Entries from May 2007 ↓

Find What eBay Buyers Want
How to Easily Find Niche Phrases
Build a Niche Store

This may seem like an unusual subject for artists. After all, what you do is based on your own muse and the pent-up creative energy that screams to be released. What an affront to think in such lowly business terms as niche and market. So to make this easier to swallow, let’s talk in hypothetical terms. Let’s invent an artist and call him Bob. Bob is a watercolor artist. Bob wants to make a living from his art, but no matter what he tries he has not been able to achieve this. Bob offers for sale his originals, prints, cards, postcards, coffee mugs… anything you can think of. But nobody buys anything from him.

This is not an unusual situation, both in and out of the art world. Hundreds and thousands of businesses create products that no one wants. They even have focus groups that tell them a product sounds great, but then nobody buys. And that is too often how the process works. Create a product (or work of art) and then try to sell it. The problem is that this is completely backwards!

Focus on a niche and the identify what problems or needs they have. From those needs, create a product that that they are willing to spend money on to satisfy that need or solve that problem. Does this sound reasonable? Why create a product and then try to find a market when you can identify the market beforehand and create a product you already know will sell.

Take this principle and then apply it to your work as an artist. Let’s go back to Bob the watercolor artist. Bob’s first step is to identify a niche that could potentially use his services as an artist. Bob has noticed that on many occasions he has gone to a restaurant or other business that has either a barren feel or has art on the walls that is completely out of sync with the feel of the place. One place in particular, his dentist’s waiting room, has pictures that are bright and warm and energetic. He talks to his dentist who agrees that he would rather have pictures that are more soothing. Bob is then commissioned to paint three pictures that will help calm and soothe his patients. Bob does some mock-ups, brings them by for approval, and goes to work. He knows ahead of time that he has already sold his paintings.

Leaving Bob behind, I can remember the Mexican restaurant that Sara and I went to with some friends the night before we left for our trip to Minnesota. This place was pretty classy and had obviously spent time and money on getting the right look and feel. Imagine my surprise when I looked on the walls next to our table and saw two paintings that were completely out of place. They were rather contemporary and had a scene of two American children with lollipops. Since they were a new restaurant, they probably were approached by friends to display a couple of their paintings for sale. I don’t think it would take much effort to convince them to put something much more fitting up on the wall.

I hope this gets you thinking about trying another approach to selling your art.

Find What eBay Buyers Want
How to Easily Find Niche Phrases
Build a Niche Store

Chris O’Byrne
www.OnlineArtsMarketing.com

‘Wealth’ is one of those words that both turns us off and, often secretly, excites us. Most of us want it, but we don’t really want to talk about it because then people might think we’re money hungry and materialistic. But what is wealth, really?

The first step is to define what wealth means to you. To me, wealth means abundance and having enough. I do not want to worry about or focus on money. When I had too little, I was always worried about getting enough to eat, paying rent, etc. If I had too much, I would worry about saving enough for emergencies, if I was investing it wisely, and even worse, wondering if everyone was being nice to me just because of it. I want to focus on my relationships and my work, the things that make me happy. I do not want to spend my time thinking about money.

One day I took these thoughts a little further. How much money is just enough? What is the least expensive way that I could live? I thought about Peace Pilgrim and how from the age of 45 until her death at 73 in 1981 she walked 25,000 miles to learn about and talk about peace. Could I live simply walking from one place to the next? I could! I could carry my laptop in my backpack,connect at coffee shops, and do all of my online business as an itinerant. Sure, this is carrying the idea to an extreme, but it also helps put things in perspective. “Enough” can be much less than we think. “Enough” does not have to be enough to maintain our current lifestyle… we have the power to change our lifestyle!

On the other hand, I strongly believe that we need to set goals of what we want and create that reality in our minds first. Have you watched “The Secret”? If not, get it and do so. How much money do you want to create each month? What kind of lifestyle do you really want? What is the least amount of money you can live on? What is the most that will cover all of your wants and needs? Set a monthly amount and make that your goal. Do you want $5000 a month? Easy. Really! How many people in the world are already making that much each month, every one of them creating it in a different way.

Is there enough money in the world for everyone to have $5000 a month? Why not? We’re not talking about everyone in the world getting $5000 worth of gold of which there is an apparently finite amount. Money is simply one of the physical manifestations of energy transfer. I know that is a mouthful, but what it really means is that money does not exist in a finite amount. Is the total amount of money in the world today more than the total amount 100 years ago? Of course. Why? Because there are more people and more minds filled with creative thought transferring their thoughts and energy (and the products that come as a result of those thoughts) to others.

This can be a difficult and deeply philisophical subject or it can be looked at very simply. MONEY IS INFINITE! There is more than enough for everyone and when we need more we simply create more. How does that work? Let’s say that you have created a loyal following of people that want to buy your paintings. Every time you create a painting, you sell it immediately. Normally you create one painting a month and get paid $5000 a month, enough to be wealthy according to how you have defined it for yourself. Now let’s say that your car breaks down and you need to buy a new one. Easy! You create two paintings that month and you have just created twice as much wealth. Yes, there is a limit to how many paintings you can create each month, but there are many other ways of creating more wealth. You could sell prints of your painting. You already have a loyal following of fans, you simply duplicate your work and create more money. Duplicating your work by creating prints is what is called “passive income”. It is passive because you already did the work and you are simply duplicating that work without as much effort, sometimes no effort at all. There are many more ways to create passive income and I will cover as many of these as possible in future posts.

