Promoting Artists and Photographers - Pt 3 of An Ideal Use of RSS

Visual artists don't need to feel left out in the RSS/ Atom promotion game. There are a number of steps you can take to promote yourself, some of which overlaps with the techniques suggested for audio artists and authors:

Create a blog to let readers know about your exploits and techniques, on a piece-by-piece basis. For each photo or painting that you showcase in your blog, show a thumbnail photo and write about what the piece means to you. Talk about the materials or equipment that you used, any problems you had during the creation, and how you solved them.
To each thumbnail image, attach a link to a slightly larger image. To monetize your images, allow access to still larger/ higher-res images for those who have subscribed using an online shopping cart. As incentive, offer a few of the high-res images as free samples.

Sales can be for a single-image, recurring frequency, or unlimited access (monthly or forever).
If you are a poster artist or painter, consider making high-resolution versions of your posters available for sale online. Photographers might make sets of images available instead of singles. If you are a stock photographer, don't just slap up thumbnails in your online gallery. Blog about your images, how they might be used in ad campaigns, and mention that you are available for work-for-hire images. Offer non-visual value for your visual images.
There are numerous payment processors to which you can hook up your shopping cart software. Clickbank and Paypal are two.
I hesitate to say this, but this is the business model that adult websites use very effectively for their images. (However, they use different payment processors.)

If you build a blog, you will more than likely automatically have an RSS or Atom web feed. Promote the feed. Put up your own little ads on your website and blog to advertise the fact that visitors can easily find out when you have added new images or writings. As I've mentioned with the two earlier parts of this series, you can set up a supplemental web feed to promote premium content. Either feed (hopefully) binds your subscriber and induces them to come back to your website. (Provided you set up your web feeds as partial-text rather than full-text.)

Every creative person I've met in my lifetime (literally many hundreds) has a desire to someday have a book published. By regularly blogging about your endeavours, you build your brand, trust, and fans. You also set up the very material you will need to write your book, and reduce the effort you would otherwise have to put in later.

In fact, all that remains is to select some of your better visuals and writing, edit it to meet some theme (loose or tight), add in some fresh content, then produce your own e-book. You can give it away online, or sell it, as with your single images.

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