The next section of my Artists Online Series will look at blogging.

Blogging can be a very useful promotional tool for artists. It's not a substitute for having a good online portfolio or for doing lots of offline work on your career but it can be a useful addition. Not convinced? Here are my reasons:

Blogging Raises Your Google Profile

Since Google prefers fresh content, regular blogging tends to push your Google results higher. Other people linking to your blog posts also increases your Google profile. Make sure you're blogging under your professional name to get the full benefit of this.

It's not just Google that likes new information: people are also far more likely to come and visit your website if you've got constantly changing content. How often is someone likely to blog about your really cool art? Once or twice tops. However, if you're regularly writing good blog posts then you don't just get repeat visits, you may also get repeatedly linked, which means... yes, better Google results! Rinse and repeat...

Blogging Reminds People You Exist

Promotion isn't something that you do once and then it's done forever: it's more like exercising - you need to do it little and often!

Blogging helps with that; if people are constantly coming back to read your blog, then they're naturally more aware of you. You don't even need to constantly talk about your own art; just by visiting regularly they're getting a gentle little nudge that you and your work exist.

Blogging Improves Your Website Numbers

Being able to say to a gallery or a funding body, "well, last month I had X number of visitors to my website" puts you in a better negotiating position because it proves that your work is already popular.

Of course, online popularity won't substitute for offline experience like exhibitions, publications and residencies but it can add to it. Last year I was told by someone in the know that if you're filling out a funding form and it asks about prospective audience audience numbers, you should definitely include your web hits. This had never even occurred to me but apparently Arts Council England counts online viewers as bums on seats!

Blogging Connects You With People

This is one of the most important reasons to blog: I've met some completely amazing people through blogging and some of them have turned into offline friends.

Blogging can help you find a group of people who support your art. This can include other artists, gallery owners and curators but equally importantly it can include lots of non-artists who are willing to be advocates for your work.

Cultivating a group of people who like your work is vital for any artist. Supporters will turn up at your shows, cheer you on, blog about you, tell their friends and even sometimes buy your work. Supporters are great!

Of course, you should also be cultivating a group of supporters offline through using things like mailing lists, but finding sympathetic people who genuinely want you to succeed can often be easier online.

Blogging Gets You Out Of The Garret

Many artists work in isolation and blogging can help reduce that all pervading sense of invisibility. My own studio is in my home: this is definitely the best option for my art practice but it does mean that I don't always get as many opportunities to connect with other artists as I'd like. When I graduated, I did feel very isolated, lonely and out on a limb. I lessened that by starting a artists' group with my college friends but it was a lot of work - I was the chairperson, general organiser and one of the main curators for our group shows. Now I get that all important sense of connection through blogging and online social networking spaces with a lot less effort. For real world connections, I have the Spike Island Associates Programme, local private views and my part time jewellery course.

Even if you are in a studio, there aren't always as many opportunities to connect deeply with the other artists as you might expect - they're busy, you're busy and you might not have that much in common anyway. But online you're not limited to your geographical surroundings - with a little effort, you can find a peer group with whom you truly click on an artistic and intellectual level.

Blogging Breaks Down Barriers

Sure, there's a hierarchy in the blogging world but there's also a surprisingly level playing field. You can leave comments in the blogs of 'far more important' bloggers and they'll generally reply to you on an equal basis. I've spoken in blog comments to published authors and more established artists in a way that I would never have dared to do in other mediums. Blogging opens the channels of communication in a way that feels comfortable to me: I feel much more equal online, I'm less intimidated by what someone's done and just respond to what they write and how they come across. Blogging makes me braver and that has translated into my offline promotion efforts.

In the same way, blogging can make you seem more approachable and human to people who are interested in your art. Why not do the next generation of artists a big favour and help to break down the myth that artists are all crazy, ear chopping introverts or outrageously drunken drama queens! Of course, if you do happen have that kind of personality then you might as well play to the gallery because I've been told several times that collectors just love that sort of thing...

