Four time, returning smARTist Alumni, Amadea Bailey, tells us exactly why she keeps coming back!

Is your art career sitting on the fence because you are?

Register for the smARTist Telesummit 2010. (It starts in 2 days!)

Your art career will thank you—and that’s a promise!

Since art in a closet, or lined up in the studio, is almost as good as no art at all, I’ve always been fascinated by how artist’s perceive their audience.

Over the years, as I’ve listened to hundreds of artists, I began to understand that finding and nurturing collectors had to do with making a paradigm shift from “me” to “them.”

Mosaic artist, George Fishman, talked with me on his “Mosaic of Art Radio Show” about just this topic: “Who is Your Audience: Making the shift from me to them.”

You can listen to our 30 minute broadcast right here!

One of the main challenges of trying to fit marketing into an artist’s busy life is this overwhelming sense that it’s just all too much. I know because I struggle with this story too.

And, I have to remind myself that it is just a “story,” and as long as I keep telling myself the same plot over and over, that’s exactly where…

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The beast’s name is TwitterFacebookYoutubeRSSFlickr.

It hides in the sites where you network, using tweets or updates, videos or photos to increase your followers/friends/hits.

These are great sites, and, if you work them, they will definitely work for you.

BUT they can easily consume a precious hour or more every day, cutting into the your studio time. That would be the beast part.

At the 2009 smARtist telesummit, networking visibility expert Nancy Marmolejo gave some fabulous tips for taming it.

Here’s one:

Feed your tweets into your Facebook page using the “Twitter” application within Facebook.

1. You’ll find Facebook applications on your home page, in the very bottom left corner.

2. Click on it and a menu pops up.

3. Pick “Browse more applications.”

4. On the next page, type “Twitter” into the search box.

5. On the results page, find the Twitter application. Make sure it’s the application by Twitter–there are some imposters.

6. Click on it. On the page that appears, click on “Go to application.”

7. Enter your Twitter username and password. [It's OK, you're giving these to Twitter. They own and run this application.]

8. Voila! All your tweets will also appear as Facebook updates.

Now that’s pretty neat. But there’s a drawback.

If you’re one of the people who tweet a lot, you’re going to have a lot of Facebook updates. Everything you tweet shows up on your Facebook page. Whether or not it makes sense. This can annoy some people so much they hide you on their Facebook page.

But there’s another nifty Facebook application that fixes this. It’s called “Selective Twitter Status.” If you use this application instead when you get to step #5 above, you can choose which tweets go to your Facebook page. When you tweet, just add #fb to the end of the ones you want to show up in Facebook.

Voila!

The beast, tamed two ways.

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When it comes to tips and tricks for your art career, nothing’s better than those 7 days of the smARTist Telesummit 2009!

Here’s how to make Twitter both productive and fun:

Treat it like a cocktail party.

If you were going to a cocktail party, you wouldn’t walk in the door and start trying to sell your art to the first person you met. Unless your goals were to a) never get to know anyone interesting, b) never sell art, and c) never get invited to another cocktail party.

Instead, you’d find something you were both interested in and talk about THAT. You’d disclose something about yourself and respond to what the other person said.

That’s the way to Tweet, too.

Last time, I suggested that you look for potential buyers by using the Twitter search box to find shared interests. I used the example of searching for ‘dog owners’ if you paint pet portraits.

So the first things you’d tweet might be about what you love about your own pet. Or the best pet you ever painted. Or the funniest thing that happened to you while painting a pet.

Or what you think about painting pets. Or what you think pets think about while you’re painting them.

Then listen. Read other people’s tweets. Respond–but not with sales pitches. With cocktail party conversation.

Sales happen as a result of creating connections that are genuine and grounded in your interest in your potential collector. It’s all about the relationship first, the sale is the last sip in the glass.
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When it comes to moving your art career into the center of social media buzz, nothing’s better than those 7-days of the smARTist Telesummit 2009!

Twitter works like this for lots of people:

1. You sign up and start tweeting enthusiastically.

2. Your list of followers grows slllooooowwwly. You wonder how all those other people got to 3000–or 300–followers. Isn’t Twitter supposed to be social networking magic?

3. You tweet less and less frequently. Eventually, you stop altogether.

If this is you, don’t despair. At the 2009 Smartist telesummit, Joan Stewart, the social networking maven, had a great suggestion about how to find your tweeps.

Use the search box.

