One of the things that makes blogging, article marketing, and public relations for your website so hard to keep up is the constant need to come up with new content ideas. One great source of fresh content ideas is as close as your television or newspaper.

Local events, holidays, national news, and even world events are great sources for new content to blog about, to write articles, shoot video, or even as a base to write new press releases. Not only are people already interested in these topics, but they also tend to get searched on in search engines, so it’s an opportunity to get boost in search engine traffic. Here are few examples:

Holidays- Holidays like Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Thanksgiving…even Groundhog’s day gives you a great reason to create holiday-related tip sheets, articles, or crafting or art tutorials. For Groundhog’s Day, The Naughty Secretary’s Club wrote a cute blog post on how to make a ground hog puppet.

Local events- Do you have a local art show, craft show, or exhibition that’s of interest to your customers or readers? Offer to write an article for a local publication (either online or offline) about the event. Or perhaps you’re participating in one of these events? Use this participation as a reason to write a press release or a blog post about the event. The Publicity Hound, Joan Stewart talks about how write press releases based on local events in her free ecourse 89 Press Release Tips.

Word events- World events like the 2010 Winter Olympics and the Haitian relief efforts is news that everyone wants to keep informed about. With a little thought, you can figure out how to make these events relevant to your article writing or blog. For example DIY Life wrote a nice blog post about Craft Hope for Haiti which is an Etsy store that donates it’s proceeds to Haiti relief.

Popular culture or trends- Don’t forget to look to pop culture and trends for content ideas. What are some of your favorite television shows? Movies? Music? Books? Design*Sponge has a great series on it’s blog called “Living In” where a popular movie, television show, or book is chosen as a interior design inspiration. Here’s a blog post about the animated movie Fantastic Mr. Fox.

So, the next time you open up your newspaper, watch your favorite TV show, or go to the movies, keep your eyes and mind open. The inspiration for your next blog post or article might be closer than you think!

Artist Pam Corwin of Rock, Paper, Scissors has posted a video on her blog that chronicled her booth setup at this summer’s Buyer’s Market of American Craft. This is a great example of using video to illustrate “behind the scenes” aspects of the artist’s life. In the video, you see what the booth looked like at the beginning all the way to the end product. The ending shot of the video tells you that it took over 7 hours for set up.

Some important points to note

• Pam shot this video using her camera phone. Remember, you don’t need to have fancy equipment to do stuff like this. Camera phones, digital cameras that can take short videos, and small video cameras like the Flip Mino
  are great for quick, impromptu videos.

• Most people attending a craft show or a trade show don’t realize or even think about the amount of effort it takes just to prepare and set up for a show. If a customer sees a video like this, how much more respect will you gain as a result?

• Short videos like this makes great content for your website and your blog.

How Pam can leverage this video further

• As well as putting this video on her blog, Pam can also put this video on her Facebook page or open an account on YouTube and post it there. This gives her more places where people can find her online.

• Add her website address to the video. Right now she has a final shot that explains how long it took her to set up her booth. This could be followed by another shot that tells people the address to her website and asks them to visit for more information.

• Make it sharable. If other artists and bloggers like me, find this video interesting and want to share it with others, it should be as easy to do as possible. If you use a video sharing service like YouTube it’s pretty much a no-brainer.

You can find Pam online at her website, Rock, Paper, Scissors, her blog, Business of Crafts, her Business of Crafts Facebook page, or you can follow her on Twitter.

If you’re thinking about doing some videos of your own and you’re a subscriber to my weekly newsletter, you can check out the 5-part article series I did on “How to Use Video to Promote Your Art Website” in the article archives. If you aren’t a subscriber, you can download a PDF version of the series here.

Early this morning, Facebook decided to reverse a change it made in its Terms of Service Agreement that caused outrage among thousands of it’s users. The change involved Facebook deleting a provision that stated that users could remove their content at any time, at which time the license Facebook had on the content would expire. It also added a provision that said that Facebook would keep the content of it’s users and licenses even after a Facebook account was terminated.

What did this change mean for Facebook users? According to some consumer advocates, you could easily interpret this change to mean that Facebook would own the right to do what they wished with whatever you post on Facebook (photos, video, comments, etc) even after you’ve decided to delete your Facebook account. According to Facebook, they’ve made this change in the Terms of Service so that they can help keep certain aspects of a person’s content active even after that person has terminated their account. For example, if you’ve made a comment on another person’s Wall or participated in a discussion on in a Facebook Group, the provision would allow them to keep the comment active even if you’ve deleted your account.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, stated both yesterday and this morning after the decision to go back to the original Terms of Service that the change in no way meant that Facebook wanted to “own” the content of it’s users, but rather it was trying solve the sticky issue of what to do with content that’s shared among a lot of people.

As an artist, this a very real issue that you should be aware of. Terms of Use provisions that allow a third party website like Facebook, Myspace, Flickr rights to use the content of its users is not uncommon. And while the chance that any of these companies will do anything with your photos or videos is fairly small, in some cases the language to do more than that is already there. So should a company decide to do more with your content than they’re doing now somewhere further down the road, if you’ve agreed to the Terms of Service that gives them that right there may be very little you can do. If you’re a painter, a photographer, a videographer, a cartoonist, a printmaker, or anyone who’s art “is” the image, this can be a serious issue.

