When I first heard the words “social media,” I had 3 years of the smARTist Telesummit under my belt, had sold thousands of copies of my Writing The Artist Statement book, and coached dozens of private artist clients.

I barely had time to brush my teeth, much less prance around a “social” site with old high school classmates-who never gave me the time of day, way-back-when, in the first place.

I admit to a glop of self-righteousness:  I (oh, no, not I) wasn’t going to fall for this latest Internet hula hoop. I was going to stay focused on the business of serving artists. (See me, with my nose in the air?)

Then, marketing guru Adam Urbanski held a series of…

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Years ago I became aware of how many times, upon meeting me for the first time, someone would ask, “Are you an artist?”

Now, let me be clear. I don’t flaunt orange hair and nose piercings. I don’t even wear flamboyant, artsy clothes. (Pretty, yes. Sometimes beautiful, yes. Just not what I would call “artsy,” which conjures up, in my mind, gorgeous handmade yummies.) And I certainly don’t turn up in torn jeans with paint all over them.

Nevertheless, that question – Are you an artist? – seems to travel everywhere I do. And it always makes me…

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Hawaii the First Time

This has been a shake-up, wake-up year for me, your normally stay-at-home-in-my-Internet-Ivory-Tower kinda gal. Oh, sure, I might wander up to Maine, or down to New York City – once in a while. But 4 trips in 4 months that all started with getting on a plane?

In the first place, I’m an introvert – which means I’m pretty darn happy toddling around in my own space, frolicking with the fairies and elves of my endless Idea Machine. It’s why I prefer being online and on the phone to, say, a keynote address where my body is in front of a bunch of other bodies – being alone keeps the external stimulation to a minimum so I can access, and cough up ideas like the smARTist Telesummit, or write books like Writing The Artist Statement.

However, something dramatically changed at…

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NOTE: This post, for those of you keeping up, is a re-post from last year. Why? Because, the problem isn’t going away and I’m the drumbeat in the lost artist jungle….

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Artists love black. Love, love, love it. It has class. It engages. It draws you in.

Black is classy. It fairly screams “high end.” It dominates and holds our attention. Let’s face it: black has power.

And for years and years and years it has been the color of choice to lay the crown jewels on, as the backdrop for a brochure, in framing… the list goes on.

But let me tell you the one place where everything black does, and stands for, works completely against you.

And against your…

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When you’ve read as many truly awful artist statements as I have, it begins to dawn on you that maybe, just maybe, the problem is at the very beginning: what the heck is it?

Here are 5 simple characteristics:

1. The Sticky Factor: An effective statement creates a personal connection to the artwork and stimulates our human thirst for “story.” This, in turn, triggers…

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Have you taken advantage of the FREE Art Career Resources being posted?

Here’s what you get. Remember, I’ll be adding to this list until May 19th:

• #1 - Find Out Exactly How Geoffrey Gorman Became Such A Successful Artist -with my first release of our interview for my brand-new, “Successful Artist Series” of podcasts.
• #2 – Have People Dying To Know Even More About Your Art With This Simple Sentence with my digital worksheet on “How To Write A Descriptive Sentence of Your Art”
• #3 - Will be posted on Sunday, May 16th.

For more information and to grab yours today visit:

http://smartist.com/exclusives/resources/

Remember to check back through May 19th for the next FREE Art Career Resource.

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!

MosaicofArtRadio-1172010.mp3

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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