The following are some thoughts on what an artist can do to improve their chances of success in the coming New Year. Contained in these ideas are links to additional articles and posts which will explain and detail these concepts more fully for the reader;

1.         Check all of the pages of your website to see if they working properly and loading quickly.  If you can speed up the loading of your Home Page, this should be done.  Besides being annoying to some viewers, slow loading speeds can negatively impact whether your website gets a higher page rank or not.  Also, make sure that your website links (internal and external links) are working and that the format of each page is the way in which it was intended to be viewed (for whatever reason, things move, stop working, disappear, images and graphics can suddenly not be viewed).

2.         Make sure that all of the images on your website are sized properly, with a low resolution (A Resolution of 72 will help your site to loader more quickly too) and the images should be color corrected as well.

Are there better images or graphics that can be substituted for what now exists on the website?  .  This should be done in order to get the search engines to index your images (Without image descriptions the images will not be indexed).  By doing this, they will ultimately get your images to show up in the search results and when the images are viewed, they will also direct the viewer to your art website as well.

3.       Review all written text and images within your art portfolio.  Whatever parts of the portfolio can be improved upon should also be done.  Are there any new images that you can display?  Are there better images that can replace present ones in your portfolio?  Try to upgrade and update wherever possible within your art portfolio.  Make sure all have titles, sizes and pricing information. 

4.     Review and rewrite your Artist Statement and Biography.  Update your CV adding any exhibitions, new publications and any other pertinent information that has taken place since the last time that it was posted on your website or printed in your portfolio.

5.         Review any of your social media accounts, update or complete your profiles.  If any of your social media profile images can be improved or upgraded, then they should be done and also add any other new information to those social media profiles as well.  Just make sure that whatever is written or is shown on the profiles is spelled correctly and with proper sentence structure. 

Remember, a social media profile is almost like having an online resume’ for the whole world to see.   The idea of a Social Media Profile is to get people to want more information about you by going to your art website.  This is accomplished with a completed, well written and attractive Social Media Profile.

Here are a few other ideas for an artist to try and to follow in the New Year; In order to drive more traffic to your website, an artist should consider starting an Art Blog for the New Year.  An art blog helps to brand you as an expert, expands your target audience and ultimately will provide more visitors to your website.

Also, an artist should try to join and set up with as many Artist Registries and Directory Websites as possible in order to also create and direct additional traffic back to their art website.

There are many free Art Portfolio Websites where an artist can join and also expose their art to many more viewers. Whether it is an Artistry Registry, Directory or an Art Portfolio website, any of these platforms will help to direct traffic back to the artist’s website and should be freely employed by the artist.

An artist should start an ongoing online public relations campaign for all important art-related occasions, events, and functions that they are involved in throughout the year. Here is an article that we posted with some ideas to follow; Top 10 Events for Artists to Send Out Press Releases.

If the artist is totally happy with their marketing efforts and with the volume of sales of their art, then all of the suggestions above are totally unnecessary.  However, if the artist is disappointed with their results, then we believe that some of these ideas may help the artist to be more successful in 2014.

Happy New Year to all art professionals from the Light Space & Time Online Art Gallery