My advice? Be careful. You should be very aware of what you’re signing up for before you start uploading your images on a social networking site. Before you start sharing your images on places like Facebook or Myspace, be sure to read the Terms of Service contract (you know those long pages of legal stuff that no one ever reads) and pay close attention on how they handle your content. And then weigh the risks and benefits for yourself. Social networking is still a great way to promote yourself, just don’t give away your rights to do so.

For more information on this issue, check out the following links:

• Facebook’s Users Ask Who Owns Information

• On Facebook, People Own and Control Their Information

• Facebook’s New Terms Of Service: “We Can Do Anything We Want With Your Content. Forever.”

• Facebook terms of service compared with MySpace, Flickr, Picasa, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Twitter

• Update on Terms

• Technical rebuttal of Mark Zuckerberg’s rebuttal to Facebook TOS change

Another blog that I read on a regular basis is the one for Satsuma Press, written by letterpress designer, Lynn Russell. There’s one blog post she wrote a couple months ago that I’ve found particularly interesting:

Well, I don’t know if I should be telling you this because I’m not sure what it might indicate about the kind of person I might be … but faced with many stacks of paper waiting to be printed {see above}, I decided to do the math on just how many passes of the press these 2009 calendars are going to take. Let me tell you, it’s a lot. A LOT.

Here’s how to add it up. There are 14 pages in each calendar: 12 months + a front cover + a back cover. I am starting with stacks of 405 pages for each of those 14 pages. {Why 405? Well, it was going to be less, but I admit that my brain has been operating at a little less than 100% these days so I ended up ordering more paper than I needed … so I figured I’d just print what I had and this is the magic number.} Of those pages, there is yet another break-down according to how many colors per design.

Lynn goes on to figure out the total breakdown which comes out to a staggering 21,880 passes of the press!

In this post, Lynn does a couple of things:

1. She illustrates in pretty concrete terms, how much work is involved in the creation of her calendars.

2. She increases the value of her calendars in the minds of her current and potential customers.

While people might know “mentally” that handcrafted work takes a lot of effort, the idea really doesn’t connect unless people “see” it in a crystal-clear way. For some people, you need to provide concrete numbers, kind of like how Lynn broke down the work to the amount of “steps” it took. With other people, describing the process is enough to make the connection. With others, they have to actually see the process in action. And still others don’t truly appreciate it until they actually “experience” the process.

So how do you get people to make the connection for your work?

• Break the process down step by step. You don’t have to get into specifics like what your glaze recipe is or where you source your materials if that’s proprietary information. But describe what’s involved in your creative process and do it in quantitative terms.

• Make a video or a slideshow of you at work. Provide ongoing commentary and closeup detail shots of your works in progress. Post these photos, slide shows, or videos to Slideshare, Flickr, or YouTube

• Blog about your works in progress and provide media such as photos and video to illustrate milestones of your progress.

• Invite and answer questions about your work and your creative process and post them to your blog or a “Frequently Asked Questions” section on your website. If you get a lot of questions on a regular basis, you may consider creating a feature for reader’s questions on your blog. Getting people personally engaged with you is also a great way to get them more connected.

• Teach. The saying about walking a mile in a man’s shoes is true. Consider teaching some of your techniques by writing downloadable tutorials, making how to videos or slideshows, or by teaching a live class. Every year I teach a class on how to make these fairly “simple” beaded chain bracelets. Every year I get students who take the class with ambitions to learn how to make these items as gifts for their family and friends. And almost every year, I get a less crafty student that says, “You know, maybe I’ll just buy from you instead of trying to make this myself.” Even among my more handier students, they respect the process more once they learn how to do it, especially once I explain how many of these bracelets I average per year*.

  * Incidently I’ve also found this to be an interesting response to the irritating, “I could make that!” comment so frequently heard at craft shows. When someone says that, my response usually is, “Well, I make about X amount of these a year and I want to expand to more. I could use more help.” It’s a gentle reminder to these wanna-be artists that making 1 item and making 100 isn’t as easy as it seems. Most people seem to make the connection in that context. At least no one has taken me up on the offer yet!

• Have a story. People interested in art are interested in the artist. I wrote about how important it is to have story earlier this year, and it’s an important thing to remember because Lynn’s customers don’t buy from Satsuma Press, they buy from Lynn Russell. So even when you’re quantifying how much goes into your work, make it clear that there is a story behind it and that small part of you also goes into it. And that makes the ultimate connection.

You read the rest of Lynn’s post here. And be sure to visit here website at www.satsumapress.com.

One cool thing about the Internet is that anyone in the world with a computer and an Internet connection can visit your website no matter where they live. However, this worldwide access can be a bit tricky is especially when it comes to language.

It doesn’t even have to be a matter of people who speak or read and entirely different language. It could just be a matter of visitor’s from the UK that understand “British English” as opposed to “American English”. It’s very likely that you’ll have visitors from the UK, Canada, or Australia and you’ll run into that “translation” problem, like the fact that in the UK purses are “handbags” and backpacks are “rucksacks”.

The Storque has a really interesting article on a couple of things that you need to watch out for when tagging some of your items on Etsy for an international audience. Like why you don’t want to talk about “fanny packs” to your UK audience. A lot of these tips will also “translate” to your website, so check out the article on the Storque:
International Tagging, Yeah Baby!