SEO For Artists

In today’s world of social marketing and blogging, it is more or less expected that you as a self-representing artist will market yourself with video.  Ah, shy artist, to optimize your online presence you need to get in front of the camera and make your video portfolio.

Chances are you have images of your work anyway.  The first step in putting together your video portfolios is to choose a variety of images representative of your work.  Group into genres or styles as appropriate.  Your portfolio should be about two minutes.

Images plus sound create a memorable presentation.  What is the overall feeling of your group of images?  Is there a key emotion that ties them together?  Enhance your mood with sounds.  A good source of free audio clips is SoundSnap.com.  A free account allows your up to five downloads a month.  Don’t be tempted to rip tracks off of your CDs.  Copywriter infringement is no fun if you’re an artist or a musician.

To keep your video a good size, make sure your images are optimized for the web.  An image editing software like PhotoShop or the Gimp will work well.  JPG is your desired format.

To put your video together you have several options.  Free sites like Animoto.com will create your 30 second video in a professional manner.  Be aware though of their branding at the end of your spot.  The creation of the video is very easy if you don’t want to spend a great deal of time on this project.  If you’re looking for more control, there are other software options.

For my videos, I use Movavi’s Video Suite .   It has a simple drag and drop interface.  Like any software, there is a learning curve, butI found this software easy to understand.  Well written help files simply the process.

As a self-representing artist, you wear many hats.  To optimize your online presence, market yourself with video.