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Email Contacts - What's Real? Occasionally on ArtId, we get a person or company that contacts a number of our members through the contact page in their ArtId galleries offering artists anything from representation to licensing deals. Sometimes these offers are legitimate and, unfortunately, sometimes they are not. Because your contact page is open for anyone to use, these emails cannot be dealt with as spam. An email received through your ArtId contact does not mean that we have endorsed the company or person. So, we'd like to give you some tips on how to discriminate between truly interested business people and those whose real goal is to get you to pay them a lot of money for nothing. How to Compare… Continue reading… 2 comments

It's easy to get caught up measuring "hits" to your website when you are selling artwork online, and then wondering, "Why so many hits and no sales?" Remember, hits are people, too. Not just faceless numbers on a statistic sheet. January is a great time to go back to your ArtId gallery and look at it from a buyer's perspective. Ask yourself some questions and see how you might improve your gallery according to your answers… Continue reading… 13 comments

For ourselves as business persons we try to keep up with "what's going on" especially in the areas that are of interest to us, like art marketing. For you, as artists selling your work on the internet, we follow blogs that help us keep up with "what's going on" in Art Opportunities, Art Marketing and Social Media. There is so much information out there to digest and some of it not all that worthy. In addition to our own ArtId Blog We have compiled a list of six blogs that we have found, among the millions, to be great for artists in the business of selling art. … Continue reading… 0 comments

Did you know that artists who write in their ArtId blogs enjoy more popularity on the site than those who don't? It's true. Every time you post a blog entry from your gallery, it not only appears in your ArtId pages and the Artists Blog homepage where visitors can read your blog and then click in to your gallery, but it also is indexed by the search engines, posted on the ArtId Facebook page (where we currently have over 400 fans) and shared with anyone on Digg, Stumbleupon and the many other content sharing networks available using the "Share" button. So it just makes sense to get yourself out there and blog to get more people to see your art. … Continue reading… 1 comment

Describing art for the internet requires artists to shift gears and think much differently about the word "description". Internet Speak In gallery speak, a "description" is "watercolor painting of my grandmothers garden where I loved to play as a child." In internet speak the same painting has to read "original watercolor painting, of garden in summer with purple and yellow flowers and a white chair." Then, you add "painting of my grandmothers garden where I loved to play as a child." … Continue reading… 0 comments

We currently have 85 live listings in the ArtId eBay Store and our hits seem to be growing. As administrators of the store, we've got this nifty tool where we can see what keyword searches brought people to our eBay store listings, so I thought I'd write to let artists see exactly how people found us on eBay in the past week… Continue reading… 3 comments

Writing a proper eBay title for artwork is an art in itself. Here are some tips to help artists write a proper eBay title for their art. 1) An eBay Title is really a description - Forget what the name of the piece is! An eBay title is more like a sentence you would use to specifically describe to someone what it is you are selling. 2) They won't buy it if they can't find it! - It's the laws of the Internet at play here. People search for things online using words. If your words don't match their words, they never find you. 2) Be the buyer! - What words would you use to find art like the one you are selling? 3) Be specific! - It may seem laborious, but the more specific you are in title the better… Continue reading… 0 comments

Since working here at ArtId I have had the opportunity to learn A LOT about how the Internet, and more importantly, how Google works. Google is a sort of Big Brother of the Internet. It decides what you will see in a search result and where it will fall in the listing. Right now I am studying Search Engine Optimization or SEO. In addition to paid advertising, sites need to get good grades. Google "crawls" ArtId constantly, basically picking up all the information on the site, determining the relevance, critiquing it and giving our site a "grade" as to how good it is. The higher the grade, the higher the listing in a Google search results… Continue reading… 4 comments

It's easy to get overlooked among the millions of other artists and their work on the Internet. Search Engines like Google work with words, not pictures, so describing your work accurately will give you an edge. Here are five tips to get found faster: 1. Describe your work as though there were no picture with it: If someone is searching for a "horizontal oil painting+yellow roses+vase and your description is "a recent painting of my garden" then the search engines have nothing to match. Example: Ellen Sullivan Farley described her gorgeous painting of lilies this way: "These are beautiful Casablanca Lilies that I grow in my garden. I love the gestural lines in these flowers and the interesting negative shapes generated between them… Continue reading… 7 comments

Part Three: Blogging I've heard (and used) every excuse in the book - too busy, can't be bothered, waste of time, don't have anything to write about and what the heck is a blog anyway? I admit it, I thought it would be a nuisance but I was mistaken. I first heard about blogs about 5 years ago. Instructors in the scrapbooking industry, who were very popular, were using their blog to stay in touch with their students, follow up on classes, post photos, write about new techniques and products and answer questions. "Hmmmm", I thought, "maybe they've got something here… Continue reading… 5 comments

Part Two: Getting the most out of your website So, you have taken the time and energy to get your work online. Take a minute to give yourself a pat on the back. This is no small thing. Now you can sit back and wait for the orders to start. Um, I don't think so. You can use your site as a sales tool and/or as an online portfolio. Either way a web site needs to be maintained, updated and refreshed. Because of the nature of my work, my site has been invaluable as a place to direct interested parties to see what kind of work I do, which has resulted in quite a few commissions. On ArtId, our marketing and advertising efforts are paying off in a substantial increase in traffic to the site… Continue reading… 0 comments

Part One: Making Choices I talk to you everyday, not all of you at once, but via support@artid and info@artid. I even have the chance to engage in some lively conversation with you on the phone- answering questions, solving problems and listening to your frustrations, suggestions and successes. This is the first in a series of articles that will attempt to answer many of the frequently asked questions I get from you, along with a few suggestions that may help you get more out of your artid. You have choices, you can: A. Create art for the joy of it. B. Create art to give away. C. Create art to stack in the closet. D. Create art to show. E. Create art to sell. All of the above are valid reasons to create artwork… Continue reading… 2 comments

Since the changeover to the new ArtId format, I have noticed that the thumbnails of some work are getting cropped in an unflattering way. The thumbnail is taken from the center of the main image so if the focal point of your work is in a lower or higher quadrant it will get cropped off. This applies especially to objects versus 2-D works. If you are experiencing this problem with your work, consider re-cropping your pictures and re-uploading them. This will serve two purposes, your work will be considered by browsers faster and if you are a Gold or Silver member, your work will appear on the home page recent upload scroll… Continue reading… 3 comments

Because ArtId makes putting your art online easy and also makes it easy for you to upload your art for sale on eBay through our eBay Store is easy to think that we've got everything covered when it comes to getting your art viewed on the Internet. If you thought that, you would nearly be right. Our functionality works pretty seamlessly. But, outside of the technology part, there are those parts in the process where you as the artists make decisions on how to showcase your work. One of those important decisions is in your studio when you are asked to describe you art . The other is uploading to eBay , when you are asked give the listing a title… Continue reading…