You’ve probably heard of image sharing sites like Flickr, Picassa, and Photobucket and perhaps you even have an account so you can share photos of your last vacation with your friends. But did you also know that it can be a great way to help promote your artwork? On today’s episode, I’m going to discuss some of the benefits (and pitfalls) of using image sharing websites to promote your artwork.
1. What are image sharing sites?
- an image sharing site allows you to host and share your photos online
- most image sharing site has a “social” aspect that will allow you to friend other users, send photos to friends and family or distribute photos through Twitter, blogging, Facebook, etc
2. Sign up with a site and make sure you fill out the profile
- Image sharing sites are social sites…make sure that you fill out the profile so that people learn more about you
- Be sure that you include your website address and information about what you do in your profile
3. Share photos of your work
- Upload photos of what kind of artwork you do
- Don’t forget to include photos of your studio, of works in progress, yourself at exhibitions, and shows, and of yourself!
- Provide detailed titles, descriptions, and tag your photos properly with relevant keywords. This will help you get found by other people…and you’ll pick up some traffic from Google Images.
- Use the sharing tools of the service to help you blog about your work, share photos with potential customers, or distribute photos to people that follow you.
- Be sure upload and freshen up your profile with new photos regularly
4. Get social
- A lot of these sites allow you to form and join topic specific groups
- Find or create a group related to your art and start interacting with the other users
- If there is a friending or contact feature, use this to start building contacts
5. Some pitfalls to avoid
- Read the terms of use and copyright and make sure that you retain the copyright to your images
- If you have professional photos of your art, make sure you have the right to post them
- Some image sharing services allows you to set whether you want other users to share your images or not. Be sure to check these out so that other users know if they can use your images or if they can use your images