You Can Reach A Wider Audience

People who might not be comfortable visiting a gallery are often happy to look at your work online, especially if you initially engage them with a blog post that's relevant to them. Through blogging you can often reach people who wouldn't otherwise consider looking at your art and those people can sometimes end up being incredibly supportive.

Through blogging, you can also reach a global audience who might not otherwise be able to see your work. To date, The Diary Project has had visitors from 39 countries, including places like Guam, Brunei and Malaysia, while this site has had visits from 29 countries.

I'm not saying this to boast - just the opposite, in fact. My point is that I'm not important yet. I'm very much an emerging artist rather than a well-known one: I'm only five years out of college and although I've had a steady stream of group shows, I've only had one solo show. I'm certainly getting established, through lots of hard work both on and offline but I've not exhibited my work abroad yet and I'm probably still be a couple of years away from doing so. [Although, do feel free to offer me an international show - I'm totally OK with moving it up my agenda!]

So it's quite incredible that people from all over the world have already had the opportunity to see what I do. This would never have happened without the internet - it simply isn't possible from my current position in the offline art world.

Blogging Empowers you

By being active online you take a little bit of the power away from the artistic 'gatekeepers' and put it back in your own hands. You're not just sitting around twiddling your thumbs waiting to be discovered - you're out there building an audience and creating your own opportunities.

Of course, the gatekeepers aren't ever going to be redundant - artists still need gallery owners, exhibitions, audiences, collectors and funders in the offline world. I'm not trying to denigrate the artworld or its gatekeepers but particularly in the early days it can feel as though you're banging your head against a brick wall and getting nowhere. I'm not complaining about that either; there's absolutely no substitute for paying your dues and we all have to knuckle down and do it. However, a little bit of encouragement online can keep you going when it feels as though no one else knows you exist. You're still going to have to engage with the artworld offline but blogging can help to increase your confidence to deal with those interactions.

Blogging can also build confidence to take bigger and bolder steps online. I was blogging over on Livejournal for 3 1/2 years before I got my website up. Setting up a website felt huge and intimidating and quite beyond me at the time, whereas setting up a blog was quick and easy. Blogging was undoubtedly a helpful first step towards finally getting my website sorted.

Blogging Strengthens Your Voice

When you're blogging about your own work, you have to think about your work. You have to put into words what you're trying to do and that's damn good experience when you need to write artists' statements and press releases. A lot of artists hate writing about their own work and find it excruciating - blogging can help you get over that.

Blogging Can Generate New Opportunities

I know people who've been published or been offered exhibitions because of their blogging. It hasn't directly happened to me yet but I have approached people I know in the online world and scored opportunities that way.

Blogging Is Cheap

Blogging costs virtually nothing compared to other forms of promotion like postcards, poster and ads but it can be very effective. Writing a good blog post won't cost you anything except time, energy and a few pence for internet access and the electricity to run your computer but it can get distributed all around the world. Not only that but when people link to you, the information is usually replicated on their blogs plus they also usually link back to you. It's like you sent out a single postcard and someone photocopied it and gave it to all their friends. As we all know, word of mouth can be a powerful thing. Who knows how connected some of those people might be? Who knows how large the audience on their blog is?

Blogging is Fun!

OK, obviously I'm biased on this one but I think blogging is a blast. It's an effective promotional tool for me but it never feels like work because I enjoy it. Believe me, that's a world of difference to how I feel about writing press releases or designing posters!

A variety of views from other artists discussing whether blogging works:
The Painter's Keys

The Empty Easel

Art News Blog

Get more help
If you'd like more information about building your online presence, check out the free resources section.

I am also available for online consulting if you need one-on-one help.

OK, so how do you improve your Google ranking?

The SiteWizard has an excellent article called How to Improve Your Search Engine Ranking on Google. It might be a bit technical for some artists (it certainly lost me in places!) but it'll give you a bit of background about how Google works. Searching for 'improving Google ranking' will give you lots of information along these lines but the SiteWizard article was one of the clearest I found.

