Artists Need to Fatten their part of the Long Tail Theres been a lot of buzz surrounding the concept of the "Long Tail" ever since Chris Anderson of Wired magazine published his book, The Long Tail, last year. We even wrote about it here with our post "Art is a Long Tail Product." Overview of the Long Tail Theory In traditional marketing, companies tended to focus on the hitmakers. With limited time and resources, most companies could only afford to market those products that were guaranteed to have massive appeal and thus massive profit. Thus movie studios were only interested in producing blockbusters [...]

Yesterday's post was about being productive.  So in the interest of equal time, today's post provides some tips for being unproductive. ZenHabits blog posted yesterday 8 Fantabulous Ways to Make the Most of Your Laziest Days.  Here are their suggestions: 1.  Find something fun to do 2.  Kill distractions 3.  Put something dreadful at the top of your list 4.  Just relax 5.  Take a Walk 6.  Take a shower 7.  Take a Nap 8.  Crank up the Music Hey - we all have an unproductive day now and then! To read the entire post visit: 8 Fantabulous Ways to Make the Most of Your Laziest Days. [...]

Yaro Starak of Entrepreneur's Journey posted about how he has become more productive.  His four suggestions are: 1.  Don't Watch Television (We make an exception to this one while working out) 2.  Hire a House Cleaner (We've finally taken this step) 3.  Don't Eat Processed Sugar (Guilty) 4.  Don't Respond to Email (It's not what you think) To read Yaro's full post visit: 4 Tips for Becoming a More Productive Entrepreneur by Yaro Starak [...]

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Sims 2 Fame by Ernie Marjoram

A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece encouraging you, as artists, to create your own community.  I discussed building your own community of fans and followers without getting sucked into over-hyped social sites such as MySpace or FaceBook. Reflecting on it a bit more, I realize there is another ingredient to success in online social networking....not only must you build a community...but you must become the leader of that community. Over this past weekend I read an article in Wired magazine (issue 15.12), Almost Famous by Clive Thompson.  The article discusses the relatively recent phenomenon of microcelebrities.   Clive puts it this [...]

We recently read The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss. Mr. Ferriss and this particular book seem to crop up on all the "success" and "productivity" blogs we read so we decided it was time to actually read the book. As with most books we read, we have mixed feelings. On the one hand, we agree with the overall premise of the book which is that we all only have one life to live and we must make the most of it.  We must be willing to step out and follow our dreams and not allow ourselves to get sucked into a monotonous rat-race routine [...]

Harvest Table by Betty Schmidt

Today's reflections first appeared in our blog on Thanksgiving 2006.  We share them with you today because our thoughts and feelings about you, dear artists, are the same.  We take the opportunity to thank you for your work, to find out why, please read on . . . A man and his rag-tag band of followers gather to break bread and share a meal. They start the meal by giving thanks. A stern group of prude Puritans in proto-Massachusetts congregate to share a meal with the native people. Legend has it that they gave thanks. They were probably thankful that they even made it across the Atlantic in a rickety old ship. . [...]

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It has dawned on me, dear artists, that we're the same. Although, on the surface, it seems that we're very different.  After all, I make software and you make art.  Most people would think that software development is a left-brain activity and art is a right-brain activity. However, that is not true.  What we both do at the end of the day is make things.  If we're any good, we try to make things that will appeal to other people.  We try to become masters of our respective mediums.  My medium is computer code, yours may be paint, pencil or clay.  But [...]

We have updated our top 10 essential elements of an artist website, first published a bit over a year ago.  We have changed the list slightly to reflect today's landscape and the more widespread adoption of RSS technology.  So, as of today, the top 10 essential elements of an artist website are: 1.  A Domain Name Containing Your Own Name 2.  Clean and Consistent Design 3.  Easy, Text-Based Navigation 4.  Contact Information on Every Single Page 5.  A Join Email List link that handles subscriptions automatically 6.  Large Portfolios are divided into collections 7.  Buying is easy for the customer 8.  High-Quality Images 9.  Site information is Always Current 10. An [...]

We all know that web sites and blogs live and die because of traffic. This puts Google, as the Internet's de facto start page, front and center in most artists minds as a traffic-driving strategy. However, Google should not be the only.....nor even the main focus of your online marketing efforts. We've written about this subject before in our articles "What if Google Went Away?" and "Google Alone is Not Marketing." This series is exploring specific ideas to drive traffic to your web site....some will work synergistically with search engines like Google....while others will not be dependent upon search engines at [...]

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