ArtDojo

Fat Free Cart is a nice little free shopping cart that integrates Paypal and Google Checkout into one from the makers of E-Junkie. If your an artist that wants to sell digital downloads securely I would suggest the E-Junkie service and it is pretty cheap. You could sell clipart, high-quality vector art, photoshop brushes, fonts, music, etc. Any other ideas for digital goods an artist could sell?

These two free little apps pack a lot of punch for anyone, but for any starving artist the word “free” makes us drool. Coming across these apps on the interweb is like going to the grocery store when they are giving out free samples. A glorious day indeed. Enough small talk.

dfGallery is a great little flash gallery. In a previous post (Getting Online - Free and Simple) I looked at various ways an artist could get started with the internet. I concluded that going with a Wordpress blog and Picasa gallery was one of the easiest. That option is now even cooler as dfGallery can import your Picasa images. A new page could be made in Wordpress with dfGallery embedded in it. Everytime the Picasa gallery is updated the dfGallery on your website would also update. Sweet indeed.

Shopify is a free hosted application that gives you a customized website to sell your goods. If you only have a small amount of goods, you can probably stick to PayPal. This application basicly gives you a way to manage orders and inventory over top of a PayPal account, but it’s pretty darn slick and easy. They have great documentation on how to customize your store and even give your shopify account your own domain name. They charge 3% commission on everything you sell up to $10,000. After that they charge 2% commission.

This is shaping up to be a nice combination of apps to get an artist online with a fully functional website. Wordpress for sketch blogging and updates, Picasa for gallery, dfGallery for presentation of gallery on the website, and Shopify with PayPal for selling your goods. Then you can just do your thing and watch the money roll in from your artwork. Soon you will be able to jump from the Ramen to the real deal Lo Mein. Well… Maybe.

A small change has been made to the frontpage of ArtDojo. It now displays that last 10 posts made by any artists that have a blog featured on here. Hopefully that will get them some more exposure. Please show your support for these fine artists with a comment once in a while. Most of them use blogger and I don’t think it has a stats package so they can see how many people are viewing them. Just another beef I have with blogger.

Anyway, if anyone has some suggestions for artdojo please leave a comment. I’m all ears. I just need to find the time to implement them. I definitely don’t want to do any type of typical art forum since there are plenty of places for that. I thought maybe it would be cool to have art jams where submitted art could be voted up or down kind of like a digg.com clone for art jams only. That would kind of go along with the whole “Art Dojo” concept I guess. That sound good? Any ideas?

Smashing Magazine made a list of 83 Beautiful Wordpress Themes. Just another reason for any artist to use Wordpress as your preferred blogging tool.

As long as I’m mentioning blogging, which lends itself to RSS feeds, it reminds me how crappy the RSS feeds are on DeviantArt. If your an artist, don’t use DeviantArt as your primary tool to promote yourself and your artwork. You will only be reaching other DeviantArt members, though this is a very big artist loving community. If someone wants to keep track of your progress or your artwork and they are not part of DeviantArt, it is much more cumbersome. The RSS feeds for the gallery don’t provide dates and seem to miss a lot of the updates. The journal is not really good as a blogging tool. Overall I think DeviantArt is a great community, but it is not outsider friendly, which is a shame because there are tons of great artists there. Lots of these artists should get a wider audience, but oh well.

For now I just keep going to the website to check up on some of my favorite artists there, but it’s a pain compared to checking on other artists with blogs.

Version 2.1 of Wordpress is out. Some of the new features that artists might like include being able to set any “page” as the frontpage of the site while having your latest posts elsewhere. This allows Wordpress to be able to function more like a CMS system. Also the upload manager is reworked to manage all photos, video, and audio. Check out the full list of features for “Ella”.

