 Well hello and welcome to today's video where I'm going to be talking about blogging for artists. I've made a few videos and I've created a little playlist more on that later. Today we're looking at this question, how do you get people to look at your blog article? You've done the research, you've planned it out, you've written it and you've published your art blog but how are you going to get people there to actually look at the article? And this is one of the biggest challenges and today I'm going to share six ways that you can send people over to look at that article. Now I imagine that you've done your research, one of the previous videos talks about that and you've written an article that your audience would really love. So once they get there they're going to be super happy to consume your article. And if you're sitting there thinking hmm this is the first video I've watched maybe I need to backtrack and watch the others then don't forget to check out the link below this video to the playlist where I've got a couple of other videos taking you right back to the beginning of blogging for artists. Now as I said before I still believe that blogging is a medium to long burn great marketing strategy for artists. So if you are wondering what you should be doing to market your art now and in the future then this could be a great strategy for you. If you're not sure about marketing at all then don't forget to check out the video links below where I give you some more ideas of marketing videos that you could watch but right now we're talking about blogging. Welcome or welcome back to my channel my name is Sophie and I help artists just like you to set up market and grow a highly successful business doing what you love and on this channel I share things all art business related. So if you'd like to learn more tips and tricks on how to build your profitable business then you're in the right place. Don't forget to subscribe to my channel and hit that little bell to get notified every time I post a new video. So let's dive into how to send people to your art blog. Now I've come up with six ways of course there are many many more but I've tried to find things that I think are quite good if you're starting out or something you might be doing as a marketing strategy already or things that are sort of fairly at the beginner end of marketing because there are other ways that you can do it but they're a little bit more advanced so I thought it would be good to start with the simpler stuff. Okay so to begin with we need to look at where you are on your art career do you have a large follower base in which case you can write an article and probably aimed at that follower base and they're going to be happy whatever you write because they love you, they follow you and they're going to read it no matter what but for a lot of you watching and probably the majority of you watching you might be starting out, you've a smaller audience and actually you need to make sure that you do what I've been talking about in the previous videos you need to research and make sure you write an article that people are looking for already. It's being searched for on Google, on YouTube, on Pinterest wherever people are looking for that topic and you're writing an article from your viewpoint on that topic so you've got to decide which camp you're in you've got that large follower base they're going to read whatever you publish you haven't got a follower base you need to make sure that you've done the research first and from there we're going to look at the six things alright so number one is the SEO so I've talked about that before and I just want to remind you how important that is search engine optimisation, SEO for short and basically that means but you've researched that blog topic and you've come up with and I know this I use this a lot so please forgive me it's always watercolours for beginners I don't know where that demonstration came from but you've come up with something to do with watercolour for beginners you've done your research you've looked at those keywords those phrases that people might be putting into a search engine to look for something and you've built a blog article around that keyword that you know has a lot of people looking for and that really is the first thing you're going to do that's the first way to get people to look at your article is to write one with a really strong keyword in the first place so that when it gets published people are already looking for that topic it's going to come up as a fresh search item they'll be like oh that looks good that's what I want to read so really that's what you can do to start out you can think about SEO make sure that you take the time to do the research every single time you write a blog article that's not just once that's every single time make sure there's a good amount of people looking for that topic and if you can find what we call a long tail keyword that means a sentence basically if you can find a little mini sentence that people are really interested in and your competition haven't really not written any great articles about then you have a great winning opportunity at that point so the first thing you can do rather than actually going out and trying to send people is to set yourself up for success from the beginning so that's the first thing you can do to get people to look at the article is write with SEO in mind alright the next one is Pinterest it's renowned as being a great what we call a traffic driver in other words it sends a lot of eyeballs a lot of views to online sites that could be your website could be your shop could be whatever you've done it's a great opportunity there are 443 million active users per month on Pinterest right now and it's likely that your audience is on there right if you've done a bit of research into your audience don't forget to check out this video here on how to find your audience if you worked out who your audience are and you already realised that they're on Pinterest it's unlikely you've chosen to be there anyway so you might be saying Sophie I've already done that and don't forget as well we've got a link I'll put a link below to another video on Pinterest as well if you want to know a bit more about that and as we know Pinterest is a really active search engine now I don't know about you but if I want to find out