In the Art Marketing Minute Podcast, you’ll learn how to sell your art, how to market your paintings, and everything else you need to know in order to have a successful art career. Each episode answers questions from artists by host Eric Rhoads, author of “Make More Money Selling Your Art,” publisher of several art magazines and newsletters, and author of ArtMarketing.com.

In this Art Marketing Minute, Eric Rhoads shares ways to make your art website more visible, and advice on photographing your paintings.

Listen to the Art Marketing Minute Podcast: Episode 65 >

Submit Your Art Marketing Question:

What questions do you have about selling your art? Email Eric today at [email protected] (include your name and where you’re from) to hear your question answered on an upcoming Art Marketing Minute Podcast.

FULL TRANSCRIPT of the Art Marketing Minute:
DISCLAIMER: The following is the output of a transcription from an audio recording of the Art Marketing Minute. Although the transcription is mostly correct, in some cases it is slightly inaccurate due to the recording and/or software transcription.

Announcer:
This is the Art Marketing Minute with Eric Rhoads, author of the Amazon best-selling book, “Make More Money Selling Your Art.” In the marketing minute we answer your questions to help your art career brought to you by artmarketing.com, the place to go to learn more about marketing. Now, here’s your host, arts magazine publisher, Eric Rhoads.

Eric Rhoads:

All right, thanks, Jim. In the Marketing Minute I answer your art marketing questions, or at least I try. Sometimes I may fail. I don’t know. email your questions to me, [email protected]. Here’s a question from Nick Sorenson. In New York, New York. Nick says I have a website. But how do I make it more visible? I’m assuming Nick, what you mean is by visible? How do you get more people to visit it? I’m guessing that’s the thing. You know, these days a website is kind of like having your name in the phone book. Yeah, if you remember the scene from the Jerk, Steve Martin movie, it was like all excited because his name was in the phonebook. And the reality is back in, if any of you remember phone books back in the day, I guess they still make them back in the day, the idea of having your name in the phone book wasn’t really a very big deal. Now, if you had your name, as a business in the yellow pages, and you were you know, you’re a dentist and people looking up dentist, well, then you’re going to be one of 200 or 300, or 500, or 1000 in there, depending on your city. So having your name in a phone book isn’t all that great. And so, website is just kind of like having your name and a phone book. So now what do you do? Well, everybody’s got a listing, everybody’s got a website. So if you want to be found, you have to find ways to invite people to visit your website. And that’s done through your various marketing efforts. I talked a lot about that stuff in my books, my courses, my videos, etc. And I think you want I think most of us want buyers there. We don’t want tire kickers, if we’re selling workshops, then we want other artists. And so you want to have an appropriate way to invite people now ads are a great way to invite people because ads, basically you can put a call to action in an ad you can show your work. And you can say something, a call to action on your ads is important. You want people to do something, if you don’t tell them to do something, they won’t do it surprisingly. So you’re just assuming they’re going to visit. So you want to say something like, visit EricRhoads.com, which you can do, by the way, it’s got a lot of cool stuff there. But if you can say visit Ericrhoads.com for to see, the 10 best paintings I’ve ever done. Or you can have what we call a lead magnet, which is a free, something like a free PDF, you could do like a visit my website to get my my free book on the 50 best paintings I’ve ever done. And, that can be an ebook or something you can put together and it gives people a reason to go. And of course, you want them there and you want them looking around. And the reason you want to do a lead magnet is that advertising is something that everybody needs to do. But you want to have an opportunity to talk to them more frequently. I like the idea of having my own medium, right. So I have my own medium. I have my own magazines, I have newsletters and things like that. But you can have your own newsletter, too. That way, you have a frequent way to talk to them above and beyond your advertising, because once you’ve got their email address, if they give you permission, then you can email them. And of course, that’s very important. You got to have their permission. And so, offering something up in your ads. You want to get people to come to your site and you want to remind them of yourself frequently. And by having their emails you can do that. So that’s a great way you can also drive people through blogs and doing interviews on podcasts. Local media and other things. And always you want your website to be real easy. And if you have a difficult name, it makes it tougher. Now my name isn’t really a difficult name, but everybody spells it differently. You know, some people would say, our h o. d ‘s, there’s no e in my name. And there, some people would say, our ad s and so in my website is our H O. Eric. He, of course, there’s different ways to spell Eric, so I probably should have, a different website name for mine. But, you want something that gives you something easy to access. And remember, and if your name is difficult name or hard to spell, or it pronounces differently than it spells, then you might want to think about a an easy entry, something that’s easy to remember, you know, in my case, it’s er IC r h OADS. With no e.com. And that’s probably something I should work on. They always say the plumber has a leaky faucet.

