Sheree Rensel commented on this post:

I totally agree with comments presented. I too realize that blogging is very beneficial for aspects related to motivation and building an audience. However, I want to know how blogging has helped your INCOME. How has blogging increased your sales or increased the money you get to support your art?
That is the topic for which I am REALLY interested.

Sheree Rensel: Blue

Ah Sheree, the answer to that would be ‘not at all’ since I’m not currently set up to make money off my art. I am slowly coming to terms with the idea that maybe I should try to make some money from my work but it’s something that I’m still internally struggling with. For a long time I believed that my work was completely unsaleable because of the fragile and often temporary nature of the things that I made. That’s no longer as true as it once was but I’m still trying to reprogramme my brain on this issue. I plan to write more about the issue of money and artists in the future.

That’s a long-winded way of saying that I’m probably not the best person to answer your question!

Fortunately, Katherine from Making A Mark left a long and detailed comment, some of which addressed this issue. I’m reprinting the relevant bits here:

Kirsty - I absolutely agree a blog should be for yourself. I personally am less on reading ‘commercial’ blogs where people are blogging for a business which is not their own or because they think it’s ‘what you have to do’ to sell art. These blogs often seem to run out of steam after a bit.

Blogs which just present work for sale (as one e-bay) are fine by me - but IMO they work so much better with a few details about why the artist chose to paint the picture…

…Re. last comment, here’s my observation. The people who appear to sell consistently using their blogs as part of their marketing are those who do good quality work. (By which I mean good quality work will find a buyer if you market effectively). What a blog maybe does for them is speed up the process of increasing awareness - and then once you’ve attracted people who like watching what you produce then you have a ready market of people who are more likely to buy.

I would agree with this, personally I prefer blogs where the artist is not solely focused on selling, although I have no objections to being gently reminded that they’ve updated their Etsy shop or that a particular piece is available in a commercial gallery. In fact, I definitely think that artists should do that, where applicable.

However, the artists who seem to have the most success online usually seem to take the long view. For example, Camilla Engman is an artist who’s had a lot of success online and she seems to have built up her sales in a gentle and organic way. She cultivates an audience for her work by having relationships with the readers of her chatty and informal blog and maintaining an active Flickr presence including starting a new group called Organised Collection recently. And of course, she makes excellent and consistent work that she offers at a range of prices from affordable calendars and prints to the more expensive original paintings.

Camilla Engman: Collection 2

Engman is a lovely example of how to operate as an artist in the offline world too. We had a show of her work at the Here Gallery and she included a couple of packs of her little prints as a thank-you gift for those of us who’d helped with the show. She’s the only artist I can recall who did something like this and it was certainly appreciated by those of us who unpacked and hung her show, since we were all volunteers and none of us were getting paid. Getting curators and gallery people on your side never hurts!

I promised a round-up of the comments that other artists have left about their experiences with blogging and here it is, although much later than I’d planned…

Usiku from Writer’s Whirlpool writes:

Blogging has allowed me to reach and meet people that possess a range and depth of human experience, yet it reminds me there is a sameness to us all.

What a lovely sentiment, Usiku. One of the things I love most about blogging is the way it can encourage people reach out and help each other - I’ve seen everything from people offering words of sympathy to people giving real life support such as organising online baby showers, paying medical bills for ill bloggers, supporting families through bereavement or other difficult times, raising funds for charities or coming together to sponsor art projects.

I get so fed up of all the negative portrayals of the internet because it just doesn’t reflect my online experience. Blogging is frequently portrayed as a selfish and egotistical thing to do but I’ve often seen it used as a powerful and meaningful way to connect with other people.

Michelle from Pencil Portraits brings up a point I hadn’t considered:

Another benefit to blogging (for me anyway) is that when I am focussed on updating my blog regularly I am more productive in my art, because I can’t wait to post it. But I have noticed a definite correlation in lower productivity when I get slack about updating my blog, so even though it takes a bit of time to post, it is definitely worth it for so many reasons.