I am dissappointed they haven’t included built-in thumbnail resizing so thumbnails could be inserted at any size. This functionality can still be included using the nice Image Manager 2.0 plugin. I am confident this feature will become built-in with future versions of Wordpress and maybe even the next version on April 23rd as it is currently ranked 3rd on the Wordpress Ideas board under “Most Popular Ideas”. If you would like to see this feature, go ahead and vote for it on the Ideas board. I’m sure more artists would move to Wordpress from Blogger when this feature is included.

It’s every artists dream to do what they love and get paid for it, but there is a reason “starving” is usually followed by “artist”. Since I want more artists creating more cool artwork, here is a list of services that can hopefully help alleviate some of your food troubles.

PrintFection - Apparell. Allows you to setup a store with multiple products and designs for free.

Cafepress - Apparell, posters, calendars, mugs, buttons, stickers, and more.

Zazzle - Pretty much the same stuff as Cafepress.

Spreadshirt - T-shirts and apparell.

PrintMojo - T-shirts and apparell. A different approach to the same thing. They only do screen printing rather than print on demand. So you must pay for a minimum of 24 garments at a time, but they handle the order fullfillment. So there are big up-front costs which may increase profit margins and quality, but I don’t know. Screen printing limits your color choices also.

DeviantArt Shop - Prints, mugs, calendars, jigsaw puzzles.

ImageKind - High quality prints and large formats.

LuLu - self publishing book service.

Ebay - Sell your originals or your prints… or anything else.

So where do you start? That’s a tough one. I found an article comparing Cafepress, Printfection, and Zazzle and another guy complaining of Cafepress Mugging. If your only concerned with promotion rather than making money, these print-on-demand services are great, but the base prices on many of them will eat your profit margin a lot. The benefit is that they are quick, easy, cheap, and most provide some level of marketing and promotion. They will also handle any returns or complaints about the product. That could be good or bad depending on how they handle them.

With these services you can test the market with your artwork while building your exposure. If you notice demand for a product, you can stick with them or try to increase your profit margin by going with a more independent store like your own PayPal store or eBay store. Keep in mind this may mean packing your own orders and paying up front costs, but you can build a more personal relationship with your customers.

Another alternative that just came to me is to ask your visitors what they would buy before you ever setup the store. Set up a page with a poll asking your users what design they would like to see on a shirt or if they would buy a sketchbook. Tell them you will get the product printed when it reaches a certain number of votes like 100 or more. You can also have a newsletter sign up next to the poll which will announce the winner and how to order the product. Kind of like your own personal Threadless page. Threadless users submit designs and the ones with the most votes get printed.

When a product gets a certain number of votes you can get it printed at a print shop, make a store page, and send out a newsletter announcing the product for sale. This seems like a good way to maximize your profit margin while being able to recoup your costs somewhat quickly. It also builds a relationship with your visitors. Seems like a win-win to me, but it’s untested, more time consuming, and there is always risk.

Advertising Income

This ranges from banner ads to text links ads like Google Adsense and Amazon Affiliation. The article How to Make Money with Your Blog Site goes through most of these options. If you do web comics, there is a good article about Webcomics Business Models.

If You Build It, They Won’t Come

Your income will depend on the market for your artwork and your exposure to that market. You can start by setting up your website with a blog and doing some self-promotion on other websites. It’s a lot easier to create income when there is consistent and good amounts of people viewing your work. Marketing techniques are so vast that a book with several authors still won’t cover everything. Just try to get your work out there, drive eyes toward your site, and if they like what they see, they will stick around… Maybe. In essence, it really boils down to the quality of your work. Unfortunately, residual income as an artist looks to be very difficult.

If anyone knows of more services or ideas, please mention them. Maybe some people have some experience with these services and could comment on how good the quality of the products are and the profit margins. Marketing and self-promotion is probably the hardest part. More on that later hopefully.

In the last article I talked about the different options for an artist to get online. One mistake I see some artists doing is trying to keep many different “homes” on the net. They will post artwork in 20 different forums, 4 community galleries, 3 different blogs, and 2 social networking sites. So whats wrong with that? It wastes the time of the artist and also the fans.

