You may have noticed the headline to this post says, “Web presences,” in plural. That’s one of the basic premises of this site: You need more than one presence on the Web, not just a website. The more the merrier; a whole swarm is much more effective than a single bee. We’re constantly being told by Internet communications geniuses, “If you don’t have a website you don’t exist!” What these ICG’s don’t tell you is that even if you do have a website, even if it’s quite a good one, you barely exist.

In order to get noticed on Internet (more than a quarter of a billion websites and counting) you also need an Internet strategy. This is nothing more than a creative plan to capture prospective clients, admirers, collaborators, the media, etc., on your Internet presences. And your website is only one of them. It’s the main one, the mother ship around which the others orbit, but by itself it’s not very effective. It needs your other Web presences to create a virtual funnel which will deliver visitors to your content. What are your others? We’ll talk about that in a later post.

You’ve Got to Make Yourself Findable on the Web

The first step in the process of making yourself “findable” on Internet is to tailor your sites (or in the case of new ones, create them) to be be search-engine friendly. This is called “search-engine optimization” in the trade, or more often “SEO.” In order to do this you first have to figure out what you want to optimize for. This sounds too obvious even to mention, but it’s not. Many web strategies have gone wrong from the outset because the strategist wasn’t exactly sure of what he or she was selling, nor how to present it. As an artist you may have several products and services. You may sell paintings, sculpture, etchings, lessons in all of these media, plus tutorial videos for each one. Each one of these products and services requires its own strategy. We must never lose sight of the fact that people connect to the web in order to seek specific solutions one by one. That’s why generic web presences like “art,” “sculpture,” or “oil paintings” don’t work. But very specific, almost pinpoint listings, work exceptionally well. Try searching “Non toxic solvents for printmakers” on Google and you will find at the top of the results list Friedhard Kiekeben’s excellent, informative and relevant Nontoxicprint.com. Though his site’s design is uninspired, his content is superlative for artists interested in safer printmaking procedures. Friedhard is using Internet effectively. You can, too.

Give Your Site Visitors Something Worthwhile: Content is King

If Internet marketing (and today there is hardly any other worthwhile kind) has One Large Truth which underlies everything we do on the Web, it’s the old cliche: “Content is King.” Content is why people go to the World Wide Web looking for solutions. You can have the slickest design on the web, incomparable features on your sites, but if you don’t have something worthwhile to offer people when they arrive, they’ll take very few seconds to go somewhere else. Have a look at this brief article by Jason Schubring at Six Revisions. It emphasizes the importance of content in your overall web strategy. According to Schubring, your content is at the base of the web-strategy pyramid. Everything else is secondary.

We’ll be discussing other aspects of web strategy as we go along. Stay tuned. Better yet, hit the “Follow” button at the top of the left column of this page and we’ll remind you.

What’s a Gallinero? And why would you want to stay there?