Time consuming as it is, this kind of networking and follow-up is essential if you want to expand your painting and photography locations, your exhibit venues, and your client base. [...]

Artist always ask me for tips on the most effective forms of marketing. One thing I tell them is that email marketing remains one of the best channels to promote your art. [...]

Are you excited about selling your art or increasing the sales you already have? This Email Marketing Guide will help you build your email list. [...]

FASO makes it really easy to promote your next exhibit to over 22,500 collectors through our weekly Special Edition USA Gallery & Museum Exhibits newsletter. [...]

Successful people have mastered the art of change. They are not loyal to a “one-way strategy.” They are focused on implementing programs that work at the time and discard it when a better plan arises. [...]

If someone loves your art, they will contact you. They will stay abreast of what you're doing. [...]

But how do you start or grow or nurture a group of committed fans? How do you lead your "tribe"? By being personal, timely and relevant. [...]

Be proactive now to reduce work stress for the holiday season and increase the chance of selling more art. [...]

Crunching the numbers, marketing, blogs, writing newsletters, visiting galleries, creating submittals, preparing and maintaining a professional portfolio, etc.; when do I have time to create and just enjoy painting? [...]

If you've built your list correctly, your subscribers want to hear from you. They love your art. They're craving for interesting, beautiful, human connections. [...]

FineArtViews is Becoming BoldBrush FineArtViews [...]

FineArtViews is Becoming BoldBrush FineArtViews [...]

The FineArtViews newsletter gets a fresh, new makeover. [...]

If your first attempts at a newsletter or blog, don't go well, don’t give up. Stop being frightened of your shadow. [...]

If you are like most artists, you’ll want to invest as little time as possible working on your newsletter to achieve the best results. After all, every minute you spend on your newsletter is one minute less you have to spend on your art. [...]

You should always use double opt-in for your email newsletter registration form. I learned that the hard way. [...]

This year we added a spring event. And some folks, especially our newer artists, didn’t get the sales or even the visitors they’d hoped for. Some reasons are obvious and expected. There were some things we could have done better. And there were some things about which people should KNOW better! The most obvious was their lack of a mailing list. [...]

Listen, you don't have to beg. Instead, do what we tell artists over...and over...and over: focus on your existing fans. [...]

The secret to high art sales, which must be done IN ORDER: craving -> creativity -> competence -> community -> conversations -> commerce [...]

When someone writes for any other reason than sharing real knowledge and value, it just adds another piece of virtual paper to the landfill that is much of the internet. [...]

Since I had never previously been in the gallery business, I had no conception of what was "normal". So, to me, everything we were doing was normal. And I really didn't understand that we were "running upstairs" until one day, we hired an experienced salesperson who had cut her teeth at galleries in Scottsdale, Santa Fe, and Laguna Beach, all big art resort towns. She had sold very well in those towns and I was extremely excited to have landed a salesperson who had worked for the "big guys". [...]

The funny thing is - when I unsubscribe, I feel guilty about it, like I'm no longer supporting people I care about - but wouldn't those bloggers rather me not just hit the delete button every day when I see their email? That gives them a false assumption that I'm getting something from them. I can't help but get distracted by what's on my computer screen because I have no internal filter. I'm visual, and if I see it - it enters my mind and takes up space and energy. Ultimately, I must limit distractions that take me away from my important work... which is making my artwork. [...]

I reply to the artists whose works I particularly enjoy and ask them if they have an email newsletter and let them know that I'd like to be on it. And even when I go to the trouble to beg these artists to add me to a newsletter list... they don't. I have yet to receive even one newsletter from any artist in this group. [4] Multiply that mistake dozens of times over and you're costing yourself, over your career's lifetime, thousands of dollars in sales (if not more). Make this mistake enough times and perhaps it will even cost you an art career at all. [...]

In my opinion, it is crucial to keep things relevant art marketing-wise. You are branding yourself with every detail... even if you don't realize it. [...]

What all of these different rendering engines mean is that the only way to be sure your email newsletter looks correct is to stick to a small, safe subset of HTML and then to rigorously test each design in every major email program...and different versions of those programs...and with images blocked...and with images enabled. One option for artists would be to pay a designer to design your email designs and test them in all of these email programs. Then you could use the same design over and over, being careful to only change your content and none of the HTML itself. Like I said before, it's a quagmire. [...]

Artists need to be tactful when meshing aspects of life storytelling with art marketing. Point-blank, sharing a little can sometimes be interpreted as sharing too much. [...]

So here's something that surprises me: I see some other artist website services recommending you use their software for your blogging solution, but, for their own company blogs, they use Wordpress or Blogger. That should tell you something. How do they find the pain points? How do they know what to fix? [1] Why don't they think their own software is good enough for their own use? [2] [...]

The question you need to answer is this: are you having fun playing with the 20% on Facebook, while ignoring the much larger network of people you can reach via the "dark social network?" [...]

A common objection I often hear from artists is that they don't have an email newsletter list so who, exactly, are they supposed to send the email newsletters to? Many artists are simply convinced they don't have anyone to send to. But I don't think that's true. [...]

Put on your thinking cap, I'm sure you can think of something more interesting than "check out my art". Your bottom line will thank you for it. [...]

If you send out a newsletter, it’s a given that you’ll want to embed links, and for this example, I am adding the link to a sample newsletter of ours. I counted 15 links in this issue: if I mention a specific work, I link to it; if I talk about a show, I link to the show site or more information about it on our site; at the bottom I append individual links to specific sections in our website; and of course, this being the newsletter, I offer two separate links for readers to pass on to their friends. Whereas in an article or a blog this number of links would be possible overload, in a newsletter it’s not unexpected. [...]

So, go for it! Remember that if you've never put out a newsletter before, the first time is always the learning curve, and the first product will take some time and frustration, but it'll get done, and doing it will get easier, and you will continuously edit and improve and innovate and experiment -- the same way you do with your art. [...]

Nobody will visit your website until they know it exists. So you have to tell people, repeatedly, about it. And email is the simplest, most effective way you can put yourself into one of the “big three” places that most people check every day. [...]

But, by offering something of value that is exclusive to your newsletter, you can convert anonymous blog followers into newsletter subscribers. [...]

We're not normally "I told you so" type of people, but we told you so. :-) We cannot stress enough the importance of sending a newsletter...it worked for Jacki and it can work for you, too. [...]

So if you are one of those crazy seven or eight, sitting in front of the machine, designing that newsletter, when everyone else is out on holiday, look at your calendar. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Schedule that article/newsletter to go when there's actually someone there to receive it. [...]

This weeks art news stories from the FASO Art News blog. [...]

Of course TV and video don’t replace reading. But when it comes to marketing your artwork or yourself, there is a place for video. Most of us have huge volumes of email and don’t always have time to read a lengthy article. But I can watch/listen to a short clip. [...]

You can send your newsletter as often as you like...as long as you don't have more than 2 people unsubscribe for every 1,000 emails you send (.2%) [3]. If you lose more than 2 people out of every 1,000 emails, then you're either sending too often, or you've strayed too far off topic (such as discussing politics in a newsletter where people were expecting art). [...]

Today's Post is by Lori Woodward Simons, Regular contributing writer for FineArtViews. I don't consider myself to have an addictive personality. I've never used illegal drugs, or smoked a cigarette (probably got enough nicotine from second hand smoke). However, these days, I'm finding that I'm just as vulnerable as the next guy when it comes to being addicted to social media. A month ago, Clint Watson “tweeted” through Twitter that I was being sucked into the Twittersphere, but I denied it! Nope, not me... but Lately, I've been showing all the signs of addiction. Today I'm admitting it, [...]