Overcoming the Fear of Self-Promotion

Posted by on May 28, 2011 in Articles, Personal Growth | Comments Off

Almost all artists (save those with enormous egos) experience a great deal of difficulty promoting themselves. The fact is, art needs an audience. Artists may love the process of toiling away in their studios, invisible to the world, but without being experienced by an audience, the creative process is incomplete.

If you’re a creative type and have struggled with promoting yourself as an artist, the good news is that there’s a relatively simple way of going about it that involves none of the emotional ups and downs most artists experience when trying to reach an audience. This approach uses the power of the internet to help draw people to you, instead of having to go out looking for them.

Millions of people use Google every day to search for the most obscure things known to man. So chances are good that whatever kind of art you produce, someone is searching for it. Using Google’s free Keyword Tool, you can discover the exact phrases they’re looking for, then optimize your site with those phrases, thereby increasing your chances of getting discovered!

While you may be a “impressionist painter”, that phrase may have too much competition, so use the Keyword Tool to discover what other, longer phrases people are using. Examples might be “impressionist art like Monet” or “new impressionist painters” — without keyword research you can never know what people are actually searching for online.

The best part of this approach is that it involves helping people discover what they already want — your art! It used to be that artists were once limited to the specific geographic regions in which they lived, but thanks to the internet, the whole world is your stage. So whether you want others to discover your new novel, see your wild sculptures or promote your band, try the process outlined above and you’ll find an audience just waiting to discover you!