Tag Archives: promotion

10 Steps To Marketing Success For Artists

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Are you an artist who seeks more from their art than it just being a hobby? Then getting interest in your work for it to produce an income is a must. To do this you need marketing and promotional success, which will enable you to start earning a living from your artistic output.

Today we are going to talk about 10 ways you can find a market for your work and where you can learn more about what is required of you to be successful.

1.
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Before you do any painting at all, afford yourself the time to do your market research. One of the biggest reasons for artists failing in their pursuit to become professional is a lack of understanding of what the market wants. Don’t be so arrogant as to assume you know everything and that what you paint is “right”.

Chances are that it isn’t, so don’t assume anything. Go out there into the World and see what’s on offer and, more to the point, what is selling. Galleries are full of pictures that don’t sell so ignore those. Ask the proprietor to show you what sells best and why and to whom?

2.
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Secondly, remember that what you are seeing for sale is what was created for last season. Most galleries stock prints these days for the mass market so you need to know what is coming next rather than what is on show now. Imagine taking inspiration from a style on display only to return with a new offering to be told that is now “old hat”.

3.
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You must ensure that you visit the trade shows to see what the publishers, independents and importers are offering next seasons market. Even this will meet you a step behind as the artists on display there are already working on next season’s ideas.

However, by taking guidance from the trade show you can at least sell to the galleries armed with colours and themes in current context. Most importantly, talk to the publishers about your work and ask them about the process of presenting yourself for consideration.

4.
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If you are satisfied to sell your work as “original only” you will need to form relationships with good and reputable galleries. The value of art is in its perception by the viewer. For example, if you hang your work in an exclusive gallery, you will expect to command a much higher price than in your local town, side street, so aim high and get the best wall space you can.

Talk to several gallery owners and listen to what they have to say. Most will be honest about your work and tell you exactly how likely it is to sell in their establishment. Wall space is valuable so they won’t waste it. You will need a thick skin at times so be prepared for harsh criticism. No matter who you are, some will love your work while others will hate it.

5.
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Discuss a fair retail price based on a fair price for you and the gallery. If you are happy with a price don’t start flinching when the gallery says they will sell it for maybe over double your price. They have to charge tax for a start, then cover all their expenses and actually find you a buyer before they see any profit for their trouble. So, don’t begrudge them their share.

6.
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Wherever your work is on show, make an effort to accompany it so you can talk to prospective customers. Art buyers love to meet the artist in person and you can do yourself a great deal of good by putting in an appearance if only at weekends. Talk to the Gallery, they are sure to welcome such proposals.

7.
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If you are going to sell your work yourself, make use of every opportunity to gain exposure. An excellent new way of doing this is through a fantastic new website facility called DebutDay.com (www.debutday.com).

This site is dedicated to bringing artists to the attention of the World by beating the search engine process and parading you in front of everyone searching for what is latest on the market. It’s inexpensive and you can control what you display and how you present yourself.

It’s probably the most proactive site to arrive in a long time and will do as much to find you a publishing opportunity as it will to sell to the general public. If you are serious about your art, you must make use of this site.

8.
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When you create new works try and adopt a theme for a collection. Single pieces do little to help the buying public form an opinion about you or your work. Some will want to find an artist to collect, so unless they can see more than one example of your work they will find this difficult to do.

So, don’t settle for one painting, aim for at least three or four in a set, it will do much for your credibility and will considerably assist your success.

9.
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Whatever you display for sale, make sure it is accompanied by a Title and a Written Explanation. The buying public love a story, it helps them to understand your work, gain more from the imagery and, believe it or not, such background information will assist them with a good subconscious reason for purchasing. Your information will make them an “informed buyer”. This will in turn allow them to impress their friends when they come to call.

10.
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Finally, in my experience the biggest mistakes artists make is to try and be something they are not or to try and convince the public of such. Painting a woman with an eye on the side of her head does not make you Picasso so don’t try to be. Artists like him are famous as much for their creation of “the style” as they are for any integral artistic ability.

The first rule of creativity is to be true unto yourself, unsuppressed by the need to conform to what others expect or may perceive as “art”. If you do not allow yourself this right of expression you will rarely find joy in painting.