My own tips are a lot less technical!

Use your name

You absolutely must link your professional name with your professional online identity. No one is going to be able to find you if you hide behind a pseudonym!

If you start a new blog, use your name in both the blog title and the username. Google seems to pay a lot more attention to the title and the username than it does to your profile, which is one reason why having your own dedicated domain name is such a good idea.

Even if you host your blog or domain on a free site, which tend to rank somewhat lower than dedicated domains, changing the title to include your name can make a big difference. I was mystified when I searched for myself by name last month and discovered that The Diary Project didn't appear on Google until about page 15. It was outranked by far less important sites, where I was mentioned only in passing, and far newer sites, like this one. I just couldn't understand it. Eventually I worked out that although I had my name in the profile, Google wasn't giving it much weighting. I changed the title of the blog from "The Diary Project" to "Kirsty Hall: The Diary Project" and the page ranking shot right up. It's now on the second page if I search just for my name and the first page if I search for my name + art.

Of course, you might not want to use your professional name in all your online interactions – you don’t necessarily want a curator or potential collector to find iffy drunken photos or blog posts where you're talking about your sex life! Remember that your reputation is all you have online and you need to protect it. Have a personal online identify by all means, but if you don't want it to intersect with your professional identity then make sure you avoid ever linking the two. Google is remarkably smart at joining dots. I linked to my Livejournal in a professional capacity twice and it now comes up in searches of me. This isn't disastrous since I don't write about anything incredibly revealing over there but now I always have to bear in mind that someone searching for me in a professional capacity could find and read that more personal blog. Since I don't want to strengthen that Google association, I deliberately don't link to my Livejournal from here (you're welcome to go and read it though).

Switch Things On

OK, this is an area where I'm not strong but you need to make sure that you've got the right things switched on in your blog or website. If you work with a web designer, make sure they've optimised your site for search engines through using keywords. Check your website or blog software documentation and make sure that you're being indexed by search engines. I used this article by Biz Stone to make sure that I had the right settings activated on The Diary Project, which is hosted by Blogger. Even if you're not on Blogger, it's worth a read because there are some good general blogging and promotion tips.

If you are on somewhere like Blogger, definitely make sure you've added your site to their own listings. It really is worth it: I get a steady stream of visitors to the Diary Project because it's in the Blogger listings. I got 55 visits from there in the last month: it's currently my fourth largest source of visitors to the Diary Project and provides more visitors to The Diary Project than this site does.

Use Your Natural Advantages

If you’re working with an unusual technique or imagery or have a less common name, then you’re always going to be easier to find on Google simply because there’s less competition.

Unfortunately if you’re called Joe Blow and you’re an oil painter, then you’re going to have to work a lot harder to stand out. So pick out the things that are unique in your work and use them in your profile and your keywords. To find those things, imagine you've only seen your own work once in a group exhibition. What would stand out? If you're not sure, ask a couple of friends what stands out for them.

Write a snappy profile

Mention the important things in your profile - your name, where you're from (in case someone is looking for artists just in your area), the materials you use, the imagery you use and any relevant keywords that describe your work. Keep it fairly concise, don't use too much art jargon and and try to employ the sort of terms that would be used by someone searching for work that's similar to yours.

Be In More Than One Place

As Andrea pointed out in comments.
"It’s easier to have a strong web presence of course if you’re something of an internet whore."

Why yes Andrea, yes it is!

One reason that I’m all over the front two pages of Google like a cheap rash, is that I’m in more than one place online. I've used my own name in at least five sites of my own, plus other people have written about me or linked to my sites.

Now, getting yourself in multiple places online is something that definitely takes time and effort and since it's complex, I’ll be discussing the most effective ways to do this in later posts. In the meantime, consider upgrading your profile on any sites you're already on if it's appropriate to do so (see earlier point about professionalism). You could also ask any galleries that show your work if they would link to your website. However, I have been told that some commercial galleries frown on artists being online, so you might want to test the waters fairly gently on that one.

