Be a gallery owner!

[kg7er]

If you've always wanted your own online gallery, my Crockett Street Gallery site is up for bid on <a href=http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=1203761539&r=0&t=0&showTutorial=0&ed=978235307&indexURL=0&rd=1>eBay</a> right now. The site gets about 300 page views a day and is well listed on many of the major search engines, but I'm not selling any art with it, and I can't afford to keep it online any longer.

If you think you can sell art, here's your chance to give it a try. Full details in the auction listing...or you can email me at <a href=mailto:kg7er@jas.net>kg7er@jas.net</a> with any questions.

I didn't know whether to post this in Computers/Technology or here in Art Business, so I flipped a coin. Could be it won't be appreciated in either spot. I don't know.



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Ron Marshall (http://bsg-arts.com/jump.htm)

[CarlyHardy]

I'm just wondering what one gets with the purchase of your gallery?
carly

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http://www.artistnation.com/members/paris/chclements/

[kg7er]

Basically, Carly, you get the domain name (csg-arts.com), which has good listings in the search engines, especially NBCi, where it's a Top Web Site. Good listings mean you don't have to start from scratch, traffic wise, like I did. If somebody buys CSG, they'll start off with about 300 visitor page views per day, instead of 8 or 12 or 0, like they would with a brand, new site.

It takes quite a while to get a new site listed on the search engines and build traffic. I've spent about 22 months doing it with CSG. And my meta tags are such that I got fairly decent positions in many of the engines.

Somebody buys the site, they would also get the site design--the HTML code and images. They would need to check with all the artists at CSG about continuing to display their copyrighted images, but I doubt any of them would balk at that, since I wasn't charging the artists any fees. (No wonder I'm going broke, duh!)

So that's about it, Carly. If you paid someone to design the site, it would probably cost more than the opening bid at eBay, but the existing, built-in traffic is really what's for sale. Goodwill, I think they call it.


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Ron Marshall (http://bsg-arts.com/jump.htm)

[KatieMoe]

300 pageviews per day is not a lot of traffic and certainly an amount that can be built up by an individual in a fairly short period of time, given the right tools and persistence.

As the internet space continues its consolidation, just about all but a rare few domain names are relatively worthless and "buying" traffic and goodwill would seem like the traffic would need to exceed millions of pageviews. Some sites with 10 million pageviews with an "attractive" audience can not give away their money-losing enterprises in this current environment.

If someone is really interested in beginning an online gallery, I'm confident they could build the traffic well beyond 300 pageviews per day on their own efforts.

But like most business ventures, it takes a real business plan and business know-how to succeed online. Anyone can throw up a website. The difference is who can execute a business plan that can succeed in this space.

CHClements made a great suggestion to me - it'd be very useful to write an article on the basic ways artists can increase traffic to their websites. Thanks for the idea CHClements! I'll work on such an article and submit it to Scott.

But feel free to ask questions and discuss ideas here as well.

If you have a website - what was your most successful avenue of getting more traffic. What things did you try that absolutely did not work? I'll start a new folder so we have a unique subject line on this...

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Kathleen McMahon
http://kathleenmcmahon.com/

[kg7er]

Kathleen sed: 300 pageviews per day is not a lot of traffic and certainly an amount that can be built up by an individual in a fairly short period of time, given the right tools and persistence.

Thanks for your insight, Kathleen. Yes, you can build web site traffic to very high figures overnight...if you pay enough money. You can buy banner ads. You can pay about $200 each to the various search engines to get their express listing service.

But if you don't have that kind of money, you have to do it the way I did...slowly. Submitting to the search engines, waiting for several months to be listed. Running free classifieds on WWAR. Posting on art boards. Guerilla marketing, basically.

Oh, and the site design isn't free either, unless you know how to do it yourself.

I already know about persistence, but I hope you'll take a moment to enlighten me about these "right tools." I must've been using the wrong tools all this time.

OBTW, Carly, I cancelled the eBay auction and found a cheaper hosting service, so Crockett Street will remain online...at least for another year. Maybe I can pick up some pointers from Kathleen on how to do it right. What say, K?



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Ron Marshall (http://bsg-arts.com/jump.htm)