But then you must be able to step out of the “real you” and find a way of harnessing your talent in a commercial way that may have more chance to support you until such time as your own passions are recognised as desirable enough in their own right to earn you a living.

10 Steps to Getting Paid for Your Marketing Materials

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Can you get paid for your marketing materials?  Yes, it is completely possible, and here’s how to do it.

How many times have you heard the same sound bites come out of your mouth to your clients, prospects, and audiences, almost boring yourself to tears in the process? Imagine generating money directly from those sound bites, from those pearls of wisdom that effortlessly trip off your tongue. Yes, it is completely possible, and here’s how to do it.

1.    Capture those tidbits of information as soon as they come to mind. Jot them down in a notebook or get them into a Word document. They can be in a raw format, with just enough information to jog your thinking about what you mean. There will be time to refine them later.

2.    Let a couple weeks go by, allowing most of the information to surface in your thoughts. It rarely happens by declaring two hours on a Thursday afternoon to sit at your computer to think of it all.

3.    Refine and organize the tips. Divide them into categories and edit the text. Use a writing style similar to what you are reading here.

4.    Be sure to include your contact details so readers can easily reach you. Add a brief section about your background so people will know your qualifications for presenting the information.

5.    Hire a graphic designer to make the words look good on the page. Your completed product will be a tips booklet measuring about 3 ½ inches by 8 ½ inches when printed. The designer will create their part of the finished product as a PDF file.

6.    Send the PDF file from your graphic designer to a printing company. Do an initial print run of 1,000 copies.

7.    Think about who can benefit from using your booklet to promote their own product, service, or cause. Send them a sample of your booklet and a cover letter describing some of the ways they can increase their sales or further their cause by using your booklet as a promotional tool.

8.    Consider corporations, associations, publications, and any other group that seems appropriate for the topic of your booklet. Reach out to as many of them as you can, on whatever budget of time and money you have available to you.

9.    Realize that every time one of the large-quantity buyers sends out your booklet to promote their own product, service, or cause, they are also marketing your business. Your contact information in the booklet allows the reader to reach you directly.

10.    Enjoy the expansion of your customer base and your checking account. You are now reaching a larger audience than you are likely to do single-handedly, thanks to the large-quantity buyers of your booklet. And you have been paid by your buyers to reach those new people.

Those sound bites you have been saying for years are now reaching far beyond your current clients, helping your buyers, their clients, and your own business. It doesn’t get a lot better than getting paid for your marketing materials.

8 Greatest Ways To Converting Your Traffic Into Your Greatest Profit

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Do you have a website which pulls in large number of visitors everyday? You can actually benefit yourself with the traffic and earn a great, residual income if you give a little more effort. Here are some of the greatest ways you can convert those traffic into mountainous cash:

1. Sell a product/service
Of course, to earn money you need to sell a product or service to your visitors. It is the best way to profit from your own product. Usually, an e-book or software works the best – they can be downloaded right away, no shipping included, no handling to be done. You earn 100% of the profits without any investments to be taken before that.

Other than that, selling your own product allows you to set your own price.

2. Opt-In list
It is very crucial that you try to convert every visitor of yours to a subscriber of your mailing list. The most important asset that an Internet marketer has is his or her list of subscribers. They define whether you will go far in the online business venture.

With an opt-in list, there are tons and tons of ways you can profit greater in the future. You can make previous customers purchase again from you, making them your repeating customers – that is of course, if they are in your mailing list and you can urge them to buy again.

Building a closer relationship with your own subscriber will be the best thing you can do. By having your subscribers ‘trust’ you, you can endorse many other useful products to your subscribers and the chances that they will buy from you will be high – because they trust you.

3. Viral marketing
You can provide a free product or bonus to be listed on your site to be downloaded by your visitors. Usually it’ll be an e-book where people can read from and learn useful information. In this bonus, you include give away rights and urge readers to give it away to anyone they want to. This way, you increase your own publicity and branding.

In the future, you will receive great benefits as when you are known, people will trust you more and this profits you. Between a product – let’s say a tooth brush from a beggar and a doctor, who will you prefer to purchase from? Unless the beggar offers something special, it is hardly that you will purchase the tooth brush from him.

