by Henk ter Heide on Saturday June 6, 2009
I know. This is rather a cheesy title, isn’t it 
But the lessons I learned are so defining for my development as an artist that I can’t continue this blog without sharing it with you. So here it goes.
An immigrant’s son starts a business. Kind of a fish and chips shop (although in the Netherlands we don’t eat fish with our chips).
This is very special. Most immigrant’s son (and daughters) are unemployed. Some are getting their degrees.
A few (male) immigrants have their own tailor shop. But I know of only 3 or 4 entrepreneurial immigrant’s sons.
Although his shop is down the road from where I live I hardly ever go there. I don’t eat as much chips as I used to. When I go there it’s usually on odd hours and I’m the only customer. Which is nice because it gives me the change to talk a little with him.
He’s clearly very proud of his business and rightly so.
Last Thursday I didn’t feel like cooking and I went down to his shop to buy me some chips and fried meat. He was serving a few customers so I had to wait for a while. Which gave me the opportunity to watch him work.
I noticed a few strange things.
First I saw him watering his satay sauce down. I must say that I never seen anybody do that.
At first I thought he did it because the sauce had gotten too dry but soon I found that he was running out of sauce. Which is very bad timing on his part. But he commented that it’s something that could happen to anybody.
Then I noticed him running through his shop to get some meat out of the fridge.
When it finally was my turn I realized that he had taken as much time to serve three customers as most (fish and) chips sellers need to serve a dozen customers.
So while I was waiting for my bag of chips I wondered why there was such a gap between his and mine impression of his business. But it wasn’t until I started thinking about how I could explain it to him that I realized the problem.
Because he’s an immigrant’s son it’s not PC to comment on his business. He could think that you were actually commenting on the color of his skin.
So nobody ever does.
And if nobody ever comments on the way you do your business you must be doing a very good job.
So there it is. The story about one thing I learned while waiting for chips.
If you’ve ever read any advise on how you should go about writing a blog you’ll know that titles are very important.
If you want to become popular you should at least publish a few stories about things you’ve learned and the more cheesy the title the better.
But I don’t want to become popular. Or actually I do, but not in that way.
So I was planning to file this story away as something funny I couldn’t use in my blog. But the story kept bugging me.
This morning I realized why.
I’m in the same boat as this immigrant’s son. Apart from a few trolling art teachers (who are willing to give me a thousand boring exercises if I only turn control of this weblog over to them), I get hardly any criticism.
People tell me that I’m talented and how much they like me telling about my life. But as nice as it is to get compliments you don’t learn anything from them. You learn from criticism.
Which means that I’ll have to criticize myself.
Thinking about this, and some other problems I’ve run into, I realized that this will impact the way I write my blog.
I never aspired to be a day painter because I think that day painters let the need to publish daily trump the quality of their work. But this will probably mean that I post even less then I’ve done up till now.
The decision to criticize myself defines me as an artist: I’m not a blogger who draws but a drawing artist who blogs.
This means that I’m going to break every rule out of the blogging rule book.
In this blog I’m writing an account of my journey to become a better artist.
I’ll do that the way that feels best to me. I won’t be posting regularly. Sometimes I might be gone for a few days (or even weeks) if that is what I need.
You’re welcome to join my journey (rss feed).
But it is my journey!
No compromises.
by Henk ter Heide on Tuesday October 7, 2008
Describing why I started the Art showcase Blog Carnival.
Anyone who has ever started a blog knows that it is very hard to find your audience. You tell your friends. You link to your site from your social bookmarking site. You try to digg yourself.
But with all your efforts you may be lucky if you can get a steady audience of a few dozen people.
For the last year I’ve been featuring a series of artists. But by the nature of the way you find information on the Web, most of those artist were well established. Working for years with their own following and a large number of paintings/drawing/sculptures.
I’ve been thinking that it would be nice to show the work of a few artist who, just like me, have only just started on their journey. Artist who are still learning their craft.
Artist who are juggling a day job with their need to show the world the images and feelings they have in their head and heart.