It is frustrating for a fan to find some great artist online and then have to check 10 different websites to keep track of them. Also the artist is not going to keep all these places updated with all his latest work.

The problem is not that the artist posts to all these different communities. The problem is that they don’t pick one place to keep as their home and direct the users from those communities to that home.

Here are some graphics to help me explain.

The above graphic is what I see a lot of artists and fans doing. This shows how fans join many online communities looking for inspiration, motivation, and great artists and the artists join many of those communities trying to get fans and anyone else that may enjoy their work. It’s a rat race for everyone involved. Fans are looking all over and artists are posting all over. It also shows how no fan or artist will be a part of every community.

This is what would work better.

In this graphic, fans find an artist through various websites and are then directed to the artist’s “home” where they can get the latest updates and see a full gallery of their work. The artist can keep their “home” fully updated with their latest news, sketches, prints, webcomic, merchandise, commissions, etc. and can make sporadic updates to the websites outside his “home” as forms of promotion. This frees the artist to promote in more places since it takes less time.

This is good for the fans and for the artist because it gives each a cental location and leads to something like the below graphic.

When a fan knows they can go to one spot and always see the latest happenings, then that is where they will go. I illustrated in the graphic that some of the artist community websites might die out, but only the small sites. The big ones like ConceptArt.org, DeviantArt, and others will stick around.

Recently, Skottie Young announced the LedHeavy Forums are shutting down and it just so happens that he has a blog now. I think this will happen with more forums that are attached to artist websites as the artists move to blogs rather than forums to interact with their fans. LedHeavy actually lasted a lot longer than most artist forums. In the past that meant those users would just go to another forum. Many of them probably will, but small forums will not last up against the convenience of blogs and the social networking explosion.

An Action Plan For Artists

• For artists, I would suggest finding a place to call your home. My first article “Getting Online - Free and Simple” may help you figure that out.
• When you post to community forums and galleries, use the forum signatures to direct people where to see more of your artwork. Anywhere you post artwork, try to direct them to your homepage if they want to see more.
• If you want your fans to interact and leave comments, don’t make them sign up for something first.
• Keep your “home” website updated regularly with news, sketches, etc. Your home should be the first place you update. The other sites should be used to promote your home.
• Don’t maintain multiple blogs, use blog categories to separate your posts. I thought this would be obvious, but there are artists with two or more blogs - one for news and another for sketches. Ugh.
• Don’t link from your home to the other community websites by saying “Check out my gallery at Blah”. This goes right back to not having one spot which is your home. Make a links page and link to those sites that way, but don’t make it sound like there is some artwork there that is not on your homepage.
• Please distribute your updates through an RSS feed. Any blog has this feature, but I still see artist websites with a news section and no RSS. Don’t make your visitors come to you to get updates.

If you have anything to add, discuss, or disagree with, feel free to comment.

Many artists are moving online with sketch blogs and art galleries as the process of building a website becomes simpler, but what’s the best option to get online?

With each service I focused on the following:

• Free to use
• Quick to setup
• Easy to maintain
• Features and Expandability

Social Networking Services

I started with the social networking sites Yahoo 360, Myspace, and Windows Live Spaces. All three are free and quick to setup, but Windows Live was the most impressive to me. Setting up a gallery on Windows Live was very easy compared to any other web gallery application I found. To setup the gallery you have to install an Active X control which gives you a unique interface to browse your computer and check the images you want to upload. Live also has a lot of templates to change your space, but it maintains a clean interface in each one.

The same can’t be said for Myspace or Yahoo where users regularly make their page “pretty” with bright colors and background images that make it hard to read the text. This kills usability and is equivilent to commiting online suicide for getting new viewers.

My pick between these three is Windows Live. An artist can have a sketch blog and full gallery up in minutes.

