5 BIG REASONS To START SMALL - For Artists Who Want Big Results!

The above painting is only 4 inches wide and 4 inches tall.
When I first started out, I started small. Primarily because I was starting from scratch and couldn't afford much in the way of supplies. But there was another reason: REACTION.

Here are 5 BIG REASONS TO START SMALL
1) VALIDATION : Back in the day on Ebay, you could get very quick validation for the direction you were going in. Instead of spending a week working on a piece, and then have no reaction, small paintings gave you a great litmus test.
Quick and easy paintings on different styles and subjects gave a road map to ideas of what will work and not work.
2) CASH FLOW : You can sell small paintings for not much money, so people are more willing to 'impulse' buy them. Selling something feels good. Having money feels good too. Even if you're not getting rich, counting on a certain amount of sales every week gives you the motivation to keep going and get bolder.
3) COST OF MATERIALS : Starting small is also inexpensive, so you don't have to invest a lot in materials. This also gives you the chance to 'sample' various mediums in the smaller sizes and see what works, what you like to work with and what products you like the most. Storing your materials and finished works is easy with small paintings, too!
4) SHIPPING : Shipping is very inexpensive for a small item. If you are offering FREE Shipping, this is a plus. It gives you more shipping options as well and makes the whole shipping experience much easier and more convenient. So much easier to pop a few stamps on an item than have to drag it through the FED EX Ground counter (shipping supplies for small items are cheap, too)
5) FAN BASE : Small paintings allow you to build a fan base easier. You can get through collectible series' faster, and painting small gives you the ability to present many ideas and looks to the public to give you more chances to catch their eye. Sure, someone discovered you when you did that quick series of small cat paintings, because they collect cats, but after contact with you and taking a serious look at what else you were offering, they might just end up with that higher priced larger painting hanging behind their couch, above the tiny cat portraits on the side table!

The Art Of Zyll: Trying New Site Called BONANZA

Discovered this site today. Don't know if it will increase sales, but the really wonderful thing about it is

NO Listing Fees, (only pay if it sells) LOTS of Traffic, up there in the amount of traffic Ebay sees, but don't know yet if it's a good site for selling artwork.
AND - you can IMPORT your listings from EBay, with just a few clicks, giving your artwork TWO platforms to sell from, with pretty much the same listing efforts.
(a few tweaks when you import, but not much)
You can also bring your FEEDBACK from Ebay, so you're not starting from Zero all over again.
They also have an instant chat feature for buyers to talk to you and a feature where people can make offers. Good Stuff.

BLOGGING -Don't Pay For It

First off, let me say, for now - DON'T PAY FOR BLOGS!
Right now I am tasked with doing some promoting for someone who has a new book coming out. They need a blog and all the other social media goodies to go along with it. However, some of the best content I could have used was a blog they did as a daily 'on the road' diary. When they set it up, they were ill advised to put it on a site you had to be a member of to see the blog, and that blog site later became a 'pay to play' website, so the content may be lost forever if they didn't convert it.
Don't pay for blogs, people.
Blogger.com (where you are right now) is plenty of blog to start with, and really all you will probably ever need. It's searchable, you can add widgets to do just about anything, point to anything, sell anything, etc.
I really don't have any idea what more a pay to play site could offer, other than a pain in the you know what - that you just don't need. Promoting is still the same, no matter where you park yourself. Instant traffic doesn't exist. You either get it through sweat equity (which eventually you run out of hours in the day to get any bigger) or you pay for it. There's never any easy way to get there. You have to do the work.
Although some people just aren't happy unless they are spending money for services and gadgets to do their work. But there are businesses out there that know that and take advantage of it.
Do a gut check and ask yourself - can I accomplish what I need to do on this FREE site? If the answer is yes--save your money for the ads you'll eventually need to run!

This Widget and Website will Help You Get Requests To Book A Date In Their City...

I first saw this widget on the website of geek turned musician, Jonathan Coulton. His site was set up on a wordpress, but it had EVERYTHING from a download store for music, to a regular store for merchandise and this nifty widget to help cultivate fans and tour dates. Now he's on his own blog style website. Check him out at : http://www.jonathancoulton.com


Get the widget and sign up to promote and track the stats the widget collects at :
http://www.eventful.com

Different Subjects Bring More Searches!

Having different subjects or phases of your artwork, or writing about different subjects in your blog brings more TAG opportunities and more SEARCH opportunies.

These are skeletons, a subject I started with, before I went in to painting abstracts....

The Art Of Zyll: Skeletons!: "I will be gearing up shortly to offer my skeleton ornaments for Halloween and The Holidays...Here's a little slide show of some Skeletons Past..."

