Blog
You Can't Harvest the Crop Before You Sow the Seeds
You can't harvest the crop before you sow the seeds.
For years, I've been the guy whose been standing mostly alone, in the wilderness, telling artists that, for the most part, SEO efforts are not a good use of artists' marketing time and budget.
I get a lot of flack for this position. There are many people out there selling courses, doing webinars, and pushing products that teach artists how to do SEO. Many artists see it as a path to the promised land of "traffic" and sales. I can see why: for those of us who did business in a world before Google, the idea is enticing...set everything up "correctly" and watch a steady stream of customers come to your site. But, unfortunately, for most artists, that path won't work. And, over the years, we, at FASO, have found other methods of online marketing to be far more effective for artists than SEO.
But the "SEO Myth" continues to be pervasive. And I've clearly not done a great job at articulating why it doesn't work. But, once again, Seth Godin has come to my rescue and boiled it down to one sentence:
"Search marketing harvests demand, it doesn't create it"
- Seth Godin [1]
And the vast majority of artists I meet need to create demand for their art, not simply sit back and harvest some existing high traffic search term.
Common sense: before people know about your art, they aren't searching for it.
So, please, stop trying to harvest a non-existent crop of traffic, and start sowing the seeds of demand.
Remember, Sharing Art Enriches Life.
Sincerely,
Clint Watson
FASO Founder, Software Craftsman, Art Fanatic
**********
[1] http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2012/10/harvest-demand-or-create-it.html
Leave a Comment