A Keyword Worth A Thousand Pictures?

How about a word worth 12,000 pictures?

Keyword importance in marketing your fine art cannot be overstated! We rise to the top or get lost based on our tags choices.

In my previous post, Marketing Your Fine Art on Etsy, we explored some steps in deciding on the best way to approach generating sales through your online presence:
1) selling your paintings in an Etsy shop 
2) offering your paintings on hosted artist websites 
3) creating your own art website domain yourself or hiring the talent

My own offerings are through Etsy and several other sites. I'm trying to find the time to setup my own domain--slow going since I like to paint, too!

About those hosted sites--as I said in a prior post, we can't just post beautiful pictures and expect the orders to pour in. Websites aren't designed that way, not Etsy, not the artist hosted sites, no sites work that way.

If you've already setup a site, do a search for your art. Don't be surprised if in a matter of hours after uploading your work, you are buried behind hundreds or thousands of other beautiful pictures. Where did your images go? You input all those keywords based on trending words and your images aren't there. "Google" yourself under both the web and image tabs, not much there either if you haven't expanded your presence through links and words.

Last week I searched for my own art on one of my paid membership hosted sites. I'd always been able to bring up many of my painting and photo images under multiple keyword searches. Not this time. I went 20 pages deep, 25 pages, 30 pages--Nothing! 

Then I happened upon the culprit. I slowed down enough to read the artist names on each picture and noticed page after page of the same artist. He has 12,000 pictures! I was fuming angry! I couldn't produce 12,000 original pieces of art if I cloned myself 100 times over! So, I thought maybe it's a sweatshop of artists doing the work. Apparently not, but it doesn't matter.

Abstract work from hosted site

My work is lost since my paid hosted site allowed this production line "painter" to post about 400 of his pictures since I posted mine.  His art and my art have nothing in common--nothing but keywords. Not everyone plays fairly with keywords. We're talking money here. Aspen Trees in Fall by Gail Kent is a sample of my traditional work.  Now I'm reasonably intelligent and can figure out how to trump him with my online SEO, but this is within my own website. I can still work around it, but it will take time and energy that I need for creativity in the absence of my 100 clones.


So lets get busy building our presence and crank out our 12,000 pictures! I'm not linking to the 1st guy to get to 12,000. He promotes himself quite well without my help!

Your comments are welcome - share how you've dealt with similar frustrations and resolved the problem on Etsy or other sites you have.

All the best,

Gail Kent
Gail Kent Studios

Find me or my work at the following addresses:
Gail-Kent.artistwebsites.com
Twitter - @Gail_Kent, and Facebook -  www.facebook.com/GailKentStudio
www.etsy.com/people/gailkentstudio
https://sites.google.com/site/gailkentstudios  (in process)