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I just got a facebook account. I’ve been meaning to get one for the longest time. All I knew about it before signing up was: You could upload photos, and a lot of people where on it. THAT’S IT! Wow, I was a little surprised to find that it has a much as it does. I’m all ready using a few apps, slinging comments all over people’s walls, and trying to snag as many friends as I can (of course all people that I actually know/knew… for now).

Now, why the heck does this matter to anyone?

Well, I’m working on an experiment. I’ve heard that facebook is a great way to drive traffic to websites, if done properly. I’ve got little blurbs about this and my other two sites up there at the moment. I also uploaded several pieces of my artwork and posted a link to this in the gallery description saying that I’ve got more here. On top of that, the items that I sell on t-shirts, I’ve got links to their product pages.

Facebook Seems like it was
practically made for artists!

I knew facebook was popular but I had no idea. I can totally see how much potential it has for connecting people. Because of the way it works, it’s perfect for visual artists. I’ve said it once, and I’ll probably say it a thousand times: getting traffic to your site (and eyeballs on your art) is all about increasing your presence on the web. People can only view your work if they know you’re there! Facebook looks to me like a great way to get exposure. At the very least, it will keep you in touch with your friends, and your friends in touch with you… and your art. Some of my best customers (and by that I mean they buy a lot of stuff ^_^) are friends and family. Let’s face it, we could all use more friends.

Let’s recap

As an artist you can build your traffic very simply by getting a facebook account, staying in touch with friends and family, uploading samples of your artwork with links back to your website (for if they want to see more).

Question for the artistic masses:

“Do you use Facebook? Do you use it to build you traffic for your site and get eyeballs on your art? If so, how successful is it?”
I’m very interested to see how others are doing with this. I’ll keep everyone updated on my results with facebook advertising.

Hope that was helpful,
Type to you later,
~Nathaniel

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As we all know, the internet is a great place to expose your art to the global community. It’s cheap and easy to set up a simple gallery of your work. In fact, it might only take a couple minutes to a few days at most. However, if even if your artwork is the most amazing, revolutionary, and inspired stuff out there… you won’t get any actual eyeballs on your art unless people know you exist.

So how do you attract these eyeballs? There are a vast array of methods that are free, fast, and easy to set up. The first I’m going to mention is social art gallery sites. Here are a few that work very well for not only generating traffic but for also serving as your main gallery website:

www.elfwood.com is a fantasy and science fiction specific gallery community for both artists and writers. There are also a great deal of tutorial pages and a host of communities built around elfwood. The main thing people have a problem with is the genre restriction. However, it’s still a very awesome community and well worth your time if your particular genre of interest happens to be fantasy or science fiction.

www.deviantart.com is a site for artists from every genre. They also have a nice feature where you can pay a monthly fee and be able to sell relatively high quality prints of your work. They’re also HUGE, so you can get a lot of organic traffic through them.

www.flickr.com isn’t specifically for artists, but I have seen artists use them specifically because of the high amount of traffic that runs through flickr.

Now, I’m sure your asking “Why the heck should I use all these different gallery sites when I’ve got a gallery of my own?”… Well, do a quick search for “Nathaniel Summers” on google and you’ll find that this site isn’t listed in the top few pages. However, the #1 result is my elfwood gallery. (huh… I guess I need to brand my name a bit better here. :P )

These sites allow you to increase your web “footprint” such that you’re MUCH more visible on the web. They also allow you to get feedback on your work through comprehensive commenting systems. This makes these galleries as much about community as they are about the art.

Indeed, using community sites to build traffic is a time-tested technique that works every time to generate organic, targeted, and absolutely real traffic.

the best advice that I have for anyone trying to increase traffic on any website is to get out there and participate in the online community as a whole. Going and commenting on blogs, people’s art galleries, their myspace photos, just about anything. You can’t lose. Now, I’m not saying that you should spam, just get out there, be present and participate. You’ll gain a lot of nice targeted organic traffic this way.

My question for my readers today is: “What is your most successful method for generating traffic for an art-related site?”

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I know you can’t really explode your eyeballs if you try to stop a sneeze but suppressing a sneeze is never a good idea. The fact of the matter is that a sneeze can leave your mouth and nose at speeds in excess of 200 miles per hour. Trying to stop such a force isn’t something I would advise. In fact, doing so could cause damage to your eyes, nose, and/or eardrums.

