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How To Install Wordpress Using One Click Install | Video Tutorial

Daryle Dickens — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 18:50:04 +0000

Installing Wordpress is often the biggest challenge a new user faces. But using the “One Click Install” method makes installing Wordpress easy. (Even for you.)

This is the first video in a new series of videos I will be producing for Art Palaver. I kept this one very simple because I had to learn the software for creating this type of video. Look for more involved videos down the road. I plan to cover many internet tools that artists can use to better promote themselves and sell more art. Feel free to leave a comment about what tutorials you’d like to see.

Wordpress is a great tool for any artist looking to have their own website. Often thought of as “just a blog” WP has really evolved to a complete content management system. These days when you are surfing the web you probably come across many sites that are built with WP but look nothing like a blog. Don’t get hung up on the fact that it started as a blog platform.

I’ve talked to a lot of artists that agree and want to get started with WP but get stuck on the install. They visit Wordpress.org and download the software but then don’t know what to do with it. Understandable, but there is a better way and that way is called “One Click Install.”

First thing you’ll need for this is a web host that offers one click install. (I recommend Site5 <— affiliate link*) Then all you have to do is watch this tutorial and you’ll have your very own website in no time.

Now that you have your new WP site be sure to stay tuned to Art Palaver for more video tutorials on how to secure, customize, and keep your site updated.

*that means I make a little money if you click the link and then buy from Site5)

How To Install Wordpress Using One Click Install | Video Tutorial is a post from: Art Palaver The Artist Marketing Resource.

Using Twitter To Sell Art | Free Webinar

Daryle Dickens — Thu, 20 May 2010 17:51:10 +0000

Twitter is a microblogging service that was created in 2006 by a fellow named Jack Dorsey. The service limits each user’s post to 140 characters or less which is the same amount allowed by SMS. (AKA texting from your phone.)

Though the service started slow and was used mostly by those in the tech and computer fields it quickly grew once celebrities like Ashton Kutcher and Oprah jumped on board. It is now one of the most popular websites on the internet.

But can Twitter be effective in promoting and selling your art work? You bet it can!

Twitter is another avenue that can get your work in front of eyeballs around the world, eyeballs you would have trouble reaching in any other way. Twitter after all is about connecting with people. And it is a great tool for building trust with those connections. Trust is what leads to sales. Right?

But how do you make this happen?

This free webinar will go over effective methods and practical steps an artist can apply to Twitter in order to build a following that leads to more sales. It will also cover powerful tools and resources you can use to get the most out of Twitter.

Every week ArtPalaver.com host’s a free webinar covering a topic to help you sell more art. Each webinar is about 20 to 30 minutes long and includes live Q & A so you can get specific questions answered about art marketing challenges you are facing. Find the details of feature webinars and archives of past webinars right here.

This webinar has already happened but you can find the audio, video, and slides below:

Twitter for Artists

Using Twitter to Promote Your Art

View more presentations from Daryle Dickens.

Using Twitter To Sell Art | Free Webinar is a post from: Art Palaver The Artist Marketing Resource.

Promote And Market Art Using Social Media | Free Online Seminar

Daryle Dickens — Tue, 18 May 2010 00:41:05 +0000

Social media marketing is a very popular topic these days. But how can an artist use sites like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, and other social media outlets to promote and sell art?

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 Your Art Using Social Media

View more presentations from Daryle Dickens.

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

Search Engine Optimization for Artists | Helping Your Fans Find You

Daryle Dickens — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 20:52:12 +0000

Simple and easy search engine optimization practices can help fans find you and your artist website.

Each week I host a free weekly webinar to help you sell more art. Each webinars contain about 20 minutes of content and end with a live Q&A session. If you can’t make the live event the audio recording and slides are available for free afterward.

The next webinar is on SEO practices for artists.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and it basically means taking steps so that search engines can find your information when people search for it. Are you an oil painter that specializes in painting bumblebees? Would you come up in Google is I search for “bumblebee oil painting”? I would hope so.

I’ll talk about the small steps you can take to improve the SEO for your site so those people interested in your artistic niche will find you when the search the web. Usually it is just a matter of tweaking the things you are already doing. And a lot of what I teach is lessons I have learned the hard way. But since I started taking these small steps I watched my traffic quickly increase.

If you are investing in an online presence for you art then you want traffic. There are two basic ways to get traffic. 1)Pay for it with ads. 2)Optimize your site to be found my search engines. For most of us SEO is the cost effective way to go.

