1. Continue to work on your art.  As you produce get some digital photos or even videos of what you are doing?  They will make great post to the blog or as works in progress on one of the forums.

2.  Write your artist statement and get it posted to all you profiles.  This should be what you are producing, what you will be producing and what you want the viewer to appreciate about your artwork.  It takes time to produce a great artist statement.  And  you should revisit the statement as you are exposed to other artist statement.  Alyson Stanfield offers a great course to help you develop your artist statement.  For now you need to develop an initial and consistent statement to add to all you profiles and also to make as you first blog post.  Some points from Alyson’s Book your statement is about you, your work, where you are heading.  She also points out that this is not a biography.  There are some other great gems in her  book I’d Rather Be in the Studio!

3. Gather your body of work get some great high quality pictures of your pictures. Post them to your flickr account.  See my post on Is Flickr A Social Media Site? Start cataloging you work on Flickr  at least one good description done on the work you plan on posting to your blog first.  Work on the other pieces as much as you can.

You are an artist, this is your work.

Leave comments if you agree, disagree, have a question, or something to add.

Take Good Care of Yourself,

Jeremy

Artist Statement: Write an artist statement, make it an evergreen post.  Sidebar, header or footer.

Post you wips:  Post your work in progress (wips).  As it goes ask for comments, get you readers involved in the creative process.  Sell originals on your.  Get a paypal account and follow a tutorial on paypal about how to add a button for purchase.  Once you have done this a few times, it will be as easy as sending an email.

Twitter (easier than sending an email)

Keep the conversation going with a twitter account, you can remind the world what you are creating.  More on twitter in Part 1 Sell Art Online With Twitter

Use Flickr or Picasa

If you are going to use Imagekind, or you think yo are going to use Imagekind use Fickr or Flickr Pro to store all the electronic copies of your art.  I recommend you use it as a make shift file ssystem/catalog for your art in Is Flickr A Social Media SIte?

Use Imagekind or Redbubble

Set up galleries to display and offer prints for sale.  If you are looking to provide high quality framed prints of your work Imagekind and RedBubble both have nice features.  A comparison between these two sites comming in Print On Demand – Part 2

Read Great Books and Blogs

Get two great books I’d Rather Be in the Studio! and The Unconventional Guide to Art and Money read them and put them to practice.
Read Art Marketing Blogs

EmptyEasel.com
Tony Moffit
Fine Art Views.com
ArtBizBlog.com

Your comments are appreciated and will help move forward the idea that an artist can take total control of their online success.

Jeremy

“Flickr is a social photography website affiliated with Yahoo, so you will need a Yahoo ID to sign up. This site is good for connecting with other artists and whet people’s appetite for your artwork, but I must mention it is not a place for selling. Actually none of the social networking sites are, a constant commercial is a turn off. On this site, you can use your website URL as your user name, so when ever an individual looks at your photos, they will have your website to go to if they are interested enough to want to learn more.”

http://www.brighthub.com/office/entrepreneurs/articles/49064.aspx

Be careful not to use Flickr for commercial purposes, it is expressly forbidden in their terms of agreement.  But you can use it to store and sort all photos of you art. It can be a data base for storing all you art work.  If you are storing photos of your artwork on Flickr as a way to track you inventory make sure your description includes the following:

1. Name of the Piece:
2. Where is the Physical Piece: ie collection of the artist
3. where else s this piece on line
4. Date of creation:
5. Support: Canvas board, paper
6. Medium:
7. Technique:
8. size: height by width by depth
9. Notes: Tell a short story about the piece

You can copy the above ans use it as a template for each photo of your artwork you upload to flickr past the above.  The above list is abbreviated from Alyson Stanfield’s Great Book I’d Rather Be in the Studio!

In addition to using Flickr as a data store and catalog of you art. You can also link to Flickr through you blog,  Imagekind and other web services.  When you have a free Flickr account, you can upload 2 videos and 100MB worth of photos each calendar month.  The value of a Flickr Pro Account (24.95) is you are limited by to a 20 MB file size for photos and a 500 mb file size for video. There no limit on the number of the files. You can combine Flickr with your Imagekind Account and have an easy way to get you Large High Quality images over to you Imagekind Gallery.

Back to the original question, is Flickr a social media site.  You can use Flickr for social networking, but you can not use it for commercial purposes.  It is probably the best investment you could make for an online inventory system.  Just remember you can not sell your art work directly on Flickr, but you can sell it through you Imagekind Account.

Imagekind will be reviewed in great detail in an future Blog Post  Print On Demand Part 2

What about the Internet for marketing your art? It is far reaching and works differently.  If you web site is not bringing in new sales and prospects, are your keeping it fresh an updated does it communicate.  As Alyson Stanfield says in her book I’d Rather Be in the Studio!, “Your Art never has spoke for it self.  It will only speak with the voice you give it. “  If your art work is meant to express something special help the collectors out by writting more than two words about the piece.

Give your art a voice.  Marketing on the internet is a full time endeavor.  It should be a part of your daily process like painting your brushes.  It does not have to be your only venue, you still should get out of the studio, and do all us those other things.  By adding the internet to your efforts, you have increased the possibilities of selling your art in multiples.