Blogging: Your secret tool for creative success

Given the volatile state of social media today, it’s more important than ever for fine artists and other creatives to have an online presence they can fully curate. Podcast platforms are saturated, foetuses are now posting on TikTok, and YouTube videos are throttled with ads. To make matters worse, many of these platforms suppress the reach of your posts to encourage you to buy ads or ‘boosts’. So how do you get seen?

I was chatting with fiction writers and artists over the past few months, and a surprising number of them rely on third parties to get their work seen. Writers feel that magazine submissions are the holy grail of recognition, and are reluctant to consider other venues for exposure. Most artists I have spoken with over the past two years are still convinced that Twitter is the only place where collectors are buying artwork.

One writer I spoke with advised authors to aim for one hundred rejections a year. My response was that if a writer turned each of those submissions into a new blog post, they would have a really awesome blog. Sending in one essay or short story one hundred times seems masochistic. But aiming for one hundred original new stories is definitely an effective way to build a portfolio.

Basically, if you’re a fine artist, photographer, or musician, a blog is where you curate your work. It is where clients can browse your portfolio and get to know you better. Building up a blog is amazing for your SEO because it makes you searchable outside of social media.

What to do with a blog:

Share your work. Showcase your artwork, photography, writing, or any other creative projects. Experiment with different styles, and create a portfolio of work over time. Share your process, behind-the-scenes images or videos, and drafts you feel happy with. In doing so, you will create proof of concept for your work, which your potential clients, collaborators, and supporters will appreciate.

Connect with other creatives. Blogging is one way to meet people outside your immediate community. If they share your interests, they will comment on your blog, and you can have interesting conversations them. You can learn about opportunities to showcase or exhibit your work, and be invited to publish guest posts on other blogs. From there, you can gain support from a wider audience, and learn from the feedback you receive. This is the first step towards building a dynamic community.

Build your brand presence. Your blog will help you to share more about your creative projects. If there is a style of art or writing that you prefer, you can establish yourself as an expert. Write about the things you know well to position yourself as a thought leader. In this way, you can attract new opportunities.

Most people scrolling through social media feeds may not want to read long captions or threads. They may ask you where else they can see your work. Having a blog gives you a place to present your archives and present extra content for curious supporters.

If you’ve stopped blogging and are on hiatus, now is a great time to get back to it. If you’re a fine artist or other creative, start sharing your work, and if necessary, do a rebrand.

How you can get back to blogging after a break:

Choose a few topics that you really care about. Your interests will change over time, but while you’re focused on something, share your thoughts with your readers. You can write a series of posts on the same topic, and connect the posts in a series. This style will help your audience to connect with your work and understand you better. You can also cycle through topics seasonally and adjust to your readers’ changing interests.

Be consistent with posting. Try to post something new on a regular basis, even if you only post once a week. Take some time each week to brainstorm ideas for blog posts. They don’t have to be long posts, or epic essays each time. Varying your presentation style will help you to avoid feeling blocked. Try writing lots of posts close together, and schedule them to be published at a later time.

Repurpose your blog posts for social media to promote them. Summaries and quotes from one blog post can be used on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. There are people selling courses on how to repurpose a single post to create social media content for different accounts. But you don’t need to pay.

Create your own graphics with templates and stock images on Adobe Express or Canva. And if you’re adventurous, you can even generate original graphics using Canva Text to Image App, Stable Diffusion, or Bing Image Creator.

The more people know about your blog, the more feedback you’ll get. By resizing and repurposing your posts, you would create a consistent look for your brand across your social media accounts.

Starting a blog is time consuming but if you already have one, go ahead and dust it off. Rebrand, rename, or update your style if you wish. By blogging about your creative process, your inspirations, and your latest projects, you can connect with other creatives, build an audience, and promote your work. And because blogging is a form of organic SEO, you can also use it to improve your search engine ranking and get your work found by more people.

Transform your blog into your own safe space for showcasing your work. Use it as the launching pad for networking with like-minded creatives. If you’ve been on hiatus as a fine artist, writer or other creative, give blogging a(nother) try, resurrect your archives, and see how you like it.

Good luck.

Postscript: The pop art illustrations in this post were generated with the Bing Image Creator app. My prompts are in the captions. Enjoy playing.