Please join me for the live event and bring you questions. And as always if you have issues you want me to address you can leave questions in the comment form of this post.

Below you will find the audio, video, and slides for this webinar.

SEO for Artists Webinar

SEO Basics for Artist Websites and Blogs

View more presentations from Daryle Dickens.

If you’ve never taken part of a webinar this is a great chance to give this effective learning tool a try. You can join either through your computer and the internet or you can call and listen in via phone. And that is all you have to do, listen in. As you listen your microphone or phone is muted so no else can hear you. Please let me know if you have any questions about the webinar format.

Search Engine Optimization for Artists | Helping Your Fans Find You is a post from: Art Palaver The Artist Marketing Resource.

Facebook For Artists | Free Art Marketing Webinar

Daryle Dickens — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 17:44:59 +0000

Facebook is a powerful tool for artists looking to promote and sell art online.

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.

Wordpress For Artists | Windows Live Writer

Daryle Dickens — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 11:30:33 +0000

Wordpress blog software is an ideal application for promoting and marketing your artwork online. It gives you all the tools you need to create a professional looking artist website and easily publish fresh content, keeping your search engine optimization… well optimal. And all this leads to more sales of your art. But WP is not perfect, far from it. (Though there are many people always working to improve it.) A common complaint I hear from artists who blog with WP is they have trouble getting their posts to look just the way they want them to. Configuring text, fonts, headlines, images, and video players within Wordpress’s built in post editor can sometimes be frustrating. There are plugins out there to improve the default editor but today I am here to talk about Windows Live Writer.

Live Writer is free blog editing software from Microsoft. It was created for the Windows Live community but it works with a number of blogging platforms like Wordpress, Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, SharePoint, and Community Server.

I’ve been using Live Writer for over 2 years now and it is how I manage this blog and all the other blogs I publish. Which brings up another useful aspect of Live Writer, it allows you to manage multiple blogs neatly in one program. And I know a few artists who manage multiple blogs. Writer formats its editing screen to look like the blog you are publishing to so that you are able to see what your post looks like before you publish the post. This also helps me keep my blogs straight.

I like using it because it allows me to work on my blog posts while I am offline. And for me that means less distractions. I also keep my working drafts stored within Writer. This means when I open Writer I get a list of posts I am working on listed to the right of the workspace. Writer also has many easy to use features that are better than the default WP post editor. You can easily adjust the font, text color, text size, numbered lists, and bullet points, just to name a few. The real benefit though comes when you want to add images, tables, maps, or videos. Live Writer makes placing these and adjusting these a breeze. You can also make simple edits to images like rounded corners (which I dig) or sepia tone (which I don’t dig).

Wordpress users are accustomed to using plugins to add function to their blog. Live Writer also has the option of plug-ins to add even more functions to the blog editor. These help a writer incorporate things like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, as well as further customize your posts. I personally do not use any plug-ins in Writer but they are an option.

If you decide to give Live Writer a try you’ll need to make a small adjustment in your Wordpress dashboard before you connect Live Writer to your blog. Under “settings” click on “writing” and look for “Enable the WordPress, Movable Type, MetaWeblog and Blogger XML-RPC publishing protocols.” and check the box, hit “save change” and you should be good to go.

Give Live Writer a try, it is free and makes publishing to your blog a little bit easier. Mac users can check out Blogo which is blog editing software designed for Mac.

Wordpress For Artists | Windows Live Writer is a post from: Art Palaver The Artist Marketing Resource.

Wordpress For Artists | Create A Free Artist Website With Wordpress.com

Daryle Dickens — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 11:30:00 +0000

Wordpress is a great resource for an artist that is looking to create their own website to promote themselves and their art. I recommend going with the self hosted Wordpress platform found at Wordpress.org. But there are some costs associated with going that route.

First you’ll need to purchase a domain name which is about $10 a year. You will also need to get web hosting which can be $6 to $15 a month depending on the hosting company and the plan you choose. I believe these expenses are investments in your art career and well worth the cost in order to promote you and your work. But I also know that for some artists just starting out these are expenses they simply can not afford.

If you are looking to create a web presence without spending a dime I recommend starting with Wordpress.com. This is a completely free blog service that offers plenty of great features and customization all within a community of other users who are there to help you when you need it. You could head over to Wordpress.com right now and have a website/blog up and running in less than 15 minutes without ever having to break out the credit card. This option takes away any excuse you may have for not having your own artist website.