For that reason I’m starting the Art showcase Blog Carnival.
If you draw, paint or sculpture and you write a blog and you would want to extend your audience, posting an article at Art showcase will be just the thing for you.
Other art Blog Carnivals might demand work of a certain quality, but since you’ve just started you can’t give that. Some Carnivals may seek work of young but promising artist but nobody can say about himself/herself that he/she is promising and to be honest neither can I.
I’m interested in your growth as an artist: Growth in your drawing, painting or sculpting skills. The process by which you find subjects, the way you work with them and learn from them.
You can submit two kinds of articles:
- Articles in which you show your work either with or without comments. Preferably two articles so you can show where you was a while ago and where you are now. (Enter the second link under “remark”.)
- Articles in which you talk about your creative process. (For instance articles about: Where you find your inspiration.With what kind of subjects you work. How you develop your skill. etc.)
When you find that I’ve listed your work in the Art Showcase you might feel tempted to link to my site. To show your appreciation and/or to show your friends that you finally got some recognition.
Don’t! Google frowns upon two way links because spammers use them a lot to sell their V*something. (Angering Google will hurt your ability to gain an audience.)
I would, however, appreciate it if you would bookmark this article at any social bookmarking service you use. By doing so you will not only show your appreciation (which is nice), but you will also be helping other starting artist to find the Art Showcase (which is even nicer!).
If you don’t use any social bookmarking service, might I strongly advise you to start doing so. Not only is it a lot of fun to show people links to what ever subject that interests you, but it will also help you to promote your blog.
This being the Internet you’ll find that nobody is interested in a list containing only links to your articles. But there are a lot of people who are interested in the same kind of things that interest you. While looking through your list of interesting websites/articles they will also find your blog.
If you feel that your blog falls in the category of sites that would benefit from a listing in the Art Showcase blog carnival, head over to the entry form and submit your work.
by Henk ter Heide on Saturday September 13, 2008
My blog had an unexpected three weeks vacation.
Here’s why.
About a year ago I thought it would be a good idea to buy a new PC with windows XP before Vista would completely take the market over. But it turned out I was a little late. I could choose between an of the shelf PC that was only slightly better then the PC I had or a custom made PC with windows Vista.
Even though I didn’t like what I heard and read about windows Vista I thought it would be a waste of money to buy a new PC if it wasn’t a real improvement.
I did try to work and play with windows Vista. But it didn’t work very well. I could install the game Dirt but the wheel didn’t work. I tried to configure a network with my old and new PC but although the old PC saw the new one. The new one didn’t see the old one.
When I tried to install my email program I found that to be impossible.
After that my new PC just sat there for the better part of a year while my old PC became slower and slower.
Two months ago I decided that my old PC had become to slow. It took me a minute just to start my mail program and even longer then that to start Firefox.
At first I thought that enough time should have past to give the world a change to get used to Windows Vista. With all the new updates it should be possible to get my wheel and email program running.
Yes and no.
I still couldn’t find the update needed to get the wheel running but I did find an update for my email program Turnpike for only 160 English pounds!!!
Agh. What are these people thinking?
I bought Turnpike ten years ago for only 40 pounds. Over the years I’ve downloaded several free updates and now they want me to pay 210 Euro’s.
I’ve thought about using an other email program. But it’s to much of a fuss. There seems to be no easy way to export/import my email addresses. And the way Turnpike files mail is much easier then other programs.
The alternative was to clone the hard drive of my old PC and install Windows XP on the new PC.
I did so 5 weeks ago and at first everything seemed to go alright. Off course I missed a lot of drivers and it took some doing to figure out which ones I needed. But after a week the PC seemed to work.
Except for the fact that the wheel still didn’t work.
Three weeks ago I had my first Blue screen of death (BSOD).
I pulled the wheel and every thing seemed to be fine.
To be on the save side I went to my dealer to ask for advise and the told me that I should open the PC up to see what kind of motherboard was inside and install those drivers.
After figuring out that I had the Asus P5B and not the Asus PSB motherboard I installed the drivers and everything was fine… for a few days. (Why would they use a font that makes it all most impossible to see the difference?)
