Your Art on Pinterest

I've recently started using Pinterest to share my wildlife art, along with other things I'm interested in such as other wildlife art, wildlife photography, nature, space, etc., and I think it can be a useful tool for promoting your art and website. There are already lots of articles on how to increase your following on Pinterest, such follow other Pinners with similar interests, Like and Comment on others' Pins, etc. So I'm not going to go into the basics of Pinterest here. This is not an introduction to Pinterest so I'm going to assume you already have your account set up and have some idea how to navigate Pinterest and are now interested in making the most of it. So in this blog post I want to talk more specifically about how to improve your chances of getting your websites and art seen on Pinterest, and also how to prevent your art from getting lost in the sea of Pins.

One important thing to keep in mind is that, if you post your art on Pinterest and make a mistake, you can go to your Pin and edit it. But if someone else has already re-Pinned your Pin then you can't edit that Pin. Your mistake is out there forever! So you really want to try to get it right the first time you Pin something.

If you have your own website (and you should!) the first thing to do is set up your site to make it easy for you and others to share your art images on Pinterest. Add Buttons to your website with their Widget Builder. Or you can go a step further and add buttons for Pinterest as well as other social media like FaceBook, Google+, Twitter, and more. I use the tool from ShareThis.com and this is what it looks like on my website:

The tool just sits there along the side to the left of the menu. It stays in place even if you scroll way down the page so it's always accessible. Both the Widget Builder tool and ShareThis tool are free, and they're easy to set up of you know basic HTML. You just copy and paste their code into your page.

Now that you have tools set up so anyone can share your images it's important to do a few other things to your site to optimize it for Pinterest. You want all that sharing of your images to lead back to you, your website, and your art. One thing you should do is make sure your name is clearly visible within the image itself, not just as text next to the image. You should do this anyway, not just for social medial sharing. Anyone can download your images at any time and you want to be sure no matter what they do with it, such as post it on their, or email it to a friend, it always points back to you. Don't rely on your signature. It may not be legible, especially if the image has been compressed. It's worth taking the time to open each image in Photoshop (or similar program) and add clear text with your name, and even your website, right into the image, like I've done here:

 

It may not be pretty but it's very important for keeping your images credited to you. You don't want people taking credit for your work. There are some unethical Pinners who will replace your Pin's URL with their own, unfortunately. You always want people to be able to find your site should they see your image and want to know more about it. While it may be safer to plaster the text right across the middle of the image as a big watermark, I'm opposed to that. That ruins the image so much that I, personally, won't Pin and share such images. It's just too ugly. So if you want your images to be shared, don't totally obscure them with ugly text.

The next thing you need to do to your website is add descriptions to your images that Pinterest will use when someone Pins your image. I am amazed at how many Pinners are too lazy to add even one word of description to their Pins! They just put a dot, or a space, or a simple word like "wow" in, just enough to satisfy Pinterest's description requirement. Unfortunately, this will not help your art get seen. Pinterest does not have eyes. It has no idea what your image looks like. So if someone uses the Pinterest Search feature and types in "art" your images will not come up if they lack a description, or have an inappropriate description. Let's face it, we're never going to get all those lazy Pinners to type something, so let's do it for them.

Pinterest will grab some information from your website automatically, if it's there. If you highlight text from a page before you click the Pin button then Pinterest will insert that selcted text into the description for you. So make sure there is text near each image that says something about the artwork so Pinners can use that if they want. 

Many Pinners don't know about this, or won't bother, however. So you can go one step further and add behind-the-scenes descriptions to your HTML that Pinterest will grab by default. If nothing is selected Pinterest will grab whatever is in the "alt" tag for that image, so be sure to include alt tags in all your images! Since no one visiting your website normally sees these alt tags (it only shows up if the image does not display) you don't need to worry about cluttering up your page, so make your alt tag as long and descriptive as you'd like. For the above fox painting my alt tag looks like:

alt="Oil painting of a red fox pup in his den, by wildlife artist Crista Forest, ForestWildlifeArt.com. Fine Art Prints available"

The words within the quotes are what Pinterest will insert into the description automatically when someone Pins your images from your website. Don't use only the title of your artwork. Use descriptions with keywords you think people will use when searching for art like yours. I don't even bother including the titles in mine. The above fox painting's title is "Learning" but I doubt anyone searching Pinterest using the word "learning" is looking for fox paintings. It's more important that I get related keywords like "painting" and "fox" and "art" in my description. Be sure to include your name. As you can see, I even included my website URL, which becomes clickable once Pinned.


Speaking of URLs, here's another tip about those when posting your artwork. If you have an account with Fine Art America, Etsy, Daily Paintworks, or similar site, don't Pin your art from there. Many of these sites make it easy for users to Pin from them. The problem with this is that when you post from these sites their URL becomes linked with your image, as shown in this Daily Paintworks Pin below.

