Should Artists Have Multiple Sites?
The short answer to this question is a definite YES.
It is a good idea to have a number of domains that are related to each other by having similar themes and that are linked to each other.
One way to do this is to have your main selling site with the domain name that introduces you and what you do…
eg. www.joeblogsartist.com This site will introduce you as an artist and what you do. It may contain your artists statement, a history of you and your art, original work etc.
You can then create sites that fit different themes or series that you are involved with. You may paint watercolours of flowers. In this example you would make a website of your flower paintings and link it to your name site. You could even create a “How to paint flowers in watercolour” and link this back to your name site. You may take photographs of the flowers, so create another site showing your photographs and link this back to your name site. Every artist should have an art blog. This would also be linked to your main site. Continue building websites and linking them to your name site. In this way you create a huge net that helps you to capture visitors searching in the flower theme. Because you have a huge net Google will believe that you are an expert in your niche and will place your sites higher up the search engine pages.
Isn’t it going to cost a lot of cash to build this network you ask yourself. The answer is no. If you use WordPress you can build your art websites for absolutely no cost. You will of course need to pay for your sites to be hosted, and to purchase domain addresses for your art sites. But once again this is not going to break the bank. You can purchase domain names from Godaddy for around $8 per year. Hosting from Hostmonster and other firms costs as little as $7 per month, and once you have registered your first domain you can house unlimited domains as sub domains for no cost at all.
Well there we go. Once you have created several sites and linked them to each other your visitors will be able to navigate between them. Written down this may seem complicated, but honestly once you try it you will find it quite an easy exercise.
