One of the easiest lies artists believe is “you need to use the Internet to sell yourself”… that, somehow, ‘the Internet’ will drag you up and out of obscurity, and bring you to a huge audience who will buy all of your work for top dollar and praise your brilliance in long articles in Rolling Stone magazine.
And it is, for the most part, a lie. Artists do survive just fine without having a web presence.
But there is some truth in there, and it mostly depends on what definition of ‘Internet’ you use. If you’re willing to learn how to use it, chances are the ‘Internet’ could (or should) be a really easy way to reach a larger audience for your work.
Most of us who have turned to the ‘Internet’ to market and sell our work have simply started ‘static web sites’ — places to store our archives. An address to put on business cards.
The problem with a static web site, of course, is there’s never a reason for anyone to go back (even if they look great, and showcase awesome art). At least not regularly. You hand me your card, I check out your site once or twice, I see the same material, I never come back — not because I don’t like you, but because… what’s the point?
There’s no sense of community. There’s no chance to build a community. There’s no opportunity for growth. There’s no interaction between us, or between myself and the other people looking at your work.
They have their uses, but ‘static web sites’ are extremely limited and limiting. If want to use the ‘Internet’ to market yourself, to promote your work, if you’re looking for interaction, a community, finding people with common interests, you need a ‘dynamic web site’.
You need something that changes, that can encourage discussion and can be frequently updated — Facebook, Twitter, a blog, Instagram… ask your kid for the other ones.
Because, no word of a lie, if you’re not using a dynamic web site to market and promote your work, you might as well be swimming up a waterfall… which can be a problem for a lot of us who never considered swimming lessons important to our art to begin with.
But it doesn’t have to be hard.
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cultural sn:afu 