Art Heroes Radio

Keep clients involved and excited by using a mailing list right, a conversation with Alyson B. Stanfield

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Alyson B. Stanfield is an artist-marketing consultant, but you can call her an art biz coach. That’s because since 2002 Alyson has built successful online artist communities at ArtBizCoach.com and ArtBizBlog.com, which help artists of all kinds strengthen their own businesses through online classes, live workshops, and the weekly Art Marketing Action newsletter.

Alyson, a former museum curator and educator, has witnessed the good, the bad, and the downright ugly attempts artists have made at self-promotion. She knows what works. She put what she knows into her book, I’d Rather Be in the Studio! The Artist’s No-Excuse Guide to Self-Promotion, which is now in it’s third printing.

Alyson is really big on building and maintaining relationships—noting that it’s much easier to make friends than to speak in “sales talk.” Our conversation will cover the following:

• The Do’s and Don’ts of building a mailing list
• Email secrets (Alyson doesn’t think they’re secret, but apparently they are because so many artists are ignoring them!)
• How to use your mailing list most effectively

Q+A Call In Show— Opportunity is the most dangerous distraction you'll ever face

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Every artist knows the feeling of looking at a blank page and freezing like a deer in the headlights. When you can do whatever you want, sometimes it's damn hard to choose what to do. Starting a new work of art is always exciting, but sometimes constraints are your best friend when comes to moving forward with assurance. Focus not only makes it easier to move forward, it often allows you to do so more quickly, with greater poise and balance.

Opportunities have a lot in common with the blank page. When choosing between options— whether career direction, personal development, or wild things that come out of the blue— it's easy to cease forward motion altogether. A great opportunity can be a trap if it causes you to lose focus on the work you're invested in, the direction you've chosen. Especially when the opportunity sounds like it may support your goals if only you divide your time. Freelancing, commissions, starting a side business and similar opportunities can tempt you into believing that with some additional income, you'll have more time to work on your art. More often they just add reasons not to get out in the studio.

More than anything else, doing what you want to do comes from not quitting until it takes off. Success only looks instant later. As an artist, you always need the creative challenge of doing new things, but don't allow yourself to be distracted from your art by the temptations of opportunities that don't match your long term goals.

How to design effective artist websites that get results, a conversation with Reese Spykerman

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I hate to say it, but some of the worst websites I've ever seen belong to artists. Often they are confusing, hard to navigate and search, difficult to interact with, hard to read. A website can be creative or artistic, but an effective site requires good design.

The web is an amazing tool for artists to sell their work, build their reputation and reach new customers, but your results are only as effective as the experience your site provides for your audience. In this episode, Reese and I will discuss the most important ways you can use design to improve your sales, exposure and opportunities. We'll also talk about how to work with designers to get the best results.

Reese Spykerman tells stories through design. A self-taught designer, Reese creates websites, ebooks, and other branding materials for people like Chris Guillebeau, and companies like Whos' Talkin. She believes that good design is clear, easy to understand, and creates a delightful, memorable experience for audiences. You can read more about Reese in salon.com and entrepreneur.com.

The self-made art star— How to produce blockbusters by discovering yourself

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Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art. — Andy Warhol

There's a lot of talk about the similarity of artists and entrepreneurs lately, and how each can learn from the other. Seth Godin's new book, Linchpin, even appropriates the term "artist" to describe the person in any profession who "changes the game, that elevates each interaction and that takes enormous emotional and professional risk with their work." There are some definite parallels between artists and entrepreneurs, but only handfuls of either become successful on a grand scale.

The real question is: what do the artists and entrepreneurs who achieve rockstar status have in common? It's not just great product, or hard work, or time put in… those qualities apply to plenty of people you've never heard of. If you wanna know how to be a rockstar, maybe the people to look at are, well, rockstars.

Creativity and the future of thought, a conversation with Clive Thompson

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Clive Thompson is a writer who covers science and technology. He's a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and Wired, and has published the blog CollisionDetection.net for eight years. His journalism has been widely anthologized, and he's received several awards for his writing, including an Overseas Press Council award and two Mirror Awards. Clive has been a performing musician for 25 years, and is currently working on a book about the future of thought.

Clive and I have had some great discussions over the years about the science behind thought and creativity, attention deficit as an evolutionary adaptation to a complex world, improvisation, and the DIY movement in art.

Q+A Call In Show— What are the most important ways you can invest in your arts career?

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You've been told all your life that you have to "spend money to make money" and it's no less true for artists. But how do you know which investments in your career will pay off and which will just suck your bank account dry? On some levels, this varies for every individual, but there are some areas where investing in your art as a business will almost always pay off.

Equally important to understand is when to spend money… if you spend money on a full page ad in a magazine before you've shot professional photos of your work, for instance, you could do yourself more harm than good. In this show, I'll talk about education, tools, materials, space, assistants, professional services such as lawyers, accountants and web development, advertising online and in print, merchant accounts, and more. I'll present some ideas about how to assess the value of each, which ones are most likely to help increase your income and at which stage of your career you should plan to implement them.

I hope you'll call in to share your experiences as well.