clint watson, fine art studio online (faso)
feature interview july & august 2017 - Part Two

Software Craftsman, Art Fanatic, and FASO Founder, Clint Watson

In 2001, Clint Watson launched FineArtStudioOnline.com, a website creation tool and marketing system for fine artists - professional art websites. He focuses on helping his artist clients create websites and providing them with marketing ideas, opportunities and advice.

He firmly believes that artists can change the world with their artworks and strives daily to help them make that a reality.  Clint lives in Texas and the virtual world.

Editor's Note:  Clint responded to our interview questions with detailed answers important to all artists. Because of its length, PSST presented his interview in two parts. Enjoy this Part Two Installment and click here for Clint's full bio and Part One.

BoldBrush

PSST:  It is always a thrill to open an email and read, “Congratulations! Your painting was selected as part of the FAV15% (jury's favorite 15% of the entries) in the BoldBrush Painting competition.” Could you explain how the BoldBrush contest works?

CLINT:  Sure!  The BoldBrush contest awards over $23,000 worth of awards every month, that’s $276,000 a year.  BoldBrush contest entries are $14/each, however they are free with all paid FASO plans (the number of free monthly entries depends upon the plan).  So if you want to enter every month, you will actually save money by signing up for the FASO Intro plan, even if you never build a website.
 
Here are the details about how the judging works:  Every month, we invite a well-known painter to be the judge.  He or she judges all of the entries to select the award winners.  There is no pre-jurying of the entries.  The judge sees every single entry and selects a 1st place, 2nd place, and 3rd place as well as 8 finalists. 

In addition, there is also a monthly “BoldBrush award”, which is a very interesting award, chosen by the judge.  The BoldBrush award has the same monetary value as the Best of Show, but has the additional stipulation that it can only be won once in a lifetime by any given artist.  That means that it’s impossible for the same artists to win all the awards and, it forces us to constantly look for new, great artists.  It eliminates a common criticism of many art contests that “the same people always win”.  With the BoldBrush Award, that’s impossible. 

We also award outstanding awards for the mediums of pastel, watercolor and acrylic.  This is to ensure that those mediums are recognized as they should be.  All painting mediums are welcome and eligible to win all the awards in the contest and, in fact, we have had many pastel, watercolor and acrylic winners.  However, the reality is that our contest garners far more entries from oil painters.  It’s just a more popular medium. We want to be sure we support great art in all painting mediums!  Hence, we offer the outstanding pastel, watercolor and acrylic awards each month.  The outstanding awards are chosen by the BoldBrush jury, which is made up of the BoldBrush team and myself. In addition the BoldBrush jury, as you mentioned, selects our favorite “15%.”  It’s not really a strict 15% but we’ve found that by selecting our favorites, as a group, it generally works out to about 15% of the entries.

build your audience

PSST:  Artists say they cannot write. You are a proponent of publishing a regular newsletter and frequent blog posts, and these are so simple to do within FASO. Please comment on writing and on steps we might take to reach a buying audience?

Clint:  I should have read ahead!  I already talked about this a little bit in one of the previous questions.  And, you are correct that I am absolutely a proponent of sending regular newsletters.  In fact, I think it’s the single most important marketing activity for most artists to undertake to reach their buying audience.  A lot of artists have heard lots of hype about blogging, but an email newsletter is far more effective.  Blogs, by themselves, rarely get much attention. And, while we’ve all heard success stories about blogging, most of those stories are about people who adopted blogging in the early days, over a decade ago.  Back in those days, blogs were new and exciting and, more importantly, they pre-dated the rise of social media.  Today, the role that blogs initially filled has been taken over by social media platforms.  So, blogging today work best when paired with a regular newsletter and social media posts. 
 
Getting back to sending regular newsletters:  I’m always hesitant to use the word “newsletter” because I think that word carries a connotation of seriousness that makes many artists find the whole idea daunting.
 
