How are we working to promote SOAR and its artists?
Posted By Editor on August 18, 2010
We were asked this question recently and, in writing the answer, turned out a pretty comprehensive snapshot of where we are in our advocacy for the art community of Southern Oregon right now, just over 7 months after SOAR’s debut.
There are a number of strategies we’re using to spread the word about SOAR and its artists. In addition to some great word-of-mouth allies who spread the word personally (THANK YOU!), SOAR’s own facebook page now has over a hundred fans who share, and increasingly interact with, posts on the page. This sends signals throughout the internet that there is interest in the site, and spreads links to it around cyberspace as well. SOAR’s blog, Art Matters!, automatically posts new content to the facebook page and to our Twitter stream, @SOARtists, which has its own discrete set of followers who retweet posts to their own followings, as well as my LinkedIn page where I have over 50 professional contacts.
LinkedIn is interesting because they tell you how many people your immediate contacts connect you with. In my case, 52 connections create a network of over 270,000 professionals, which as of 8/16/2010 has increased by 403 just since 8/13. It was this information (when my little network of 11 individuals connected me to 26,000 people) that finally convinced me online networking was a viable mode of marketing and promotion. After experimenting with it for a few months I’ve found the results to be very positive and encouraging going forward, with momentum building each week. I’ve created a group there for SOAR but haven’t had time to do much with it; there’s more potential we can tap there. In addition, there are a lot of great artists groups at LinkedIn where you can exchange information and extend your network to new connections who are involved in your own specialty.
I send occasional email updates to a larger set of contacts, but don’t want to offend anyone with lots of emails, so I limit this to significant updates. Whenever a new artist or organization gets a listing, I send out a welcome here on facebook, which autoposts to my personal page, and there is an immediate spike in visits both to the main website and the blog.
We ask that listed members post links to the site from their websites/blogs, and just began syndicating their blogs, which also spreads hordes of links around the search engines, simultaneously promoting SOAR, Art Matters! and the artist’s blog itself (in the week following the syndication of several blogs, traffic to the main site increased over 150% and to the blog over 400%!!). This not only raises visibility and awareness, but also sets the “relevance” of our sites with the search engines by association, helping them point more consistently to us and our members when people search for anything related to the arts in Southern Oregon. The search feature on the main site is set to search only the sites I specify, and I add member sites and blogs to it when they join.
We have an art event calendar on the website, created with Google, which is a handy central hub of information about our art events and gets a lot of visits. People who want to track our events, classes & workshops can subscribe to it with Google, any feed reader (including a browser itself) or their desktop calendar. Our primary local promotion is
a print version of the calendar which is published monthly in the
Jacksonville Review. This has helped increase awareness of the sites
dramatically amongst both locals and visitors. I talk to visitors on the
street all the time and let them know about the site, blog and calendar
so they can refer to it while they’re here and from home when planning
their next visit. We hang fliers with the site’s address on tear-tabs
which artists or art supporters can take home and use to navigate to the
site their first time (the percentage of return visits indicates they
are bookmarking to visit again). If there’s a bulletin board where it
can be posted near you, just send a request and I’ll email a .pdf you
can print and hang up.
In March I began coordinating the art display at the GoodBean Cafe, which has also done much to increase local awareness of the site and encourage more artists to join. The more people represented in the directories, and the more they notify their own networks through email, facebook, twitter and links from their own websites, the more visitors we receive. Reciprocal linking is crucial to success in promoting our artists!
There’s much more to be done, but nothing happens as fast as I’d like since I have to keep building new websites to pay the bills. For now I’m happy to report the significant progress of SOAR and Art Matters!. Though frequented mostly by SO and Pacific Northwest visitors, soartists.com has been visited by people across the US and from 17 other countries, and the blog has been seen by people from 36 different countries. Both are about evenly split between new and returning visitors. On average they hang around long enough to view 5 pages or so, so we see that they’re exploring. I expect the syndication of member blogs to increase the interest, visit time and page views going forward.
All of this is intended to increase visitors to artist’s sites/online galleries/stores and the “brick-and-mortar” (non-virtual) galleries and art events here…with the ultimate goal of helping sell more Southern Oregon art and attract more arts & culture-minded travelers to explore our region! Before SOAR, the only arts & culture information online for potential travelers to Southern Oregon began and ended with the Shakespeare Festival and the Britt Festival, as the travel sites focus primarily on hiking, camping, fishing, hunting and other outdoor activities. We love the outdoors, that’s why we live here, but we have much more than that going on! Now visitors & residents can see what’s going on and plan to include a wider range of our art offerings in their activities – before they even pack their bags! So be sure to tell friends and family who live outside our area…and those who do, too!
I’ve put heart and soul into developing an attractive site that presents our exceptionally diverse and talented art community in a favorable light to those discovering us online. If you have suggestions about other ways to attract visitors, we’re all ears – send them our way! Among other projects-in-progress to be released as they’re completed, we’ve added an online bookstore and requested lists of recommended reading from all the SOAR artists so we can add more titles. Of special interest will be books written/published by SO artists/artisans and books featuring them, which I really want to add so we can help them sell copies. You can visit http://www.soartists.com/bookstore/ to see what we have so far.
The bottom line is this:
You can help us help you – mention SOAR to fellow artists, galleries and art-related businesses, people who support the arts, buy art and attend art events.
Make sure you send links to any networking sites and online galleries/stores you join after your listing is posted so we can add them to your contact information. Link to us (SOAR, Art Matters! or both) from your own site or blog and share links through your own networks, whether by email or social networking sites. Get permission for us to syndicate posts from the owners of art blogs you love. Register for our blog using your Google or facebook account, or the “register” link on the blog itself (it’s on the left under “Meta”). Comment on posts on facebook and Art Matters!, and encourage, share information with and praise each other through them. Send your ideas and your own favorite resources’ links/contact information to me, or persuade them to get a listing yourself! (This includes sources for materials, equipment and supplies, exhibition and market opportunities, festivals, events etc.) We just posted a store at SOAR’s facebook page with one product – a listing on SOAR – to make it easier for the facebook-loving segment of our art community to get theirs – if you’re on facebook, too, share that beauty with your creative friends!
Though I say “we” and “us” a lot, this is really a one-woman show. I believe in you, and that’s why I’m working to promote Southern Oregon art from the time my coffee’s ready in the morning til I can’t keep my eyes open at night, 7 days a week, and I can only do so much myself. Whatever you do helps me help you – It all counts! Because Art Matters. And you do too.