Personally, I haven't always done this well, I used to be positively shy and retiring. For instance, I'd been curating for several years before I twigged that I ought to put my name on the posters of the shows! I genuinely felt that I was much less important than the artists and it was 'putting myself forward too much'. So at the moment, I have very little online documentation of the five years of curating that I did, although I'm planning to put together a curating page on this website in the near future. That said, at least one or two of the shows that I curated turn up in Google when you search for me.

Considering that I didn't get paid for any of the curating I've done, I should at least have been getting some major props for it! It's safe to say that I wasn't doing myself any favours when I was hiding behind that bushel and I regret it now. But at the time, I just wasn't emotionally ready to be more forward. Later in the series, I'll be talking about how to promote yourself when you'd much rather hide under the bed clothes - believe me, it's an area where I have plenty of personal experience!

Link to yourself

If you are in more than one place (see above) then make sure that you link back to yourself in your profiles. Don’t make visitors go searching for your blog, website or Flickr account but instead make it easy for them (there’s that mantra again!) by pointing them directly towards the places you'd like them to go.

Google also looks in the text of sites, so using your name, the name of an art project or your other sites in your own blog posts can also make you pop up on Google more often. You could try doing things like labelling your photographs when you blog them (something I've only just started doing). I don't know for sure that it helps but it certainly won't hurt. Plus it also makes it clear when an image is yours rather than another artist's - important on a blog like mine where I blog both kinds of images, sometimes in the same post.

Linking to yourself in this way also ups your Technorati numbers. Technorati works by giving you a popularity ranking; you start out low and the more sites that link to you, the higher your ranking rises. Now, obviously you shouldn’t try to artificially boost your Technorati rank by linking to yourself more often than is necessary. However, there’s nothing wrong with pointing people at your other sites if it's relevant to what you're talking about or when there's new content over there. It's not manipulative or 'too in your face' unless you're either sneaky or make a big song and dance about it: instead just think of it as being helpful, both for them and, admittedly, for you. Regular visitors will just ignore the hot link but new visitors won’t be left wondering 'hey, what's this other thing they're talking about?'

Start A Blog

If you don't already have one then start a blog.

Blogging improves your Google ranking in several ways.

Firstly, it means that your site has fresh content. Google and the other search engines prefer newly updated sites: a site that’s been updated recently will tend to place higher than a static site that hasn’t been touched in a couple of months or even years.

Secondly, if you’re blogging then you’re usually linking to other people and they’re hopefully linking back to you. I’ll cover this more in more depth in the articles on blogging but suffice it to say that links are very good. The Google spiders love links - it is called the web after all - so the more little threads you have going in and out of your site, the more visible you are to those spiders.

Be Patient

You won't appear in Google instantly so don't be disheartened if you don't see changes overnight. You can help yourself by doing the things I've mentioned but the web is a big place and those little spiders, although surprisingly fast, can sometimes take a bit of time to find you.

If you haven't seen any change in a couple of weeks then reconsider your options. Look at your Google Analytics and Technorati results again, see if you can spot where you're missing out. Keep testing, do more research, do more reading and try new things. Go back and search for yourself in Google again and note any changes. However, be aware that something like building up a blog takes time; you won't instantly get hundreds of visitors unless you're already famous - in which case, you should probably be writing this series instead of me!

Get more help
If you'd like more information about building your online presence, check out the free resources section.

I am also available for online consulting if you need one-on-one help.

The next few articles in the Artists Online series are going to be about improving your search engine visibility. I should point out that I'm not an expert on this, so I'd recommend that you do additional research.

Set a baseline

This should be your first step because simply put, if you don't know where you currently are, you can't know whether you're improving or not. It can also help you spot any obvious mistakes that you're making - I just spotted one of mine!

