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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?”

I remember back when I was going to college in Phoenix AZ that all of my friends and classmates had myspace accounts. I sat there thinking “This is some messed up fad, I can’t believe they all bought into this.” I promised myself that I would never get a myspace account.

However, I did eventually get an account simply to find an old friend (which I did). The cool thing was that I discovered how important social networking sites are for targeted traffic generation… at least for personal sites. This website is full of my artwork and opinions. Thusly, it is something that many of my friends may be interested in. Admitedly, I don’t have much of a social life and I find social networking sites like MySpace, Elftown, and Zaadz to be great ways to make friends online.

Now, that being said, don’t spam your friends. They don’t appreciate it. I post information in relevent forums and I also post bullitns/blog entries that my friends can see. That’s it. Still, it starts you off with a decent visitor base to work from.

For artists, I would definately suggest getting Elfwood and Deviantart accounts. These sites are ranked very highly in the search engines. Getting accounts with them and posting a few “teaser” pieces can only increase your traffic. However, you have to stay active. You have to get out there and comment on people’s artwork. You have to respond to comments on yours. Get out there and get involved, it’s fun and it is very rewarding.

For bloggers it is important that you visit other blogs and comment on them. Every comment you leave provides a link back to you. This is important because it not only increases search engine ranking but also, if your comment is provocative enough, will prompt people to come visit your blog. BlogRush is also useful in this capacity. Read this article to find out how.

My advice boils down to this:
Get out there and get involved. Make your presence known in the web community. At the same time, don’t spam. I happen to think Spam tastes good in person… but I hate it online. If you are an unknown on the web, your website will also remain unknown. I see far too many blogs with no comments in them. I try to make a point to try and comment on something.

An invitation to all bloggers!

If you have a blog and no comments, comment on this post here and I will be more than happy to drop you a line. Feel free to look around my site in the meantime. I’ve got ADD pretty bad, and if I could sit down long enough write out all of this stuff, you shouldn’t be too bored reading through it.

Get out there, mix it up, have some fun. That’s what this is all about anyway. Oh… and I wouldn’t mind selling a few T-shirts while I’m at it. :P

Type to you later,
~Nathaniel