a recipe for example or how to do something then I go to Pinterest first if I don't want to watch a YouTube video a sort of longer form video Pinterest now these days there's just as many videos come up as a result on Pinterest as pins but I will be quite often looking for something and I will search in Pinterest and I'll put in what I'm looking for and then look and sift through the results now if you create a series of pins around your blog article and people again are searching for that topic they're searching now over on Pinterest they click on one of your pins and arrive on your blog article you see how that works it's very nice is you could create between 5 and 10 different pins for that one article and post them to different boards so long as the boards are relevant and get people looking at your blog article you can also put those pins on group boards where perhaps people are really interested so if you knew for example you've written an article about watercolours for beginners and you know that there's a group board for people interested in watercolour painting you might want to put one of your primary pins on that group board for other people to see and over they go and read your article top tip make sure that you create colourful attractive and stand out pins for your blog article you want to make sure there's a bit of writing on there so it's really clear what people are going to be clicking on when they look at your pin so the next one obviously is YouTube you're on it it's a search engine again people looking for information that this time they want the results in video format so there's a couple of things that you could do here you could create a short teaser video where you just introduce the topic and then you can say you want to read my whole blog article then go over here and read that we have to bear in mind though that people who watch videos very often like to watch videos so you might also just make a longer version you might put a very similar video that's similar to the written form so that people have that choice and you can embed that video over on your blog so if people go over look at the blog they can say oh I can read it through while I'm having my cup of tea or coffee or actually there's a longer video I'd rather watch the longer video it can be the same content but just two different ways that people can consume it so there's a few things you can do there you can also make shorts on YouTube which again a little teaser I think Netflix get people over to your blog article alright the next one is already ads so the other way to get people to see your blog of course is to play the ads game so dependent on what platform you use a lot of if you're on Instagram a lot of time you might want to run some ads on Instagram or Facebook or you're going to use Pinterest or YouTube or you might run some Google ads again this is probably not for total beginners although simply boosting a post on Instagram is pretty easy to do you might make a little carousel post about your article and then you might boost that and get some eyeballs that way so additional benefit of running ads running ads to a blog article versus running ads to a landing page where you're asking people to sign up to your mailing list or you're asking them to buy your online course or you're asking them to purchase artwork the difference between sending people over there and sending ads to simply an article is you'll likely pay less you'll probably get more eyeballs it will cost you less per click or view to send them to a blog article then it will to send them to a page where people have to sell it's just the way the algorithm works so it could be again a great way to start just kind of dipping your toe in the ad water so the next way that you can send people to your art blog is using PR perhaps you've written an article on a trending topic or a hot topic something that people are talking about why not see if you can get some press coverage see if you can reach out and get a press release get an article in a magazine or in the local paper and then sign post them back to your website where that blog article sits and that way you could get a whole load of new people looking that you didn't even reach perhaps via your social media platforms so it's really good to mix up the strategies don't just rely on I'll put it on Instagram and see what happens if you really want to get a lot of people looking at the blog you're going to need to manage it up and do some different things PR is a great strategy to do that so the final way to get people to look at your art blog is guest blogging now this is a great way again to get in front of a brand new audience you can offer to write another article that perhaps compliments or leads onto the one that you've written and you write it for a third party blog you write it for a blog who has the same audience as you do but obviously offers something a little bit different they might have ideally a larger audience to you they perhaps also have a great mailing list they send out to their mailing list we've got a guest article we've got a guest blog written by this particular artist go over here to read it now this can be a reciprocal thing you can ask them to do the same for you they write an article for you you send that out to your audience adds value a little bit harder work you've got to ask if you can write an article for them but I promise you it's a really great way to get in front of a whole new audience so whilst the first ones might seem a little bit easier great place to start and the last two probably more powerful in the long run but just take a little bit more time to set up I hope you've loved these tips and tricks and I hope you've enjoyed my little mini sort of series of articles around blogging let me know in the comments below if you have these strategies you're going to focus on first to send people over to your art blog and like I've said before feel free if you've written an article and you'd like me to have a look at it post a link in the comments below and I would love to read your article so what should you watch next if you haven't completed the little playlist I'd suggest doing that if you have perhaps you'd like to watch some marketing videos to find out other ways that you can market your art thank you so much for watching and I'll see you on the next one