Charm FX

Posts Tagged ‘arts’

Artists, performers, writers and other creatives using a blog or web site to showcase their work need to be aware of PageRank. It’s a number calculated based on link analysis that’s supposed to indicate how relevant your site is to other sites discussing similar content. The problem with that is, for artists, often our content is very, very specific! The more specific and individual we make ourselves and our work, the harder it is to be seen by search engines as “similar” or relevant to a keyword phrase or sites that may be tangentially related to the subject of our work. For many visual artists or performers who’ve documented their work with photos or videos the problem is compounded by a lack of text on pages for the search engines to index. For these it is very important to annotate images and videos with tags, captions or some descriptive text.

Having said all that, PageRank is only an indication of how likely your site will turn up in a search for specific keywords found in your site based on links from other sites seen as also relevant to those keywords. PageRank is not necessarily a direct indication of how much site traffic you can expect to see on your site! Often we see advertising for SEO services or instruction on how to improve search engine optimization for our sites. I’ve even seen this being offered specifically for Artists and creativity related sites. I’m all for optimizing your site for search engines, but the assumption that doing so will have a direct and immediate impact on site traffic for artist’s sites is typically not accurate.

When you are making work that is highly individual it’s important to realize that search engines are really not smart enough to grasp the subtle differences that might make your work or performance great versus something manufactured using similar descriptions. If your goal is to increase awareness of your work and a broader base of collectors or fans the thing to concentrate on is traffic. How do you increase traffic if you’re not focused on PageRank? For specific, individual work we all need to focus on virtual locations where targeted influence can result.

Some suggestions include:

— an obvious one is to use social networks like twitter where followers may have similar interests and may retweet mention of your posts

— bookmark links to posts on StumbleUpon where others may find value and give your bookmark a “thumbs up”

— On LinkedIn join Art related Groups or Alumni Groups if you attended an Art institution or program. Submitting a post with useful links to posts on your blog or site that include Art related references, articles or videos will likely result in traffic from individuals with similar interests who may pass along your link or mention it on facebook, twitter or other social networks.

These methods have a higher likelihood of resulting in site visits from individuals who have already self filtered themselves, who are interested in the content they find in these channels.

Please mention your own experiences and add methods you’ve found to be effective in the comments below.

Most artists, performers and even producers or directors have needed income from employment while they worked and planned for their eventual career success.

Here’s a brilliant way to take advantage of what most of us do at some point which is Google yourself. You think a potential employer doesn’t do this?

Placing a Google Adwords ad asking for a job and using the name of the person you’re trying to get attention from for your keywords almost guarantees your ad will appear in the paid ad space at the very top of the results page if that person Googles their own name! It only costs you if it works and then it costs pennies…and because there is not likely to be much competition for names it should cost very few pennies. If you wanted to cover your bases you could setup Yahoo/Bing ads too.

Sure, it’s obvious, but only if you know people in media and the arts are likely to be keeping tabs on their own social presence. The example is a copywriter, but couldn’t this work for gallery owners? production executives? music directors? We’ve all had jobs that had nothing to do with our goals…mind numbing, spirit killing work we’ve told ourselves was just to get us to where we needed to be. Maybe trying some simple ideas aimed specifically at what we want are worth trying!!!

Please add any non traditional methods you’ve used to get the attention of potential employers or those you needed to persuade in the commnets. (Keep it safe for work please. : ) )

Please consider posting this to your social accounts below. You never know if something might help a friend.