This would be great if clicking that link right there would take viewers to your Daily Paintworks page, but it doesn't. (This is not the same as the URL people are taken to when they click the actual image, btw) If someone clicks that link what they see is a whole page of images Pinned from Daily Paintworks by anyone and everyone, which may or may not show any of your images. It's better to have your own website URL in there so when people click that link they will see all images posted from your website, not Daily Paintworks. You'd much rather have them discover other images from your art website than other artists from DPW! If you already have some of those Pins on your Boards you don't need to delete them and go re-Pin those images from your own site. You can just Edit the image and replace the DPW (or Etsy or whatever) URL with your own.

Well, that's it for now. I'm fiddling around with Boards and think I have some ideas on how to organize things to make Boards more appealing and more likely to be followed. But that's a whole topic in itself so I'll save that for a future post. In the mean time, come over and follow me on Pinterest!

http://www.pinterest.com/csforest/

Online Art Sales Only for Small Paintings?

I've heard a lot of people say Etsy is a good place to sell artwork online. But looking around there it seems those doing the most sales are selling crafty stuff such as knitted yarn toys, jewelry, pottery, or vintage items, mostly under $50. I don't see many painters selling much there. And if they are selling paintings, it's mostly small inexpensive work.

I've also heard people say DailyPaintworks is a good place to sell paintings. But even those artists who sell frequently there only seem to be selling tiny works for $100 or less.

Same with ebay. Those who sell any at all seem to sell mainly very small paintings for a couple hundred dollars or less....usually on the "less" side.

Is that pretty much what you have to stick with to sell online, paintings 8"x10" or smaller so you can sell them dirt cheap? I haven't seen sales for larger pieces priced at $500+ on any of these sites.

Many artists supposedly use the strategy of selling lots of small, inexpensive works in order to build a following, some of whom eventually move on to buy larger works. But I don't see the sales of these larger works there.

I'd wonder if artists aren't selling larger works by other means. But it appears even those who do paint small and large are still using DPW and ebay, etc, as their shopping carts for their larger works, and those sites just don't show large works in the sales history. So even if they paint small ones to build a following it doesn't seem to result in sales of larger pieces, only more frequent sales of small ones.

Am I right?

No, not necessarily.

Why? Because I've also heard from artists who say buyers don't like to purchase larger works through these third-party check-outs. They usually contact the artist directly and make purchases behind the scenes. They like direct contact with the artist. They want a more personal interaction and communication about an expensive piece in order to feel comfortable with spending more money.

That makes sense to me.

I was wondering if I would spend much money through some third-party checkout myself and decided I would probably want to contact the artist first, too. In fact, being an artist myself, I would probably deal with them directly to save them the fees and commission associated with these third party sites. :)

Maybe even non-artist buyers sometimes think this way too.

What's your experience been with online sales? Do you only sell small works? Or have you had successful sales of larger works online?

StatCounter

This is a great little free tool you can use on your website or blog, StatCounter.com. (No, I'm not affiliated in any way so I'm not trying to advertise here.) I just started using it on my website not too long ago and so far it's been pretty interesting. It's not just a counter. It gives you all sorts of info on where visitors are from, referring sites, search engine keywords they used, where you ranked in that keyword search, if they found you through an image search, etc. This is helping me optimize my site by using more of the popular keywords. I'm finding out, for instance, that a lot of people land on my blog searching for hyena art and brown pelicans, which I find odd. I would not have thought of those as popular search subjects.

I think it's worth the time to watch the Keyword Analysis and Recent Keyword Activity on your site. Pay attention to what search terms seem to come up frequently and use more of those keywords in your blog posts.

One thing that seems to make a difference is naming your image files with the keywords. Don't name your barn painting with something generic like 'image01.jpg', for example. Be sure to name it what it is, plus some extra keywords, even if the name is long. Name it something like 'landscape-farm-red-barn-oil-painting.jpg'. I've gotten more visits through Google image searches since I change my file names. Even though it was a big pain to change all my file names and the corresponding HTML, I think it's worth the effort.

Other interesting information you can gain is finding out where people are coming from. If you post in several forums, for example, and include your website or blog in your signature, you can see if visitors are coming from those forum posts. If you notice more visitors coming from certain forums, and fewer from other forums, that can help a lot. It tells you which forums to spend your time and energy posting in, and which to not waste your time on.

There's tons more info you can see from this site, like which of your site pages are most popular, what images they've downloaded from your site, what countries they're from, even what browsers they're using. Lots of info! Worth checking out.

Protecting Your Images Online

A few people have asked me if I'm worried about having my images online. Am I? Not really.

Artists new to the online art world are sometimes a little hesitant to put their images out there, fearing unauthorized use and distribution of their artwork. But there is so much opportunity for positive exposure on the internet that it would be a shame not to take advantage of it because of this concern.

There are several things you can do to help protect your images from unauthorized use. Watermarking is the probably one of the oldest and most common forms of protecting images. It won't stop people from downloading your image but it will make it unusable for printing or trying to take credit for the work. People are also less likely to want to download it when there's an obvious watermark on it. Here is an example of a typical watermark:

Not very pretty, though, is it?