But by Thursday night I was again having one BSOD after an other.
Friday I dropped my PC off at my dealer and was told that it probably would be a driver issue and I could get my PC back by Tuesday. Tuesday they told me the motherboard was broke and it would take at least 1.5 weeks.
Yesterday I got my PC back.
They formatted the hard drive for no good reason so I had install my backup. (Only lost two days.)
I’m not quite sure whether the problem is solved. I’ve already had two BSOD and windows is complaining about missing a USB mass storage device driver. Which was start of the problem three weeks ago.
But it seems that the rest of the driver issues are solved and google tells me that the mass storage device driver is a separate problem that has something to do with windows XP.
I haven’t tried my wheel yet but I’m hopeful…
by Henk ter Heide on Sunday May 25, 2008
Solving a few blogging problems.
I’ve gotten stuck. First with drawing and later with writing my reviews of other art sites.
It took me a few weeks to figure out what was going wrong and how I should deal with it.
Getting rid of a drawing
I was in the middle of a hatching exercise when I lost interest. I just didn’t feel like finishing this drawing.
For a while I thought that it might have to do something with the time of the year or with the wheather. I do tend to loose interest when skies turn gray. Something which happens every winter here in the Netherlands. But the summer has started and the skies are blue and sunny but still I don’t feel like finishing this drawing.
I don’t know whether it has something to do with autism or if it’s just my personality, but I feel that you should always finish what you start. Before I can start a new drawing I have to finish this one.
Only thing is that I won’t.
Earlier this week I remembered that I have been in this situation before. Not with drawing but with other hobbies of mine. Reading for instance. Sometimes I would start a book. Read a few pages and then stop. And then the book would just sit there. Waiting for me to finish it. While that book sat there I wouldn’t start an other book. I couldn’t. I felt I had to finish this one before I could start an other one.
Usually as a child I read books I had borrowed from the library. After three weeks I had to return them and get a new bunch of books.
After getting rid of the book I couldn’t finish I could again start reading.
I’ve been thinking about what is wrong with this drawing. I’m not sure. Maybe I don’t like the colors or maybe I have had it with practicing hatching for now.
I don’t know. But what ever it is in stead of waisting a lot of time trying to figure it out, I can better just start with the next one.
Hatching trees
Don’t listen to advice
I’ve been reading a lot of advice about how to write better blog posts.
One advice is to take your time. Spread the writing of an article over a few days. That way you have time to re-think your article.
I have tried that technique with personal posts and with posts about drawings but it never sat very good with me. With personal posts I find that I loose the train of my thoughts if I don’t finish the post in one go. And with posts about drawing I find that there isn’t enough to say to warrant so much trouble for one post.
But a few weeks ago I decided that it might be a good idea for my review articles.
Watching a sites I want to review I often find that I have idea in my head of which I don’t know how to describe them. I thought that I might improve on my posts if I were to leave a few days between the selection of the sites I wanted to review and the writing of the post. A few days to gather my thoughts.
But it didn’t work. Instead of improving my articles I felt that they became worse.
It took me a while to figure out what was going wrong. It isn’t that my article became worse, they stay more or less the same. The problem is that my expectations became so much bigger that my articles felt worse.
Being autistic means that the ideas I have about sites usually come in the form of pictures. Most of the time I have a hard time translating those pictures to words. Taking a few days longer doesn’t make it any easier and doesn’t make the translation any better.
As good as this advice might be for other people I’ll go back to doing it my own way.
by Henk ter Heide on Thursday May 1, 2008
Going back to publishing links to interesting artsites on my own blog.
About a year ago I started publishing links to sites with interesting drawings and paintings.
At first I published them on my on website. By doing so I hoped to get two results.
- I wanted to show people the many beautiful sites that are out there.
- And by publishing about (popular) artsites I wanted to get a bit of their traffic.
Not totally unselfish I admit
But since I started doing this only a few months after I had started this website I didn’t have much traffic. And most of the people who visited my website weren’t looking for beautiful art. So hardly any of them left my website via the links to artsites I featured.
