Keys to building a successful art blog

An art blog is not just a website providing a place to ramble about your art. There are specific key elements that every blog should include in order to create the most benefit. When built and managed correctly, an artist blog can become an invaluable asset helping you promote your art.

All blogs have various elements… images, text, headlines, captions, comments, etc. A great blog considers the placement of these elements for the best impact or in the business world also known as “conversions”. Your blog should be directing visitors where you want them to go and what you want them to take note of or do while visiting your blog. If all you do is provide text to read and images to see, don’t expect more than visitors that read and possibly gaze at your work. You have to ask your visitors to take action. You have to show your visitors where to click.

Here are the key elements to building a great art blog:

Write your post headlines to appeal to humans – make the text readable and make sense. Don’t use descriptive words that don’t make sense until after the post has been read. If your post is about a beautiful blue painting titled “my periwinkle day”, don’t title the post “my periwinkle day”, title the post something more explanatory such as “My periwinkle day is painting inspiration in blue”… or something similar.

Focus on content – many SEO (search engine optimization) experts will give all kinds of rules and guidelines telling you how to write a post with keywords and “Google food”. The rules for Google happiness change constantly, so one thing that might work well today could very well hinder your success tomorrow. So, instead, focus on the real point of your blog and make the content interesting. Show your readers what you want to share, tell them about your art and your passion for what you create. Stick with sharing good content, and the search engines can’t argue it’s validity.

Don’t add the extra bling - as artists we tend to like to decorate. However, don’t over decorate your blog with all kinds of extras that have nothing to do with your art. If you owned a little art shop, would you put ads and gifts and muffins from the shops around you, right at your shop’s front door? Of course not. You want your visitors to come inside and browse… explore… and experience your art. Give your visitors the opportunity to enjoy your art without the distractions of all the extra “stuff” you don’t really need.

There is a golden rule of sales online… “People will do anything NOT to buy from you”. It’s true. Give a visitor extra things to look at or click on and they will. So instead of distracting or directing away from your expected visitor path, minimalize where you can and point the way everywhere else. of course, don’t be obnoxious about your path pointing. Just don’t post signs in 5 directions when there is only one direction you really want them to go.

Build pages intended specifically to convert. Convert as in result in a sale of your art, a phone call about your art, some kind of action by the visitor. When you build a page designed specifically to convert, make sure it is as straightforward as possible. Don’t include any other links or external information. You want to create a kind of one way in, one way out, page so that your visitor will not become distracted and will choose to take action. In WordPress you have the option to use different templates for each post or page. In this case, choose the “no sidebars” option.

Don’t forget text formatting – the way text reads has a lot to do with how much of it is read. Using style sheets and text formatting options, you can adjust things such as the font used, font size and even the line height. Take care to make your art blog reader friendly and you’ll find you have more readers actually reading about your art.

No matter what type of art you create or who you are promoting your art to… setting up a blog with the above key points will increase your exposure and help grow your art business.

Remember to write posts regularly to keep your visitors interested, but most importantly, stay true to yourself and write about your art with the passion that you create your art.

Chris Pearson is the author of Thesis, a highly customizable template system for WordPress. The above information was derived from a presentation he gave about SEO for blogs at Affiliate Summit East 2010. Thanks Chris for the insight!

Tagged as: blogging