There are other things you can do that won't ruin the appearance of your image. In order to download an image off a website people generally have to right-click on it to bring up the save image menu option. There is a javascript you can add to your site that will prevent people from right-clicking on your image and pop up a notice warning them that your images are copyright protected. This only discourages the less Web-savvy thieves out there, however, since it's really not hard to find the image URL by viewing the source and downloading it directly. They could also simply take a screen capture and crop and save the image that way.

Another option is to "shrink wrap" your image which is a way of putting a fake transparent image over the real image so when someone tries to download your image they think they're getting the real thing when, in fact, they are getting the transparent image. You can find out how to do this here on About.com.

Personally, I don't do any of these things, really. People distributing my art all over the web just means more exposure for me. The trick is to make sure my name and web address stay with my image so the free publicity does me some good so I add my name name and web address into my images directly. I guess you could call that a form of watermarking but it doesn't obscure the image the way the typical watermark does. Here's how mine looks:

You might argue that if someone wants to steal your artwork they could simply crop the name and address off the bottom. Well, yeah, they could. But I think the vast majority of people who download and distribute your images do so simply because they like it and want to share it with friends. I don't think they're trying to take the credit away from you and are unlikely to go to the trouble to crop the image. Names and links to the sources of images are usually just lost out of carelessness and lack of web page editing skills.

To discourage those who might actually want to steal credit for your work, or print it out, I suggest simply keeping your images low resolution and low dpi. Keep the dimensions smaller than 500 pixels and keep the dpi below 96. You can also add a 10-20% jpg compression which will further degrade the image. On your computer screen these adjustments won't affect the image much and it will still look decent on your web page. If your image is, say, 400 pixels wide at 72 dpi then when someone tries to print it out on their computer printer it will only be about 5 inches wide and won't look too great. Should they try to force it to fill the page in an attempt to get an 8"x10" print it will look downright horrid at that resolution and dpi. Maybe they'll be satisfied hanging that crappy postcard sized print on their wall but they certainly won't get away with trying to sell them as fine art prints to anyone but a blind person.

Dazzle Your Snail Mail with Zazzle

It would have been a better subject title if I could have found a word for "mail" that rhymed with "dazzle", wouldn't it? But try to find one. Yeah, go ahead!

Anyway, I just got some postage stamps today....

You're thinking, yeah, so what?

Well, they're not just ordinary postage stamps. I got some postage stamps no one else in the entire world has. What's so special about my stamps, you ask? They have my artwork on them. :)

I got them printed up on Zazzle. Take a look!


Of course, there are lots of sites where I can have my wildlife art printed on coffee mugs, calendars, etc. But those things don't go anywhere where other people besides my immediate friends and family will see them.

These are real stamps I can use on real mail. Isn't that cool? :)

Of course it's not limited to artowork. Any image at all (well, within reason) can be uploaded nad turned into a postage stamp. Do you have an upcoming wedding? Send invitations with postage featuring the happy couple! When it comes time for mailing Christma cards send your cards this year featuring the happy face of your child opening gifts or sitting on Santa's lap.

Fore more info click on the Zazzle logo below.

Why Limited Editions?

My frustration at not being able to find prints I want from certain artists had made me question the whole idea behind Limited Edition prints. Why do we want those? I believe the original idea was to make art buyers feel that they had put their money into some sort of investment that would appreciate in value. But who likes art? Only people who look for financial investments? I think if you're interested in financial gains there are much better ways to invest money.

So who really likes art? Pretty much everyone. Art appeals to all human beings on some level. Have you ever entered a home that didn't have at least one picture on the wall? Unlikely. Sure, most of these people are not art connoisseurs or serious collectors. But should someone have to be in order to enjoy art? I'm not even sure collectors actually enjoy art. I had one buyer tell me that he collected so much art he had to keep much of it stored in boxes, including one of mine. He told me an original of mine he'd bought a while back was being safely kept packaged and stored under his bed. What?! Who's enjoying my art there? The dust mites?!

I've thought a lot about whether or not I want to get my art published as limited edition prints and I am pretty sure the answer is no. Yeah, I know, most artists would love to. Seeing their work as Limited Editions makes them feel like they've reached some level of success. There's some prestige about having your work in limited editions. And many people think that open editions and posters "cheapen" your art and reduce your ranking as a respected artist in the art world.

But that's what the "professional" art critics (and, sadly, many artists) think. But I don't paint for art critics. I want to share my art with everyday people, as many people as want to enjoy my art. The idea of Limited Edition (LE) is a bit snooty and egotistical, in my opinion. LEs are often beyond the affordability of everyday people. Especially when an artist becomes well-known their LE prints can cost more than their originals once did! LEs tell many people of ordinary means that they are not worthy of owning the art. Should I tell the dog groomer down the street that she is not worthy of owning my art because she is not a bank CEO? (And, considering anyone and everyone can get LE giclées made online these days I really don't think there's anything special about LEs anymore, anyway.)

One publisher I was with sold litterally tens of thousands of prints of one of my images. If that image had been a LE of only 1,000 how many people would not have that image now? Obviously more than 1,000 people wanted it. Why should I tell them they can't have it? No, I don't think LE prints are for me. I want to keep my images affordable and available for as long as people want to buy them. And what's wrong with that?