Let’s say you’re a painter–and you paint dog portraits. Dog owners would make great clients for you. So you type ‘dog owners’ or ‘dogs’ or even ‘I love my dog’ into the search box–and voila! You have a bunch of potential clients. Chances are, if you follow them, they’ll follow you back.

But–and here’s the key–don’t say hello with a sales pitch. Next time, we’ll talk about how to keep people reading your tweets.

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When it comes to tips and tricks for your art career, nothing’s better than those 7-days of the smARTist Telesummit 2009!

Twitter can drive people to websites. Just put a URL in your tweet and there they go.

Hypothetically.

Finding out whether or not they went is another matter.

If it’s your website you’re driving them to, you could use Google analytics to find out if your tweets bump your traffic up. (What? You don’t have Google analytics installed? It just takes pasting a little code into one of your pages and you really can’t afford to be without them. Go now. I beg you.)

But it takes 24 hours to get analytics data–and you can’t tell exactly when someone visited. So that alone won’t  help you know how effective your tweet was about your fabulous new show/sale/commission/medium/press coverage.

BudURL to the rescue. This nifty free service does two things at once:

1. It converts long URLs to short ones that take up fewer characters

2. It also tracks hits–and continuously updates them.

Post your tweet, then go back to your BudURL account page. Watch, in real time, as people hit the URL you posted.

This is pretty useful for a couple of reasons. You can…

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I’ve been talking to a lot of artists lately in a series of strategy sessions, and I’m watching a pattern replicate itself like an out-of-control virus.

I’ve come to call it the Business Bitters–that mouth puckering contrast to the sweet taste of creative flow.

The story is simple and timeless: artist paints or sculpts or weaves or throws or composes, experiencing a kind of…

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For two years now, I’ve had the illustrious Attorney DuBoff as an expert legal presenter at my professional art career conference, the smARTist Telesummit.

Not only can Attorney DuBoff hand you legalese in plain English, turns out that, as a young attorney with a yen for the arts in a firm that suddenly had a high profile artist client, he is the person who created the concept of Art Law as a field unto itself. (Amazing, isn’t it, to think someone could actually create a field of endeavor.) His book Art Law in a Nutshell is a classic.

When Facebook started getting in all our faces with changes that threatened protection of our images and brands, Attorney DuBoff was the first person …

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I confess: Twitter has totally seduced me. Without a phone booth in sight, I can switch into my Twitter cape and tights in the blink of an eye.

But it hasn’t always been this way.

Back in August of ‘07, like many, many others, I thought Social Media was a huge waste of time. And I found it impossible to imagine why people I highly respected, like master coach and artist Molly Gordon, MCC, and Joan Stewart, kick-ass free publicity maven (both three-time presenters on the annual smARTist Telesummit), were bothering.

Then I was drawn into a free series of teleseminars on Social Media (yup, free gets me too!) and by the end I got it: the word social was a historical reference to the beginning of the Facebook phenomenon, when college students wanted to stay connected to friends.

But like all things web-related…

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It’s easy to deride Artist Statements. I’ve done it myself countless times when they are pompous, self-congratulatory, or badly written and trite, trite, trite.

But like the About section of any website, where we click in the hopes of connecting with the human being behind the virtual page, an artist statement has only one purpose…

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Are there parameters for “great” art that we can identify?

Years ago, a survey I read named three elements that all great artists shared: being prolific, having an artist statement, and having strong support systems.

So it was no surprise when I ran across this video, a preview for a longer documentary of the painter Fritz Rauh, and discovered that Rauh indeed hit all three elements.

But this post isn’t really about what makes great art. It’s about this video.

Even though this was done by master documentary film makers, there are elements here that you could use in creating your own master ‘art’ video. What do you see?

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The Superior Court of Fresno County, California ruled against a blogger,  Cynthia Moreno, whose family suffered (business loss, death threats, etc.) as a result of her blog entry on MySpace,”Ode to Coalinga,” where she criticized the city of Coalinga and its residents.

Her blog post had been harvested off the Internet and reprinted in the local paper. Ms. Moreno…

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I’ve heard it a million times: ask the busiest person you know to do something and they’ll get it done. I’ve even watched this in real life at my kid’s school. You could reasonably ask the busiest mother to run a bake sale, she’d say yes, and the next week up would go the bake sale!

So when a local artist called today and asked me to mentor a local group of five artists, I could have been that mother with the bake sale. I love…

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In the old days it was location, location, location.

Now, it’s attitude, attitude, attitude.

We know this is true, especially as social media marketing takes over the traditional way of doing business.

I mean, it’s always been true that our attitude…

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