Marketing

Vatican - January 2010

"I've found artists are lousy at self promotion, monetizing and maximizing earning."* - Jim

Last night I had dinner with my best friend, Jim.  Jim is a web design/internet marketing consultant and content producer.  He mainly helps entrepreneurs build their web presence by creating effective and eye catching sites that help the consumer discover their services and products.  His goal is to help each client find at least a 10 fold increase in revenue over the cost of his services.  Jim is an ethical business man who wants entrepreneurs to succeed.

We were chatting about my websites that I need built for my photography.  We came up with the fact that I need two sites, tied together.  One will be my portfolio site that I can give to potential galleries, magazines, contests, etc.  The other is a commercial site promoting my future photography courses, photo books, photo contract work, and other services and merchandise.  I may even need a third one for my adult content (not porn, just not appropriate for the youngin's).

Jim asked me a while back to send him links to websites of other photographers that I really liked.  I told him how I liked the clean, simple, elegance common in all of them.  I don't want the formatting and graphic design parts competing at all with photos and words.  He felt that was really helpful, but then he asked the hard questions, "Who are your buyers, customers, consumers, clients, etc.?  What do you have to sell to them?"  These questions that makes it hard for this artist to self-promote, monetize, and maximize earnings.

I've been thinking about these questions a bit now.  Who would buy what I create?  What would they buy of my creations? With those two simple questions I've come up with a list of potential things I can offer and who would buy them.  This is important so we can point our advertising to those narrow groups to maximize revenue from advertising with out sending out spam for unwanted stuff and wasting effort and resources for those limited gains.

Here are a couple of tidbits I discovered from talking this through with Jim.  Very few art buyers, if any, will buy my photography, especially the nude art, and hang it on their walls.  As much as I love seeing my work big and on a good wall, society isn't ready to have those photos hanging in their homes.  My photos are also not the type that make for good subscription-based websites.  I don't produce enough content fast enough to do that, and to be honest, while I want some of my photos to arouse and excite, it is not for the quick masturbatory relief that subscription sites aim towards (not a judgment on those sites, I think they are helping the environment by reducing the amount of paper going into Hustler, Barely Legal,  and other stroker mags.)

For now, I am exploring where my work can be exhibited/published to get to an audience and make me some scratch from it.  I have some ideas, but they are not ready to share.

It is hard for artists to self-promote because many of us create art for ourselves and then hope some audience will come to us wanting it.  That doesn't work unless you are extremely lucky and good.  We are in the age where artists must promote themselves and be willing to sell both their art and themselves as a branded product.  I am coming to accept this as not selling out, as long as I keep to my artistic morals, aesthetics and ethics.  Now comes the next challenge, what the hell is my brand????


*This quote may be off a bit due to the influences of enjoying a cold beer, good Italian food, great company and eating outside of a restaurant on the first warm summer evening in northern California.  I think that is the gist of it though.

Money - Pink Floyd - The backup singers at 7:00 minutes are priceless and damn sexy.