Which was a bit sad. Partly because of the work I put into finding beautiful sites and partly because beautiful sites deserve to be seen.
After publishing links to sites on my site for a few months I decided to try something else:
At my Stumble account I have a, not very large, but loyal following of people who are interested in the, mainly, paintings I find for them. Why publish my links on this website were people didn’t seem to be that interested. A better idea would be to publish them at Stumble. And so I did for a few months.
Then some-one mentioned Twitter.
I found out it was even easier to publish links on Twitter then it was on Stumble. And even better. I found a plugin that made it possible to post those same links on my website.
Now I had three places to post my art links: Picture of beautiful painting to my Stumble account and links to interesting sites both on my Twitter account and my own website.
For a few months I was very content with myself.
But now I’m getting restless again.
A few days ago I came across an article about spam on Twitter. It seems that a lot of people are starting Twitter account to bother as many people as the can with their garbage. They follow thousands of people in the hopes that they will follow them back. But they never read the stories of the people they follow.
Looking at the last few people who started following me I find that they are mostly spammers: “Following: 4000, Followers: 50, Updates: 12″.
These people won’t appreciate my art links.
Problem is that the same holds true for my Stumble account. At the moment I have 35 fans who visit me regularly, but not very often. On average I get about 1 visitor a day.
By following those visitors back to their own Stumble blog you get an impression of what they are interested in. Most are interested in naked women…
An other problem I didn’t even consider when I started using StumbleUpon and Twitter is copyright. Everything I publish on Twitter and StumbleUpon falls under their copyright.
Although the paintings I link to are owned by there respective copyright holders and links are something of a public domain. My opinions are mine.
Starting today I’m going back to publishing links to beautiful and unusual artsites on my own blog. Although I’m not a art critic I will try my best to tell you what you can find on the different sites I link to. If possible I will even publish one or two of there paintings/photos.
Today I’m starting with the site of Raj Alrihal. He paints very large pictures that seem to tell a story about the future and far away places. Whether these paintings are part of a game or maybe a movie isn’t clear.
Most of the paintings are to large to publish here but these are nice samples of his work. The top painting is a detail of a larger painting.
The second site that I will feature today is Mark’sSketchblog by the American animator Mark Behm
Any one who has visited some of the artsites I to which I’ve linked in the past will know that I love paintings and drawings about people and monsters. Mark has both.
His portraits take the form of caricatures like this one
His monsters are more funny then scary, like this one
By visiting Mark’s profile you can find two more blogs he runs with some friends. Both are quite nice.
by Henk ter Heide on Saturday February 23, 2008
Making a decision about the future of this blog.
I’m finding that I’m slowly getting to a point of which I naively thought I would never reach it.
When I started this blog I thought that I would be drawing beautiful pictures without ever having to practice technique. Since I have a photographic memory I thought that I only had to draw what I saw.
But it doesn’t work that way. To draw what you see you need a fair amount techniques I don’t have.
So a few weeks ago I spent a few days drawing circles. I didn’t blog about it because I thought it wouldn’t be very interesting if I blog about the same subject 10 days in a row.
But last week I didn’t do any drawings and I remembered that there was an important reason why I started this blog at about the same time as I started drawing:
I need a way to publish my drawings. Even if I’m only do boring practice drawings I still need to publish them. If I don’t I get the feeling that I’m doing something that is without purpose and I stop doing it.
So I’ve gotten to the point where I have to take a decision both about drawing and about blogging. Either I stop doing both or I continue practicing my drawing and write articles that probably will be rather boring.
A few months ago I would probably have chosen the first option but in the last few months I’ve noticed that my readers are very picky. They only read the article that are of interest to them and ignore the rest. So I think I could get away with writing 10 articles about freehand circle drawing without any one noticing it.
by Henk ter Heide on Wednesday January 30, 2008
A little blogging fun.
I just found a site where they can calculate the monetary worth of your site.
The worth of my site is a little over 2000 dollar. But since I have no plans of selling my domain I’ll never get it.
