Long Holidays . . . and time to think

Well, another year passes. Another year begins. Something about windows and one is never closed but that another is then opened. So it is with the calendar. And here it is already the THIRD day of January! I'll be writing my art goals and some objectives over the next couple days and share some or all of them here.

One goal is to do a better job marketing my studio work. I seem to be able to land at least one sizeable public art commission every year or two and that certainly helps the annual income bottom line. But the studio work is important to me as an artist, so I produce quite a number of such works each year. Translation: Lots of dollars tied up in mats, glass and frames. I need to market this work more aggressively so one goal is to make art sales online. Even before the new year began, I accomplished the first objective towards that goal: I opened an Etsy online store at: PoppengaArtStudio.etsy.com   I've already got enough art my Etsy at this point to spill over into a page two of listings. There are more objectives to achieve in order to realize the sales goal, but getting the store online was a significant start.

With Etsy there's also a free tracking service called Google Analytics. It lets me see that my Etsy store visitors are coming from all around the world. Google Analytics also generates various reports that can help me analyze the data collected. A filter on one of the reports shows which page a visitor entered on (Google calls it a "landing page") and how many pages each visitor visited (at Etsy "pages" are each listed painting.) If a visitor lands and then leaves without checking out another painting, that translates into a 100% bounce rate. In the marketing world, you want a low bounce rate. Right now, I'd be thrilled with an overall bounce rate of 50% (half the visitors land/leave and half of them stay to look at more paintings.

An interesting trend I've noticed already with the help of Google Analytics is that in the USA the two states sending the most visitors are New York and California. New York is ahead with twice as many visitors and a significant difference beyond just numbers: New York visitors linger and look at more paintings (pages). California visitors land and leave. Don't know yet what that could mean, but it is curious.
As for other goals and objectives, I'll sprinkle a few more thoughts at this blog as I find time to.