Our primary emphasis over the coming year will be on helping our members to market their work. We will do this in three primary ways:

1. By adding new features such as individual site shopping carts (this work is almost done) and then the prints option which will allow visitors to select an image, and then to size, mat and frame it.

2. With marketing help for Artspan members. Our Editor, Nina Alvarez, has made a tremendous start with this at artspan.blogspot.com. Please take a look – there is a lot of very valuable information there and more is coming.

3. With content directed to attracting collector and other traffic. We will expand the number of portals and also plan to add new sites. We project these sites as:

• CollectorsMoment.com which will focus on the many issues facing collectors: tax, estate, insurance and a lot more. We have a basic design and content set for this site. We have a partner for this venure, Laurence Zale, a prominent New York art advisor. We believe this initiative will lead to increased traffic to Artspan itself and ultimately to our members’ sites.
• ArtJewelers.net will be promoted as a separate and distinct destination for anyone interested in purchasing jewelry. There will be searches and directories specific to jewelry.
• ArtspanPrints.com will be another way for our artists and photographers to sell their work as prints. Visitors interested in buying prints will be able to do this not only from the individual member sites but from a new Prints portals dedicated exclusively to the sale of original giclee prints.

We believe that our members should enjoy continuing success, even in this difficult environment, and that we can help. That is our mission.

We will also be adding to Artspan itself. For example, a new set of templates will be introduced, the C templates, to complement the A and B templates. The C templates will replace the Artspan Classic designs and will have the navbar on the left. They will be fully customizable as to color and fonts. And there will be other features added to the sites or improved.

Major initiatives included:

• Integration of our billing system with PayPal. This took a lot longer than expected but was the critical step in getting us ready for the shopping carts and prints.
• Improved Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Member Sites
• We instituted a new way of naming images (for our database). The page URL’s (web address) for the image enlargements now incorporate the categories and subcategories you specified for that image. This means that search engines should rank your sites more highly for these categories.
• The Alt text was changed (this is the text that appears when you hold your mouse over the image). Also key for SEO.
• We created additional links back and forth from your site to the portals that feature the kind of work you do. Links to major art sites (like Artspan!) can play an important role in how individual art sites are ranked.
• Added tech and other features to the sites: zoom feature, new file upload functions and more.
• Completely overhauled and expanded the searches and directories and the results and results pages. You can also show more searchable images and can choose different thumbnail images for different categories.
• Added some 18 new portals and content including RSS feeds and created content for the Artspan marketing blog.

We are now beginning our 10 th year, and it’s probably a good time to take a quick look at how we began. Artspan came about because of my own experience in the mid 90’s in having a website designed. The design was expensive and, to me, rather ugly. I couldn’t manage the site (i.e. upload images, create pages) or customize the design in any way. Finally, it attracted no traffic other than that which I could bring to it. It was, in a word, useless. But it did lead to the formulation of the Artspan concept, which was (and is) a simple one: to give artists and artisans inexpensive, self-managed, elegant full-featured individual websites. And to make these individual sites part of a larger whole, a community

There is strength in a group, in a community. Traffic and information can be shared. Artspan is a destination because there is such a variety of work. Galleries, decorators, collectors can use the searches and directories to find work that is of real interest to them. An umbrella site with so many members is also good for your search engine rankings – for one thing, think of the links back and forth between your site and Artspan.

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Here are marketing articles and tips from the December Artspan Marketing Blog written by Nina Alvarez. These are terrific pieces. If you are serious about maximizing the use of your website, you must check them out.

• Creative Pricing for the Holidays
• How to Price Your Art
• Understanding Your Potential Buyer

• 5 Simple Steps for New Bloggers
• Marketing to Your Niche Online
• Finding Your Niche Online
• Distracted People in a Crowded Room
  

Although we don’t recommend only marketing your art through a blog, we do recommend using it as a supplement to your website. A good blog is free advertising. It drives traffic to your website, cultivates your brand identity, and grows a potential buyer's trust in you as an artist.

Artspan will install a blog option for its individual websites, but in the meantime you can get going with a free, templated blog site like Blogger or Wordpress.com.

Here are Five Steps for new bloggers to follow:

1. Start easy. Follow the site's instructions for setting up your new blog. Choose a simple but expressive URL and blog name.

2. Add pictures. Upload crisp images of each piece of art you want to sell and line them up in your sidebar with a title and price. When your individual blog posts deal with your art (as they often should) include a description, price, and link directly back to your website where they can be purchased immediately. Check out Hilary Winfield's blog An Abstract Life http://abstractartlife.blogspot.com for some vibrant examples.

3. Keep the blog fresh. Post with relevant material on a regular basis and respond to comments.

• Share information about yourself: Why should they trust you? What does your art offer to the buyer?
• Include information about your art, themes, subjects, settings, your region, process, special events, and other related topics.

4. Drive people to your website. Share information at the blog that will promote your website.

• Link to specific pages and information and announce something new on your site.
• If you have unusual or very popular sections on your website, share that with your blog visitors.

5. Promote Your Blog. Utilize your online community to get the word out.

• Tag and share your best posts at social bookmarking sites like digg, del.icio.us, and stumblupon. These sites store and organize your bookmarks, helping interested parties find your blog.
• Leave engaging comments on related blogs with a link back to your blog.
• Include your blog URL in your email signature.
• Burn your RSS feed at Feedburner. Just sign up and insert your blog URL. They will guide you through the rest. This application promotes your feed and even allows you to offer email subscriptions and interactivity to your blog.

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Copyright 2009. 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.

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