But it is fun to know that my work hasn’t been for nothing.
by Henk ter Heide on Sunday January 6, 2008
Why do I blog?
I just caught myself writing something strange.
In an answer to some one who had commented on one of my drawings I said that I might try some technique that might improve my drawing skills but that I had to think about the impact it would have on my blog.
The strange thing being that my blog is about me learning how to draw. So every thing that could improve my drawings and drawing skills should be more important then my blog.
My feeling that the blog is more important then learning how to draw got me thinking about why I blog.
When I started blogging I had a few reasons:
- Because I like to write.
- Because I like to draw.
- Because it feels useless to write when no one is reading your work.
- Because it gives me a public forum to show my drawings.
- Because I can get all those cool statistics about the amount of people that read my blog and my RSS feed
Now I’ve been blogging for a while I’m finding even more important reasons to keep doing it:
- Because it helps me to take some distance from my drawings and look at them through the eyes of some one else.
- Having to write an article about some problem means that I have to think it all the way through instead being content with a half as solution
- Because I get to meet a lot of nice people who are enthusiastic about the things I write about.
- In writing about autism I can some times answer question people might have.
- In writing about autism I can, hopefully, show people that we are not pathetic disabled people who need your help but independent proud people who do things in our own way.
- Because it helps me to meet people who point me in new directions.
- Because it’s turning out to be a great tool for growth and self improvement.
(Maybe some one can tell me if a “half as solution” is a decant thing to say?
I hear it a lot on TV but it’s never clear whether you can use it in any conversation or not. To my Dutch ears it sounds a bit off.)
by Henk ter Heide on Tuesday November 27, 2007
Thinking about the kind of audience I’m targeting my blog at.
(Have you ever noticed how your life slowly grinds to a halt when you give in to your fears? I’d better start drawing again soon otherwise I won’t have a blog left to target.)
Before I started with this blog I had a Dutch blog for two years. Kind of a diary. I talked about my life and the kind of problems I faced on a daily basis.
You can imagion that hardly anyone read that blog. I had about 1 reader a week. I always suspected that the only people reading where colleague’s of mine who were afraid that I would tell were the skeletons where buried.
When I started this blog it was not only meant to be a podium where I could tell my stories but also as a kind of marketing tool to present (and maybe even sell) my drawing. So I wanted a lot more readers then I had with my old blog.
So I did what you are supposed to do. I read the Problogger site to learn about blogging. I read Weblogtoolscollection to learn about design and plugins and most important I read Copyblogger to learn about how you should write. In July I came across a site that promised to teach you ways to get free traffic and for a month I read The thirty day challenge.
I did learn a lot.
- I learned that if you write several articles a day you’ll get a lot of traffic from google. But my main focus for this site is to present drawings and I don’t do 3 or 4 drawings on a day.
- I learned that the blogshere is kind of a community. You’ll get much more readers when you comment on other peoples blogs. But I have a hard enough time to communicate in real life. I don’t like talking to strangers and I don’t want to talk to people only to get them to read my blog.
- I learned that there are a lot of plugins that you can use to increase the joy of writing and reading a blog but that you shouldn’t over do it otherwise your blog will look like a Christmas tree and no one will like it.
- And I learned that you should think about your target audience.
That last piece of advice always puzzled me the most.
There are some 500 million people on the Internet. Some of them visit my website ones in a while. Why would I want to think about who they are?
I never think about who people are.
I think about the way they act. I think about what kind behavior I can expect of them. But I never think about who they are.
(I’m told that’s typical of autistics.)
A few months ago Ed Dale, the king of affiliate marketing and the guy behind the thirty day challenge, advised his reader to read the book Made to Stick
by Chip and Dan Heath. The book is about the art of advertising. Specifically how you can get people to remember your message.
I’m not that interested in advertising but Ed was very enthusiastic about this book so I bought it.
It’s turned out the be a very interesting book. With a lot of anecdotes and fun the book explains how you can get your message across in a way people will remember as good as the story about the guy who lost his kidney.
