This week’s Saturday Entrepreneur continues the series about marketing advice for artists. Last week we discussed the reasons you should always have business cards on display at your art fair booths. This week our topic is how to make it easy for people to find you online, even if you don’t have your own website.
(To read last week’s article about displaying business cards, click here. To read the first article in this series, discussing the relative merits of business cards, postcards and brochures, click here.
Many artists don’t have websites of their own, but their work is featured on gallery websites. If this is your situation, you’ll want to direct your potential customers to those websites.
However, many gallery websites are not professionally programmed, and consequently your work may have a web address (URL) like this:
http://gallery.com/?page_id=8/Gx+:PjzorkxUrG&x$baaarf
That’s hard enough to share in an email message; it’s impossible to to expect someone to recopy it accurately. Here’s an easy way to solve this problem. Click on the images to see them larger.
1. Go to http://bit.ly. Bit.ly is a URL (web address) shortener.
2. Sign up! It’s free!
3. Paste the long URL (web address) into the big blue box, like so:
4. Watch the link get shortened:
5. Customize your link!
A shortlink to a page on someone else’s website isn’t nearly as good as having a website of your own, but it’s better than no web presence at all!
Next week: “Away” messages for email and voicemail.
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