Get online

If you don't have your own website or if you're not a member of commercial art gallery then as the first step it's better to sign-up with free online art gallery. This will help you to get first-hand experience with art galleries. When setting up your online art gallery follow these tips:

• Make sure you provide at least short description about yourself and your art on the artist page. If you have art degree or if you received any awards in local and/or national art shows make sure you mention them.
• Take pictures of a few of your artworks and upload them to your art gallery. The pictures should be in focus, they should not include visible things unrelated to your artwork, such as easel, the wall, etc. Many digital cameras come with software that allows you to crop unwanted parts of the images - use it. If necessary adjust brightness/contrast and image colors f your picture to match your artworks.
• If the art gallery allow you to enter additional information about your work then do it. You will spend more time setting your artist page, but on the plus side your artworks will be easier to find and they will provide more information to art gallery visitors.

Increase your chances to be seen

Don't limit yourself to just one online art gallery or website. Look for other free art galleries and sign-up there. This will help you to show your works to more people, and it will increase the chances to sell your art. As with the first art gallery/website, make sure that your artist pages on these art galleries are of good quality, that is they provide enough information about you and your art, and they have at least a few pictures of your works.

If you don't have your own website then decide which art gallery will be you main art gallery. Add more information about yourself to the main gallery, and upload more pictures of your works. Link all other art galleries to your main gallery/website. This will help you improve position of your site/main gallery in search results, the links will also help people to find your main site.

Promote your site and galleries

Creating the site and multiple art galleries will help you to get some visitors, but this is only a beginning. You need to actively promote your website/main gallery, as well as your art. Passively waiting when somebody will come in and buy your art almost never works.

• If you friends or relatives have their own site ask them to add a link to your site or main art gallery.
• Exchange links with other artists, especially with artists you know. If you're a member of local art galleries then consider asking them to place on their site a link to your site or art gallery.
• Put website/main gallery URL on your business card, and never forget to mention it when you submit your works to local/national art shows.
• If your site/main gallery is relatively new you may consider to submit your site/art gallery to free web directories. You can get a list of free directories from this site: http://info.vilesilencer.com/ . Be warned that submitting your site to free directories is a long and boring process.
• Sign-up on social networking/bookmarking sites like digg.com, del.icio.us, stumbleupon.com and other, and add a bookmark for your website/main gallery to all these site. Ask your friends and relatives to do the same.
• Sign-up in art forums. In many art forums you can post pictures of your works or a link to your site. On each forum add a your site or gallery link to your signature.
• - Post art classifieds. To find a list of sites where you can post them please search for "art classifieds" in your favorite search engine.
• Sell you art on craigslist.org. You may not be able to sell your art at first, but at least this will promote your art in your local area
• If you don't mind to spend some money then try to sell your art on eBay. Use eBay stores if you're planning to list many artworks for sale.

To be continued ...

Art-3000 specific recommendations

The tips below will help you to improve the quality of your artist page, as well as increase the chance of displaying your artworks or artist page to site visitors. Although these tips are specific to Art-3000 gallery, they may apply to other art galleries too:

• By default, each artist page shows up to 4 random artworks. To get visitor's attention, even if you just want the visitor to go to your main site, we recommend to have at least 3 - 4 pictures of your artworks and short description about yourself / your art on the artist page. If your work in different styles and/or medias then we recommend to upload more pictures - you need to have at least two pictures for each style and media.
• Add descriptive names to your pictures. Adding picture description could be helpful too. We provide RSS feed of all new pictures uploaded to our site, and both picture name and description are included in the RSS feed.
• Make sure that you specify style and media for all your pictures. Pictures, that don't have style/media set, are not displayed on the search/browse pages when visitors search/browse for specific style or media.

Setting up URL alias for artist page

By default our art gallery creates artist pages with URLs (page addresses) that look like this:

http://www.art-3000.com/artist/?id=2

You can make the artist page URL more recognizable if you specify URL alias parameter when you edit your profile in member area. For example, if you specify URL alias "Salvador_Dali" then your artist page URL will look like:

http://www.art-3000.com/artist/Salvador_Dali/

Not only this URL looks better when you post it on other sites, it is also more search engine friendly.

URL aliases have a few restrictions:

• URL alias can only contain letters, digits, underscore '_', dot '.' and dash '-' characters.
• Maximum length of URL alias is 32 characters.
• You cannot use URL alias that is already used by another artist.

If you use the URL alias we highly recommend not to change it in the future, otherwise you will loose all links that may be pointing to your artist page from other sites.

If you already posted links of type "http://www.art-3000.com/artist/?id=<your_id>" to other web sites you can consider updating them. That is not important though - our gallery will properly work with these links even if you configured your account to use URL alias.

Setting up URL alias for gallery pages

By default our website uses gallery URLs (web page addresses) that look like this:

http://www.art-3000.com/artist/Your_Name/?g=1

You can change gallery URL and make it more recognizable if you set URL alias for the gallery in member area. For example, if you specify URL alias "Early_Works" for a gallery then you can use a URL below to access the gallery:

http://www.art-3000.com/artist/Your_Name/Early_Works/

It is important to note that to set custom URL alias for any gallery you will need to set URL alias for your artist page first.

There are two restrictions for URL aliases:

• URL alias can only contain letters, digits, underscore '_', dot '.' and dash '-' characters.
• Maximum length of URL alias is 32 characters.

If you use gallery URL alias we highly recommend not to change it in the future, otherwise you will loose all links that may be pointing to your gallery from other web sites.