In a previous post, I wrote about the importance of adding video to your art website and listed some ideas for videos you might want to create. Here’s a couple more ideas to consider:

• How to care for your artwork- If your artwork or craft item requires some maintenance or special cleaning, create a video with tips on how to care for and clean your artwork.
• Frequently Asked Questions- if you have an unusual craft or art technique, chances are that you have alot of questions from your customers that you answer over and over again. Create a video that answers some of your customer’s most frequently asked questions.
• Create a day-in-the life video- customers find the artist’s life fascinating, so try shooting some scenes from a typical day in the studio.
• Create a “how to” or “advice” videos- A lot of craft and art items are used as personal accessories or in interior design. If you paint for example, create a video showing the best way to hang or light your paintings. If you make hair accessories, demonstrate the latest fashions using your accessories.
• Lectures and presentations- If you’re lucky enough to land a art-related speaking engagement or were invited to lecture at an craft related conference…ask for permission to videotape your session and to post brief clips on your website. This shows you as an authority in the art world…plus it has the added bonus of encouraging more speaking engagements.
• Media appearances- If you’ve landed some time on the small screen, see if you can get a copy of your television appearance and permission to show clips on your website. For tips on how to prepare for a television appearance, check out this past post:
  9 Ways to Prepare Your Site for a Television Appearance.

• Participate in Etsy’s “Handmade Story” video project- Right now in conjunction with the “Handmade Pledge” project, the online craft marketplace site Etsy is creating a documentary project in which they encourage artists to explain how making and selling their artwork affects their lives. You can find out how to participate here.
• Your art in motion- Does your art move? Then still pictures won’t do your work justice. Have video showing your art in motion. Artist Ann P. Smith does this perfectly with her video animations of her handmade robots on her website.
• Bonus Tip:- Remember that you can extract the audio from your video and make an mp3 audio download, a podcast, or even an audio CD. Especially useful if the video itself is not the best quality.

Are you already using video on your website? Leave me a comment and let me know about it!

In the past couple months, I’ve been noticing a big increase in the use of video on the Internet. I myself have been using a bit of video on this blog and video will figure into a redesign that I’m currently undertaking for my own website (more on this later).

Did you know that 52% of all web traffic video-related? Or that over 70% of people surfing the web watch online video? Or that on average YouTube visitors spend 27 minutes watching video? So what does that mean for you as the average artist or crafter working away in your studio? It means that if you don’t have video on your craft website, you are missing out on a huge opportunity.

Crafts actually are the perfect subject for video. Those who buy craft or those who collect art love to watch artists at work. Those who attend craft shows say that meeting the artists and talking with them about their artwork is part of what makes the whole experience fun. If you sell exclusively to galleries or exclusively online…this is an important piece of promotion that you are missing.

Having a video of yourself working on your art or a video of yourself explaining what your craft is all about is a great way to duplicate this experience on your website. Those who visit your website get to see you at work in your studio…they get to see that what you are selling on your website did not come from a factory. Plus, they also get a better idea about who you are as an artist by hearing your voice and seeing your face. Instead of a lifeless image on the web, you and your craft becomes an actual person that they can make a connection with. And it’s that connection that art collectors love when they are purchasing art.

So how would you get started? In the past online video used to be a huge undertaking. But now with the availability of tools like iMovie and Vegas Video, the spread of high speed Internet, and the ability for even the smallest cellphone to take video any artist can get video on their website with just a little effort.

Here are ways you can use video to promote your art on the web:

• Remember that the videos don’t have to be a huge production. Short videos of 1 to 3 minutes are usually perfect for the web.
• Be yourself…craft lovers are interested in the real you. Don’t think you need to become an actor in order to make your video.
• Take a small video tour of your art studio. If you don’t hold open studios, this is a fantastic way for your customers to see where you make your art.
• Take video of you working in your studio. People love to watch craft being made.
• Create a video artist’s statement where you talk about your creative philosophy. Even though you may have a written copy of your artist statement already, people are more likely to watch a short 1 to 3 minute video than they are to read your artist statement.
• If your craft has historical roots, create a video where you explore the history of your craft.
• Did you know that you can make video without owning a video camera? Choose photos you and your craft and record audio narration to create a video slideshow.
• Don’t restrict yourself to posting your art video just on your website. Open an account at YouTube and post your video there. And don’t stop at YouTube. While they may be the most popular there are other video sites out there as well. Open accounts at Dailymotion, LiveVideo, and Blip.tv and post your videos there.
• Share your video link with craft bloggers. Links to videos make great content for those who blog about crafts.
• Remember that the more places people can find your craft video, the more people can find your website. So be sure to share your video with everyone you can think of!

