The heart of your art business

Last week’s chap­ter showed us the three gen­eral buck­ets of tools that we can choose from when we set out on our quest for increased vis­i­bil­ity, how­ever, that alone is not enough to help you chose the right tool for the right job. While, it isn’t within the scope of this series to dive into the depths of what does what when, we can get a good under­stand­ing of how each tool func­tions. So just like ham­mers come in many shapes and pur­poses they are all made to pound stuff into some­thing else. The same can be said of each of the three buck­ets of tools:

• Social media both helps peo­ple find you and helps you lis­ten to them, so it is a tool for two way communications.
• Your vir­tual hub is your buy­ers’ go to place for every­thing related to you and your art business…it is your mother ship. Your vir­tual hub is a tool for pro­cess­ing infor­ma­tion obtained from social media, giv­ing it a form that embod­ies your vision.
• Search Engines bring poten­tial buy­ers who aren’t nec­es­sar­ily look­ing for you but are look­ing for solu­tions within a broader con­text. Search engine tools help you, help the right poten­tial buy­ers iden­tify you as the solu­tion to their problem.

Let’s move closer

Now that we have three buck­ets of tools and we kinda know what each bucket is used for let’s go a lit­tle closer and look at each tool. I’m going to start with the most impor­tant bucket, your hub, because with­out it the other buck­ets really have no point in the con­text of your business.

Your Vir­tual Hub

The fun­da­men­tal pur­pose of a Vir­tual Hub is to have a cen­tral “place” or “head­quar­ters” for every­thing related to you and your stuff. Your vir­tual hub doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily need to be one sin­gu­lar place, it can be a col­lec­tion of places with a cen­tral theme and that theme would be you. Think of it as a cen­tral hub with satel­lite loca­tions each pro­vid­ing a dif­fer­ent view of you.

With the hub image in your mind let’s take a look at what the Hub needs to do. It needs to be your:

• Com­mu­ni­ca­tions  Cen­ter–This the place from which from which all mes­sages to both your exist­ing buy­ers and poten­tial buy­ers emanate. Those mes­sages include announce­ments of new work, of show venues, sales, any­thing that has to do with bring­ing peo­ple to you or help­ing them find you.

• Net­work­ing Cen­ter –The place peo­ple come to learn more about you and the place you can inter­act with them. This is the place where peo­ple come to con­nect with you and the place you wel­come them into your world. Most impor­tantly your net­work­ing cen­ter does not limit you to an arbi­trary set of poten­tial buyers.

• Activ­ity Cen­ter- The place where you share your process with buy­ers and poten­tial buy­ers, the place where you share your muse. It dif­fers from a gallery space by virtue of its’ lack of for­mal­ity. Here you might share videos of how you do the magic you do, you might also hold con­tests that help you engage more with your clientele.

• Nav­i­ga­tion Cen­ter- This is the place that dis­trib­utes your poten­tial buy­ers to your venues so they may see and buy your work. Here is where you direct peo­ple look­ing for a par­tic­u­lar style and price cat­e­gory of your work. So, peo­ple look­ing for your any level of your work can eas­ily find that work because you’re direct­ing them in the right direc­tion from here. Think of it as ver­sion of the “you are here” maps found in large depart­ment stores. The nav­i­ga­tion cen­ter also guides buy­ers and poten­tial buy­ers when you sell in dif­fer­ent geo­graphic loca­tions like art fairs. It makes sure you are found through use of mobile tools that let your net­work find you using mobile phones.

The heart of your vir­tual hub

The areas I described above by no means rep­re­sent all of the pos­si­bil­i­ties for your hub, they do how­ever, rep­re­sent a frame­work around which to design your hub. More­over, your hub frame­work needs to be flex­i­ble and adapt­able to changes in both tech­nol­ogy and mar­ket behavior.

The best best can­di­date to serve as the heart of your hub is the ubiq­ui­tous blog. The blog frame­work allows you to meet all the cri­te­ria for a hub listed above in addi­tion to extreme ease of use. Today’s blog soft­ware is the tool of choice for any­one wish­ing to build a web pres­ence sim­ply because the soft­ware has the most flex­i­bil­ity and adapt­abil­ity to date.

One of the pri­mary rea­sons blogs work as hubs is they are extremely friendly to search engines by mak­ing reg­u­lar con­tent changes easy. As I’ll dis­cuss later, reg­u­larly chang­ing con­tent is one of the key fac­tors in improv­ing your vis­i­bil­ity through search engines. Other key fac­tors include being able to uti­lize the vast array of tools in the search engine bucket, the most impor­tant of which is Search Engine Opti­miza­tions or SEO.

There are gen­er­ally two cat­e­gories of blog frame­works avail­able today, they are:

Ser­vice based

Exam­ples of this cat­e­gory are Google’s Blog­ger and Blog spot frame­work, and Type Pad by Six Apart. Blogger/Blog Spot are free and the most highly used by artists. Blogs hosted by ser­vices are at a major dis­ad­van­tage for a host of rea­sons not the least of which is lim­it­ing their abil­ity to meet the require­ments as a hub.

Some of those dis­ad­van­tages include:

• A lack of con­trol and own­er­ship over con­tent by the blog­ger her­self. The ser­vice is free to change and limit how the con­tent is pre­sented at will. Depend­ing the indi­vid­ual terms of ser­vice the ser­vice provider may also be free to use the con­tents of blogs using its’ ser­vice with­out limit.
• Extremely lim­ited cus­tomiza­tion pos­si­bil­i­ties reduc­ing the blogger’s abil­ity to stand out.
• Lack of tools or free­dom to opti­mize the blog for search engines.

Self hosted

This cat­e­gory includes all blogs that are “free stand­ing” and not part of a ser­vice. These blogs reside on their own server and are owned by the blog­ger her­self. Word­Press blogs are by far the most heav­ily used for no other rea­son than their sim­plic­ity and ease of set up and use. Because Word­Press is open source it also has an vast com­mu­nity of devel­op­ers who off almost an infi­nite num­ber of themes that allow Word­Press sites to to be mor­phed into sites that are often mis­taken for the sta­tic web sites of old.

One of the key advan­tages of self hosted sites over ser­vice hosted ones is  their  ease of cus­tomiza­tion and their SEO friend­li­ness. That SEO friend­li­ness gives artists  the best and eas­i­est way to be found in web searches by giv­ing artists the abil­ity to finely tune how they want to be found on the internet.

More to come..

The next install­ment of this series will com­plete our exam­i­na­tion of the Hub bucket and move on to look more closely at the Social Media bucket.

Stay up to date with this series fol­low the links below:

• The Sum­mer of Love and the hippie-dippy busi­ness model

• The Age of Confusion

• What I learned from Alice, a Cru­civer­bal­ist and Sputnik

• Your vis­i­bil­ity Tool Kit