On a recent evening, I took the train into the Center for Book Arts in New York City where Peter Cuce, a marketing expert, gave an overview of the various tools that artists and authors can use these days, from free web hosting sites to social media like Facebook and Twitter as well as lesser known ones like Posterous.
Has anyone ever heard of it? Posterous is a neat blogging platform through email. Yup. You can write an email and post a blog, all at the same time. If you attach a bunch of photos, it will create a slide show and the best part is that Posterous allows you to connect to 20-30 other services for selective auto-posting. So, it can be simultaneously sent to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.
Or, if you’re looking to start an e-mail marketing campaign, you can check out MailChimp — a service that you can use with a list of up to 2,000 contacts and 12,000 emails a month for free. There were numerous articles/sites that could prove helpful, so I’m attaching the list (with Peter’s permission) here for anyone who wants to check them out.
Flickr related: http://goo.gl/lists/nUmZ
Excellent Marketing Articles: http://goo.gl/lists/kr9c
Portfolio-only sites: http://goo.gl/lists/sqr8
Places to sell art: http://goo.gl/lists/49Ag
Social Networking/Portfolio Sites: http://goo.gl/lists/BRTW
Artist Specific Online Marketing Sites: http://goo.gl/lists/5HLP
Miscellaneous (Including MailChimp): http://goo.gl/lists/dqTA
For me, it was great to have this kind of information at my fingertips as marketing often has been the part of my business that has gotten the least amount of attention. And Peter couldn’t have been more down-to-earth or helpful.
More posts to come soon on making the cover for our prize-winning “All That Remains” by Catherine J.S. Lee and the latest of my Japanese sumi-e ink paintings, and others, but I hope this blog post is particularly helpful. Enjoy the weekend!
