I wrote recently in my Squidoo Lens, PromoteYourArt, that having a Squidoo Lens about yourself and your art is useful as a stop gap while you work on that artist site of yours.

As I look around on line, I've been noticing the trend of lots of artists and jewelers having blogs as a way to share their work on line. And lots of these blogging jewelers also sell their work on Etsy.

That seems like a good solution to me:

Get out of having a website by having a blog and selling your work on an outside site such as Esty, Ruby Lane or others.

Creating a website of your own is overwhelming to many because you've got to choose your best work, decide how to present yourself -- you're basically creating your entire artistic and online image, if you haven't done that already.

Adding to this challenge is that many folks try to do the website programming themselves. So then you've got a frustrating computer issue on top of the work of creating the website itself: gathering and digitizing images, writing text, making sure you have a headshot, and so on.

So while it's true that I believe you must be online, perhaps you can get by without a website, depending on your artistic and professional goals.

Blogs should be self-hosted to be taken seriously, this means you buy your own domain name and pay for your own hosting service.

You may not realize you can create whole galleries of images using a blog, in addition to posting pictures within a blog post.

Blogs can also have multiple "pages," so you can set up pages for: about, contact us, bio, etc. (On my blog, All Things Metal Clay, "About" is a separate page.)

Even though blogs are easier than websites, you still may need professional help in order to set one up. And sure you could set it up yourself, but part of being a self-employed business person is realizing that you don't have to, and shouldn't, do everything yourself.

That's the blog part of your online presence, to that you can add an online sales outlet, if you wish. Actually, you could sell directly on the blog, but you might want to take advantage of being in a community sales site.

Etsy was called "handcrafted amazon.com" by the Wall Street Journal, and more and more jewelers who I meet who sell in an online community are using Etsy.

A friend who sells at a lot of shows pointed out that Etsy lacks a detailed search function, a definite disadvantage.

And the final component of your online presence is your Squidoo Lens about yourself, that one is actually the easiest and perhaps the one to do first. Then after you have your blog and your Esty shop, you can edit your Squidoo Lens and add in links to those.

Kirsten Skiles's blog, Knitsteel is a terrific example of what I'm talking about.

And, she's taken it even further by putting up her entire portolio on Flikr.

You can click through to her Flikr page and her Etsy shop from her blog.

To help you get started with creating your own Squidoo Lens and blogging, I have some links for you.

Visit my Lenses:

PromoteYourArt

and

BestSquidooTipsPlus

Since creating a Squidoo Lens is actually the easiest part of the plan, I actually recommend doing that first.

I have a blog and a Squidoo Lens about myself.

My blog is All Things Metal Clay.

My Squidoo Lens about me is ElaineLuther.

Squidoo Lenses can be a great partner to your blog. The feed each other. Squidoo Lenses generally rank high in google searches, which can help people find your blog, if your Lens contains a link to your blog, as it should.

Even though I have a blog, I still use Squidoo. For example, the idea for this Lens began as a blog post. I thought it was a great idea; I wanted to reach more people with the idea, add some book recommendations and expand on the idea, so I created this Squidoo Lens.

Now that I've created this Lens, I'll probably post about it on my blog, and add it to my blogroll.

Whatever your area of expertise is, you can create Squidoo Lenses on that topic to share information and help people find you.

To see all my lenses, just click to go to my Lensmaster Page,

To let people know about your blog, you'll need to "claim your blog" on Technoranti, and do other things to get the word out.

I want to share some really cool tools I've found, a code generator and an automatic ping service.

The first is:

Tag Generator

This generates the code for you to place tags within a blog post for your choice of web bookmarklet sites/blog search sites.

The second is:

Ping-o-matic

This allows you to ping multiple sites all at once, saving you a lot of time while you let the blog searching sites that you have updated your blog.

These tools work really well, and will help drive traffic to your blog, helping you get consistent numbers of viewers.

Did you find this Lens helpful? If so, please help others find this blog by rating it above. Just click on the stars! It's easy and it just takes a sec! Thanks!

(c) 2007- 2008 Elaine Luther All Rights Reserved