A Blog may not be an essential for large businesses, but they can be very beneficial to the success of small ones.
In fact, one of the best small business uses of a blog is when you produce hand-made crafts or other forms of art, and want to promote them. The blog and your personal art site work in partnership.
Let’s take an example. You may be familiar with the online craft website at Etsy.com. This is a place where crafters can set up a free account and showcase pieces they’ve created online, setting prices, recording sales, and so on.
It gets their work out to the general public and gives them a professional location through which to do business.
A Blog Is A Fantastic Communication And Trust Building Tool
But these artists don’t always want just to display their wares and sell them. If you’ve gone to great lengths to create a piece you’re selling, sometimes there’s as much joy to be taken in discussing the creative process on a blog as in selling its end results.
And that’s where the blog comes in. You can set up a blog in a different location like Blogger or WordPress, and put the link on your Etsy site (making a reciprocal Etsy link on the blog), and that will be where you showcase your methods and talk about the process.
Some craft blogs take the reader step by step through the creation of a piece, posting photos from each stage. In between the photos, the creator discusses what they’ve just done or are about to do, and then they post another picture. Readers can comment on the post, mentioning other ways they accomplished the same thing, or linking to their own craft blogs where similar work is discussed.
The utility of having your own blog to go alongside your art, whatever form it takes, was acknowledged in the creation of another site that includes artisan crafts as Etsy does, but also concentrates on drawing, painting, film, and other digital arts. DeviantArt.com provides a forum in which creators can display photos of their work, or upload video, audio, and other digital files.
This site can simply act as a display location if the artist prefers, or can be a portal for making sales. It’s the creator’s choice which pieces are just for viewing and which will be sold.
But one thing that’s built right into the DeviantArt site, along with the areas for displaying and selling the art, is a journal.
In other words, a blog.
If you post a piece of art on the site, you can discuss the process in entries attached to that one piece itself, or you can engage in more general conversation about your art in daily journal entries. Viewers can make their own comments in either location.
There Are Huge Advantages To Starting A Blog
Most artists, whatever art form they work in, have begun to recognize that they need a blog site not simply for displaying and selling their pieces, but also a place where their buyers or followers or other interested parties can comment, ask questions, compare notes, or even make suggestions.
Whether you have an art site in one location and link it to your blog, have an art site that includes a blog or journal, or have created your own hosted website, a blog can be a vital tool in sharing your creations with the world.
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