Google Plus - I'm In!

I was just able to start a profile on Google Plus! More Later....

So Next Was FACEBOOK.....

As MYSPACE faltered, everyone was chirping about FACEBOOK. I didn't want to be disloyal and jump ship. Especially after I saw the site. It was so PLAIN compared to MYSPACE. I thought "oh, okay, this is for the people who don't know or don't want to fool with HTML" It was simple. For me, too simple. The graphics are tiny, the text is tiny. I marvel that I can even read it.

But everyone eventually migrated to Facebook and people who weren't even online broke down and put up profiles.

The advantages of FACEBOOK are its popularity, so you have SHARE buttons everywhere to share your content from out on the web and share within the FACEBOOK site as well.

Beyond that, I don't know what other advantages there are. Targeted ads, perhaps (I have yet to run an ad)

For marketing purposes, FACEBOOK is a great place to congregate. Pretty much everyone has a FACEBOOK page.

You can create 'Events' for actual events or even dates you want to remind people of (such as the launching of voting online, the introduction of a magazine, etc)
The 'Events' are always readily available for view, so you can find out what's going on, even after posts and comments about an event have been 'bumped down'

You can reach lots of people, although you have to do it over time (you can be cut off from doing friend requests if you are requesting too many people too quickly)

You can see what's happening and how people are responding to what's going on or to your individual posts.

The disadvantages are that everyone is in your business.

I can't say I even 'Like' something someone said, did, or pointed to without everyone in the vicinity knowing about it.

Google Plus is supposed to be solving this problem, and I just got an invite to get in, but I haven't checked it out yet (spoiler alert! It looks a lot like Facebook right now)

Other disadvantages are that they don't allow any "FREE" advertising. Unlike a blog where you can create linked JAVA scripts to click on, like small ads, FACEBOOK doesn't allow the JAVA.
You can 'Share' links, but do it to much about the same thing or in the same way and people will tune you out as a 'Spammer'

Also, FACEBOOK still restricts the number of 'FRIENDS' you can have to 5,000.
On MYSPACE, that was unlimited.

Now, FACEBOOK 'pages' for businesses can have unlimited 'LIKES', which are like friends, but you can't communicate with these people in the same way.

You can 'breath out' information, but you can't go out and invite someone to your page you believe would be interested in your page.

For an artist, FACEBOOKING can be fun, but as a great promotional tool, it takes time and isn't as effective as some other methods.

From My Blog: The Art Of Zyll: Returning To Fire

The Art Of Zyll: Returning To Fire: "This is one of my favorite paintings that I have created recently. I started with a 'repurposed' canvas. I had started a painting for..."

Ghosts Of MYSPACE Past

My first 'social media' experience was on the site MYSPACE. As an artist, I loved MYSPACE (plus I knew a little HTML, which was important to have a good looking page there)

MYSPACE seemed like an actual 'place'. You could literally 'escape' into the world of MYSPACE and get lost looking at everyone's unique perspective. I marveled at the cleverness in other people's page construction. Some people could do such unique things with codes!

For artists though, we were the orphans. There were areas for Music, Film, Comedy, but no separate tabs for Artists - even though there were tens of thousands of us worldwide the site.

My page there was heavily international. I had almost no local friends. I actually sold a painting through MySpace to a band in Finland.

But, unfortunately, I don't hardly ever go to my MYSPACE page anymore. They have stripped the pages of a lot of the unique code that decorated the pages. Which would be fine if it meant keeping the pages loading faster.

However, MYSPACE sold out a while back - blasting all that visitors with overdone trailers for corporate movies. Apparently they wanted the memory on the site to go to SPAMMING over designing.

I understand they want to make a buck, but I can't even load my page or anyone else's I want to look at anymore because the 'spam' clogs my computer.
It's pointless.
Some people, especially bands, will still use MYSPACE as a way to put themselves on the internet. But I think they are just shouting down an empty hallway.

MYSPACE was recently purchased by some new people, one including Justin Timberlake.
The site last sold for over 800 million dollars, but the new owners picked it up for a mere 35 million (so when I say it's lost it's value, I guess the proof is in the pricetag)

Many were excited to hear it had been bought and sold again and that someone well known was involved, but I was a bit disturbed to visit and see that they were talking about using MYSPACE to follow celebrities. My blood ran a bit cold. Were they actually going to use the carcass of MYSPACE for yet another altar to worship the like of Kardashians?

Oh please, say it isn't so and return the paradise of MYSPACE to me!

(I'm counting on you Justin!)