The November Ask about Art Licensing Call…
Phew! You guys are getting good and really making us work to pull together answers for you!
November was me – Tara Reed – weighing in on your most pressing questions. As usual, we received more questions than could be covered so I chose those that would apply to the broadest group of artists and when possible, questions that hadn’t been asked before.
Here is a run down of what we talked about:
- Why did you choose to divide your efforts between teaching and licensing your own art?
- I’m not sure what to charge for my design, what is the average price to charge?
- What one thing could I do to make the biggest impact on getting started in art licensing?
- What are your top 5 suggestions for connecting with end consumers to positively build an art licensing brand?
- What are the top grossing art licensing themes?
- When starting out, is it good or bad to list companies that you license with?
- How do manufacturers license a collection? (whole collection, pieces, etc.)
- How do you make mock up samples by hand or on computer?
- What marketing materials do you use at a show? & where should I go to get them?
- What do you consider the most effective but also economical marketing techniques/tips/must-dos for a self-represented artist?
- Submitting art directly to a manufacturer vs. having it on a website – how does an online portfolio affect the perceived ‘newness’ of the art?
- Which is better – specializing in one look and build that as a brand or have many styles and themes?
- Is it possible to succeed in licensing if you have to work full time to pay the bills? Any success stories? (Guest success story artists – Karen Embry – weighed in – thanks Karen!)
- What is your opinion about working with a licensing agent as opposed to working independently?
If you missed the call or want to listen in again, click the button to purchase.
The audio replay is a mere $15 through 11/29 and then goes up to $25.
The next call will be on December 16th – same times – 5:30 pm PST / 8:30 pm EST. I will be asking all your agent questions to Suzanne Cruise – art licensing agent and owner of “Cruise Creative”.
Submit your questions at www.AskSuzanneCruise.com anytime.
Find her online at www.CruiseCreative.com
Talk to you soon!
– Tara
P.S. Don’t forget to tune in on Monday 11/23 at 4 pm PST / 7 pm PST when I’m a guest on “Art & Soul Radio” – listen online at www.BlogTalkRadio.com/art-and-soul-radio. Be sure to sign up for their podcasts on iTunes! (disclosure: no material gain, just a guest on the show!)
P.P.S. The links I promised everyone who was listening live
Some printing sites I’ve used:
www.OvernightPrints.com
www.BargainPrinting.com
www.PSPrint.com
www.UPrinting.com (great deal for banners)
(no material gain – just some places to check that I’ve used personally)
Handbook of Pricing & Ethical Guidelines – great resource for ballpark of royalties, flat fees, etc. across many art fields & industries (this is an affiliate link)
I discovered an interesting thing when looking at my 'webmaster tools' on Google…
I’m not one to obsess over analytics and keywords and SEO… I try to optimize things for all of my websites of course, but I could drive myself crazy and never get to picking up a paintbrush if I looked at all the many ways to analyze a website.
But for some reason I was compelled to go take a look. If you sign up for a Google account there are so many free trackers and tweakers and tables that you could hire a full-time employee to manage it all. (Not in the budget so it’s me, at random intervals.)
As you can imagine, I would like the www.ArtLicensingInfo.com site to come up well with the keyword “art licensing”, and it does. It currently has the #4 position. (Yeah!)
But an interesting thing happened when I looked at the “Keywords” table… what on EARTH is “00pm” the keyword Google thinks has the most significance for my site? Next most significant? “00am”…
Well, I clicked on it to discover that Google thinks the WebCalendar, that I don’t even think anyone really looks at, is the most important piece of ArtLicensingInfo.com. Google says, ‘”Below are the most common keywords Google found when crawling your site. These should reflect the subject matter of your site.”
ACK! They aren’t Google! They aren’t!
Anyway, I felt compelled to share. Sometimes it is good to go see if what your site is about and what Google or another search engine thinks your site is about, matches. If it doesn’t, the people you want to find you aren’t going to find you. How many of you have done a search for “OOpm” in hopes of finding information about art licensing? I’m not a betting girl but I’m going to bet NONE.
So… the web calendar is history. It takes time and is apparently a Google SEO gremlin in disguise.
I encourage you to go see what your site looks like to the Google robotic eyes… for more information about webmaster tools, go to http://www.google.com/webmasters/
Here’s to your creative (and SEO) success!
– Tara
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