Here are a few strategies for increasing traffic to your web site and for encouraging people to sign up for your email newsletter an important goal, as we discussed yesterday in "The Real Goal of Your Web " In addition to the personal, ongoing strategies we discussed in Focus the Lens - Marketing Email , here are some more strategies: 1. Give away a "freebie" in exchange for their email address Perhaps a free ecalendar featuring your artwork. A free report that you've written about your artwork technique for other artists. 2. Get other people to drive traffic to your site. This is [...]

Successful marketers know that the best strategists take their offers TO the customers rather than waiting for the customers to come to them. That's why the primary goal of your web site is building your "house" email list. One strategy for marketing a business is to set up shop and wait for customers to come to you. A gallery could, for example, lease a location, invest in lighting, inventory and staff and open their doors. Day after day, salespeople could sit and wait for customers to walk through the door. Occassionally, a sales would be made, but why follow up with those customers? Just wait for [...]

Each person you know and meet has a "lifetime value" in terms of your career that is most certainly not immediately apparent. However, just as $1 in the bank will grow enormously over time through the "miracle" of compound interest, so will the benefits you receive from people *if* you treat each person with respect, honestly and with an attitude of how you can mutually help each other (not just what you can "get" from the other person). I'll illustrate the point with a story and let you decide the lifetime value of a single contact. (The actual names in this story have been obscured or changed). Years ago, when I [...]

1. Make a list of EVERYONE You 2. Email Everyone You 3. Send Five PERSONAL Emails 4. Follow Up on Each Email You 5. Follow Up with People Your Friends 6. All Focus the Lens Series [...]

The "last step" in focusing the lens is to repeat the process Once you have an established relationships with the “friends of your friends” go back to step 2 and send these people the "everyone you know email" and begin the process again. If you will make this process a part of your daily routine you will likely never run out of leads for your art work. [...]

This step is simple: Send each person whom your friends refer a personal email, again five or six emails a day at most. Introduce yourself, tell the person that so and so (your friend) recommended you contact them (this is extremely important) and provide links to your site and your work. Assure them that you will not harass them. For greater response make this step a PHONE campaign. [...]

I received the following email today. I'm not sure if the sender has been following my "Focus the Lens" series or not, but I thought it was a great example of a personal feeling email which the sender obviously sent to people in her address book. As I discussed in Focus the Lens: Email Everyone You Here is the email: Greetings, Everyone! Retirement is wonderful! As many of you know, I began painting again during the winter of 2005-06 after more than 30 years. I entered some local art shows during the year, had some success, and have decided to continue with this [...]

About two weeks after you email each person personally, contact him/her again, PERSONALLY and ask specifically if there is anyone they feel you should follow-up with personally. You’re shooting to get five or six names here (this is an average, some people will give you no names, some will volunteer more than five). This could be people your friend thinks would be most interested in your work, most interested in art, or perhaps people who replied to their blanket request two weeks earlier but did not contact you directly. Assure your friend that you will treat the person referred with the utmost professionalism and respect as you have [...]

In the last post, I encouraged you to send personal emails to your contacts and ask them to email THEIR contacts. If any of your contacts ask for a sample email to use, here is one I put together as an idea. I would love it, if anyone who is doing this project would post a comment with samples of email that have worked for them. Dear , John Q. Painter is an artist who is also a friend of mine. I've enjoyed watching his work over the years and, in fact, own a couple of his pieces. I think you might enjoy his work also. John just [...]

If you’ve been “focusing the lens” with me, by now you’ve made a list of everyone you know and sent one email to each person on that list. Congratulations, you’re off to a good start. Today, I want you to pick five people from your list of contacts and send each one of those people a personal email. Yes, this means each one has to be individually written (although you can copy some of the main “guts” from one to the next) That’s not so hard, right? Just five emails. If you’re really ambitions, do as many as ten, but no more. I don’t [...]

If you’re following along this week, yesterday you made a list of everyone you know. Today, you take the first step in focusing the marketing lens upon your artwork. Today’s action is simple: email everyone you know. Draft an email announcement. Take a bit of time to make it interesting. Make it enticing. PLEASE, whatever you do don’t send a “hey check out my site” email. Talk a bit about your work. Or perhaps something new that you have done. It is a bit of a balance as you don’t want the email to be too long or too short. [...]

This week, I begin a series of articles on referral marketing. I firmly believe that for most artists, the majority of their market will come from people they know and/or from those with whom they have a personal connection. Seth Godin , marketing guru, writes about an interesting way to look at Internet marketing where a person become a "lens" to "focus" traffic upon a specific area of interest. For example, my blog is a "lens" focusing people upon aspects of marketing art. For artists (and other marketers), I propose that the "lens" concept works in another way. Think of your network as "light." [...]