Anyway, here’s a question from Bruce Hunt in Phoenix, Arizona, who asked, Is it enough to use my own camera to photograph my paintings? Or should I pay someone to do it? And if so, how do I find such a service? I think I want to answer that in a couple of ways for you, Bruce. First off, if you’re a professional artist, you have to act like a professional. And professionals do things differently. And one of the things that they do is they have great photographs of their paintings, great high resolution photographs, well lit, no glare. And you want to have those for a lot of reasons, I judged a lot of contests, I was judging the Art Renewal Center contest recently. And you know, we get to click on images. So we can look at them in more depth than this one, the photograph of one of the paintings that I was looking at was so out of focus, I really didn’t get a good feel for it. And it’s just like, Okay, if the artist can’t really take the trouble to do a good painting, do they really deserve an award. Now, I try not to allow that to influence me. But you know, if it’s hard to see, or if it doesn’t look good, or if it’s got glare on it, and sometimes people put, have sending images that have glare on them, it just isn’t flattering to your image. Also, we all think that we are experts in Photoshop, and so on. But we have, we all have different monitors, and our monitors are calibrated differently. And when this happens to us, an artist will create an ad or they’ll send in an image and the image doesn’t look good to our art director because his monitor is calibrated. And so they everybody calibrates their, their monitors to look good to them, but they’re not doing it the proper way. And as a result, you’re sending in a dark photo, when you think it’s a light photo or something like that. So having a pro is good, or having a pro teach you a little Art video.com has a there’s a video on there on how to photograph paintings. It’s an old one, but it’s still very valid. The key to photographing things, I photograph my own and and solely because I just don’t want to have to deal with having to take him out. But sometimes I’m getting to the point where I’m so busy, I probably will just have somebody come and pick them up and do them and do them in batches. The pros, the people who do things like Princeton, g plays and things like that they do it one of two ways. They’ll use photographs, or they’ll use flatbed scanners and some of these companies have, there’s a company here in Austin that has a flatbed scanner, that’s about a you know, it’ll do a 60-60 inch painting. And they lay him down that way you’re not getting any kind of glare anything like that. And of course you have to be dry. And the key to paintings, you know there’s photographing of paintings is different. A lot of people will photograph them before they varnish them because varnish it adds glare. If you’re photographing a painting properly, you’re using two lights from the sides and they both have polarizing filters on them. And then you have a camera on a tripod that has a polarizing filter. And then you take what’s called bracketed shots, which means you’re you’re trying lots of different lighting, you want to have the aperture closed down as much as possible because that makes things sharper, and you’ve got to make sure that you’re using you know, if you even touch the camera and you’re not using a shutter release, then what’s happening is that you’re actually creating movement, the camera and you get a little light movement in there and it’ll show up. So there’s a lot of things that you can do you what I would consider doing is going to a pro. If that doesn’t work higher pro given A couple 100 bucks for a couple hours of their time and say, teach me how to do this teach me how to set it up and, and do it properly or you can, for probably a few bucks, you can get a video on that. But I think you know galleries need excellent photos. And someday when you become famous, you’re going to wish you had photos of everything and be able to put them in a book, I have hundreds of photos of paintings that I’ve done over the years. And some of them were done with crummy cameras and iPhones and iPhones are pretty good cameras these days, especially the new iPhone 12, which has a bigger sensor, but that sensor is still small compared to my professional, I use Sony cameras. And, they have a one inch sensor where the iPhone is probably like an eighth of an inch or something. And so you know, you get a lot more quality in that. So I think professional photography is really important. So check that out. And yes, I think it’s important. How do you find it? You know, how do you find anything anymore? You Google it? Right? Okay, well, I think that probably answers those questions.

Well, this has been the art marketing minute with me. Eric Rhoads. My goal in life is to eliminate the idea of starving artists to help your dreams actually come true. So if you want to submit questions, simply email [email protected]. And to learn more about marketing ideas, you can visit Artmarketing.com. Thanks for listening.

How to Submit Your Art Marketing Questions: What questions do you have about selling your art? Email Eric today at [email protected] (include your name and where you’re from) to hear your question answered on an upcoming Art Marketing Minute Podcast.