I love the idea of using a blog as a way of giving yourself motivation - great idea, Michelle!

Mark from Graf Nature Photography: Notes From The Woods writes:

I use my own blog for connecting with viewers of my own work, as well as exploration of my own feelings and analysis of why I do what I do. Turns out, a lot of readers often wonder the same about their own work. Sometimes it helps just to write things down to work out what you are thinking.

Oh, I couldn’t agree more, Mark. I’ve always used writing, and indeed, making my art, as a way to work out what I’m really thinking and feeling. I’ve always written about my work a lot so writing on a blog wasn’t that big a step for me. I think that so many artists work in isolation and having that link with viewers and other artists can be so helpful - just to get an extra set of eyes on the work, if nothing else. One of the reasons I like exhibiting is because of the dialogue and additional perspective that you can get on the work - I guess you can think of blogging as an informal sort of exhibiting process.

That leads us neatly onto Katherine from Making A Mark, who makes a similar point:

1) Blogging can also be thought of as the virtual equivalent of the ‘private view’. Thinking of it like that helps people to pitch their remarks - one to one, helpful, informative - but also professional.

2) I like supporting galleries, exhibitions and other artists on my blog - and they come back and tell me they’ve sold work as a result. More co-operative support for one another would give a nice artistic twist to “the wisdom of crowds”

3) It should never be under-estimated how much slog blogging can feel like at the beginning - but it is habit-forming and it does get easier the more you do it and the more frequently you post. The growth in visitors is also exponential - my second tranche of 50,000 visitors arrived a lot more quickly than the first 50,000!

Woah Katherine - 50,000 visitors! I can’t even imagine that yet but maybe I’ll get there one day. I do agree that blogging is habit-forming although I think a lot of bloggers get dispirited at the initial ‘writing in a vacuum’ feeling. I think you’ve got to be writing for yourself as well as an audience - if you’re getting some personal reward that isn’t dependant on other people reading or commenting then it’s a lot easier to continue. In that respect it’s a lot like making art.

Tina from The Cycling Artist blog brings up the importance of regular blogging:

I’ve been blogging a while but only recently made a pact with myself to do it *every day*. Strangely enough it gets easier. I used to wonder what to blog about, what was interesting enough to write and direct my fans, collectors and other artists too that wasn’t just a rambling self-journal. I didn’t want it to be for artists only, so had to find a happy balance. Sometimes I get on a bit of a soapbox but hopefully not too often.

It’s about 20 minutes each day typing up, copying into two blogs (I duplicate my tina-m.blogspot.com blog over to my MySpace account too). It’s a nice start to the day actually. And I’ve just recently found out about RSS feeds and used feedburner.com to set them up - in case any other artists are as mystified about it as I was!

Tina, I’m interested in the fact that you duplicate your blog over at MySpace - do you find using MySpace works in terms of visitor numbers? I’ve been wondering about setting up an ‘outpost’ over in MySpace but I don’t want to commit to something that’s going to take lots of time.

So, I’ve just signed up for del.icio.us - I’m kirstyhall if you want to add me to your network - after being inspired by this great little video explanation of social bookmarking from Common Craft. Their other videos are fab too - I love the simplicity of their format. I’m going to have to come to grips with RSS feeds next - it’s one of those things I’ve been meaning to sort out for ages but I feel that I understand it a bit better now. You know, technology can be wonderful for all of us, artists included, but it can also be very overwhelming and daunting so it’s great when other people take the time to explain things in a clear and simple manner like this.

I try to do a promotional or marketing thing every day. That sounds daunting but it can be quite a small thing and it doesn’t always involve contacting people. Today I’m working on the ‘alt tags’ on my images. I kept reading about using alt tags on images when doing research for my Artists Online series but I just wasn’t quite getting it. Then this morning I read this article, which clearly explains what they are and why you should use them and it suddenly clicked.

