Artspan News

The Forum is growing nicely. We now have close to 400 Forum members. Some are Artspan members; others have simply found the Forum and joined. We ask all Artspan members to check it out and tell others who might be interested.

The Forum is informative and lively, you can learn from others and you can share your experiences. Each genre has its own forum. Thus, sculptors can talk with fellow sculptors and watercolorists with watercolorists, etc. And the Forum is fun: Google ranks us # 15 for art humor out of 74 million results, on MSN we are #5.

The more forum members, the more content the forum has, and its continued strong growth is extremely important for all of us. This is because it provides art-related content to the site. This content is "read" by search engines and will result in increasing our rankings and in attracting more traffic to artspan.com and to your site.

So here is what to do:

•  Go to www.artspan.com/community

•  Register as a Forum member (we recommend using your regular Artspan username and password).

After you register, you should edit your profile information using the User CP (Control Panel) button at the top left of the forum browser bar. Add a signature line, and include your website domain name. After you have done this, each time you add a post, your URL will be indexed by the search engines. This will increase your rankings making it possible for your site to attract more traffic. You will also enable Forum visitors to click on your link and in that way further increase your traffic.

Would you like to show your work in a major art magazine?

We are looking at using our greater buying power and established advertiser relationships for the benefit of any of our members who would like to show their work in a shared display ad in a premiere art publication. We have in mind Art in America and B&W Magazine (photography). We would take a full page and the charge to each participating member would be approximately $300 per issue for Art in America and $50 for B&W Magazine. Approximate size of the space for each member would be 2" wide by 2.25" high. This would be space appropriate for one image and several lines of copy.

The more artists featured on a page the smaller the image would be and the lower the cost. Or we could feature larger images by fewer artists at a greater fee.

The benefit to Artspan members would be exposure in a prestigious magazine at a reduced cost. Art in America is a premiere art magazine and a must-read for collectors and gallery owners. B&W Magazine (Black and White) is for collectors and anyone seriously interested in photography as an art form. Art in America has a subscriber base of 75,000; B&W has 35,000 subscribers. If interested, please email display@artspan.com. Let us know what you think of the proposed cost and space. If you feel more space is advisable, then the cost would rise. If you want to spend less, tell us that. Also, would you be interested in multiple exposures?

Artspan is of course a portal, a gateway to the world of art. We want to expand the concept. We want Artspan to be both a major portal to the wider world of art and, we also want to incorporate a series of more focused portals which will be will be gateways to the various distinct art categories such as painting, sculpture, photography, mixed media, prints, glass art, fiber art, ceramics, jewelry and more.

We have done advanced planning on this and will let you know more over the next few weeks. The evolution in the Artspan concept has also meant a brief hold-up in the launch of the new Artspan homepage.

We have made some corrections in the genre searches. There was a problem in that the results were appearing in the same order. This has now been fixed.

We do want to restress the importance of your revisiting the keywords for those images of that you have made searchable. It is important that if you want your images to show under a search for your first or last name that you include your first and last name in the keywords box for each searchable image. It is important to format the keywords correctly also, like so: keyword,keyword,key word, and so on. No capitals or spaces by the commas are needed.

Please enter as many keywords as you can for the images you have made searchable. These keywords must correspond to the image in question. It makes no sense to have “photography” as a key word for a landscape painting. It will not create additional traffic. And it will devalue the search functions in general.

Here is a suggestion for keywords which should be present for each searchable image: your first name, your last name, your city, state, country, type of work, subject, medium, colors, anything that would serve to identify that artwork. Spend some time on it. Go back to it in week or two: you may have some more ideas.

Questions, as always, should be directed to www.artspan.com/help

September saw a record number of visitors: unique visitors (visitors counted once only): 76,000; total visitors: 140,000; and over 3 million page views and 5 million hits. This does NOT include visitors who go directly to member sites. This is a much higher number. The Artspan visitor count is a monthly record. As we continue to invest in Search Engine Optimization strategies, the visitor count continues to improve.

Countries which provided the most visitors were (in order): USA, UK, Canada, Australia, Brazil, Netherlands, Singapore, Sweden and France.

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Copyright 2006. Artspan LLC. All rights reserved.

All images are the property of their respective owners. The opinions expressed in this newsletter do not necessarily reflect those of artspan.com members.

Thoughts or ideas for future newsletters? denise@artspan.com

Technical questions or problems? www.artspan.com/help

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