With all three your limited to only what the service can do for you. So expandability is pretty much zero beyond the service given.

Community Galleries

There is actually only one community gallery service worth mentioning here. That would be DeviantArt. Other sites like ConceptArt, CGSociety, etc. are simply forums with a fancy frontpage.

The best is DeviantArt, but being the best donkey still doesn’t make you a horse. With DeviantArt you are limited to only having one gallery with no sub galleries and the journal can hardly be called a blog since it lacks so many features. You must sign up on DeviantArt to make comments. The only real good thing for an artist on DeviantArt is that your work has access to a large community of people that are all art lovers. They also offer a print service for your artwork which might be a good way for a starving artist to make some money. I’ll probably cover revenue sources for artists in a later article.

Expandability is zilch, but DeviantArt is not focused on that. They are strictly focused on building a community of artists and they have succeeded in that.

In any case, I don’t believe DeviantArt or any forum website should be an artists home on the web, since they will be abandoning anyone that does not want to be a part of that community. I think these services should be used to promote your true home on the web. I’ll probably cover that later in an article on promoting your website.

Other Blog Services

For this article I looked at the blogging services Blogger and Wordpress (the solution hosted by WordPress not the downloaded version).

Both cover the first three criteria of being free, quick to setup, and easy to maintain but are drasticly different with features and expandability. Neither has a built-in solution for maintaining a gallery. I’ll cover that later though.

Blogger is almost too simple, but lives up to its name. It’s a blog and not much more. WordPress’s features are covered on their features page. Wordpress probably has the most features of all the free blog services. They are very progressive about improvement, have thorough documentation, and active support forums. There are also a bunch of various plugins that further extend the software, but only a small amount are available for the hosted solution. WordPress is the only covered solution that is based on open source software.

If you ever want your site to be www.yoursite.com, it can be done with either service. Wordpress has a simple process allowing you to buy the domain yourself or through them. You can also move to your own host, download the WordPress software, and port your site over to it. With Blogger the process involves getting a domain, hosting, and setting up blogger to transfer posts to your host. Bloggers solution seems a bit complicated and clunky to me.

Both also have a growing community aspect to them not unlike the social networking services.

One difference for artists is the photo uploading process. Blogger allows you to upload a thumbnail in three different sizes which is linked to a larger picture, but the larger picture will likely be a smaller version of the picture you uploaded. Wordpress gives you the option to have a small thumbnail linked to your larger picture which won’t be resized down. This is good if you want to show high quality images, but bad if you just want to show a sketch since you will have to resize it before uploading. This may be a small tradeoff for the option of showing high quality images. I’m sure the WordPress interface will be improved in future versions (or maybe I will write a plugin for it).

What About A Gallery?

If your just starting your site on Blogger or WordPress, you probably want a small gallery for people to see what you have done. It’s also good for first time viewers to your site so they can see your style and decide if they like it.

The best solution I found was a Google Web Gallery which can be easily maintained with Googles picture managing software Picasa. You can see an example of the web gallery at their test site. Making a web gallery with Picasa is pretty simple after some trial and error (or you could read the help files unlike me) and much easier than using any online gallery system where you have to upload one picture at a time.

With Picasa you can probably have a web gallery up in a few minutes. If you use the downloaded version of WordPress you can install the Picasa Web Matrix plugin to get random pictures from you gallery on your site.

Conclusion

All these solutions are free with the most expandable solution being WordPress with a Picasa web gallery. This combination is a good trade off of all the solutions. Some people might find Blogger easier to start with or Windows Live, DeviantArt, or some other service, but getting online in any way is a good start to promoting your art.

One thing that I neglected to mention is that all these services supply RSS feeds. This is very important as the new version of Internet Explorer 7 has native support for feeds and this technology is becoming more and more mainstream. More non-geeks will be using feeds to keep informed as time goes on. Not having a feed is a big no-no.

I hope some artists find this first article on ArtDojo to be helpful.