There are lots of easy ways to increase your traffic and build your customer base.

Your own traffic building efforts will guarantee a huge difference to your site visits. Here are 6 top ways:

1. Add more artwork. Most artists with more hits have more art on line. If you have unused art space on your website, fill it up, and enjoy more traffic. If you are not sure what to do, especially newer artists please don't hesitate to email the [email protected] for assistance. You can add more art at any time, and even add more art spaces as needed.
2. Keep your art work current. Active artists change some of their images and information at least every couple months. It does not take long to keep your content up to date and the payoff is great. Visitors will return often to your site for more when they find it is changing!
3. Invite your fans to see your work on line This is one of the key ways to increase your traffic, especially to easily keep in touch with your customers. After you load or reload an art work, use our "Notify Fans" feature to send an email with your personal comments and a direct link to the art image just loaded. Got some news you want to share? Let your network know!
4. Update your mailing list. Your customer and network list is gold for you. If you send out emails (the fastest and least cost way to keep in touch) you need to keep your email list current. Load up your email list to your website by logging in to your site then click on "Market your artist site", then click on "Maintain your mailing list information." You can load up your email addresses either one at a time or in bulk. Contact us if you need any help.
5. Use your web address. Three ideas for showing your website address (shown on your webpage, i.e. www.MyArtClub.Com/Joe.Smith): 1) at the bottom of all correspondence and email, 2) on all pamphlets or business cards and 3) on any listing of you as an artist, or art group.
6. List your web page with search engines and directories. Listing your website and art work can increase your traffic especially for new customers. MyArtClub.Com has links on line to several free search engines and directories sources. Click on our "Links" page which is found from the main MyArtClub.Com page, on the right hand column under "Resources".

This article first appeared in the My Art News Letter #12

How can you protect your art while showing it on the internet. Let's start with the premise that the reason you have a website is to display your art and attract prospective customers to admire and buy your art. Given this premise, what are some things you can do to achieve this purpose and still protect your art.

First let's consider the size of the image. Marketing research indicates that when a viewer lands on your site, you have 4-5 seconds to capture their interest before they move on. So the very first reason for them to leave your page is an image that is 3 MB (megabytes) large because that's the size of the image that came out of your digital camera. Even with more and more people accessing the internet via high speed links, it can take 35-55 seconds to download this image. Your prospective customer has long since departed your website.

Another reason to keep your image sizes small relates to how the images are displayed on the viewer's screen or monitor. These devices are only capable of showing images with a resolution of 72 dpi (dots per inch). The images that are produced by your camera have a resolution of 300 dpi which are appropriate for sending to the printer. Therefore if you are loading large images to your site, you are providing a potential thief with all they need to extract your art, blow it up to a reasonable size and print it out. Opps.

MyArtClub.Com recommends that you resize your images between 50 KB (kilobytes) and 140 KB before loading them to your site. We have found that in most cases, this size of image provides a clear representation of your art that can be loaded to most computers in a matter of seconds.

As computer screens are replaced with larger sizes (19" and 21" screens), the available real estate to display your image gets larger. However, many of your prospective customers may still be using a smaller 15" or 17" screen size. Therefore to show your art to best effect, display your art so that it can be seen without having to scroll up and down the page to view the whole image.

Most image editors have a mechanism for resizing your art. We recommend a couple of simple tools that are freely available to download off the web. They will either resize your art images one at a time or can resize an entire directory of images for you. They will also control the physical size of the saved image for .jpg files by controlling the compression or quality factor. The Microsoft editors save your images with a default quality of 80%. However you can vary the quality factor to set the physical size and improve the image at the same time.

In our next blog we will discuss other recommendations about displaying your art on your website.

We often get email asking about the incident last year when it was discovered that art from a number of our artists was being copied to a website in China where they were selling copies of art for very low prices. As many of you may know, a hue and cry went up across the land and the website was taken down. What you may not know is that another one sprang up to take its place.

So the question is inevitably what can you do to protect your art from being copied. The short answer is – never let any one see it. Not exactly palatable advice for an artist who wants people to see and enjoy their art. However the reality is, that if it can be seen on the internet, then there is a way to copy it.

Like the old adage that says the locks only keep honest people out but never stop the real thief so it can be said about people taking a copy of your art image. Despite the fact that MyArtClub.Com puts filters over the art or suppresses the right click option, there is little you can do if you know how to read the underlying HTML code that presents the page.

So it only keeps the non-technical people from being able to copy your image. If you can see it on your browser, then there is a link to the art image that exists in order to present it. And if you can see it on the screen, then you can take a picture of it on a digital camera, never mind the computer.

Which brings up other places that people can copy your art. If it is in a gallery or on exhibition, if it is printed in a magazine or your publish art cards to advertise your work, then it can be copied using a digital camera. So unless you are planning on hiding your candle under a bushel basket, then publish your work on the internet and if it gets copied onto a Chinese website, so be it. At least they had the good taste to copy your work.

In the next blog, we will explore ways to reduce the chance of your work being copied effectively.