your blog and possibly earn some residual cash. Now, return to your profiles on the social networking websites and add a link to your blog from each profile. Don’t place links to your social sites on your blog. This is done so your multiple profiles will be back-links to your blog (back-links help with search engine rankings). Make the blog about your type of art and post to the blog at least once a week (more if you can). This helps to establish you as an ‘expert’ in your type of art. Include news and tips about your business. Try to make the blog attractive and relevant to your business (style-wise).
The blog could be replaced with your own website, but I am focusing on the free route.
Your own website, though it is an expense, allows you much more flexibility in how you set up your site and allows for greater visibility. Having your own site also requires you to work with files on a server. It’s not hard, but it depends on how much you want to be hands on and your learning curve. Visions Business Services can help with designing your own website and hosting it on your own server space.
Now you have a blog…. Wait until you have at least five posts and begin to submit your blog to blog directories. Blog directories give your blog exposure to masses of blog readers. They can read, rate and leave comments about your blog and you the same on others’ blogs. This will get you some traffic to your site and get you some word-of-mouth buzz going. Many of these directories have member areas that you can post news about your business as well as profiles that you can customize.
Some good Blog Directories:
By this point, you have created a number of links that people can find out about you and or your business. Now it’s time to publicize the links. Here are a few tips on how to let people know where to find your links.
- RSS Feeds – set up your blog/website RSS Feed so people can subscribe to it and get automatic updates from your blog. EXAMPLE (that’s why it’s important to post consistently) . There are a multitude of RSS usages. See here
- Email – Use your extensive contacts in your email address book. Don’t send people a bunch of useless junk…. only send things like when you do major website updates, have an upcoming event or anything relevant. Create an email signature and you can place links to your various web pages. Doing this, you send your links to whomever you send an email to. If you don’t mind a little extra work send out a monthly or quarterly newsletter. EXAMPLE You can make the newsletter about your art maybe add some polls or other items to make it interactive.
- Commenting – leave relevant comments on other people’s blogs. This helps get people to view your sites and many times you can create a back link to your blog. Look out for ‘Do-Follow’ blogs…. they are really good for getting a back link from a comment you leave. Keep your comments to the point and on topic, as most comments are moderated and a comment left just for a back link is often marked as spam and never posted!
- Twitter – I added Twitter here because it allows you to post a link to any of your websites and, by rule, the comments must be short. Not to mention you can quickly get a lot of followers which can translate into customers.
- Word-of-Mouth – word-of-mouth is often an over looked way of driving traffic to your websites. That’s why you see Hotels.com and this dot com, because more people watch tv that are on the internet regularly. I know we don’t have tv budgets, but we can get some business cards with the website addresses, we can send text to friends with the links when you make updates. Use some of the recording industry tactics, like posters, stickers, printed towels…. Anything that you can add your web addresses to and is relevant to your art (business).
- Traffic Exchanges – traffic exchanges will get your some traffic, but it requires you surfing other websites to get credits to have your website rotated and visited. These are good to use to beef up your page view count, but you won’t close many sales through these. They are good for increase your social networking profile count and if you use Google Adsense or some advertising that plays pays you for volume of click through. Here are a few of the better ones. I say sign up to a couple try them and if it is something you not really feeling, just stop… they are free!
Final Thoughts:
This is intended to sparks some ideas about how you could market and sell your art online. There are infinite ways to achieve the same end, but your will find the same tools mentioned that I mentioned about, with just about any method you choose. Think of the Internet as a collection of connected links and devise ways to get more of your links in front of more potential customers. Be creative and good luck!