Chris O’Byrne
www.OnlineArtsMarketing.com

I’ve been tagged by Diane Clancy for the meme of 7 random things about myself and then tag 7 more blogs of interest.

1. I’ve been playing bluegrass guitar, mandolin, and fiddle for over 30 years! (myspace.com/chrisobyrne)

2. I have a degree in chemical engineering and another in physical science teaching and almost a masters in Earth Literacy.

3. I taught high school for six years and helped start a charter school for the arts (Studio Academy) in Rochester, MN.

4. I have four beautiful children.

5. I’ve driven to every state capitol in the lower 48 states.

6. My hobbies include birding, geocaching, highpointing, camping, traveling, cooking, music, reading, writing, and very rarely, pen and ink.

7. Today is my 43rd birthday! (I’m back into my prime!!)

My 7 blogs of interest (that I do not think have yet been tagged) include:

1. Genius Types: Creative Live and Passive Income

2. Steve Pavlina: Personal Development for Smart People

3. Ryan Healy: On Copywriting

4. 43 Folders

5. Otto’s Random Thoughts

6. Clint Watson Blog

7. Alyson Stanfield’s ArtBizBlog.com

Chris O’Byrne
www.OnlineArtsMarketing.com

In Ryan Healy’s post, Trackbacks Continued, he talks about yet another useful technique: sending trackbacks to yourself. With that in mind, I am including a trackback in this post that sends a trackback to my last post discussing Ryan’s previous article, 3 Reasons to Trackback.

Round and round we go!

Chris O’Byrne
www.OnlineArtsMarketing.com
www.peacefulbirder.com

I think there is still A LOT of people out there that do not know about subscribing to blogs. In order to understand this concept, you first need to know that there are things called newsreaders out there. Let’s say that you  read several blogs every day. A newsreader takes all of those blogs and lists them on the side and then shows you which ones have new posts. To read the posts, you simply click on their title and they show up in the same window. You do not have to go to each blog and check for new ones, the newsreader does it all for you. There are several newsreaders out there. Some you use online (such as Bloglines and Google Reader) and others are programs you install on your computer. I personally use a free Mac program called Vienna and I love it.

What does this have to do with the price of tea in China? If you look in the upper right of the screen, just above the search field, you will see I have added a new little gadget that shows you how many people subscribe to this blog. Not many. You can change this. Right now. Click on that sucker and go to town!

Thanks to Ryan Healy (again) for making me aware of this gadget. He wrote a post on how his readership has been rising ever since he installed a similar gadget on his blog.

Chris O’Byrne
www.OnlineArtsMarketing.com
www.peacefulbirder.com

I listened to a great teleseminar last night, a interview with Clint Watson (of FineArtStudioOnline and FineArtViews fame) by Alyson Stanfield (of ArtBizCoach and ArtBizBlog fame) about how to become an online art magnet. The main focus of this talk was how to get more traffic to your art site by the smart use of links, search engine optimization, and blogs. Clint and I share many of the same views and opinions about art marketing and I wondered if I was actually going to learn something new. I did. Quite a bit. Well worth the money I spent for both this teleseminar and a recording of his previous one on “How to Create a Website that Sells”. You can purchase both for the reasonable price of $25.

Chris O’Byrne
www.OnlineArtsMarketing.com
www.peacefulbirder.com

Rather than reiterate what Ryan has already so succinctly written about trackbacks, I thought I would just send you to his post.

Trackbacks work differently with my blog. People can use MY trackback with no problem, but for me to use someone else’s trackback just doesn’t work. The reason is that I use RapidWeaver for my blog. I love WordPress and am a certified WordPress Customizer (okay, I made that up), but I wanted to play with RapidWeaver in case I needed to use it for someone else. There is a third party plugin for RapidWeaver called RapidBlog that I use for a few of my clients. This set up is even better because it automatically synchronizes with someone’s Blogger account. That way they can write in their own blog whenever they want and the blog text will automatically insert itself into the website I have designed for them and follow the same design as the rest of their website.

Okay, if you are reading this you will see that I have switched over to WordPress. Fortunately, the new version allows me several import options, so I was able to bring all my posts with me. Hurray for WordPress!

Chris O’Byrne
www.peacefulbirder.com
www.OnlineArtsMarketing.com

We all love systems - they make life easier!

In all parts of my business, I think in terms of systems whenever possible to conceptualize the total process.

The best thing about systems is repeatability. If you can handoff a simple checklist with instructions, you have a fantastic system. Of course, this is the key to any entrepreneur’s success…

Here’s a simple system for marketing information on the web:

For the rest of this post, go to The Mindful Entrepreneur.

Chris O’Byrne
www.peacefulbirder.com
www.OnlineArtsMarketing.com 

Here is a great post on the odds of becoming a successful freelance copywriter… or anything else.
Ryan Healy’s Blog “On Copywriting”

Chris O’Byrne
www.peacefulbirder.com
www.OnlineArtsMarketing.com