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    The two major components needed to be a successful professional artist are mastery and marketing.   A rule of thumb for building a successful art business:  "Mastery before Marketing."   What I'm saying is this: achieve a baseline level of competence in your craft before moving on mastering the art that is marketing.     Think about it:   Would you frequent a restaurant with mediocre food because they impressed you with a great website?   Would you spend an evening with friends listening live to music by an off-tune band with a singer who flubs the lyrics, just because they had a cool logo?   Would you hire a web designer who used harsh colors and [...]

    “I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” - Mark Twain   There's an important truth in that quote:  the power of focus.     Every great writer will tell you that great writing is great editing.  A first draft is often long, meandering and confusing, but with enough editing, a first draft can become a polished gem conciseness.  But editing isn't important solely for the sake of brevity, but mostly for the sake of clarity.  Because it's extremely difficult and time-consuming to cut needless words, editing is a process that separates the "Joes" from the "Pros".   But if you [...]

    Imagine your sitting at home with nothing to do.  Or perhaps you're going out, and you're waiting for your spouse to finish getting ready.  Perhaps there's nothing good on television [1].  Perhaps you're simply bored.  What do you do?   If you're like a lot of people, you grab your smartphone....check email, check Facebook, check Twitter....check email again.....   It's not a great habit, but it's a powerful one (and one that tech companies have carefully cultivated in their users).     So while we lament the brilliant minds who are wasting time staring at their phones, we can also ask ourselves, "can this help us market [...]

    We now recommend that most artists should add a custom SSL certificate their website.     We explained what SSL is in What is SSL?   And we explain why we now recommend artists add SSL to their website in the follow up article, Why Your Artist Website will Soon Need an SSL Certificate.   A recent Google Chrome update has further convinced us in our belief you should add SSL to your artist website:     Google Chrome recently released an update that has added a more prominent privacy warning to all websites, including artist websites, that do not include an SSL certificate.   Here's what Chrome looks like after the [...]