Networking Amongst Artists
Today we had the second meeting of the Ohio Arts Community at the Panera in Fairlawn. We had a terrific group of people, including everyone that was at the first meeting with about 8 new attendees.
In attendence:
Anna Durtschi, Celebrative Art
Bud Graham, Canal Fulton Glassworks
Kristina Malcolm & Bryon Decker, fluxusmetalworks
Donna Stuver & Linda Loveless, Creative Keepsakes Craftshows
Eva Sherman, Grand River Beads & Gift Gallery
Deb Selden, Ohio Mart/Stan Hywet Hall & Gardens
Gary Bernauer, Heartfelt Holidays – Purple Door Gifts
Paula Atwell, Lake Erie Artists Gallery
Katie Mullins, Bonya’s
Everyone is concerned with how the current economic situation is affecting their businesses, and also how to market their businesses better.
We discussed several things:
- networking
- website management
- getting more sales and traffic to websites
- cooperating with marketing
- advertising on Facebook
We had a great time networking and sharing ideas. One of our topics was keywords for driving traffic to websites.
Here is the information we discussed about website traffic:
Getting Your Website Noticed
Celtic Star by Katie Mullins
Text is what gets your website noticed by search engines. Your text should be typed directly onto your website page, not put on in a jpg or pdf.
Keywords are how people find your website. For instance, let’s assume that we are looking for a jewelry artist in Cleveland who works with metalsmithing. When I search on Google or Yahoo, I will enter the words “jewelry” “Cleveland” “, possibly “metals””artist”. If you would like to be found for these words when people search, these are some of the keywords that you will include on your website.
This works best when you naturally include these words in your text in different combinations. It works even better if you can string them together in two or three word groups called “long tail keywords”.
Example: Kristina Malcolm is a Cleveland jewelry artist who specializes in working with metals. Kristina is a trained metals artist. Her metals artist studio in Cleveland is where she makes her metal jewelry.
The more you can repeat your keywords in a natural manner on your webpage, the better chance you have of improving your search engine optimization (SEO)—or getting found via search engines.
First Meeting
The Ohio Arts Community had our very first meeting in the Barnes and Noble in Fairlawn, Ohio. Our first meeting went very well, attended by Linda Loveless and Donna Stuver from Creative Keepsakes Craft Shows, Kristina Malcolm, Katie Mullins, and Paula Atwell.
We started talking about how we could help each other get more sales online, and drive more traffic to our art shows. Lots of introductions all around, and some talk about improving traffic to our existing websites. We are going to meet again at the same location on Monday February 14. If you would like to join us, please contact us through the contact form on this website.
