By now, you’ve probably heard about the new three-part PBS documentary called Craft In America. The series originally aired on May 30th. I had DVRed the series and finally got around to watching it last week. It was a wonderful show and it featured stories of a lot of fabulous artists. To go along with the documentary, there is a great web site that has more information about the project and more about the artists featured in the documentary. Check your local PBS station for re-air dates…and if you miss any of those, you can purchase the DVD on the web site.

Watching the documentary reminded me of what a great opportunity television appearances are for artists. Whether is a landmark documentary like Craft In America, a regular cable series like That’s Clever!, or even a feature story on the local news station, television appearances are an incredible opportunity for an artist to promote themselves. If an artist works it right…the opportunity can go way beyond the 15 minutes of television fame, and a web site becomes a powerful tool in leveraging the benefits of appearing on television.

If you manage to land some time on the small screen, here are some tips on prepping your web site for the event and some tips on maximizing your television exposure:

1. Start preparing as soon as you get an air date- In many cases, television shows are pre-recorded weeks or even months in advance. When you find out when the show is going to be aired, you’ll have a time frame in which to plan and prepare. Don’t procrastinate even if the air date is months away. Those months will fly by before you know it and there are some things that require some lead time. So use that time window wisely!

2. Make sure that visitors can contact you easily after the show is over- After I watched the documentary, I wanted to contact some of the artist for a possible interview for my Crafting Voices podcast. I went to the Craft In America web site to find out more about the artists and to find information on how to contact them. The ones I ended up contacting were ones that had web sites and ones that information on how to contact them easily available. If potential customers don’t have a way to contact you after seeing you on television, a great opportunity is wasted. So make it easy for them to find you! If you don’t have a web site, build one! It doesn’t have to be elaborate…even getting a free blog from Blogger, Wordpress.org, or TypePad is better than no web presence at all. Make sure that your contact information is readily available. Don’t hide your contact information. Email is good…having your email and a phone number is even better.

3. Do some search engine optimization- People may not always remember your web address, but they may remember your name. I’ve had some customers find my web site by Googling my name instead of my company name. If you have some lead time between the time you tape your appearance and the air date, you should do some work to optimize your web site so that people can find you by doing a search.

4. Freshen up your site- Before your television appearance airs, take some time to spruce up your site a little. Make sure your copyright dates are current. Update your site with new content and images of your work. Check your contact information and make sure that it’s up to date and correct. Run through your site and make sure everything works, your links, your images, your shopping cart, sign ups for your newsletter or mailing list. You don’t want all those people who take the trouble to come to your site after they watched your appearance to find it broken when they arrive.

5. Make your web site press friendly- The great thing about publicity is that it often leads to even more publicity. In many cases, reporters and magazine editors find out about you the same way that everyone else does…through your television appearance, or any other story that features you. And just seeing you on TV may prompt them to want to do a story on you…especially if they think that you would make a good subject for whatever they’re working on now. So make it easy for reporters to find out more about you. They’re busy folk and the easier you make their job, the more likely it will that they’ll feature you. Consider creating a press center on your web site, a section that has links to press releases, a list of other magazines, newsletters, and television shows that’s featured you, your bio, your artist statement, a fact sheet about your work, and contact information in case they want to interview you. You should also have a place for them to request high quality images of your work, images of you in your studio, and images of yourself. Even if you have your bio and artist statement on your web site, having easy to find copies or links to your vital information in one place will make a media person’s life easier

6. Tell everyone- If you’re lucky enough to get a chance to be on TV, don’t keep it quiet…tell everyone! Send postcards and announcements to your customers, both wholesale and retail. If you have a blog, create a series of posts about the television appearance, starting with an with the announcement of your TV appearance, the process of taping your show, and the announcement of the final air date. Make an announcement in your newsletter or on art-related forums. Write a press release about your television appearance and put it in your press center; press releases are great for catching search engine traffic. Don’t forget to send out a press release to local media and industry-related media. If you’ve never written a press release before, check out the following links:

• How to prepare and submit a press release to media
• How to Write a Press Release
• How to Write a Great Press Release: A Sample Press Release Template

7. Build a promotion around your appearance- Special events are always a great way to create excitement on your web site. With a little creativity, you can create a promotion that’s tied to your television appearance. Perhaps you can create a special in which customers who mention your segment on the television show gets a special discount on their next purchase. Perhaps you can create an online contest or host a live chat during or after your appearance.

8. Be prepared for extra calls, emails, and orders- You never know what kind of reaction that you’ll get as a result of your show appearance. You may not get any noticeable results or you may get an avalanche. It may happen right after the show or it may come gradually over a period of days or weeks. Either way, be optimistic and be prepared to handle an incoming rush. That means clearing out your email inbox to handle extra emails, that means having help to answer the phone if you’ve included your phone number as contact information. That also means having an extra pair of hands to help complete and ship out orders…as well as having some complete work ready and supplies on hand in case you need to make more. Who knows…you may get the same reaction artist Heather Courtney got after she appeared on The Ellen Degeneres Show. She got almost 1,000 emails and tons of orders after it aired!

9. Get a copy of the show- Make arrangements before the show airs to have someone tape it at home. Then ask the producer or whoever you’re working with if they can send you a copy of the show to include on your web site or in your press kit. Having someone tape the show is insurance in case the producer refuses to send you a copy of the show or if the producer is slow in getting a copy out to you. So no matter what the producer says you will have at least one copy of your appearance in your possession. Getting permission to use the show footage is kind of hit or miss depending on the size of the show and how rabid the legal department is. Some artists takes a “better to ask for forgiveness than permission” approach and will use footage without asking for permission choosing to wait until someone complains. I’m not necessarily condoning this approach, since I think that it technically constitutes copyright infringement. But be prepared for the fact that a lot of shows don’t allow you to use footage of the show for any purpose as a general rule. Some smaller shows might not be so strict. If you do get permission, take the footage and display the video on your web site or you can put the footage on CD and include it in your press kit.

