Name of your website?Portrait Paintings By Artist - Showcase Your Artwork & Attract Customers
Your name?
Bob Walton
Your Location (city, etc)
Cary
Please give us a short summary of your website?
It's a free artist directory, art supplies and resource center, created with SEO in mind for high rankings with search engines.
What inspired you to launch your own website?
I was helping a friend build and optimize her website and ended up with an extra registered domain name that I felt had some promise.
When did you launch your first website, and what was it?
October 2007
How did you decide on a name for your website?
Looking for an SEO friendly site that was related to art and portrait painting artists.
What makes it different from other, similar offerings?
I've carefully crafted each page to rank well with differing keywords and phrases.
What is your eventual goal? (To sell it, keep it for income, secure a book or other mainstream media deal?)
Assist artists gain greater exposure for their art, while generating passive income through affiliate marketing.
How does your investment of time and money balance against your success?
Too early to tell, but I already rank in top ten for several targeted keywords for google.
If you had an unlimited development budget for development, how would you change your site?
Use a more professional "select edit" website template for site development.
If your site got really big, really quickly, would you be able to keep up with the demand?
Yes, it's designed to be mostly self-supporting. Further automation would need to be considered, such as artist submissions.
What unexpected costs and headaches have you had to deal with?
Some html and php programming nuances that took several days/hours to resolve.
What has been your biggest challenge?
Crafting good copy using SEO competitive intelligence and latent semantic indexing to create well reading, key phrase optimized, pages.
What method has been most successful for promoting your website?
Submitting to directories, posting comments on related blogs, and allowing for organic results.
How has running your website differed from your expectations?
I found unusual favor with other artists and art bloggers who've been very supportive of my efforts.
How long have you run the site already, and how long will you continue to keep it up if you don't enjoy big gains in traffic, income or popularity?
Only one and a half months. It's in its infancy but growing fast.
To whom do you give credit for your early success?
Mike Marshall, a friend, colleague and SEO expert; Matt Promise, a friend and technical webmaster consultant; Michael Stalker, good friend and promising web programmer. Lastly, my Lord, who saved me for certain death and raised me to newness of life.
What is your website address?
Portrait Paintings By Artist - Showcase Your Artwork & Attract Customers
