Moving Beyond Interested Quilters Browsing Interesting Quilt Websites
Now more than ever, artists are faced with the challenges and opportunities of the Internet with its fast changing capabilities to feature artwork. For many artists, traditional art galleries continue to fulfill a necessary market sector. The global reach of the Internet is an attractive addition to the artist’s promotional needs, marketing efforts and sometimes as storefront.
Given the Internet’s popularity and speed of growth, it is difficult to be noticed in cyberspace. Most artists do not possess the knowledge, skill or time needed to create and maintain an effective web presence nor understand the complexities of search engines. Internet communities are a great way to raise visibility on the Internet and thereby attract search engines. Increasing quilt artists’ visibility beyond various quilters’ social networks is one of the goals of this blog.
The fundamental ways to “move up in the search engines” are relevancy, traffic and interlinked websites. These are three important search engine criteria, not including paid for search engine ranking.
Quilt artists want their art to be taken seriously by that one in a hundred browsers who actually intends to make a purchase for their office lobby or to enhance their home decor. We may not like the idea of a buyer who wants a brown quilt to match, (and another brown quilt) their brown walls, but that’s the client we must attract to keep sales rolling. This is our opinion, and it may not be the way you approach finding clients and commission work.
So what do we have to do? We have to make relevant, attractive and effective websites and blogs. We have to generate the traffic statistics. We can share ideas about successful commercial practices in the art business. We may have to listen to advice which we might think we don’t really want to take or like.
Contemporaryquiltart.org has been established and is being developed to provide a commercial balance to the quilt artist’s creativity. By collectively promoting ourselves on the Internet we optimize important search engine criteria:
- Heightened relevancy on a very focused topic – quilt art,
- Directly increase traffic to our websites,
- Increase the web links to all our websites
- build community.
Navigating the evolving Internet sphere does require continual learning, adjusting and work. There will likely be rewards we cannot imagine, let alone predict. Changes in technology happen so rapidly they appear to be happening “on the fly” and by the time we start to get comfortable with the new stuff, others are miles ahead of us.
Staying as current as possible is our best option.