So, indulge your ego and go type your name into Google.

Try the following versions:
"Your name"
"Your name" + art
artist + your medium + your geographical area
artist + something unique about your work

What do you find? Are you on the first or second page? That's good, you're pretty visible but if there's a lot of variation between the different search terms you might still have room for improvement. If you doesn't appear until 20 or 30 pages into Google, then unfortunately you're effectively invisible because only the most determined person is still hunting for you. Even 10 or 15 pages down is bad because people can be pretty lazy when searching online.

Take a note of the most and least effective ways in which you appear. Try to think of other ways someone might search for your work and test those too.

If I type "Kirsty Hall" into Google then I come up as 5 results on the first page and 10 out of the first 20 results. That's 50%, which isn't bad but if I type "Kirsty Hall" + art, then 19 out of the first 20 results currently refer to me. When I'm searching for an artist, I will generally add the word 'art' to help rule out the non-artists who share their name so clearly a curator who already knows my name has an excellent chance of finding me online.

If they don't know your name it's always going to be harder but it can be done if they've seen your work and remember something distinctive about it.

The search terms, 'artist + pins + sculpture' will bring this site up on the first page. However, if someone has only seen my work with string, then I'm in trouble because I don't appear in the first ten pages of Google at all if you use the search terms, 'artist + knots + string'. I'd just better hope they add the magic word 'sculpture' because that shunts me right back up to the front page!

The search terms 'artists + drawing + envelope' bring me up as the very top result on the first page - how lovely. Unfortunately, only I would know it was me because my name isn't mentioned in the little blurb - instead the words, "Each day in 2007 I am doing a drawing on the back of an envelope, ..." appear. Now that might be enough for someone to identify the Diary Project if they've heard of it before, but to me it instantly says, "oops, I need to change that profile".

Remember my 'Make It Easy For People' mantra from the Flickr posts? Well that applies here too. You need to make it easy for people to find you but you also need to make it easy for them to recognise you when they do find you. While someone might not remember your name well enough to type it into Google, it's quite likely to ring bells if they see it written down.

Being found when someone knows absolutely nothing about you is always going to be the hardest thing to achieve. Despite the fact that I list where I'm from and what I do in most of my online profiles, typing 'artist + Bristol + sculpture' doesn't bring me up until the 19th page of Google. Now, obviously, there's a lot more competition when you're using more general search terms so it's always going to be more difficult to get top results but I clearly need to do some work in that area.

Chart Your Progress

If you already have a website or blog then sign up with Google Analytics and Technorati right now. You can see how many visitors you're getting, which sites are referring them and which other blogs or sites are linking to you. Monitoring your numbers from the beginning means that you can see when things start to improve, which is always encouraging.

Plus being signed up to Technorati can provide a small but steady stream of visitors, in addition to highlighting who has linked to you and in which post. The incredible detail in Google Analytics can help you to work out why things have improved, as well as being endlessly fascinating in its own right. For example, I've just spotted that this site has suddenly had 12 visits from Etsy, which is somewhat mystifying since I'm not even on Etsy. I can only assume that someone from there has linked to me (if you're from Etsy, please do tell me how you got here, I'd love to know).*

Every so often, type yourself into Google to see if your rankings have changed. Don't just look at where you place, look at how often you place. What you're aiming for is to appear in the front two or three pages, over and over again.

Right, now that you've worked out how things stand at the moment, it's time to work on making things better. Don't be disheartened if you're pretty invisible right now, you can make improvements fairly quickly.

* EDIT: Aha, mystery solved. Thanks to Tina Mammoser for pimping me on the Etsy forums.

EDIT: Leonardo Bjork points out that putting your name in quotes can make a big difference to your Google results. Since most searchers know to do that, you should make sure you try it when you run your Google tests.

Get more help
If you'd like more information about building your online presence, check out the free resources section.

I am also available for online consulting if you need one-on-one help.