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The goal of much of your art marketing is to build your own community of fans and followers in a way that you control, without ceding your community to Facebook, Instagram or even your art galleries.  And, not only must you build a community of true fans...but you must become the leader of that community.I recall reading an article in Wired magazine (issue 15.12) years ago, Almost Famous by Clive Thompson.  The article discusses the (at the time relatively recent)  phenomenon of microcelebrities.  This trend has continued and accelerated in the years since the article was written. Clive put it this way: Microcelebrity is the phenomenon of being extremely well [...]

  An artist said to me, "I feel like it’s hard for me to entice people with my email newsletters and don’t want to be cheesy so I hardly do them."   This is a common, but dangerous mindset for your art business.   Assuming you haven't "cheated", meaning you haven't used deceptive or misleading methods in the way you've built your newsletter list, your list is populated by true fans, past buyers, and potential students. These are people who look up to you.  These are people, for whom, you're a minor "rock star."   There is nothing about your art, the inspiration and stories behind your [...]

  Here are a few guiding principles you should keep in mind that will help you utilize email marketing as a channel to promote your art.   Quality over quantity - I've stressed how important it is to send your email newsletters on a regular basis, but not at the expense of quality.  Take the time to create compelling content.  Quality over quantity  applies to subscribers too.  Don’t obsess over the size of the list as much as the quality of your subscribers and how interested and engaged they are.  Remember, you’re trying to build a list of 1,000 true fans.  Not a list [...]

  An overview of how email marketing works.  Consider this an "Email Marketing 101" guide.  I will be delving further into each of the topics presented below in future posts.   The goal of email marketing is to build an engaged audience of fans.  Preferably true fans.  The original author of the concept of "True fans" hypothesized that you need 1,000 true fans to build a solid career.  I think for visual artists that number is probably lower, perhaps much lower.  But the concept is exactly the same.  To build true fans you need to build a relationship and trust with them.  And one [...]

    While I'm a huge proponent of email marketing for artists, I've started shying away from using the term "email newsletters" because of the connotation that "writing a  newsletter" conjures in many people's minds.     Embrace the Medium   Whenever a new communication medium appears, it's natural for people to simply transfer what's working in a previous medium to  the new medium.    The first television ads were really just radio ads repurposed for TV.  The radio ad (optimized for voice) played while the view stared at a static image.   The first television ad was by the Bulova watch company in 1941.  And, indeed, they simply took the [...]

What is Email Marketing?   Put simply, email marketing is the promotion of your art works to your audience via email.   It's one of the most important ways to build your audience and to build trust with your audience.  Your long-term success depends, essentially, upon both of those factors:  building an audience of true fans and building trust with that audience. In marketing, we like to think in terms of marketing "channels."    You can think of email marketing as simply marketing using the "email channel." Other channels would include Facebook posts, Facebook Ads, Instagram posts and ads, Google - both paid and organic, real-world galleries, magazines articles [...]

  We live in a society that glorifies instant gratification, but it's a false promise.  A siren song.   Anything worthwhile still takes work...a lot of work...even in 2019. People seem to have forgotten that.  And becoming a great artist takes more work than most things.  Selling art has always been a difficult prospect, and it takes more time, more effort, and more finesse than selling most things.  That hasn't changed.   Artists sometimes try FASO for a few months and then write us to say "no sales, didn't work."  After a few months.   As I wrote in Branding is the Only Power Artists Have,  "Helmer claims [...]

  I have been doing a lot more writing about art marketing lately, but I've moved a lot of it for now to Twitter, believe it or not.   I've found it much easier to riff on the ideas quickly there without the overhead of a full blog post (although eventually these ideas will be written up in more detail).  Twitter moves fast and that helps/forces me to push my ideas out the door faster.   I've been doing this in the form of "Tweetstorms".   I've you'd like my latest thoughts on art marketing, I encourage you to follow me on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/clintavo.   And if you want to [...]

  Three stone-cutters were asked what they were doing. The first replied: "I am making a living." The second kept on hammering while he said: "I am doing the best job of stone-cutting in the entire county." The third one looked up with a visionary gleam in his eyes and said:  "I am building a cathedral." In most organizations, most employees think they are making a living cutting stones.  But they aren't, at least not the ones who aspire to be leaders in the organization.    The effective ones are building a cathedral.  The ones who want to make a dent in the world are building cathedrals.   The great [...]