4. Pay-per-click
In this case, you don’t pay for every click but earn instead. There are many advertising programs that give you a percentage of the bidding on a certain keyword. The famous ones are Google Adsense, Chitika, Yahoo Publisher Network and Kontera.

When people click on the ads shown from either of these advertising programs, you will earn a small portion of money. Nevertheless, if you have high traffic to your site – these programs alone can generate your residual income.

5. Offer an advertising space
Usually websites which brings in very high traffic will sell a small portion of space on their web page. You can charge a minimum of $300 for advertising someone’s ad a single month on advertising fee if your web page is pulling more than 2000 visitors a day.

Other than that, you can also create exit pop-ups that advertise other websites as well. By doing this, you don’t clutter your website with too many ads and you can earn a better reputation from your visitors.

6. Affiliate marketing
If you don’t have your own product for sale, you can sell other’s products instead and receive a commission on every sale. With affiliate marketing, you have an unlimited source of products to sell and you don’t need to go through any problems after your sales.

No customer service, you don’t need to issue any refunds, just let the owner do everything else for you after each sale. If you have a mailing list, you can endorse many other products and earn very great profits from your subscribers.

7. Pay-per-lead
Instead of earning money from every click your visitors clicked on, you are paid if you get your visitors to subscribe into other’s mailing list. Nevertheless, it is not necessary that you just get visitors to become other’s subscribers.

There are a lot of bigger companies like Coca-Cola and Pepsi which holds survey every few months. By referring your visitors to them in order to complete a survey, you can also earn great profits from it.

Applied correctly, you can make a huge fortune on the Internet and build a steady online business – taking over the place of your day job. Take some time to put effort in either of these strategies, because it can make your day bright.

8 Ways To Make Your Ads More Effective

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I don’t know everything and if I have learned one thing about doing business on the Internet it is that the more you learn the more you don’t know. However, I have been doing business on the Internet since 2006 and I’ve managed to carve out a successful enterprise for myself with several profit streams. The largest percentage of my marketing and promotional efforts has been conducted through one simple method-Ezine Advertising.

These are the 8 important lessons I’ve learned regarding Ezine Advertising and Marketing Success: 

A common mistake many advertisers make is to attempt to do too much, or rather sell too much, in one ad. Sure you have lots of great products but you can’t sell them all in a few lines-at least not individually.  Instead focus on the benefit your customer can achieve from all your products and promote that! People are much more likely to click on a link that BENEFITS them than a link that promises to sell them something.

For example, “Help your child reach their maximum potential” instead of “Try our many reading, writing, math, shapes and colors programs”

More importantly, tell the customer “what your product or service is going to do for him.”

It is important that you identify your Unique Selling Proposition before you begin your advertising program. This will determine which Ezines (or markets) you target as well as what you should include in your ad copy. Who will be interested in your product and why? What benefits does your product offer them?

Don’t go for the sale in your ad! You are at a disadvantage because you can’t list all your products’ wonderful benefits in the space allowed. Also, there is only a small percentage of any Ezine audience that is ready to buy your product at the exact moment they view your ad. Yes, maybe they should be, but most people today live in the moment and if this isn’t the time they want to buy then they aren’t going to buy, end of story.

But it doesn’t have to be the end of the story.  If you go for the soft sell approach your target consumer is much more likely to click on your link and then you’ve got the chance to go for the hard sell-again and again!

Here’s an example. I’m selling a product called the Preschool Prep Power Pack. It’s an educational CD for preschoolers. Now I could go for the hard sell in my promotion and I would make some sales but a lot of people who really might be interested won’t even look at my site and product. However, I’ve chose to go the soft sell approach. Instead of selling my product in my ads, my ads offer two FREE items. I offer a free newsletter (Preschoolers Learn More) offering tips about preparing preschoolers for kindergarten. This is my target market for my product. The folks who subscribe also receive a free ABC-123 coloring book. Why wouldn’t the parent of a preschooler subscribe, right?

But what’s in it for me as a business person? A lot! Think about it. I now have the freely offered contact information for my target market. Now I can regularly email them information about my product. I’m confident they will buy eventually because my product provides a solution to something that concerns them-or they wouldn’t have subscribed in the first place!