After reading about two thirds of the book I just realized that they also tell a lot about targeting your ads at the right audience. The only difference is that while every other book and site stresses on how important it is. The writers of this book just give examples of real problems governments and companies face and how these problems were solved and how they could have been solved.
A few years ago the state of Texas had a problem with littering. They spent a lot of money cleaning up and educating the public with messages like “Please Don’t litter” but nobody paid them much attention.
The problem was that the kind of guy that littered: A 18 to 35 years old, pickup-driving male who liked sports and country music. He didn’t like authority.
“Bubba” wasn’t impressed by the states message not to littered. On the contrary. The more state stressed not to litter to more “Bubba” did.
The advertising companies they came up with was targeted at Bubba: “Don’t mess with Texas” says a lot about how you would want people to deal with Texas and with littering.
You’ll have to read the book if you want to find out which techniques were used to get to this slogan. The point that interests me is that by targeting the message at a specific person it becomes much clearer what you should say to get the message across. The book has a dozen more examples where imagining a specific person clarifies the message. But only after reading the story about Bubba I realized that companies who advertise have the opposite problem of what I have.
I’m not trying to get a message across. My problem is that with all the techniques I’ve learned about blogging I’m pressing myself into a mold that isn’t really me.
I’m trying to do all the things you should do to get more visitors:
- Finding interesting meaningful titles.
- Telling what the article is about before I start with the article.
- Writing an article you can scan without loosing the track of the point.
- Presenting interesting content. Never forget the “content”
- Making it an interesting story.
- Giving enough backstory. Taking care that some one who hasn’t read the rest of my stories still understands what I’m talking about.
Giving enough backstory is the point that I find the most difficult. Even with communication in real life I usually have the feeling that people know almost every thing there is to know about me. I know they don’t. But it feels as though they do.
It takes a lot of effort not to make remarks that refer to other articles I’ve written or even to articles that I’ve jet to write.
How can thinking about my target audience help me to improve my blog?
Well for one thing now I know for whom I’m not writing. I’m not writing for people who find me via a search engine. Most of them only stay for something like 1 second so they don’t actually read anything. The few that stay for longer usually come to read either my articles about fireworks or my articles about abstract drawings and then they leave.
Which is fine. But they don’t seem to be that interested in the rest of the things I talk about.
So for whom am I writing?
I think people that have some personal interest in autism, either because they are autistic or because they know someone who is. I like to think that my writings would be of interest both for people who believe that autistics can lead a full and fulfilling life and for people who don’t think they can.
And of course I also write for any one who is interested in drawing and in my trails and tribulation while I’m learning to draw.
(If you’re in neither group you’re still welcome to read my blog )
by Henk ter Heide on Monday September 24, 2007
I’m going start a shop to sell my drawing. That makes it possible to change my blog and make it interesting.
There’s a blogging saying that goes something like “It’s nice when ten people read your blog. It’s nicer when a hundred people read your blog and it’s very nice when a thousand people read your blog”.
Last week I realized that the same holds true for an artists drawings. It’s a nice feeling when a few dozen people a day look at two or three of my drawings but it’s much nicer feeling when people have my drawings on their wall.
When I started this blog I planned it to be something like Steve Pavlina meets Vincent van Gogh. I would show my drawings and write about the creation process, about my life and about my autism.
I thought that I had something new and that people would flog to read my blog. And they did. With a lot of ups and downs. But over the past few months my traffic rose from fifty views a week in May to on average 120 views a day right now.
At first it was very exciting to see the stats rise, but after a while I got used to it.
By June I figured it would be fun to offer a few ads on my site and see if I could make a little money. Although I never made very much (at this moment it stands on $6.43) it was very exciting. Every time Google reports that I had made $0.07 I went through the roof with joy.
But after a month the excitement was tempered by the realization that I actual didn’t make that much money. So I read a few sites about Adsence and got advised to take an Adwords account to get some experience with advertising.
In the beginning of July I took an Adwords account and very soon found that Google Adwords is something of a catch 22.
