Even though social media gets a lot of attention these days and people love to talk about what is new and what is next I believe good old fashioned email is the best way to keep in touch with your collectors and your fans.

AN EMAIL LIST IS TANGIBLE

Let’s look at two lists, a Facebook fan page list and an email list.

You decide to focus all of your attention on Facebook and build up your fans on there. Over time you get 1000 people to click your “like” button. You can now communicate with 1000 people via Facebook. Yeah! Great way to use the power of social media to promote you and your artwork.

Another artist you know decides to focus on building up an email list in order to keep in touch with folks who have shown interest in her work. Over time she build up a list of 1000 email subscribers and can now send messages directly to her fan’s in-box.

Who has the more valuable list?

You guessed it right, the email list.

Why is that?

There are many reasons. First and foremost the email list is an actual tangible list that you can download and keep on a spreadsheet and move to other email services if you need to. There is no way to do that with the fans of your Facebook page.

Email is also more valuable because anyone who connects to the internet has an email account. It is the very basic reason people use the internet. I know people who do zip on the web except check their email once a week or so. Despite Facebook’s high user number email’s use will always be higher.

And email will still be around long after Facebook is gone.

Email the right way

I could keep going but hopefully you get my point and have decided that you are going to work on building your email list. To do that you are going to need an email service. Plugging a bunch of email addresses into your Gmail’s “To:” and “CC:” field is the wrong way to use your list. Don’t do it!

Sign up for Mailchimp and set up a legitimate professional email list system. The people on your list will thank you for it. Mailchimp is FREE so you have no excuse. There are other such email services such as Constant Contact, aWeber, and iContact, but Mailchimp is the only one I know of that is free to use.

Okay well it is free up until you reach 1000 subscribers on your list and or you send out over 6,000 total emails a month. That is a great deal. They don’t even ask for a credit card on the free plan. Once you are over 1000 names on your list hopefully you are in a place where you can afford the $30 a month for the service.

Having a service like Mailchimp is a great way to manage your email list. It keeps it clean by weeding out old email addresses, it lets you know how many people opened the email and what they clicked on. It also keep you in compliance with the CAN-SPAM Act.

So there you have it! Free internet tool #1 Mailchimp.

If you have any questions about Mailchimp ask them. If you have any questions about email marketing ask me or better yet ask in the comments.

You can also download this free email marketing guide offered by Mailchimp.

Mailchimp Email Marketing and List Manager is a post from: Art Palaver The Artist Marketing Resource.

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This free online seminar will discuss various ways social media can be used to sell more art. We are going to focus more on methods and strategies, not just the tools of social media. Because if you do not have a sound strategy in place chances are you’ll just be wasting you time.

Each free Art Palaver webinar is no longer than 30 minutes long and includes plenty of time for live questions and answers.

The live event has already happened but you can find the audio, video, and slides below:

Social Media for Artists

Promote And Market Art Using Social Media | Free Online Seminar is a post from: Art Palaver The Artist Marketing Resource.

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The most visited URL on the internet is www.google.com, the second most visited is www.facebook.com. What started as a way for students of Havard University to stay connected has grown into the second most popular site on the whole world wide web.

Facebook currently has more than 400 million active users, 50% of those users log on to Facebook in any given day, more than 35 million users update their status daily, and an average user spends more than 55 minutes per day on Facebook. (Find more stats here.) What this means for the modern day artist is that there is a community of Facebook waiting to get to know you and your art. It means when we talk about marketing and promoting your work through social media Facebook is the one place that can not be ignored. Which is why I am excited to offer a free webinar on Facebook for artists.

This webinar will cover:

• Profiles vs. Pages
• Protecting your privacy
• Setting up your page to promote you and your work
• Finding fans
• Converting Fans into Sales
• Everything in between!

There will also be time for Q&A to answer your specific question.

If you are not able to make the live broadcast the audio will be available for download shortly after the event. I’ll be making separate posts that include this download. Please drop me a note or leave a comment on what day/times would work better for your schedule. Also let me know what topics you would like to see in future webinars. I plan on doing at least one webinar a week.

The live event has already happened. See what webinars are coming next here: http://www.artpalaver.com/category/marketing-selling-art-online/art-marketing-webinars/

Here is the audio recording of the webinar:

Facebook for Artists Webinar Audio

And this is the video which includes audio and slides:

Facebook For Artists | Free Art Marketing Webinar is a post from: Art Palaver The Artist Marketing Resource.

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In this video I talk about the Crush It! give-a-way. Facebook. Artist Aaron Ristau. Boing Boing. Lightsabers. All in only 240 seconds. It’s a good show.

The name AP240S comes from Art Palaver 240 second Show, get it? Each episode is just about 4 minutes long, or 240 seconds. AP240S looks better than AP4S to me. The idea behind the show is to do a fast one take no edit 4 minute recording where I talk about art, artists, selling art, marketing art, promoting art, and anything else that fits within all of that.

This is only episode six and I am still getting used to the format and speaking into the camera. Four minutes is actually a long time for an internet video so I know I am going to have to get better if I am going to ask for 240 seconds of your attention. And I am working towards doing two of these a week, one on Monday and one of Friday so I am really asking for 480 seconds of your time every week. Which is a lot. But I don’t expect everyone to watch every episode from start to finish. That is just the way of video on the internet. And if they seem to be a bit much I can always change it to the AP120S or maybe even the AP60S. Time will tell.

You may have noticed the Art Palaver site has been a little funky recently. I’ve been tweaking and improving the design and function of the site and it can cause things to be a bit weird at times. Sorry about that. The changes to to make room for many new resources that are coming down the pike. But that is all I am going to say about that. Look for changes to start really being hyped in March. This site is kind of my version of a one man band so it takes me a bit of time to get all the instruments in working together.

AP240S Episode Six | Crush It! Contest and Aaron Ristau is a post from: Art Palaver The Artist Marketing Resource.

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Don’t see a video? Click here.

Win A Copy Of Crush It By Gary Vaynerchuk | AP240S Video 005 is a post from: Art Palaver The Artist Marketing Resource.

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But if your readers are not plugging in your URL and visiting your blog directly how do you know you have readers? Tracking subscribers is just one great use for Feedburner. After you “burn your feed” Feedburner keep track of how many people are subscribed to your blog and also how they are subscribed. This information is very useful in helping you build your fan base. But subscriber stats is just one tiny reason you should be using Feedburner.

Email subscription is another reason. Many of your fans are not using RSS readers so that little orange square means nothing to them. But I would bet all the cash in my wallet that they do use email. Feedburner has an option that allows you to plug in an email subscription form into your blog. Your fans simply enter their  email and each time you blog your post is delivered right to their inbox. Using this one simple tool will increase your readership.

Feedburner has a ton more tools for the artist blogger to take advantage of. It allows you to add custom options to your feeds such as links to social bookmarking sites or Facebook. You can limit the amount of text that is delivered to a feed, forcing readers to click a link to your site to read the whole post. The “SmartFeed” option makes sure your feed is able to be read by everyone’s reader, no matter the format they prefer. You can create animated widgets that show show your blog’s headlines in your website or places like MySpace. PingShot is a Feedburner service that notifies many other sites whenever you post. You can also add Google AdSense to your blog via Feedburner. I could keep listing all the options that are waiting for you at Feedburner, these are just some of the highlights.

If your an artist blogger you should head over to www.feedburner.com right now and burn your feed.

Want to learn a bit more about feeds? Click here. (Contains a good list of feed readers.)

Still trying to wrap your head around Feedburner? Click here.

Have You Burned Your Feed? is a post from: Art Palaver The Artist Marketing Resource.

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