To all my U.S. readers…have a great Thanksgiving today!

You can never have too many resources when it comes to your craft business. I just found two new ones from my colleague, Judy Dunn. She’s created two great Squidoo lenses. One is “Artrepreneur; The Intersection of Art and Business” (which is the same name as her fabulous blog) where she gives a great overview on what it takes to succeed in the business of selling your art.

Judy’s second lens is called: “Photography that will Make Your Craft Work Sing“. In this lens she gives some great tips on how to photograph your work and some resources on getting your work professionally photographed.

Be sure to check them out!

• Artrepreneur; The Intersection of Art and Business
• Photography that will Make Your Craft Work Sing

Do you have an email newsletter that you send out to your customers? Then this podcast I’ve found on the Marketing Sherpa might interest you. It gives some interesting insight on a common question a lot of email list owners have, “When is the best time to send out my emails?”

In this podcast, managing editor of MarketingExperiments, Hunter Boyle talks about an experiment they ran sending emails out at 2 a.m. and 6 a.m. instead of past 9 a.m. Some of the results included:

• more people opened and clicked on links in the emails sent before 9 a.m.
• West coast business people and indie entrepreneurs were opening emails up until midnight (EST)
• list owners that have international subscribers may benefit from testing what time to send emails

For more results, you can listen/view the podcast here until November 19th.

If you don’t have an email list and you’re thinking about starting one, subscribers to my newsletter can read my article series on “How to Plan and Start a Great Email Newsletter“. If you’re not a subscriber, you can sign up and get access to the article series for free here: http://www.craftedweb.com/subscribe.html If you subscribe now, you can get a free audio download on “10 Steps to Getting More Traffic on Your Website“.

Saw an interesting complaint from danidraws on Twitter this morning:

Artist’s website took FOUR clicks before I got to see any artwork. Grrr…

This kind of reminds me of that Tootsie Roll commercial that asked how many licks it took to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop. Mr. Owl took three licks before he gave up and bit into the Tootsie pop.

How many clicks are your customers going to take before they give up and leave?

Sometimes in the interest of keeping things neat and organized on our websites or because of how online store software is built, we end up putting our artwork in numerous categories and sub-categories, and sub-sub categories divided according to medium, style, product line, price, and however else you can categorize something.

The result can be a labrynth of web pages that hopefully leads to your artwork at the end. The question is are your customer going to follow you that far? And if they do, how are they going to find their way back? Add a slow loading site to the mix and your customers probably won’t even make it through three clicks.

Next time you visit your website, do the following:

1. Go through your website and count how many clicks it takes before you can find your artwork or you can buy something. If you get past three, you may have to reconsider your site navigation.

2. Look at your navigation categories. Would they make sense to anyone who’s not familiar with your work? Are there too many? Is the same product showing up in more than one or two different categories? Is there a way to combine some sub-categories in a more streamlined way?

3. Have friend or family member who’s not familiar with your website log on and try to find something specific. Tell them to find a particular item on your website or a particular piece of information. Sit beside them and watch them try to find it and don’t give them any help. If you see them fumbling around or taking a lot longer than they should be, you may have a problem.

4. Watch for useless extra steps. Are you putting information on two or three pages when you could just combine the pages and save people from the extra steps? One of my pet peeves is when you have a list of questions and you have to click through to get the answer…one answer, then click back to read the rest of the question list. If you find one of these extra steps on your website that don’t serve a good purpose, eliminate them.

Thanks to danidraws (aka Dani Jones) for inspiring this post! And if you get a chance, check out her website for some incredible illustrations!

Added two more links to the Photographing Your Art Link Roundup.

Learning to photograph your work- This post is from Lizoid Blog. It contains tips, and links to craft photographers and useful tutorials.

15 Useful Batch Image Processors- This post by Smashing Magazine lists the links to 15 batch image programs. Now if you need to resize or convert a bunch of images at a time, you can simply use one of these programs to do the work for you.

If you’ve missed the original post and the rest of the links to great craft photography articles, you can check it out here:
Link Roundup: Photographing Your Art