Making a living out of art, design or anything that involves creating can be quite tricky. Being a creative is more a calling than any other job in the world; going to galleries, applying for grants to look for opportunities is an annoyance.

There must be some different way to create more opportunities for yourself, either to sell your work or to get out there and raise more awareness about your artistry. The time when you travel from gallery to gallery with your portfolio by hand has certainly passed, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t anything you can do about it yourself to create more opportunities!

Why should you consider blogging as an artist?

Creating an emotional connection with your audience

Whether you like it or not, being an artist also means that your art is a brand that you need to promote. One of the key elements of any business is cultivating its customers and audience.

Blogging can thus create the perfect opportunity of having an open discourse with your audience, in a meaningful and yet in-depth way. You can use your blog to share your perspective on art, as well as to give tips or tricks about the medium you use or give people some more insights into your creative process. In other words, by blogging you will allow people to feel closer to you and your artistic work.

Having a loyal following is very important, you can get it by blogging in a consistent manner, where you update your fans about your work, future events and exhibitions and anything that you are selling.

Eric Kim, a street photographer, talks a lot about his perspective on photography and also shared some insights and tips and tricks that might be of use to his audience.

Copyright: Eric Kim

Storytelling providing the right context

With your art, you tell stories to an audience. But who knows these stories better than yourself? Writing about what your work represents and is about, about thoughts and feelings on your work ensures that everyone understands the context behind it better.

Benjamin Von Wong is a specialist in staged photography. All of his photographs have an important social message, which he explains in his blog for the audience to understand every stage of the creative process, as well as the added layer of depth because of the social importance.

Copyright: Benjamin Von Wong

Going viral

By putting your thoughts out there, you can also help your artworks to go viral. A blog allows you to share your own thoughts and even finished projects to the masses. Having images and text available makes it easy to share globally across social platforms.

By going viral, your work is more likely to be noticed and you might get new opportunities, as well as new audiences who start following your work more closely.

Before going viral on Instagram, the Belgian creative photographic duo Mothmeister devoted a couple of blog posts on Bored Panda dedicated to what their work is all about. The duo now has about 184k followers on Instagram, art books and a lot of planned exhibitions.

Copyright: Mothmeister

Expanding your network

One of the best things about blogging is that you will be optimizing everything you do. As an artist, you might not be aware of Search Engine Optimization (or SEO), but by blogging you will be generating content on your website, which keeps it fresh and high on Google’s rankings. This will allow your website to gain more traffic and perhaps more collaboration opportunities, or even clients.

The key to a better ranking on Google is to consistently use keywords and tags in your texts. This way you are bringing in traffic organically, without having to pay for it. In fact, blogging is a great way to ensure people who don’t know about your work, will be able to find you!

Opening up new opportunities and avenues

By growing your network, new opportunities may arise organically. Imagine writing a blog post about how your latest artwork relates to the glass ceiling effect in Europe and what you want to change about it. Perhaps a female rights organization might look for a keynote speaker at their next event who has a different perspective on the topic.

Or a gallery might stumble on your photographs and find them absolutely amazing and can contact you based on what you have written about your work for a possible exhibition opportunity. You’d be surprised about new ventures that can come your way by just blogging about your art.

Originally Finnish Nightmares was an illustration project evolving around Matti, a stereotypical Finn who appreciates peace, quiet and personal space. The project started out as a blog but now is so popular that the Finnish Nightmares books are a popular book to have in every Finn’s bookcase.

Copyright: Finnish Nightmares

Final Thoughts

The digital society can offer a great ton of possibilities for artists. By consistently blogging about their work, perspectives or life, artists can easily connect with loyal followers. Artists have the opportunity to get their work out there by going viral and thus can create a lot of new business opportunities.

This will not only help you as an artist form your thoughts about your own work but also people to understand and to be able to frame your work in the right context. Always keep in mind, everything you do in life, opens new doors for you!

Hopefully, these tips will inspire you to start a blog of your own that will help you to boost your online presence, and even might help you to get more opportunities as a whole. If the whole process is giving you a headache, or you feel like you could use some assistance in crafting catchy and engaging content, you can reach out to us here.

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