How to promote your art gallery on the web
Marketing your art gallery on the Internet might be one of the wisest moves you’ve ever made. There are thousands of potential clients on the web – and you don’t need to wait around hoping that they come across you. There’s a lot you can do in order to make yourself easier to find when they’re searching on the internet for a art gallery in your neighbourhood.
If you don’t have a web site for your gallery then that’s job one on the To Do list. It is possible to promote yourself on the web without a website – but why make things more difficult than they need to be? You could employ a local company to produce a site for you – (remember to contact other businesses they’ve carried out work for, to check they’re pleased), or even build it yourself from scratch (all the knowledge you need is available on the web). Alternatively, you could post a job on an outsourcing website like Rent-a-Coder – that can be a very cost-effective way to get a website created.
A lot of people make the error of not having any tracking or analytics set up for their internet site. This is crazy, because with no analytics you’ll have no way of knowing how many visitors your website is getting, where they’re coming from, and what they’re reading on your website. It’s just like having a blindfold on. There are lots of analytics systems to pick from – many are free, and simple to install.
One of the best ways to get started promoting your site, is to post it to various directories. There are hundreds of standard directories on the web – many are free of charge, and others you’ll have to pay for. Yahoo Directory is perhaps the best known paid directory – but at $299 every year, it’s debatable whether or not it represents good value. DMOZ is a well known free directory – but it normally takes months to get accepted, if you actually do. Still, it’s well worth using a directory submission service to post your site to a hundred or so of the main free directories – they should charge only a few cents each.
Vertical market directories or web sites are the most worthwhile places to showcase your web site. Regrettably many markets simply don’t have sites like that – and the few that there are realize their value and are inclined to charge accordingly. Fortunately, there is http://www.ClickArtGalleries.co.uk/ which is a art gallery specialist so it’s definitely worth signing up with them (particularly as appearing on that web site is currently absolutely free!). If you can find other sites in your marketplace, try to register with them too.
Instead of sitting back and waiting for site visitors to appear at your site – you could advertise to get started bringing them in. Google Adwords is a brilliant way to achieve this – it’s a Pay Per Click advertising product that will show your adverts alongside Google’s search pages – and as you might expect, you only pay out when somebody clicks through to your website.
If you want to be able to remind people to come back to your site – or to tell them when you have bargains available, then you’ll want to capture their email address when they are on your website. Services such as GetResponse make this easy. You can use the service to send just one newsletter from time to time – or create a sequence to be mailed automatically at regular intervals. This is a superb method of staying in contact with prospective clients – and once it’s put in place – it all happens automatically – you don’t need to worry about it again.
With any luck , this article has given you a practical summary of Online Marketing as it applies to your art gallery. There’s plenty more to master – but the most important thing is to get started – put up a basic internet site (you can always upgrade it later), and start acquiring new customers from the net. Have fun.
This entry was posted on Sunday, October 31st, 2010 at 3:23 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.