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Do you know that I can see wheter you open my newsletter, and if you click on any links?
More precisely: did you know I can even see on WHICH links you click?
You didn’t?
Well, it’s true, I can.
Not that I necessarily want to know all these things: I am happy enough if you just read my newsletter. But the tools come free with every mass mailing program.
Through other programs I can also see how many people visit my website. I can see from which country they are, which internet browser they use, and how long they stay on which pages of my site.
No worries, I cannot see wheter it is you exactly who is visiting.
Unless you have an unusual internet provider, or if your server carries your own name. Then I might know who you are.
I do not spend a lot of time tracking these facts however. Not anymore.
It was exhilirating when I first found out about tracking stats, in 2009. I would send an elated email to my sister Francis if someone spent a full hour on my website – until she, who had a website before me, pointed out that person might have just walked away from the computer to visit the bathroom.
(For one hour? I protested. I never want her to win.)
Conversely, I would be insulted if someone else only stayed on my website for 0 seconds – I had not yet learned about bots. And I did not know then that 5 minutes is considered a long visit in online land.
I soon got bored with the stats and stopped checking.
Actually, right now I am sure I should have spent much more time looking at my visitor stats over the last few years.
Don’t look at my stats, please
Until this morning I had put off looking at my internet stats for a long time. It was too painful.
I told you earlier about how I do a special project every summer. And how this year I started with a simple blogging course, which then got me entangled into some serious research into online marketing.
Why? Because early on in the blogging course I had come to realize that I was doing something seriously wrong. Not in the writing, but in the marketing. I had way too few visitors and made way too few sales online compared to what I am selling offline. So how could I justify all the hours spent at my computer, honestly?
I decided to give trying to get some serious traffic to my website going one more shot. If that doesn’t work I will cut back on the online hours I make.
I am giving it till next summer.
Art marketing podcasts
Since I am nothing if not obsessive, I spent most of July listening to tons of marketing podcasts and visiting websites and blogs on marketing. There are quite a few of those. It seems that all of us want to sell stuff to everyone else.
Only a few, however, specialize in art marketing. Which to my mind is a totally different branch.
Online marketing guru’s – from Sterling and Jay at the InternetBusinessMastery, who also host the #1 internet business podcast in the US, to my all time favorite copywriter Sonia Simone at Copyblogger – all tell you to first build trust with your readers. Try to become an expert in your chosen niche. Then, when you are engaged in an ongoing discussion with thousands (!) of them, just listen to what they say they need.
Provide it.
Automate it.
They will buy.
You will get rich while you sleep.
The artist’s ideal economy
I do not want to sleep all that much and I don’t need to get rich.
But art is communication, and I do want the things I make to be valued enough for them to sell. And then I want to go on making them forever, because I am happy when I make.
Because of that mindset, I am a typical artist.
You can read all about it in Why are artists poor? The exceptional economy of the arts by Hans Abbing. Abbing is an economist at the Rotterdam Erasmus University, a painter and a photographer. He found that artists do things that are totally counterintuitive for economists. When a boss offers an artist with a day job a pay rise, the artist will immediately cut back in hours.
Because all he wants is to spend as much time as he can in his studio.
But artists work counterclockwise in another way too: they don’t first think about what stuff their market needs. They don’t think about any market at all. They make their stuff and then dump it onto the marketplace period.
(And yes, often they will then also proceed to blame the market if it doesn’t sell.)
So I needed to find some specialists who really knew about art marketing. Those are way fewer in number.
Good art marketing guides are hard to come by
Also I wanted to make sure they knew what they were talking about. I had taken the odd course here and read the odd book there, but I was not convinced about the added value of many of the art marketing guides I found.
The first notable exceptions being Leslie Saeta and Dreama Toll Perry of the art marketing podcast and blog called Artists Helping Artists. Leslie (from California) and Dreama (from Kentucky) are online friends. They are also very entertaining ladies of my own age (which feels good).
