Random Acts of Art
Posts tagged as:
More black characters by DemiseMAN
Killer in Wonderland
Teresa
Lime bat
Black heart
When the death snatched her
Sacrifice for Blueberry
Axel
Ink
Rain on me
Lieth to ur heart
Gothic vampire13
Trick or threat?
Romance of nobility
The lady dead whisper
The spider witches
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
More fan-arts by delboysb91
Kazuya
God of war
Immerse your soul in love
You’re not a loser like me
Requiem
One thousand birds
Kyuubi Naruto’s rasengan
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
More wolfs by der Sheltie
Wolf warrior
Beautiful wolf
Wolf vs werewolf
Attack: Armor wolf warrior
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
A few lovely pencil drawings by Burdge bug
A different kind
Aim
Hazy
Daddy Edward
Arnold approves
Merry Christmas
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
Arachnae
Cytheriae
Comm + Farel Rivael
Two knifes
You are not gonna come closer
Rain over the old city
More drawings by Elvire De Cock
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
When I started with this website, about two years ago, Steve Pavlina was just starting to earn real money. A few thousand dollars a month. There where several other big bloggers who where starting to make money and the web was buzzing with stories about how easy it would be to make a little extra money.
Although I didn’t start this blog to make money I did like the sound of those stories.
The purpose of this blog was and still is to learn how to draw. To learn how my photographic memory works. And to think about those things without having the feeling that I’m talking to myself.
But still I thought it would be nice to earn a little money with this website. So after about six months I took out an adsense account and started advertising on my blog.
And the first month I made 1 cent.
That might not sound as a big deal but it was.
It was the first time in my live that I earned money of which I actually felt it was mine.
I do have a job and of course earn money with that job, but it isn’t really mine.
Part of my salary belongs to the company that rents me my apartment, part to the gas company, part to the grocery store, part to my phone and ISP provider etc.
And even if I’m left with a little money that I can put in my savings account it still isn’t mine. Because without fail within a few months I will have some extra expenses and then my savings will disappear.
But no company had laid a claim on this first cent. It was really mine.
Of course you can’t do very much with 1 cent but I felt that if I could make one cent there would follow more.
And it did.
The second month I earned 7 cents and third something like 43.
In total I earned about $7 in the first six months.
But by then reality had set in.
Google only sends you a cheque when your total earnings reach $100. And at the rate I was going that would take me several years.
Even worse the ads that Google put on my site didn’t have anything to do with the subject of my site.
There is a little village in the Netherlands with my surname. Apparently they sell a lot of houses in that village. So I found a lot of realtor ads on my site. Not the kind I wanted to have.
So I gave up on the idea of earning money with advertising on my site and Google still owes me $7.
That would have been the end of it, if it wasn’t for my work to bring art to the masses 
First via this site later via StumbleUpon and nowadays via twitter.
While looking for interesting art sites to link to I come across a lot of daypainters who sell their work. And although I don’t have that much work yet, it got me of dreaming.
Wouldn’t it be nice to sell some of my drawings. Not only because it would earn my some money of my own but also because it would be something of an acknowledgment.
People telling me they like my drawings is one thing, but if they would actually buy them that would really mean something.
The only trouble is that at the moment I only have about 5 or 6 drawings of which I’m really satisfied. If I would sell them I would have none.
A few weeks ago I discovered something that isn’t actually new. Artists have been doing it for centuries but I never thought of it.
Via DeviantArt you can sell prints of your work.
But it’s a very complicated process. First people have to click on the link in the upper left corner of this page. Then they have to navigate the DeviantArt site and then I only get about 10% of the proceeds.
But it did get me thinking.
I draw on sheets of paper that are the same size as the paper that comes out of my printer. And with the quality of printers nowadays I could very easily make my own prints. Hardcover envelopes would cost a few euro and for a little more then one euro I could send it all over the world. And receiving money in a save way via Paypal isn’t that hard.
But still.
It might be a lot of fun, or not. It might only be a lot of work. I’m not sure.
I’ve been thinking about this for the last couple of weeks, but I couldn’t make up my mind.
The point is how much would I actually make. A few dozen euros would be nice but what could I actually do with that money?
I’m just a small town artist learning to draw. I have made a few drawings I’m really satisfied with, but I’m nowhere as famous as you would have to be to earn real money via the web. And chances are that I will never be.
I’ve never been someone who attaches great value to money, so why bother.
Last week I read something that changed everything. The theory of 1000 true fans.
It turns out that you don’t have to be famous to earn a living on the web. If you can find 1000 true fans who are willing to buy one print a year, you can make a living.
I’ve calculated it for myself. It works out to 900 true fans willing to pay me 20 euro a year to earn what I’m earning right now (including taxes). (I don’t earn very much. 
)
It probably will be a while before I start selling prints from my work on this website, but the theory of 1000 true fans finally gave me an answer something that has been bucking me ever since I started this weblog.
Common wisdom has it that readers of weblogs are an impatient crowd who never take the time to read through a whole article. Instead they like to scan the headlines. To counter that you should start an article with summary and use ample headlines.
Then there are the search engines who have there own rules concerning linking within your blog and the use of keywords. And of course you’re supposed to be constantly trying to grow the number of people that come and read your blog otherwise you wont succeed.
I’ve tried. Living up to all those rules. But I didn’t like it. It felt more like work then like play. With all those rules and regulation I had to follow I had no fun writing my weblog. And as a result I hardly wrote anything.
But going by the theory of 1000 true fans there is only one rule I have to follow. I have to be me. Writing my articles in a way that feels right to me.
The people who are interested in the things I have to say and the way I’m saying them will know to find me. The rest of the world doesn’t matter. If people stop by, read my blog and don’t like it. That just means that they are not one of the 1000 true fans.
This blog is not for them and I don’t want to adjust my blog to their taste!
{ Comments on this entry are closed }
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:
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.
{ Comments on this entry are closed }