Search Engine Marketing for Artists

Art Marketing Circle VI

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What art did you create?

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OK, on to the article…..

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Building an audience is far more important than “driving traffic.”

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We’re continuing our members-only series outlining our Circles of Art Marketing framework. Since marketing will not work unless all elements are understood and practiced you need to think about all six circles as a holistic system. One circle alone won’t accomplish anything for you. Therefore, if you’re a new member, or missed what we covered previously, I recommend you catch up on the series at the following links:

Art Marketing Circle I - The Sovereign Artist

Art Marketing Circle II - Your Art

Art Marketing Circle III - Turn Your Art Into a Product

Art Marketing Circle IV - Sales

Art Marketing Circle V - Your True Fans

Art Marketing Circle VI - Audience

If you missed the previous articles about this circle, you may catch up here:

Your Audience

Your Website

The Lifetime Value of a Single Contact

Your Newsletter and Social Media

OK, let’s look at channels through which you communicate with your audience…

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Search Engine Marketing For Artists

Search engine optimization is known as “SEO.”

You may wonder why I’m including search engine marketing in the Audience circle (people who already know about you) instead of outer circle, Awareness (people who don’t yet know about you).   After all, you probably want people who have never heard about you to go to Google, type in a search, find your website, visit it and become aware of your art, and become a raving fan who purchases a new piece of art.

That is a lovely fairy tale.  And like most fairy tales, it is pure fiction.  The reason I am talking about search engine marketing in relation to your audience relates to some ancient farming wisdom:

You can't harvest a crop before you sow the seeds.

Or, as Seth Godin says:

"Search marketing harvests demand, it doesn't create it"

- Seth Godin

You can’t use search engines to make new people aware of you because if they aren’t aware of you, they are not going to search for you or your art.  That is common sense.  

I ask every single new customer of FASO Artist Websites how they hear about us.  Every single lead attributed to Google, when I ask the artist how they heard about us replies, “another artist told me about you.”   

It’s easy to deduce what happened.  An artist asks a colleague about their website and one of our customers replies and says, “I use FASO.”  (“And I LOVE them”, grin).  The first artist goes home, “Googles” “FASO”, clicks through to our website and starts a trial because they were already aware of us due to a trusted recommendation.   The real source of that lead is word of mouth, not Google.

You can’t harvest demand that doesn’t exist.  You must create it.

Unless you are in an extremely specific niche that people do search for, and this applies to approximately zero artists, people will not search for anything that will lead them to your website.  You can game the system, of course.  You can pay SEO “experts” to add all kinds of articles and blog posts to your site that will, after spending too much money, send “traffic” to your site.  But none of those people will buy your art and it will have been a waste of your money.  This is the online version of a gallery opening where hundreds of people show up for the free wine and beer but the only people who actually purchase are people who were already interested in the artist or were told about the artist by the gallery’s skilled salespeople.  Selling art requires a salesperson.

In other words, the only people who will search for you are people who are already aware of you.  And that is your audience or someone who was told about you by someone already in your audience.

This means, the only search optimization you really need to focus on is ranking for a search for “Your Name art.”  And, unless your name is extremely common (and/or there is another artist with the same name), you will rank just fine.  If you can’t rank in the top three or four positions with a search on “your name art” because it is too common, or because there is a more famous artist with the same name, I suggest using a different professional name that is unique and one that  nobody else has.  It’s easy for “Lady Gaga” to rank because it’s a one-of-a-kind professional pen name.  Writers make up pen names all the time.  But most artists won’t have to do this.

For years, I've been the guy who's been standing, mostly alone, in the wilderness, telling artists that, for the most part, search engine optimization and marketing efforts are not a good use of artists' marketing time and budget.

I have gotten a lot of flack for this position.  There are many people out there selling courses, doing webinars, and pushing products that teach artists how to do SEO.  Many artists see it as a path to the promised land of "traffic" and sales.  I can see why:  for those of us who did business in a world before Google existed, the idea is enticing...set everything up "correctly" and watch a steady stream of customers come to your site.  But, unfortunately, for most artists, that path won't work.  And, over the years, we, at FASO, have found other methods of online marketing to be far more effective for artists than SEO.

But the "SEO Myth" continues to be pervasive.  And I've clearly not done a great job at articulating why it doesn't work.  But, once again, Seth Godin has come to my rescue and boiled it down to the sentence I referenced above:  Search marketing harvests demand, it doesn't create it.

And the vast majority of artists I meet need to create demand for their art, not simply sit back and harvest some existing high traffic search term.  

Common sense:  before people are aware of your art, they aren't searching for it.

So, please, stop trying to harvest a non-existent crop of “traffic”, and start sowing the seeds of demand, which is what we discuss in the next circle: awareness.

See you then!

Creatively,

Clint Watson
BoldBrush/FASO Founder
Art Fanatic
Apostle of Creativity

PS - May your life be filled with peace, love, and joy!

PPS - What do you think? Please let us know in the comments or at least help us out by clicking “Like” on this article. Thanks so much:

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FASO Loves Mark Lague’s oil paintings!

Symphony Ten, Oil on Panel, 30in x 30in by Mark Lague

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