Leslie paints sailboats with palette knives, while Dreama, who talks with one of these American accents that always get joked about, paints colourful gardens full of flowers and deck chairs waiting for you to slump down in.
In short, they paint the good life.
They started a podcast by accident about a year ago, while they were trying to grow their own traffic.
Their idea was to get together with a group of artists in an online meeting every week, to help each other out. But soon Leslie proved to be such an active and resourceful researcher and Dreama such a witty and clever sidekick that they took over the whole thing.
They come up with a never ending stream of tips and tricks about the online Art Biz every week. I have put many of them to good use already.
When I had finally finished integrating my two former blogs with one new website, in July, I asked Leslie for a review. She gave me a lot of excellent advice and feed back – one of the things she pointed out was that I was not presenting my work in the best possible way.
I realized I was pretty blind to many obvious things on my own site, even though I am always helping others with texts and advice on theirs.
The abundant artist
Then I found a second art marketing website that looked promising: Cory Huff’s The Abundant Artist. Cory is another interesting guy – he is amongst other things an actor, an internet specialist and a mormon. As a real Dutch woman and therefore a staunch atheist I was a bit worried he would take offense to some of my work – but he sounded amazingly open minded in his podcasts and video’s. I have really come to admire his practical and open way of communicating.
Cory provides a huge amount of basic knowledge about marketing and the internet for artists. I would say his tutorials provide all the basic knowledge about marketing and the internet that every artist needs. He even set up a whole range of video’s to guide you through every bit of the process of building your own wordpress website. I listened to his podcasts time and again and every time realized I had yet missed another piece of important information.
Over the years I have mastered many computer and online programmes, I can build websites in Dreamweaver, set up a Blogger blog in 10 minutes, I know how to set up a WordPress site and install plugins – I even picked up some code writing tricks. I have a Twitter account and a Facebook account, I am on Google + and Linkedin and then some places.
So I flew through the 8 week course in a few days – but I also realized I had never before understood the true and proper value of a really clean website, super easy navigation, supplying meaningful tags and how to name your files so that they show up in Google image searches.
As a teacher of journalism, who is always telling her students to think about the reader first, second and third, I had not applied the same rules to my art business!
Amazing.
But I finally got it.
Because my summer study period was drawing to a close – schools start next monday – I asked for a few extra, short website reviewing sessions with Cory Huff. To speed things up a little.
He was quick and practical.
Yes, I had to do away with the blogposts on the front page.
Yes, I had to put an opt-in form for my newsletter on my homepage.
Yes, even if it was unaesthetical.
Yes, I had to dump the shop and put Buy Now buttons with the art that was for sale instead.
And he suggested a few more measures.
And you know what? After all these years, I liked being told what to do.
Another funny thing is I knew or had read about a lot of the things he said, but I had always had doubts about most of them, and therefore never put them into practice.
Doesn’t matter, said Cory; just do it.
And so, this morning I looked at my stats
I have finished most of the work on the website now. The navigation is simpler. I have clearly indicated which things are for sale and at what price. I have weeded out some superfluous content. I intend to blog more regularly and systematically.
I asked you for help to come up with a tagline for my website, since I could not for the life of me think of one. I got some exellent suggestions, and then I got an email from Jennifer Abramsohn, an American journalist in Germany. She wrote ‘How about 100 % cynicism free art’? And I had to laugh so loud I knew it was perfect. Thank you so much, Jennifer!
Also I have started to make some other things than prints to sell. I love thinking them up and designing them.
So I am pretty happy with all the work I have done over the summer.
And since I was planning to write this report for you, I now had to check my stats.
I am taking a deep breath here. Will you still like me as a person once you have seen my ridicilously low visitor count?
(Just joking, for the most part at least).
On the upside, things can never get worse than they are.
My new website went online on June 21st.
