If you’re an artist, you have a lot to gain and a lot to lose from online marketing. On the one hand, you have the ability to connect with millions of potential customers across the globe. On the other hand, you have the scrutiny of an audience that can be both good and bad.

While you might not need to follow every single piece of advice in this article, you should at least take note of these 10 tips that will help you become more famous and successful on the internet as an artist.

1. Create something unique and original

Now, this might be difficult for some people to hear, but it’s important to understand that not everything that is unique and original is good. You need to find a good balance between being unique and original and appealing to a wide audience.

Originality doesn’t mean that your work will be flawless or that everyone will like it. It simply means that you will have taken the time to come up with something that is new and different.

For example, imagine that I show up to your studio one day with a box full of kittens. You’re sitting there with your adorable cats in front of you and your coffee table is littered with paint brushes and canvases. Suddenly, I yell, “BATHE THOSE KITTENS!”

You might have made a painting of a dog years ago, which is fairly common among artists, but on that day, you decided to paint cats. Your painting is probably not perfect and it might not even be finished, but it is original.

Back to my original point: if you want to be unique and original, but you also want to appeal to a wide audience, be careful not to cross the line from unique to weird. The more original your work is, the more people are going to be able to tell that you had to dig deep within to come up with it. They will also have the perception that your work is odd or bizarre because it is unique and original.

2. Be generous with your gifts

What do you give a really, really, generous person? You give them the opportunity to give more back. So, when you’re thinking about online marketing, be generous with your gifts to your customers. You can give them free stuff, you can give them discounts, or you can give them a free trial of your product or service. The key word here is “generous” because you want to make sure that you are not being taken advantage of. You want to make sure that your generous act does not come at the expense of your own bank account.

In the example above, you gave me the opportunity to write about you and your work. You’re extremely generous because you gave me free access to your blog. However, if I were to write a bad review of your work, you could accuse me of being ungenerous and cost you monetarily.

3. Monetise your blog (or website)

If you’ve been reading my writing for long enough, you’ll know that I’m a big advocate of using your blog to make money online. You don’t have to run a blog to do this though. There are plenty of other ways to make money from a website or blog, including getting paid to write posts, affiliate marketing, and more.

One of the simplest ways to make money from a blog is to use affiliate marketing. This is when you recommend a product or service that you think will be of interest to your readers and when commission is paid on sales or qualified leads.

To give you a basic understanding of how affiliate marketing works, let’s say that you’ve been blogging for a while and you’ve developed a small audience. You might decide to try out a product that will allow you to automate email marketing and sales. If someone clicks on an affiliate link and makes a purchase after, the owner of the website will pay you a commission for the lead.

To start making money from a blog, all you need is a website or blog. Once you’ve got that, you can start to promote products that you think will be of interest to your readers. To find products that you can promote, simply use your blog’s affiliate program to browse through different brands and products.

4. Build your brand

This is pretty much self-explanatory, but you need to make sure that you put in the work to build a brand for yourself. If you want to be taken seriously as an artist, you need to establish yourself as an expert in your field and create a brand identity that is going to make people take you seriously.

On your blog, you can establish yourself as an artist authority by using words like “artiste,” “artist,” and “master” to describe yourself. When people read your blog posts, they will know exactly who you are and what your area of expertise is. If you want to be taken seriously as an artist, start using these words often in your writing.

Another way to establish yourself as an authority is to provide detailed and in-depth information about your area of expertise. When you write about anime for example, you can go into great detail about anime history, how it was made, and what makes it special. You can use this information to show that you are an expert in your field and that you have a lot to offer others interested in the topic.

5. Be consistent

This one might seem obvious yet people still go through the motions of doing things randomly. When you want to be successful at anything, you have to treat it like a business and be consistent in the way you approach your work. If you want to be a successful artist, you need to be consistent in posting content, building a community, and generating leads.

You might think that interacting with your audience on social media is enough, but you need to take things further. When you interact with your audience on social media, you are not going through the motions of establishing a relationship with them. You are simply interacting with them as someone who has interesting things to say. To make money online from a blog, you need to interact with your audience in a way that is going to drive them to action and establish a relationship with them. That is what you should be doing on social media.

6. Measure the right things

One of the most important things that you need to do if you want to be successful online as an artist is to measure the right things. You can measure how many visitors you get each day, how many people are interacting with you on social media, or how many people subscribed to your email list. However, if you want to be taken seriously as an artist, you should be measuring the things that are going to make a difference in your bottom line. For example, how many pieces of art do you sell each month? How many people come back each month to your site to look at your work? All of these questions need to be answered to properly measure your success as an artist.

7. Optimise your site

If you’ve been blogging for a while and got a decent amount of traffic, you might find that some of your posts are getting a little more engagement than others. If you’ve been writing about anime for example, perhaps your posts about Dragon Ball get the most engagement while your fashion or food posts get the least amount of engagement. To bring more traffic to your site, you need to do a few things. First, you can use Google Analytics to track the types of content that gets the most engagement on your site. Then, you can use that information to create more of the same.

Creating more of the same can be done through a variety of methods. You can write a new blog post with more in-depth information about anime, you can cross-post to other sites in your niche, or you can try out a new product that will help you build more credibility.

8. Build a community

When you want to be successful online as an artist, you need to build a community. Your blog can be your starting point, but you need to move beyond that to create a bigger network. To do this, you need to get involved with social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. You can start by joining the networks themselves, but you should also get involved with the forums when you’re on social media. This is where you can engage with others and where they can engage with you.