However, there is a way to stop a sneeze without causing damage. You have to stop it before it starts. It is possible to simply relax, clear your mind, and concentrate on stopping the involuntary spasm that is a sneeze, however, that’s not very reliable and its not easy to summon the will power to subdue something as powerful as a sneeze. Imagine that you’re an international super spy, you’re on a stealth mission, you’re in someone’s office trying to steal top secret plans and as you open up the drawer to the desk your nose begins to itch, then tingle and you sneeze. This alerts the guards outside who promptly rush into the room and shoot you in the face, mission over. Oops! I sneezed!

It’s actually really easy to stop a sneeze. Just one conveniently easy pressure point will do the trick. That’s right, all you have to do is take your index and middle finger and press them to the little indention that your super-orbital ridge (your eyebrow bones) make where they meet just above your nose (between and slightly above the eyebrows).

If you trace your eyebrows with your fingers you can feel the bones. You want to press right where they join up with the forehead. The bones form a shape that’s almost like a “W” that will perfectly fit two fingers. I’ve provided the illustration to help… well, illustrate this.

Now, I’ve got to lay out a few things. This pressure point will stop most sneezes. However, it won’t stop all sneezes, including:

• Those brought on by high concentrations of irritants (such as pepper up the nose).
• Those caused by extreme allergy attacks (such as sneezing fits that last several minuets).
• A sneeze that’s right about to happen.

It’s also very important that you catch the sneeze early. If you wait too long to apply the pressure point, it won’t work. Upon applying the pressure to this point, you should immediately stop feeling like you have to sneeze. If you can still feel the sneeze building up, get your fingers away from your face before you poke your eye out.

I personally use this technique all the time. Sneezes actually do serve a purpose, so I use it sparingly. I tend to use this when I’m on the phone, with a customer at work, when I’m trying to be sneaky, etc…

Give it a shot, you’ll be amazed at how well it works.

www.trafficjam.com has just been launched and it is pouring in visitors to the most popular blog posts across the blogrush network.

What is trafficjam? It’s a content rating site much like Digg and Stumbleupon. However, the rankings are figured out by a combination of the click-through rate of posts in the BlogRush widget and the amount of time they spend on that page. Apparently it’s a big complicated algorithm that figures out just how popular an article is. What is means is that these little blogs can pull in traffic like the big guys.

Trafficjam has just launched and it’s getting MASSIVE amounts of traffic already. This traffic is then being funneled to the most popular blog entries from BlogRush users all over the planet. BlogRush not only gives you the ability to increase your exposure by putting links to your content all over the web, If you’re content is popular, it could potentially expose it to thousands every day! BlogRush has never looked better. If you’re a blog owner, there is NO REASON not to join.

Join BlogRush today, and start driving targeted traffic to your blog TODAY!

Also, bookmark trafficjam.com and view it often. Why? Because you can see very quickly what headlines are generating clickthroughs and what topics are hot. Write an article about a similar topic, link to hot posts, use similar headline strategies and you could drastically increase your clickthrough rates and your subscribers. TrafficJam is a priceless headline, content, and keyword research tool.

Caffeine is a wonderful thing right? I know plenty of people who can’t even start their day without a cup of coffee or a nice cold coke. That caffeine rush sure is invigorating isn’t it? Heck, once you’re hooked on the caffeine, water just doesn’t compare to a cold bubbly soda. But have you ever thought about what happens to your body after drinking a Coke? This Article lays it out in detail and it’s some narly stuff. To summarize, you consume 100% of the daily recommended intake of sugar (in one serving), your blood sugar spikes, your pupils dilate, your blood pressure rises, and it increases dopamine production (not unlike the effects of heroine that make it so addictive), it severely dehydrates you and depletes you of vital nutrients.

The dehydrating qualities of caffeine where somehow kept from me in my youth. My assumption was “if I’m thirsty, I should get a drink” Apparently, however, the type of drink is VERY important.
Read the rest of this entry »

With the new AWSOM Pixgallery 4.5.0 release, visitors can finally comment on individual images in my gallery. Unfortunately, this also made all the previous comments that where made on the artwork page disappear.

Even so, feel free to get in there, check out my artwork, and leave some comments to try out the new system.

