Welcome to the second week of tips to help you drive traffic to your artwork on BAP. If you missed the first week just click on any of the first four tips below to catch up.
1. Tag your work. Tagging = traffic.
2. Title your art well and write clear descriptions.
3. Promote your BAP RSS art feed everywhere.
4. Sharing is good for traffic. Start using your SHARE button.
5. Join the 10+ million already on Twitter and enter the conversation.
6. Optimize your Twitter profile and get more followers.
7. Jumpstart your Twitter network.
8. Tweet smart. Tools, tips and tags.
5. JOIN THE 10 MILLION ALREADY ON TWITTER AND ENTER THE CONVERSATION.
There are now more than 10 million people using Twitter to communicate and share ideas. If you haven?t already, it?s time to join the conversation. You can share links to your art, get inspiration from other artists and connect with potential buyers or curators. Twitter helps you build word of mouth about your work, and on Twitter, word of mouth has a direct impact on your traffic. First, some basics:
What is a tweet?
Tweets are 140 character messages that you send to people on Twitter
Why would I send one?
When your messages include links, they can drive traffic to your artwork and connect you to potential buyers, curators and other artists to collaborate with.
Getting started on Twitter:
Total time: 3-5 minutes
1. First, get a Twitter account. You can sign-up here:http://www.twitter.com.
2. For your screen name, use the same name you use elsewhere online. Building a singular brand using the same name makes it easier to find you online. Of course, if you go by a street name, and that?s how people know you, use that. Basically, you want to use the most obvious name that people will think of when they want to find you. Don?t use a corporate sounding name or business name. People like to follow other people on Twitter ? not companies.
3. Upload your profile picture. Here you can you use a clear face picture or something that reflects your art. Make sure it?s interesting and representative of your work. Does it reflect your personality? Increasingly profile pics are becoming personal branding devices. It?s how people will visually define you in their minds. Be creative but don?t let it get in your way. Clear face pictures are almost always a good way to go.
4. Enter your one sentence bio and link. This is your headline for yourself. Be interesting, witty, creative yet at the same time clear. This sentence, combined with your profile pic is what 90% of people will base their decision on to follow you or not if they are not familiar with your work. That said, what you write here is how you want to be portrayed to the world. Be yourself. When you have completed your one sentence bio, enter a link to your website or your main art page on BAP in the space provided.
5. Customize your background, text and sidebar colors. Your Twitter page should match your website or the general brand you are building for yourself. When in doubt, go with light grays, black or white so your work ?pops? off the screen more and doesn?t get muddled with too many other colors.
6. Send your first tweet. Log into Twitter and enter a 140 character message in the field provided. This is the limit for all tweets. It forces you to be succinct which can be a good thing. You can also include links, which can be shortened to give you more characters for text with free services like http://www.bitly.com.
7. Tell BAP you?re tweeting! Send BAP a tweet at: @bklynartprjct and include #bap to say hello. We?ll say hi back, introducing you to our 6,000+ followers in the process. Feel free to include a link to your artwork. We’re happy to help you build some buzz for your art.
6. OPTIMIZE YOUR TWITTER PROFILE AND GET MORE FOLLOWERS.
1. Make sure your Twitter profile picture is interesting and representative of your work. Does it reflect your personality or the one you are building for yourself online? Increasingly profile pics are becoming personal branding devices. It?s how people will visually define you in their minds. Be creative but don?t let it get in your way. Clear face pics are almost always a good way to go.
2. Check your bio and link. This is your headline for yourself. Be interesting, witty, creative yet at the same time clear. This sentence, combined with your profile pic is what 90% of people will base their decision on to follow you or not if they are not familiar with your work. That said, what you write here is how you want to be portrayed to the world. Be yourself. When you have completed your one sentence bio, enter a link to your website or your main art page on BAP.
3. Customize your background, text and sidebar colors. Your Twitter page should match your website or the general brand you are building for yourself. When in doubt, go with light grays, black or white so your work ?pops? off the screen more and doesn?t get muddled with too many other colors. Of course you can also use your own artwork. If you do the size should be.1600 x 1200 to provide you with enough scrolling area for larger monitors. http://twitter.com/bklynartprjct. You can also use http://freetwitterdesigner.com/ a great tool that lets you create a fully customized theme.
7. JUMP-START YOUR TWITTER NETWORK.
Total time: 3-5 minutes
1. As a first step, you can follow us at BAP by clicking here, then follow friends, colleagues and people you already know using Twellow.com. Twitter is a word-of-mouth that connects like minded people, so starting with existing relationships helps form a strong base.
2. As a next step, join Twellow.com using your Twitter username/pw. Think of this site as a ?Yellow Pages? of Twitter users that you can search based on key words.
3. Once logged in, enter key words related to art, your particular kind of art, your city, etc., to find people who you would want to follow – and who would also want to follow you. For example, if you are an illustrator, enter: illustration, art, or illustrator as key words.
4. Twellow then returns search results of possible people to follow ranked by how many followers they have. This is important because the more followers they have, the more valuable they can be to you if they re-tweet (share) something that you tweet about (i.e. a link to your art). For example, if two of your followers who have 5k followers each, re-tweet a link to your art, your art will be seen by 10k additional people.
5. Last, to follow someone in the search results list, just click on the FOLLOW button to immediately start following that person (you must be logged in, if not just click follow and be taken to Twitter to confirm there.
8. TWEET SMART ? TOOLS, TIPS and TAGS.
Use Tweetdeck to streamline tweeting. To be more efficient and get more out of your tweeting experience, we highly recommend the free software Tweetdeck which includes a url shortening feature and also streamlines all your twitter usage. At the end of the day, you’ll tweet a lot more using Tweetdeck and build deeper relationships with your network.
In our opinion, using a tool like Tweetdeck is the only way to go, especially if you also use Facebook and/or have multiple Twitter accounts. Here at BAP we use Tweetdeck pretty much all day long, can?t imagine tweeting without it. If you?re an Phone User put a little TweetDeck in your pocket with their free, top rated app that beat out the $2.99 Tweetie.
Shorten links
If your goal is to share your art on Twitter, you?ll definitely want to include links in your tweets. Links are long and ugly and can eat up much of your 140 character limit but no worries, you can shorten them with free services like http://www.bitly.com. This allows you to start driving traffic to your art immediately.
Use #hashtags and get your tweets seen
Including the #art hashtag includes your work in the results when someone searches for #art on sites like Twitscoop or twitter.search.com. Using the #bap hashtag includes your work in the BAP art tweet stream that can get your work seen by BAP’s thousands of followers. You can also include hashtags for the kind of art you are linking to (i.e. illustration, painting, photo, etc.) One thing though – always try to minimize the characters in your tweet – this encourages re-tweeting so people have enough room to enter their information too.
Sites like hashtags.org let you search by hashtags and even subscribe to RSS feeds of individual hashtags so you?re instantly connected things you love minute to minute as it happens across the real-time web in areas like #art #design #illustration.
Always ask for a re-tweet – People tend to re-tweet messages that include the text “Please #Retweet”. It’s a simple thing to include and can result in many more people seeing your work. If you’re low on characters, you can use “Please #RT”.
These are just some of the ways you can start getting more traffic to your artwork on BAP. Many of these principles can be used on other sites as well. Feel free to use them anywhere and everywhere they can be helpful to you.
Already done some of the basics? What’s worked best for you? Have ideas to share? Leave a comment below and include a link to your art page on BAP. We’ll be writing more of these articles in the next few months, so tell us about your biggest challenges and we’ll do our best to help.
Next week, look out for the final segment of our three part series on driving traffic to your art on BAP.
See the Week 1 tips here.
