Attracting Customers Who Actually Buy
Moving Beyond Interested Quilters Browsing Interesting Quilt Websites
Internet Evolution
Now more than ever, artists are faced with the challenges and opportunities of the Internet with its fast growing 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.
Due to the Internet’s popularity and growth, it is difficult to be noticed in cyberspace. Most artists do not possess the knowledge, skill and time needed to create an effective web presence and to 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 the goal of Artist of the Month found on contemporaryquiltart.org .
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).
co-ordinating decor
Quilt artists want their art to be taken seriously by that one in a hundred browsers who actually makes a purchase for her office lobby or to enhance their home decor. We may not like the idea of a buyer who wants to buy a brown quilt to match their brown walls, but that’s the client we need to attract to keep sales rolling. This is our opinion, and it may not be the way you approach finding clients and commission work.
So therefore, what do we have to do? We have to make relevant, effective and attractive 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 information and insight to the quilt artist’s Internet skills, growth and success. By collectively promoting ourselves on the Internet we target important search engine criteria:
1. Heightened relevancy on a very focussed topic – quilt art,
2. Directly increase traffic to all of our websites,
3. Increase the web links to all our websites.
In addition, we share our experiences through a shared learning virtual environment, the Internet. More than social networking, these connections will lead to better websites and business practices. Together we are celebrating our passion, the art of quilting.