Here are the stats for the first two months:
| June 21 – July 20 | July 20 – August 20 | |
| Visitors | 1053 | 1313 |
| Unique visitors | 584 | 695 |
| Pageloads | 5894 | 6298 |
| Bounce rate | 54 % | 51 % |
| Time on site | 5 min | 5 min |
| Visitors nationality: | ||
| Dutch | 713 | 786 |
| American | 101 | 206 |
| Visitors more than 9 returns | 52 % > 9 times 16 % | 54 % – > 9 times 30 % |
And here is some of the proof:
So there is some progress already.
Amazing. Let’s see how things work out from here.
I am not sure if this long, long post was of any interest to you!
Or if you have any further suggestions on any of the things I wrote about.
If so, just enter your thoughts in a comment.
PS I shall write short posts hereafter.
Tags: art marketing, blogging, internet stats, mailing program, visitor stats
Well, the stats about time spend on your blog will improve with this post, that´s for sure..!
I just recently found out that the bouncerate isn´t a good tool for blogs. Only when visitors go to another page other than the front page, it starts counting the avarage time on site. At my blog most of the people doesn´t come further than the front page. So most of the time I see 0:00.. So when someone clicks through 3 pages, I´m euforic.. In my next posts, I will try to let people stay longer, but it´s also the process of how a blogreader reads..
If a first time visitor only visits the homepage, or the first post, I would be disappointed anyway. Wouldn’t you? I have to admit I still have to do the lesson about stats.. to know how to set it all up and understand it better.. I will let you know if I find out more!
You have me hook, line and sinker the whole way through Kitty! Compelling reading because I know what a perfectionist you are and how enthusiastic you are to make all this work. It’s all gold! I find it all relevant as well because I can relate to how you feel about the classic way people want to sell things online and the contrast of selling art online. I think it is far more personal and so it is harder to make the changes, even harder to see where to make the changes. But your stats are evidence that all this hard work is paying off for you. I am so excited to see you getting this result. I wish I was in a position now to stop and take heed of how you have done this but as you know I’m not making it a priority just at this moment.. but will keep the Aussie representation in your stats going and hopefully in the not too distant future get my art things back on track too!
And, no I haven’t walked off to go to the toilet… I’ve been reading and typing on your blog the whole time!!!! ; )
Ha ha, we’ll see within a year, Chantal! I am planning to give reports every now and then.. Glad to see you represent Australia in such an eloquent way!
What a great way to get people to stay on your site for more than five minutes! write a long and interesting post. Who doesn’t want to talk about readership? Now, this will come as a shock. About two months ago I switched my blogspot design and I guess that messed up my google analytics tracking because suddenly I had 0 visitors (even though I would have 10 comments) and guess what? I haven’t reconfigured it yet! And I think I’m resisting (but you know me). It still is fascinating to check out though! And yes, I will admit that I have left sites open to go cook dinner because I will forget to go back later. And last night I spent 3 hours on one blog and it was only because I realized the house were bidding on is the feature of a four year long gardening blog. Talk about finding relevant information on a blog!!
I am no expert .. there is a bug in my GA as well which I dare not change for fear of loosing the stats. Well, you may resist all you like. You will do fine with or without stats! But about the blog.. how interesting. The seller must be sad to part with it then.
Nice blog! and great to see it is working for you! One thing I’m missing: twitter and fcaebook buttons so I can share your blog ;-)
Thanks! The buttons are there on my screen.. may be you used an Ipad or some other device that does not show them? Hm..
Kitty this is blog gold! I’m always willing to read a long post if its well written, relevant, and gives me something in return. You came through on that completely here. As artists we do always seem to do things backwards…is it because we’re wired a bit differently than most folks? It takes outside perspective and some willingness to experiment in order to make big things happen. Kudos on your successes already, and I’m sure you will hit your goal well before next summer!
Thanks Gina! Is that the reason WE do things backwards? I thought it was just me being very clumsy! What a relief ;-)
Kitty! I can’t believe how much work you’ve been doing to nail this art marketing thing. You are serious and methodical. I admire it. Where do you get your energy?! I’m going back to check out that marketing website. You will prevail!
Let’s hope so ;-)