Breaking new Ground & community building

What non-traditional meth­ods do you use to mar­ket and sell your art?

For mar­ket­ing e-cards have been very help­ful for me. I have a num­ber of col­lec­tors who enjoy send­ing e-cards from my web­site to friends and fam­ily.  They select a paint­ing and then can cre­ate a card with a per­sonal mes­sage and send it along via e-mail to peo­ple they know will enjoy see­ing my art.  They’re quick, easy and free and help spread the word about my work with a per­sonal rec­om­men­da­tion from an exist­ing collector.

What do you do dif­fer­ently to get your work out to those who want it.

I used to offer mugs and such but I didn’t find that very prof­itable. I don’t think that my work is very well suited to that kind of venue. So I tried some­thing else. I self pub­lished a book, Paint­ing Nature, at blurb.com and that’s worked out much bet­ter. This allows peo­ple who like my work to have a beau­ti­ful col­lec­tion of paint­ings to enjoy not as wall art but in a new and dif­fer­ent way.

Do you have a com­mu­nity of followers/buyers?

My com­mu­nity or “tribe” which seems to be the new mar­ket­ing buzz word is so impor­tant to me and I appre­ci­ate them every sin­gle day! Some are art col­lec­tors who have pur­chased one or more of my paint­ings, oth­ers are sim­ply art lovers who like to see what I’m cur­rently doing, many are artists who share my jour­ney, come to learn and always encour­age me.

What meth­ods do you use to build your community?

There are so many ways to invite peo­ple to share your jour­ney on the inter­net.  My web­site has an RSS feed that peo­ple can sub­scribe to and then they will receive alerts every time I add some­thing new there. Then there’s my daily paint­ing blog, read­ers can sub­scribe and get the daily post in their inbox, there’s also a new blog­ger fea­ture in the side­bar that allows peo­ple to actu­ally become a “fol­lower” of my blog. I have many fol­low­ers on Twit­ter which really keeps you in the loop hour by hour and day by day. I’m also on Face­book and have a “fan” page there plus you can fol­low my daily paint­ing blog through an appli­ca­tion on Face­book.  I also have an e-newsletter, Palette Paper, which comes out monthly which peo­ple can sub­scribe to. Finally, there’s good old fash­ioned snail mail. I send out hol­i­day cards and event cards through out the year as excit­ing things come up.

Things like Twit­ter, Face­book and the com­ment fea­ture on my blog really help get the con­ver­sa­tion going so I can get to know peo­ple and peo­ple can also get to know me in a more per­sonal way.  When that hap­pens col­lec­tors have more insight into who I am and what dri­ves and influ­ences my art and they become more invested in what I do and the paint­ings become much more per­sonal for them.