As an experiment I went into Google Images to see how often my work appears and the answer appears to be ‘never’. Oops! Oh, I’m there a couple of times, mostly when people have linked to my curating work but images of my work - er, not so much. So I’m doing yet another of my little experiments; I’m altering the alt tags on my images in this blog, so that they include my name and descriptions of the work. And when I’ve remembered how to do it, I’ll go into the gallery pages and check all the images there too. I’ll let you know if it makes a difference to my Google results.

I’ve updated The Diary Project this morning and it’s all completely up to date, which always makes me happy.

Kirsty Hall: Diary Project envelope from 8th August 2007

I am a little cross this morning though because I can’t find my username and password for my a-n projects unedited blog. I’ve been meaning to update it for absolutely ages - it’s getting to the embarrassing point at this stage - but it kept falling off the bottom of the list. I’d finally got myself organised to sit down and do it this morning and then promptly found that I couldn’t. Grrrr… I’m going off to try various options in the hope that I can drag something up from my memory, if not, I’ll email them and try not to look like a complete idiot!*

On the plus side, I’ve just learnt how to make text change size in Wordpress, the rather fabulous open source software that runs this site. This is happy-making because I try to learn something new every single day, even if it’s just a little thing. I like getting to the end of the day and thinking ‘well hey, whatever else happened, at least I learnt something today’. Hmm, I wonder if that’s partly an artist thing? What do you think? Certainly, I think that creative people of any stripe tend to have more than average curiosity and that’s often coupled with a desire to find out how things work and learn new things. I also think that creative people are frequently fuelled by dissatisfaction - you know the feeling, ‘well, it’s kind of OK but it could be even BETTER!’ Of such constant thoughts are new things born. It always amazes me that people who aren’t artists have this romantic notion about how it must be wonderful all the time, when in reality it’s usually more like an itch that you can’t quite scratch!

*EDIT: Much to my great surprise, I did manage to guess the username/password combination so I now have absolutely no excuse if I don’t update that poor neglected little blog today!

Since launching the site I’ve become hooked on Google Analytics and check it daily to see how the site is doing. It’s like a little competition with myself, did I get more visitors yesterday than the day before, do I have someone from a new country? Partly I’m trying to work out if my (very slow and rather laid back) promotion is working but mostly I just find it fascinating. You can see which site people came from, which countries people are from, which pages they looked at and how long they stayed - it’s absolute heaven for a nosy person!

For instance, who is the single visitor from Hong Kong? Or how about the person in Portugal who’s visited three times? I don’t think I know anyone in either of those places, so how did they find me? See, it just sets the brain wondering. (If you happen to be either of these people, please do leave me a comment because I’m dying to know!)

In less than a month I’ve had 139 visitors from 12 different countries, many of whom have been back more than once. Of course, I’d love loads more but I think that’s pretty good for a brand new site. So a big thank you to everyone who’s visited and those of you who’ve been kind enough to mention me in your own blogs, I really do appreciate it.

I’ve also learnt so much about blogging since launching, which is a little bit odd since I’ve been blogging on Livejournal since 2003. However, Livejournal is such a self-contained world that blogging outside it is quite different. I have to think about things like ‘how many visitors am I getting’ and ‘are the settings working, can search engines find me’? I never had to think about any of this stuff on Livejournal: my LJ is more of a personal space and I never really conceived of it as being about promoting myself as an artist, so numbers weren’t important to me there. In fact, I still have no idea how many people read my LJ, nor do I particularly care because it’s just not about that.

I’m currently mystified by the fact that Google found this site within days and I quickly got to number two in their listings*, yet The Diary Project site, which has been running over at Blogger since January doesn’t comes up until page 16 despite the fact that my name is in the profile. Last night I spent about an hour researching how to get better search engine visibility: I changed various settings and added my name to the blog title. I’ve just checked and in less than a day it’s gone up to page 3 - boy, those Google spiders work fast.

Oh, and I’ve changed the comments on here too, so you no longer need to have your first comment moderated. We’ll see how that goes - if I’m drowned in spam then I may need to change it back but I thought the moderation thing might be off-putting.

*I’m knocked off the number one spot by another Kirsty Hall on Bebo, which is undoubtedly good for my ego!