Here at FASO, we once lost all of our rankings in Google....sounds like a marketer's worst nightmare, right?
When Google dropped the original Panda [1] bomb, we had somehow incorrectly configured part of our robots.txt file, and left a section of the FASO site open to Googlebot that we had never intended for Google to index. The big, bad Panda bear didn't like that section of our web site, and we lost all our rankings for about a month (except, importantly, on searches for "faso").
And guess what happened to our sales and traffic during that month? Nothing. Well, almost nothing.
Our growth just continued right on and we kept making sales. That's because we have never relied on "SEO" as our marketing strategy. Just as we've never relied on "social media marketing" as a primary marketing channel.
You see, to truly control your own fate and be free, you should structure your art marketing like we do: We control our own assets and maintain direct relationships with our customers, fans and followers. We only utilize SEO and social media as "extra" marketing channels.
We did immediately figure out what we had done wrong, we corrected our robots.txt, and we did get our rankings back (and have since been able to to maintain #1 and #2 on several of our target keyword phrases). Having high rankings is very nice, and those searches do send us some customers. But we will never look at SEO as any primary sort of marketing channel.
Instead of obsessing over SEO and the latest hot social media fad, we focused our efforts on direct channels. For example, we started the FineArtViews newsletter in 2007 with a seed list of a few hundred subscribers and have built our subscriber base to over 50,000 artists.
Facebook and Google can close up shop tomorrow and we can still instantly reach 50,000 potential customers any time we want to. We anticipate that list to be in the hundreds of thousands in a few more years. That's what we call a marketing asset.
You, dear artist, can do the same thing with your art marketing. All it takes is a bit of work and an organized system.
The work, you'll have to do for yourself, but we can help you with the system. We have the information you need delivered to your inbox daily via FineArtViews. And we have the tools you need to make it all happen with FASO.
Sincerely,
Clint Watson
FASO Founder, Software Craftsman, Art Fanatic
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Footnotes
1. Panda is a sort of anti-spam algorithm that Google periodically runs, to get rid of what they call "webspam".