In a recent blog post on the Art Biz blog there was a question about whether it’s a good idea to have Google Adsense on your website or on your blog. The reader wrote about the fact that you might be able to earn some money by offering these ads, so wasn’t that a good idea?

Now, in my opinion, if you’re using your blog or website to either promote your work or yourself, introducing Google Adsense has more drawbacks than potential pluses. Here’s what they are:

1. You’re sending traffic away from your site- If you’re busting your butt trying to encourage people to visit your website in the first place, the last thing you want to do is to send them right back out again? By introducing Google Adsense to your website, you’re essentially building traffic for someone else. Not good if the goal of your site is to promote yourself or sell your work.

2. You have no real control over what kind of ads show up- While Google Adsense can be fairly good at provide ads that match whatever content that’s on your website or blog, you may still have a situation where a questionable ad shows up because of something innocent that you post on your website. Here’s an example. I know of one blogger who blogged about her sister being diagnosed with breast cancer. So guess what type of ad showed up on her blog? Ads for breast cancer information of course, but also ads for breast enhancement as well…just because the word “breast” appeared on her blog. This lady is an abstract painter…why would she want to have ads for breast enhancement on her blog?

3. Adsense can totally distract from the look of your website or your blog- If you’ve spent the time and/or money to have a nice attractive website, why muck it up with a piece of content that you don’t have much control over. Besides the fact that to many visitors, running up on a Google Adsense while looking at an artist’s online portfolio is similar to having a salesman come up to you trying to hawk timeshares while you are trying to tour a gallery. Adsense can completely distract your visitors away from the reason why they’re on your website in the first place…to look at your art.

4. You probably won’t make much money…if any at all- People do make money off of Google ads and some people can make quite a lot of money by displaying Google Adsense. But the only way to make real money by displaying ads is to design your blog or your website specifically to gather Adsense traffic and to encourage the people to click on the ads. If you do that, then you will be taking the focus off of you and your work…and if that’s the reason you have a website, that’s exactly what you don’t want.

Bottom line…if you want to make money on your blog or on your website you need to focus more on trying to get leads and trying to sell your artwork rather than trying to get money from Adsense.

I have to thank Alyson Stanfield over at the Art Biz Blog for the link to this Wall Street Journal article about “The Lost Art of Writing About Art“.

Apparently the art critics writing about the biennial exhibition of contemporary art at the Whitney Museum weren’t so much criticizing the art as they were criticizing the commentary about the art. I believe the criticism involved the words…”unalloyed gibberish”.

Ouch!

Why is it the fashion to use phrases like “inhabits those interstitial spaces between understanding and confusion” (an actual excerpt from the exhibition) when it comes to writing about or talking about art? I experienced a lot of this when I was in school. When the professor called on students to make a statement about their work, those budding artists seemed to automatically gear up into this kind of high flown and incomprehensible language to describe a collage made out of paper and a variety artfully arranged found objects.

And I, who much to the disappointment of my professors and fellow students never quite got the knack of inventing such phrases like “invents puzzles out of nonsequiturs” (another actual excerpt), would be at the back of the class rolling my eyes.

And guess what? That’s how most people will react to your artist statement or any kind of description or commentary about your work if you start writing about how your work “is a conflation of art space and work space” (the hits just keep on coming!).

If you’re exhibiting in galleries or museums, if you’re selling at an art or craft show, if you have a brochure or website, sooner or later you’ll be called upon to write about yourself or your work. Your artist bio and artist statement are the things that speak for you and your art when you aren’t there to speak for yourself. Do you want your potential customers to roll their eyes when they are reading your artist statement?

