Where we are going with promoting t-shirt art

This is the latest from Art Life Collective guru and chief, Blair Hadley, for everyone involved in creating designer t-shirts:

Greetings All:

My, how we've grown - well over 300 images…80 plus artists! As Art Life Collective moves into the next phase of business development, with the upcoming implementation of a search engine for the gallery, additional site improvements and the recent creation of the forum, there are some other matters I would like to discuss with every artist who is featured on the site. As we continue to do our part to spend capital to develop the site and promote the business, I would like to talk with you all a bit about the nature of the Collective and my vision, which may be ambiguous to many of you.

There is a reason I chose to call the business the Art Life Collective. That is what I truly see it as being - a collective, cooperative effort designed to benefit all of us. That is why, when someone buys one of your images, I share roughly 25 percent of the revenues I take in directly with the artist. That is quite literally the biggest cut I can manage and still have the business model itself hold together. One of the big reasons I started this company was because I feel there is a great need to provide a resource such as this on the web, which is at the very least free to artists, and at the best a profitable venture. Although I have a business to run and I need to make enough money to pay my bills and be comfortable, that is about the extent of my own financial aspirations from this venture. Many of my motives for creating this are passionately philosophical and philanthropic in nature. I want you guys to have a good place to go to get exposure as artists. To this end, I seem to be succeeding, and receive requests fairly frequently for contact information on someone who is posting work on the site. I always pass this information on, regardless of whether the interested party buys a shirt or not. We want you guys to succeed.

We also want the business to succeed. So far we are doing ok and it looks like we'll be around for a good while, but if you are interested in the success of this venture as well as making money and getting exposure, you need to start self-promoting. Advertising dollars go only so far, and reach a mixed audience. But you guys have the direct ability to drive traffic to the site and more specifically to your work by taking advantage of the web. This can be done in many ways. The best way is to start blogging and posting in forums about the site, your work, and what ALC is about. The best way to DRIVE CUSTOMERS DIRECTLY TO YOUR WORK is to paste the url of your artist page into a link, like this: http://artlifecollective.com/shop/index.php?main_page=detail&cat_id=28 . Ok…that is a really nasty looking link to my artist page! But, although some of you may know how to do this some of you may not, there is an easy way to clean that up and make it nice to look at. To take a link like that and make it look pretty on a forum or blog, all you have to do is this - these are called html tags - and the following ones are UNIVERSAL for turning a link like that into something nice:

< href = " LINK HERE "> WORD (or words) HERE < / a >


What that does is this: Blair Hadley

What I just did is insert my artist page URL into the first field and my name into the second. The only thing that will appear as a clickable link is my name - Blair Hadley - much better looking than that big, cumbersome link above. Put anything you like into the second field. My name was just an example.

I know a lot of you out there know how to do that, but some may not, so there it is just in case.

Art Life Collective is something we are all a part of. It is my life's work at the moment, not yours, and I appreciate that. You make the art. I'll make the shirts. But, its success depends on those who care about selling their art here helping themselves and the company by self promoting. We've created the resource and will, of course, continue pounding away at improving the site and increasing its visibility. All we are asking is that you pitch in, for your own sake if nothing else. Also there is a link to the new ALC forum (www.artlifecollective.com/bb) posted on the artist registration/login page. That will be the primary means by which we get news out to you guys from now on, so I hope you will register and check it periodically. It is also a good way to network and communicate with one another and ALC staff. Also, we will be adding features to the forum such as shirt giveaways and featured artists, etc., so it really is imperative to at least register.

Finally, thank you all so much for being a part of this adventure. We have together created a site and a business unlike any other on the web. We are way cool. Go us!

-Blair