New activity on Twitter for promoting our portfolios
Earlier in March, I wrote about my current strategy for promoting the sale of prints of my work. Basically, I am trying to draw people who are interested in my photography to my blog on BackyardImage which purely talks about the photographs themselves and the background to them. The images do link through to the site where someone could purchase a print, but I am aiming this site at potential buyers, not other photographers. I also want to directly collect emails from these people if possible and build a mailing list.
But, of course, you need to get them to see the site in the first place! And here, that Twitter activity that I mentioned in the early March piece ties into the plan. Since I joined the Twitter group that was formed by Sharon Cummings as a way to get more views and retweets, my stats have gone through the roof:
All you need to do is to add the current hashtag the group is using – #SpringForArt – and other artists that are following that tag will retweet your work to their followers. There are actually two hashtags, but I think that is confusing and I stick with just this one. In a month or so, we will change to a more summer-oriented tag.
Now I’ve heard it said that this is just artists retweeting to other artists, but I see this differently. All of these artists have some followers who just like their work. Sharon, in particular, seems to sell her work pretty frequently and has sometimes tied it to a tweet she did. Some of the followers I now have are actually nothing to do with creating photographs including one man followed by 373K others. If he retweets some of my work, it will really get a good audience.
So if you want to join in – you don’t need a Fine Art America account as any of the portfolio sites is fine – just start using #SpringForArt on your tweets.
New Print on Demand site
After many years on Fine Art America and a few more on Society6, I decided to start two new ventures. One is a store on Etsy that sells digital downloads. I’m not 100% sure about that yet, and so will track it for a while. But my main focus now is building a portfolio on Pictorem. This is a referral link – not sure if it works with new artists, but please use it if you are thinking of opening an account. What initially attracted me was that they had free shipping, and you could set your prices via various mechanisms from a percentage profit to a charge per square foot of print space to a fixed amount. The shipping costs are high on FAA and often frighten people (I think!). What also impressed me after I joined was that I noticed several things that could be improved. They were using the file name as the title, were importing keywords or tags, but were not importing the description or caption. I also noticed that the title field, exactly like on FAA, was not big enough to see the entire title and so you always had to scroll about within it to edit the title correctly. I wrote to the develop using the contact form and the developer called me back. We had a good chat about my experiences and that weekend he changed the system to read in the title and description from our Jpeg files and also he changed the design of the import file to show the full title to make it easy to see if it has been truncated. Now that is customer service!! We are going to chat some more about my experiences in the stock world in working with large volumes of images and how that could help Pictorem.
My online store at Pictorem is here. I’ve now got 217 images live on the site and many more to come. I’ve noticed that they have many ways to view the image on different wall types in different frames and also different sizes, which could really help a buyer choose the perfect size and type for them. All good stuff! So, if you are thinking of signing up there, here is the link again!
I’ll let you know in the future how this goes!
Interesting to see how the Etsy store develops. Keep us posted! Good luck with Pictorem.
Thanks Elijah!
Hi Steve, thanks for sharing.
I don’t see any effectiveness in sharing a hashtag with other artists. I have already had experiences with others and the readers of the hashtag have made the statistics go up, but it has always been other artists.
I have a store on etsy, recently. Preparing more images! I have seen in your etsy shop that you sell your images in digital format. Have you had any experience with selling in that format, instead of a print?
Discouraged with FAA, high shipping costs, especially for Spain!!
I’m keeping your Pictorem link, maybe I’ll use it in the future!
I can see what you mean – although I am a bit intrigued to see that the images on Pictorem that have the highest view count – up to 30 – are all ones that I have tweeted about. The majority have one or zero views as I am so new there. I find it difficult to believe that many photographers would follow a link? On the Etsy store – I really am not sure how good an idea it is. Each image takes me 15 minutes to create all the files, package them and upload the necessary files to get a download of them. So I might focus on Pictorem for a while!
I wanted to build an Etsy store, fulfill my orders with finerworks but I only went as far as building an inventory with finerworks. I haven’t had time to build the Etsy store! Too much work!
Yes, it is quite a lot of work, but putting individual prints for sale is less than I have been doing with my digital downloads. Although you need to have a production line set up to show the print in the best light in various rooms.
I am reluctant to allow digital downloads, I want to have control of the print process and I don’t want to make it too easy for people to steal the files .
I’m so used to my images being all over the internet that it doesn’t bother me much to be honest. I do agree that using better print companies is important, but perhaps for customers of a download, it isn’t really as important to them? Still, I will see what happens!
OK, I’m signed up with Pictorem, I like it much better than FAA. I have never had a twitter account and don’t intend to get one, especially after their censorship of individuals and businesses – imho …..
Hope it works out, Barry!
Does pictorem share customer info w the artist?
I don’t know – I haven’t sold anything there. When I talk to the developer again, I will mention it – not sure how I would expect him to react to be honest!
The reason why I’m moving my stuff from FAA to GeoGalleries is that they will disclose customers’ e-mails. To add to that “e-mail list” of customers.
Interesting! I do see that when people follow my portfolio, that I see their emails, but nothing else for now. I need a sale!
That’s promising.
Hey Steve, for digital downloads I direct people to my Pic Fair store. I really want to avoid doing in personal fulfillment duties when I can let others do it for me. I also have images on ArtPal. Had them there for a year or two. No sale and really unimpressed with the number of viewers I get there. I put a few on Redbubble but haven’t uploaded that many or spent much time playing with it. I really can’t think of any reason of why to just be on one POD site. I can understand putting most of your marketing efforts into one in particular, but it can’t hurt to have stuff on some others. Art sales are hard to come by right now. My FAA sales are down. Heck, basically missing in action the last two or three months!
Thanks Bob – interesting about the Picfair store – I have one although the pricing is lower than I would want for a digital download for prints perhaps. The Etsy store does automatic fulfillment and it also gives the buyer six different frame formats in the file, but I’m still not convinced it is a good idea. I have seen a few mentions of ArtPal on Twitter but have never investigated them – although your experience doesn’t sound great! Good point about multiple art stores, but they do need to be ones that buyers find on their own – I have a few on Christies, but nothing at all in 2 years. So, I think you need one – FAA perhaps – where people do find the images without much marketing and then a separate site where you deliberately send buyers because you think it is the best quality or value perhaps. At the moment that is Pictorem for me.