Using a blog to promote oneself as an artist

Using a blog to promote oneself as an artist.

Fortunately, there are blogs on that.

www.bloggingpro.com/  seems to be a blog with regular content about using blogs.

http://www.bloggingpro.com/archives/2011/01/28/the-ultimate-guide-to-blog-promotion/ is supposed to be, well, the ultimate guide to blog promotion. It is a compilation of links, but with a synopsis of each. Certainly an extensive resource.

http://www.michielgaasterland.com/blogging/how-to-promote-blog-posts-in-2013/
what it says. Network, network, network.

But is there a crucial difference between getting people to read your blog and hoping they'll buy your work, and making sure that the blog promotes the work in some significant way? Exact definitions and strategies seem hard to come by. I suppose you're supposed to keep referring to the work in the blog, and hoping blog readers become work buyers.

http://weblogs.about.com/od/marketingablog/tp/10FreeBlogPromotionTips.htm
we have ten basic tips here:

comment on other blogs
post frequently
participate in online forums
use social media
link to other blogs in your own posts
include your blog link in your email signature and on business cards
hold a blog contest
join a blog carnival
guest blog
write multiple sites and join them together.

Most of this is pretty self-explanatory, and some of it falls into the 'well, duh' category. Anyone remotely familiar with the internet and blogs generally probably knows you should post frequently, include links, use social media. Commenting on other blogs and participating in online forums may already be happening for other reasons. I'm aware of the need to be judicious in doing this, though, as spending too much time on social media and forums can eat up time like a big time-eating monster, leaving you less time to actually write blog posts, or your novel, or do anything else useful. At the same time, unless you interact with people, they won't interact with you, so consider your engagement with these conflicting priorities in mind.

The most successful sites I've seen have belonged to writers/artists who have their blog closely linked to their website, and both are updated regularly and content-rich, including with pictures, because you may be a writer but people on the internet, including other writers, find visual stimulus engaging. I'm thinking of Neil Gaiman and Catherynne M Valente in particular. For me, it may take a while to actually build up content and pictures and stuff, because I'm only just starting, and busy, and kind of clumsy with the whole business of digital pictures of any sort. I am hoping this will start to improve in the next few days...