While saying “artists need to send regular newsletters” sounds like a lot of work, it’s really nothing more than regular communication with your fans via an email list.  It’s that simple.

There are two main steps all artists need to take to be successful with email marketing:
 
Step 1:  ALWAYS ask any interested prospect you meet if they’d like to receive regular email communication from you (and if they say yes, add them to your newsletter list).
 
Step 2:  Regularly send to your email list.  Just send short updates about what’s happening with your artwork and your career.  As far as the writing goes, just make sure you write personably and casually as if you were emailing a friend.  It’s far more effective and fun for fans to hear from you as a person than it is for you to spend a bunch of time trying to make your newsletter sound like an article in the New York Times or something. 
 
As for reaching a buying audience:  there is no shortcut.  You have to build your own buying audience, one person at a time.  (Although you can build it faster by guest posting for someone with a larger audience than you have, but that’s another topic)
 
Everything I outline here illustrates exactly why our “Get New Art Alerts” feature, which I mentioned above, is so successful. It ensures that regular communications are sent to your fans via email, automatically.

You can learn more about the advantages of FASO art marketing tools in this “Powerful Art Marketing” video that we recently made:

MARKETING & Social Media

PSST:  Do you have any tips you would like to share on marketing, exhibiting, or social media?

Clint:I’ve shared my main marketing tip in the previous question.  If you do nothing else, start an email list, start adding people to it (with permission) and start sending updates to that list. 
 
Everything, social media, your website, your interactions in real life, everything should be geared toward getting people on your own mailing list.  Old time marketers always say “the money is in the list” and old time marketers are right.
 
By the way, “the list” is generally the secret of successful art galleries – the best ones all have a great, qualified, “house list” of clients that gallery sales reps can call, email to, invite to shows, and sell artwork to.  You need your own “house list” of prospects. Once you’re consistently building and marketing to your email list, you can start duplicating the information you send to your email list on your blog, and then you can post links to your blog on social media.

The “house list” concept is really the secret to almost all marketing.  It’s a simple concept, but there are no shortcuts, you have to consistently do it day in and day out until someday you’ll realize your list has hundreds or even thousands of people who are interested in you and your art.  And that’s a huge asset.

Which leads to my other marketing tip: consistency.  Successful artists are consistent like a machine in their marketing.  Successful artists invite every prospect to join the mailing list.  Successful artists don’t flit around the internet trying one art site after another.  Successful artists don’t change website hosts every few months because they have “no traffic and no sales.”  Successful artists build traffic and sales.  In other words, successful artists don’t look for magic bullets….they make magic happen one day a time and one prospect at a time.

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I know social media is a big question people have.  One important thing that is really crucial is this:  Don’t stress out about trying to engage and post on all the social networks.  Start your marketing with the house list ideas I talked about above.  And, once you’re doing that add one social network. 
 
The only two that really matter in the art world, for the most part, are Instagram and Facebook.  Some artists may have had success with others, but Instagram and Facebook are by far the most used by artists and art collectors. In fact, in 2016, Instagram actually passed Facebook to become the most used social network in the art world.  So, if you’re not already active in social media, I’d start with Instagram, which is a great way to start because you can actually connect your Instagram account to your Facebook account and post new art to both networks simultaneously. 

At first, I would suggest that you focus only on posting new art and exhibit updates.  Don’t post too often, once a day is plenty.  Even less than that is OK.  On Instagram, there are all kinds of hashtags you can use to help people discover you and learning about those hashtags and how to be utilize Instagram is important if you choose to add it to your mix, but that’s a bit beyond the scope of this interview.

To recap here’s your marketing formula: build a house list of prospects, mail updates about your work and your exhibits to your house list.  Be ultra-consistent.
 
If you’d like to learn more about fine-tuning and turbocharging your art marketing, I’d encourage you to sign up for our Free daily art marketing newsletter, FineArtViews, at https://boldbrush.com/fav.  We cover art marketing topics every day from a range of professionals and go much further in depth that I can in this one interview.

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