Tattoo gallery: New Tips on Tattoos.com "Tips Page"

Tattoo Studios and Artists
your online presence
- by Damian McGrath

This page is free for tattoo artists and studios to use as a basic guide to making your life easier when it comes to getting more people to find you online for tattoo work and keeping your info up to date with a minimal of headaches. Use what you like, and email us any additions, suggestions or feedback you may have.

Tattoos.com has been designing and hosting websites for tattoo studios and artists since 1995. Over the years we have learned a few things that can make you get more relevent traffic for your website, and make it easier for people to find you and keep in touch or recieve updates. Specifically we are talking about maintaining your online presence, which is to say, your career as a tattoo artist or studio owner and how to use online tools to assist you.

This means separating your personal life online from your career online, and maintaining your online career presence as a regular part of your work. Don't be intimidated by this, it is simple to manage it and maintain it yourself and once you are used to doing it on a regular basis it really shouldn't seem like work at all.

This help page, created by Tattoos.com, will attempt to cover a range of topics that will hopfully serve as a jumping off point for artists and studios to use as a basic guide to achieving a successful and manageable online career presence. We will cover how to make your website valuable, utilizing great online tools such as gmail, keywords on your website, social networking and registering your social network name, sizing your photos properly, and uploading them to sites to get more traffic and lastly keeping everything updated with a minimal amount of work and misery for you.

DO I NEED A WEBSITE?

If I was asked this question in 1995 I would have told you definitely. It was the future, either you were part of the steamroller or part of the road. Fifteen years later, not so much. You can get by with a myspace and a facebook. However, consider the fact that you are branding yourself to myspace and facebook and basically enslaving yourself to their rules and following the direction they want you to go in more or less. So I still strongly suggest if you want to maintain and control who and what you are online then the best way to do that is still set up a website and maintain it yourself, it is not that costly or that difficult. For those of you that don't have a website and want to set one up we'd be happy to set one up for you, (plus all the extras you get from Tattoos.com like tech support and traffic from us). If you want to set up your own site, we will have some tips posted here to guide you on the next revision of this page (any day now, promise).

HOW TO MAKE YOUR WEBSITE VALUABLE - follow these three simple rules.

Target a specific audience - For a tattoo artist or studio, your audience online consists of mainly two groups, your peers, or fellow artists, and your potential or current customers. Your website and social networking sites, (Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, etc...) are great tools for maintaining contact with your audience and for you to maintain contact and see what your fellow artists are up to. Utilizing your website and networking tools to communicate with this audience is a simple matter that shouldn't take up too much of your time. You don't have to be rocket scientist to do all this yourself, you just need a basic working knowledge of computers and the internet. Later on this page, we will get more in depth on how to use the website and networking tools to achieve this objective.

Make your information valuable - Once again your fellow tattoo artits and potential clients are the ones who find your information as an artist valuable. That information of course consists of most importantly, your most recent work, which is an ongoing showcase of your skills and level as a tattoo artist. The other information would be where you are working, how to arrange for an appointment with you, where you will be traveling to work, ie. conventions, or what artists or guests may be coming to work with you. Keeping this information fresh and up to date is key to its value. What is not valuable, is an extensive gallery of the last shop BBQ where the piercing apprentice got wasted and video clips of shooting off semi-automatic weapons in the local dump. Stick to the tattoo stuff really.

Update your information - Tying this all together is the two-ton elephant in the room, keeping your information updated. So you built a website, so you started a twitter page and you are on the Facebook, but you don't update your website and you don't tweet and you hate the facebook because the news feeds consist of an aunt you haven't seen in 20 years announcing she is making a cup of tea. However, you will find if you don't try to bite off too much to chew, you can tie together website updates and social network updates and all of these pages can speak to each other and you can update just one of them, depending on what's appropriate, be it a tweet, a new facebook album or an event on myspace and without too much effort and it can automatically be updated on other networks. You can then let your fellow artists and customers know what's going on with your ever advancing at a breakneck speed career as a tattooist.

If you do not have a website, Tattoos.com is all about setting one up and hosting it for you as well as assisting you in it's design or maintenance, for everyone from the individual artists to the largest of studios. If you have an existing website, and want us to assist in maintenance or even just help you get more traffic to your website, just email us at mcgrath.damian

Labels: "Tips, Page", Tattoos.com