The great thing about starting with Wordpress.com as your website service is that the content you create on your site is easily transferred to a Wordpress.org site when you’re ready for an up grade. Also Wordpress.com offers paid upgrade options as well to improve your site without ever having to move it. Any time and effort you invest in Wordpress.com is not wasted due to this ease of upgrade that is built in.

Wordpress.com Vs. Wordpress.org

If you are not familiar with Wordpress you might be a bit confused at this point by the mention of Wordpress.com and Wordpress.org. They are two different blogging solutions. Simply put the .com version is a blog service and the .org version is a blog software.

Wordpress.com hosts your blog or site on their servers for free and your domain name is something like artpalaver.wordpress.com.

Wordpress.org offers software that you install on your own server you’ve rented from a hosting company and is then connected to your own domain name. It is what I use here on artpalaver.com.

Wordpress.org is super flexible and can be customized in just about anyway you can imagine to just about whatever you need it to do. Right out the box it is very search engine friendly. There are countless themes and plugins available for free that help you change the look and function of the your site. And there is a large community of avid users found on blogs and forums around the web that will help you when you need it. Those are just some of the reasons I think Wordpress.org is a great solution for a do it yourself” web presence. But I do understand that the approximate $120 a year price tag can be too much for the emerging artist.

Start with the completely free option and eventually move to the better self hosted .org option.

If you do start off on Wordpress.com though one small expense you might consider is buying yourself a domain name. Scrape together the $8.88 needed to secure the name for a year and then have it forward to your Wordpress.com site. myart.com is better than myart.wordpress.com.

Any questions?

Wordpress For Artists | Create A Free Artist Website With Wordpress.com is a post from: Art Palaver The Artist Marketing Resource.

Wordpress For Artists | Stopping Spam Comments On Your Art Blog

Daryle Dickens — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 11:30:00 +0000

If you publish a Wordpress self hosted blog eventually the comment spammers will find you. Comment from spammers is pretty easy to spot. The comments are brief, generic, and often off topic. Most will contain links to sites selling things that you don’t want to be a part of. The longer your blog is out there the more spammers will find you and the more fake comments will come in that you have to deal with. This can be quite time consuming. Thankfully Wordpress ships with spam protection built in with the plugin “Akismet.”

But I know many artists who use Wordpress never get around to activating Akismet because they get confused when it asks for a Wordpress.com API key.

What is a Wordpress.com API key and how do I get one?

Basically the API key allows your blog access to Akismet’s service to check if the comments appear to be spam or not. There are two simple ways to get your key. You can go to Wordpress.com and sign up for a username only account or you can go directly to Akismet’s site and have them email you a key.

Does not really matter which route you take, they are both very simple. But I highly recommend that you do take this step of getting that Akismet plugin activated. It will save you a lot of time by weeding out the real comments from the ugly comments.

Wordpress For Artists | Stopping Spam Comments On Your Art Blog is a post from: Art Palaver The Artist Marketing Resource.

Cost Effective Email Marketing For Artists

Daryle Dickens — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 12:30:00 +0000

The email newsletter is probably one of the oldest internet tools available for an artist to promote their art. They have been around since the invention of email. Many artists send out “email blasts” through their email client like Gmail or Hotmail. Cutting and pasting a list of emails into the “To:” box and hitting send. This is the easiest method and it is free. It is also illegal.

Yes I said illegal. You see when you send out an email like that 9 out of 10 times it does not conform to the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. The biggest reason for non compliance is there is no easy way to opt out of the emailings. To comply with the CAN-SPAM act the professional artist will turn to an email service to handle their mass mailings.

There are a few to choose from but only 1 that I know of that lets you run a list of under 500 addresses for free, that service is MailChimp. I’ve been using MailChimp for six months now and I highly recommend it to any artist looking to have an easy to use professional email service.

That’s really all I got for you today. If you’ve been thinking about using email to market your work start with MailChimp.

Cost Effective Email Marketing For Artists is a post from: Art Palaver The Artist Marketing Resource.

Win A Copy Of Crush It By Gary Vaynerchuk | AP240S Video 005

Daryle Dickens — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 12:31:00 +0000

Getting your head around social media and learning to use it to properly promote your art can increase sales. Crush It! will give you many new ideas on how to use social media to promote your art. And in this short video I tell you how you can win your very own copy.

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.