I recently discovered an interesting strategy for bathroom etiquette that results in benefits for both myself and my wife that I thought so helpful that I simply had to share. Before you read on, I should mention that I do not have any shame… just something you should be aware of.

You see, my wife often complains about the odor produced by my bowel movements. In fact, the restroom is generally off limits as a biohazard zone for quite some time afterwards. I understand this is also a problem for many other men. Generally speaking all the females I’ve known are completely repelled by the odor produced by male feces. They tend to avoid it like the plague, spray all manner of odor eliminators and scents in an effort to cover it up, and make funny faces while rebuking the source of the odor.

With this in mind, I sat down to think about what I could do to help ease my wife’s olfactory discomfort. Because it is often difficult for anyone to wait several hours for the stink to clear before they can use the toilet, I decided that it might be more considerate to wait until just after my wife uses the toilet to “take the browns to the super bowl”.

Judging by both common sense and anecdotal evidence, we can all agree that people tend to relieve themselves every few hours and are thusly unlikely to need to use the toilet within a few hours of relieving themselves. By waiting until my wife has just used the toilet to “drop the kids off at the pool” I can maximize the amount of time that the air has to clear before next she must visit the restroom, thusly sparing her from as much of my foul reek as possible. I find this to be the most considerate course of actions possible. It’s also very easy to do so long as there happens to be no immediate urgency to your situation.

As an additional benefit, because a woman must always sit in order to use the toilet, using the toilet right after her ensures that the seat is nice, warm, and ready for your posterior. The only exception is when your wife is a germ-aphobe who simply “hovers.” However, baring that one exception, this situation will likely be the same across the board. I must admit, I do not miss the cold seat, and although my wife thinks I’m a bit of a jerk to specifically wait for her to “warm up the seat” for me, she does appreciate the less frequent assault on her nostrils.

Someone once said that marriage is about compromise. I think this is a perfect example of this. There are obvious benefits for both parties and very little effort is required to reap these benefits. Because of this, I’ve got a new rule for toilet etiquette: if at all possible, wait until directly after my wife has used the toilet to “take a dump”. By sparing her of my noxious fumes, I am rewarded with a freshly warmed seat. Seems fair enough to me.

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This was my final for Designing Interior Spaces and Worlds.It is the lab of a mage.

Pretty much everything is super-optimized and low poly with very detailed textures. Most of the simple objects are just planes (like the trees and the windows). Everything else is simple geometry. It was a ton of fun. I’m really starting to get the hang of this stuff. I really just can’t wait until I can score a job in the game production industry. I really am itching to create something that I can actually play.

As some of my readers may know, I am also the owner of a budding Free Traffic Community called Free Traffic Works. This site is completely dedicated the various methods through which website owners can generate free traffic to their sites. Before it was just one big ad page. People could sign up and have their links shown on that ad page. Now the site is COMPLETELY different.

Now users can actually see the various free traffic services and rate them according to their own personal experience with them. They can also suggest new free traffic generating services for us to rate and to advertise for. On top of that every user can leverage the ENTIRE SITE to display their affiliate links. That’s right, when users advertise their FTW affiliate link, those that surf the site from their links will see that user’s affiliate links for those services. Even if they visit the site and come back to it weeks later, they will still see that user’s affiliate links.

It’s a powerful system with great potential. The best part is, there is MUCH more to come. I also intend to monetize the site so that users can not only use the site to advertise for them, but to also generate them actual affiliate sales to earn them money! And it’s all free, forever, I’ll never charge a dime.

Go on, check it out, it won’t hurt to take a peek. Free Traffic Works and it can work for you.

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I managed to actually finish a Rubik’s cube for the first time yesterday. I would have to say however, that is was mainly a fluke.

It comes with instructions that are actually fairly easy to follow… but I must admit that I don’t do most of the first steps because it’s easier just to do it my own way. However, the sequences of moves to get the last few steps are quite useful as they show you how to manipulate small parts of the cube at a time without disturbing the rest of the pieces. The process is supposed to only take 7 steps. Not bad really. I can get to the seventh step in a matter of minuets without any problem. However, the 7th step has you doing the same sequence of moves either 2, 4, or 8 times. Each time I would do that sequence it would just mess it up more and more. It never made any sense. Read the rest of this entry »