This article is by Clint Watson,  former art gallery owner/director/salesperson and founder of FineArtViews. You should follow Clint on Twitter here.

Here's a novel thought - ask yourself how you would market your artwork if Google didn't exist?

It seems that a lot of artists set up a website and then think, "hmmm, I need some traffic" - and embark upon learning about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques, perhaps buy some Pay Per Click (PPC) Ads, and then get frustrated when artwork doesn't magically sell. 

If you really want your artwork to sell, what you need to do is take a step back and really think about all of your marketing options and how they all fit into a cohesive strategy.  To illustrate, let's take a trip back in time.

Back in the mid-to-late nineties, I was the gallery director and a salesperson at Greenhouse Gallery of Fine Art.  During that time period, Greenhouse launched its website.  Guess what?  Google didn't even exist yet. 

In fact, all of us pioneers launching websites back in the nineties had to figure out how to get traffic to our websites WITHOUT Google and other modern search engines.  The search engines that did exist weren't all that great, so we generally focused on other promotional efforts.

So what did we all do back then?  What should you do now?

Here's what you should do:

1. Get other related websites to link to your website. 
What was novel about the internet was the ability for websites to link to each other.  So we would all try to get other websites to link to us, preferably other websites that appealed to the same type of customers as us.  Once we started garnering good links, that brought lots of direct, qualified leads over to our websites.

2.  Build and Use an Email Newsletter List.
Another thing we all learned to do was to build email newsletter lists.  I've discussed this over and over.  Email newsletters reach your existing customers and fans.  Why spend all your time trying to optimize your website for "keywords," when you're ignoring the people most likely to buy from you?

3.  Encourage Referrals
We all tried to encourage our email newsletter subscribers and existing customers to refer their friends and colleagues.  Perhaps businesses that we partnered with would link back to our websites and then also refer other business with whom we could discuss link arrangements.

4.  Have Conversations.
We all learned to engage in conversations with our customers.  That kept people coming back and encouraged people to refer their friends.  Now it's even easier to have conversations with tools like Facebook and Twitter.  But don't forget to utilize the even more powerful old school methods such as email, telephone and snail mail letters, too.

5.  Organize Your Website so that it is easy to navigate and simple for your customers to understand.
In other words, design your website for humans, not search engines.

6.  Promote your website in your offline marketing.
A ton of people find websites through offline advertising channels.  In fact, some studies show that a huge percentage of web searches are motivated by offline efforts.


Then Google came along and "organized the world's information."  And it seems everyone got caught up with the stuff I mentioned at the top of the article:  SEO, PPC, Keywords, etc.  There's nothing inherently wrong with SEO.  It's a good idea to engage in optimizing your site as long as it doesn't become your obsession, to the exclusion of these more important marketing ideas.

However, here's a funny thing:   If you just focus on the things I've outlined here, you've already won half the battle with the search engines anyway.  For example, if you concentrate on getting high-quality links from other art-related websites to your website, you'll have a source of traffic that doesn't depend upon Google - but, interestingly, getting links from other websites is arguably the most-important factor in ranking well in Google, anyway.

Or how about organizing your website so that it's easy to navigate and easy for humans to read?  Well, Google recommends that websites be "designed for humans" - if you make your site simple for humans, you'll automatically be making it easier for search engines to "spider."

Of course, there are some things you can do on your site that are specifically for search engines, but what I'm trying to say is - build your business for your customers, not for search engines and you'll do just fine.  "Traffic" doesn't buy art.....customers buy art.  Go find customers.

In fact, consider what Aaron Wall of SEObook.com, a leading site on Search Engine Optimization, said recently:

The guy who focuses too much on ranking [well in search engines] as an end goal will ultimately fail, because ranking is not a business goal.  (Read Original Article).

Now, go change the world.

Sincerely,

Clint Watson
Software Craftsman and Art Fanatic

PS - Oh yeah, some of that other practical stuff related to Search Engine Optimization?  At our sister site, FineArtStudioOnline, we build as much of that stuff as we can into our artists' websites automatically, that way our clients can spend their time focusing on 1. Their art, 2. The effective marketing ideas I've outlined here and 3. Changing the world.