When you’re writing about your work, be natural. Pretend that you’re explaining what you do to your best friend. That doesn’t mean that you should be talking down to people or that you can’t use 50 cent words like “nonsequiturs” if you need to. Just don’t go for the complicated word or phrase when a simpler one will work just as well. And FYI, no one is going to type in “nonsequiturs” when they are Googling your website. So web-wise, writing naturally about your work will not only make your fans and customers happy, it will also make Google happy when they are trying to rank your site in search engine results.

If you’re in the midst of writing an artist statement, artist Deanna Wood wrote a great blog post on how to write an artist statement a while back ago. Check it out for some great ideas. Plus, read a previous post I did on what words to avoid when you’re writing your artist’s bio. I’ll admit that I’ve been guilty of using these words!

If you’re interested in how not to write your artist statement, check out Carol Diehl’s blog, Art Vent. She wrote about the Whitney exhibit and was the source of these interesting tidbits from the show.

I’ve been catching up on my podcast listening for the past few weeks and I’ve recently finished a very interesting episode of CraftSanity. If you’re not familiar with CraftSanity, it’s a weekly interview show where podcaster, Jennifer Ackerman-Haywood interviews some of today’s most well-known crafters and indie designers. In episode #58, Jennifer departs from her usual interview format to record a panel discussion on craft blogging at the 2007 BlogHer conference, which focuses on women who blog. Some of the panelists included Kristen Roach, Amy Sedaris, Leah Peterson, and Kathy Cano Murillo (The Crafty Chica).

I thought that the most interesting part of the podcast was during the age-old discussion about pricing. One attendee said that she suspected that most people thought that her items were over-priced and she asked how she could convey the time, quality, and hard work that goes into her products. One of the panelists pointed out that when they were first starting to sell their work on the web, one of the biggest mistakes they made was trying to make their site look like Macy’s or Nordstroms. There wasn’t a sense that the items were handmade, but rather, it almost looked as though everything on the site came out of factory somewhere. It was only when they started blogging about the creative process, started telling the story about the creation of each item, and including photos of works in progress that they started making more sales. In fact, some of the items that they featured as works in progress on their blogs were often sold almost before they completed it. People became intrigued through watching the process that they couldn’t wait for it to be available.

This is a tip that I’m sorry to say that I don’t use as much as I could on my own blog and website, but I do plan to implement more in the coming year. One indie designer that does this very well is Australian graphic designer, Lara Cameron on her blog Kirin Notebook. Lara designs printed stationary, textiles, and various other things. She’s always blogging about the process of developing her fabric designs, posts some of the loveliest photos of her works in progress, of items made with her fabrics, and every so often she’ll post directions to a craft project that uses her fabrics.

By the time she posts an announcement that her fabrics are on sale in her Etsy store, her readers and fans are just itching to get their hands on them. I’ve seen her sell out of fabric within hours of posting the announcement on her blog.

So what can you do to start telling the story of the work you do? What parts of your creative process do your customers find fascinating? What techniques can you use to start illustrating the story of your work? You can begin by taking more “in-progess” photographs of your work. Get a digital camera to make it easier to take and post photos quickly. While they don’t have to be studio quality photographs, take some time to make them nice. The Storque, Etsy’s blog for buyers and sellers has a nice tutorial on taking photographs for online sales that can give you some tips on how to do this.

Write about how ideas for your work came about. Talk about what was going on in your life or in your career when you were working on a particular piece. Get your customers in on the action. Ask your customers for photos of them displaying, wearing, or using your items and post them on your website or blog. If you have access to a microphone or a video camera start recording audio or video commentary to include on your blog. Use services like Flickr, Slideshare, and YouTube to get these stories out.

It’s easy for all of us to forget that part of what fascinates people about our work are the stories behind it. Use this tip from the ladies from the BlogHer panel to to show what your work is all about.

P.S. Be sure to check out that CraftSanity episode on Jennifer’s site. The discussion about pricing starts at about 35 minutes and 40 seconds into the show, but I suggest listening to the whole thing if you have the time…lots of great info there!