Saturday 26th October 2013
Confused? That's OK! Most of these types of articles tend to offer you tips on what to do - but we thought we'd switch things up today and give you some advice on what to avoid on your blog. We don't really want to tell you want to do, as your blog is your own - but if you avoid these pitfalls, your general creativity will fill in the rest!
Arguably the most important thing to avoid on your blog is pointless posting. Pointless posts typically occur when you haven't decided what you're hoping to get out of running your blog. Fortunately, this is pretty easy to fix with a few moments thought. Increasing sales of your artwork is probably the most important goal for your blog, but there are others as well, ranging from increasing your exposure to demonstrating intelligent views to reaching out to your fans. If you keep those goals firmly in mind, you'll cut down on pointless posts that don't really move you closer to them, and instantly start generating ideas that will help you achieve them.
The next thing to avoid is posting, like, you know, whenever. The most successful blogs have a schedule, and they stick to it - you can do the same with your Gallereo blog. Just make sure that you set realistic expectations. If you hate writing, it's not likely that you're going to be making five posts a week forever, and even if you love writing, life tends to get in the way. Whatever you decide your posting schedule should be, stick to it.
Be sure to avoid compartmentalising. If you've been following our advice series, you know by now that it's vital to have social media accounts in addition to your Gallereo blog. To use them to best effect, you want to make sure that all your social media accounts and your blog play nice with one another. The more you mention Facebook on your blog and your blog on your Twitter and your Twitter on your Facebook, the better integrated they'll be, and the better your fan community will function. If your Facebook fans don't know what your blog fans know, or vice versa, you'll start running into problems.
Finally, the most important thing to avoid is too much self-promotion. This might seem like a paradox, but if you want to keep your fans engaged with your blog and coming back regularly, you'll need to post content about more than just yourself. Not that you should feel bad about posting about you and your work, upcoming shows or events, etc, but rather that you should space it out with interesting content about the art world in general. Things you love, things you hate, things that inspire you and things that speak to you are all good post ideas that will help space out the posts about you while both keeping your readers engaged and avoiding the pointless posting problem. Happy blogging!
Posted on October 26th 2013 on 07:51pm