Google rewards ads that have a good clickthrough rate. But most people don’t click on ads. They just copy the webadres to the address bar and visit a website on their own. That seems like a good deed since I pay per click but it isn’t.
When you start a new campaign or raise the amount of money you are willing to pay for a keyword Google shows a lot of your ads and you get a lot of traffic. But since hardly anyone clicks on your ads Google makes your keywords more expensive, your ads are pushed to the bottom of the pile and nobody gets to see them. Then you can either raise your budget or start a new campaign. In both cases the high amount of traffic returns for a few days and then drops off again.
Just when I was realizing that this wouldn’t work (for me) I came across something called the Thirty day challenge. Ed Dale, whose claim to fame is that he ones sold a webdomain for $58 thousand (or million, I’m not completely sure), would give a free course in which he would teach people to get free traffic and at the same time earn $10.
It all seemed like a big marketing ploy. To good to be true.
But I’m a reasonable smart guy and I figured that I could stop the moment he started asking for money. And there is nothing wrong with getting some free traffic isn’t there? So I joined up.
In the beginning of August Ed Dale kicked off with a lot of information on ways to find keywords. Maybe for people who wanted to blog but didn’t know what to blog about?
It wasn’t until the middle of August that I realized that this course actually targeted affiliate marketers. But by that time I had learned a few useful things. For instance a method to find where your target audience is located. (I targeted my Adwords ads at the USA but it turns out that my audience lives in Australia and New Zealand.)
About three quarters in he talked about getting more traffic by starting multiple blogs. Which made a lot of sense but also promised to be a lot of work.
Having three or four blogs on the same subject should bring in three or four times more traffic. Ed Dale advised to send all that traffic to your affiliate marketing site so people could buy something and make you a little money. But my goal was to get more traffic to HenkTerHeide.com and this seemed to be a little overkill.
By the end of August Ed lost me when he started talking about creating your own product. I’m just a blogger who writes about drawing. Where on earth would I get a product?
Last week I finally got it. I’ve been looking at this blogging thing from the wrong perspective. I thought of myself as an amateur blogger who maybe could become a professional blogger and make money via Adsence and maybe at some point even sell some drawings. But I’m not. I’m an artist who uses a blog as means to show his drawings.
The blog isn’t importantent. The drawings are. So instead of looking for ways to get attention for my blog I should be looking for ways to get attention for my drawings.
In a few weeks I’ll start my own art shop where I will sell my drawings. The role of this blog will be to send customers to my art shop.
This will mean a few changes for this blog:
- I can talk about a lot more subjects. Restricting the articles on your blog to your niche market is important when you have Google ads on your blog. When you talk about a dozen subject Google doesn’t know what kind of ads to present.
But since the only ads I’ll have will be for my own art shop, that doesn’t matter any more.
- The “Featured on See me draw” series will be replace by the feed of my StumbleUpon account.
For the last few weeks I had the feeling that the series was running into a few problems.
- I find far more interesting art sites then I have room for on my blog.
- A lot of sites aren’t suitable for a number of reasons.
- There weren’t that many people who followed links from my blog, which is a shame since most sites are very nice.
- I’m changing the posting frequence. A few months ago I decided to post three times a week and build in a two week gab between drawing and posting so I wouldn’t feel a deadline and could take the time for the creating process.
But it doesn’t work. I still feel the deadline. Further more I always had the feeling I was posting second rate drawings since I usually feel that my last drawing is much better then the one I made two weeks ago.
From now on I will post my drawing as soon as I’m finished with them.
Ed Dales thirty day challenge indeed turned out to be something of an ad campaign. His day job is giving a marketing course that will cost you $97/month. In the beginning of September he told people that they could (not should) take a look at his Immediate Edge site. Since my pockets aren’t that deep I didn’t.
But his free Thirty day challenge site is still online and you can still do the course.
If you’re a blogger who hopes to place some ads or maybe you want to sell some paintings or drawings I would certainly advise you to have a look.
Maybe you should take the promise of free traffic and earning $10 with a grain of salt (although some did), but he will teach you the basics of Internet marketing.