Another common mistake is not giving your ad campaign enough time to work.

Studies show it takes prospects an average of seven exposures to your promotion before they take the bait. Even after they have clicked through to your site visitors may need to visit your site as many as three times before they buy from you. So make sure you keep that offer in front of them. That means it may well pay to take the long-term package versus a one-shot ad.

People run through their emails rapidly and delete things they wish they hadn’t. Make their wish come true! Give them a second, third, fourth chance. The formula is–when you’re sick and tired of it, the public is just beginning to hear it.

Just because you’ve bought ad space doesn’t mean you have to utilize every pixel or character-space. Short, punchy lines that do not use up every available space are more effective.  Think about the reader scanning down the page or screen. What will catch their eye and make them stop scanning and actually read?  White space is your friend so don’t squander it. Use it to set off your important message.

Make sure you apply the same principal to your urls and e-mail addresses as well. Nothing can make an ad look more cluttered than giant web addresses with a complicated string of numbers and letters. If you have to use an address like that (perhaps for your affiliate code, for example) then it might be wise to use a redirect. There are numerous free services out there (http://snipurl.com for example) although perhaps it might be a good idea to use a page from your own web site with a redirect programmed in

USE YOUR HEAD

Your headline is the most important part of your ad. This is usually the line that determines whether the skimming reader will stop or skip ahead.

Some of the proven headline formulas include:

1. Ask the reader a question: “Are you worried about filing your
tax return this year?”
2. Tell the reader how to do something: “How to buy a
car without getting a lemon.”
3. Provide a testimonial: “Big Al saved me $200 last month. Thanks, Cindy Lou from Paducah, Kentucky.”
4. Make a command. Turn your most important benefit into a commanding
headline. “Stop rushing through life.” “Make more money this month.” “Feel better about yourself.”
5. Important news makes a good headline. “Max Electronics just went international!”
6. Start the clock: “Buyers who act before midnight Tuesday will save an extra $50!”
7. Give the reader something free: “Free whatsit for the first 100 visitors!”

DON’T FORGET TO TELL THEM WHAT TO DO!

It sounds almost ridiculous, but simply giving clear, specific directions about what you want the reader to do can increase the response to your ads.

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SET YOUR BUDGET

One of the most difficult things to decide for any business person is how much money to spend on promotion. There really is one simple way to determine the answer. How much is a customer worth to you? That tells you a great deal about how much you can afford to spend on advertising.

The simple formula to calculate the net worth of a visitor is: Net Profit divided by Conversion Rate.

First, what is your net profit on an average sale?  Let’s say $10 to make it easy. (Hey, I’m an English professor, I need to keep it simple!)

Then consider what your conversion rate is for visitors to become customers.  Let’s say one visitor out of 50 becomes a customer. (This makes your conversion rate 50 as you need 50 customers to make a sale)

With this example, a visitor is worth $0.50 to you. ($10 divided by 50)

So if you spend $100 on an advertising campaign that draws in 1000 visitors then you made $400 on that campaign.

SET REALISTIC GOALS

This issue is really about control. Yes, if you could control things that you would have a high sell through but that isn’t always going to happen. In fact, for most advertisers that isn’t going to happen. However, if your goal is to capture customers then you are much more likely to match your goal or even exceed it. And in the end a customer is worth a lot more to you than a sale because a customer can represent many sales over years to come-sales that were fairly easy to achieve.

As frustrating as it may be, advertising is usually about long-term versus short-term benefits.  Your ad simply serves as a lure to draw people into your site or long-term promotion. Once you’ve pulled them in then you need to sell them. So it is not really fair to judge an ad campaign on simple sales.

The success of an ad campaign should be measured by one or two elements only-first, how many people followed up on your offer (click-through rate) and second, how many of those visitors were you able to convert into customers (conversion rate).

Over time you will be able to judge where the weak link in your chain of customer creation exists and work to fix it.

Low click-through rate? Then it is probably your offer. You are not giving readers enough incentive to follow through. What is in it for them to click on your offer? Remember you are selling benefits!

Low conversion rate? Then perhaps you are not attracting the right sort of visitor. Target your incentive (the free offer, for example) to match your target audience.