Did I miss anything? Drop me a comment and let me know your ideas!

Yesterday I received an email message from a visitor to my Crafting Voices podcast site. Apparently, the phone number I provided in one of my pages is not working properly…the extension was somehow deactivated….oops.

It was a quick fix, but it’s a fix that I should have been able to catch myself had I been more careful about testing. And of course, it may have been broken for a while without my knowing.

Ironically, I wrote a blog post yesterday about making sure that everything is working properly on your site. Well, the same thing goes for your offline contact points (snail mail, fax numbers, and phone numbers). If you provide a phone or fax number, make sure that it’s the right number and make sure that it works. If you’re only available during certain times during the day, list those times on your site and try to make sure that you’re actually available or provide a message explaining how to further contact you. If you have voice mail, make sure your message is up to date and contains all the right info. There’s nothing like listening to a voice mail greeting that wishes you happy holidays in the middle of July. If your fax number, phone number, or postal address changes, make sure that change is reflected on your site.

So, while you’re running down your periodic test of things on your web site, take some time out to make sure that phone number and voice mail works like it’s supposed to, and if you have a fax machine, send yourself a fax to make that still works as well.

When was the last time you checked to make sure that your shopping cart works correctly? How about the links on your web site? Or your contact me form? A couple months ago, I had poked around my blog and discovered that my Feedburner feature wasn’t working properly. While this discovery wasn’t earth-shattering, it was still something that needed to be fixed. But what if it had been the subscription link to my newsletter? How many subscriptions would I have missed in between the time it actually broke and the time I discover that it was broken? What about your web site? Is your shopping cart working? Your “email me” link? Your contact me form?

Don’t count on the visitors to your site to let you know if something is not working right. The majority of visitors will just leave the site without notifying you that’s something’s wrong. Perhaps your web host did a routine upgrade that disables something on your site. Or you made a change to your site or added a page that somehow messes something up. It may be months before you stumble on the fact that people can’t buy anything from your web site…which is really not good.

So every so often, as part of your regular maintenance, you should check your site over and test everything. This includes:

• Your images- Make sure all of your images appear like they’re supposed to. Replace any broken images that are stored on your web site and remove broken images that are linked from outside web sites.
• Your links and navigation- make sure that your links goes to where they’re supposed to go…this also means any mailto links as well. Remove or correct any incorrect links.
• All your online forms- send yourself a message through your online form and see if it works
• Your newsletter- Try subscribing and unsubscribing to your own newsletter to make sure that this works properly…send a copy of your newsletter to yourself and see what your customers see…make sure that your mailing list program sends you a copy of your newsletter from now on so that you get your newsletter everytime you send one
• Your shopping cart- If your shopping cart has a test mode, go through the ordering process and see if you can complete an order…or at the very least, make sure that you can add or substract things from your shopping cart. And don’t forget to take your shopping cart out of test mode once you’re finished testing!
• Any kind of multimedia- If you have Flash, audio, or video on your site, be sure to check these too…make sure that the files load up like they should…make sure they like they play like they should and watch out for error messages.
• Error messages- Keep an eye out for any error messages that may pop up as you navigate through your web site. Take note of what the error message says, what page the error occurs, and what steps you took before the error appeared.
• The speed of your site- Take note of the speed of your web site. Is it taking a long time to load up? Are there certain pages that seem to just hang and never completely load? If your site seems to be slow, there can be a number of different reasons why. The most common culprit is usually the size of your images. Make sure that your images are properly formatted and sized. Another common culprit is inefficient HTML code or poorly installed programs and databases. If the slowness seems to affect your whole web site, consider checking with your web host to see if there is a problem on their end that may be slowing up your site.

At the risk of turning this post into an English lesson, I found this article on the correct use of punctuation on WikiHow.

Why is knowing when to use a semi-colon and when to use a colon is important when it comes to your web pages (you use a semi-colon to separate a complex series of items and a colon to introduce a list…just in case you were wondering)? Good writing is part of what gives your web site a professional look. Nothing screams amateur so much as someone who can’t write or spell a proper sentence…and you should also know where the hyphens and apostrophes go too.

Check out the article here.

Seems like every time I turn around, I have to come up with a new password for something. With using the internet to do online banking, writing blogs, creating accounts for forums and email addresses, and creating web sites, it’s likely that you have to create a number of different passwords and they all have to be something that you can remember without writing down as well as something that people won’t guess. And to add to the difficulty, some accounts require you to change your password every 30 to 60 days!

So I found this post at the Productivity501 Blog, 10 Tips for Creating Secure Passwords to be quite useful. One of my favorite password creation tips was number 6:

6. Ideas for Passwords - Sometimes coming up with a password can be pretty difficult. Keep in mind you need to choose terms that you won’t often talk about. Here are a list of ideas to help come up with words:

1. Choose two objects from a picture that you’ll always remember. For example: a drawing at your grand parents house, the illustration from a children’s book, a painting at an art museum, etc.
2. Choose two terms from a memorable purchase. For example: bluev6 (first car), thinibm (first computer), gold3crt (engagement ring), 7ftgrand (piano), pinedoor (first house), sunshore (honeymoon destination).
3. Look through a catalog and choose terms based on something you see.
4. Lookup a random article on Wikipedia and choose a word found or related to a word you find in the article.

Being an artist, this is a very effective tip for me since most artists are visual people. So check out this article here the next time you need to come up with a new password…

…Now if you’ll excuse me, my sixty days are up…gotta go change a password!

Photo of the lock in this post is a cast resin keychain from Harry Allen’s REALITY series