Today, press release marketing presents the artist with another low cost opportunity to promote their artwork. If done properly, press release marketing will bring traffic to the artist’s website, help in building and maintaining an artist’s brand and will eventually create incoming links to the artist’s website, thus, enhancing it’s SEO and gaining a higher page rank too.

There are myriad of free and paid press release and event news websites that an artist can use to market and promote their art. To locate these sites go to the Google and type in "Free Press Release" or "Free Event Listing" into their search feature. After obtaining this information research through Alexa.com to see what the traffic is of each website (type the URL into the Alexa Search to see what their traffic rank is). The lower the Alexa Rank number, the better this is, as this indicates that more readers will be exposed to your press release. Based on your research I would only submit to the top 4 or 5 free press release and event listing sites. If you want to submit to more sites, I suggest that several of the press release sites have a service that will distribute your press release to other news outlets for a small fee as this is a more effective use of your time to let them do this. For instance they may charge $30.00 to distribute your press release to another 50 news outlets!

Here are a couple of tips if you have never written or submitted a press release before. Many of the better known press release sites will provide to you guidelines on how to write a press release. I suggest that the artist study and follow their suggestions. Also, an artist may want to look at and study press release releases by other artists, art galleries and other art organizations in order to see how they structured and wrote their releases. Choose to study the press releases of the successful artists and the larger and better known art organizations. These press release sites will have art or entertainment categories that can be searched for this information. In addition, most press release sites have submission forms that will guide you when uploading a press release.

Artists should submit press releases and promote themselves for any new exhibitions or competitions that they will be participating in, sales of any art, any new gallery representation, charity participation, any educational or lecture type events and also when they receive any awards or special recognition. All of these special events provide an opportunity to get and keep the artist’s name out to the artist’s target audience.

An artist’s press release should answer the following questions for the reader: who, what, when, where, why and how. To write about anything else will make an advertisement out of one’s work and the press release will either not be accepted for publishing and distribution or will simply not be read at all.

In all press releases, there should also be an "About the Artist" section and artist contact information contained at the end of the press release. In addition, there should always be links back to the artist’s website and blog contained in the press release. Most press release sites have restrictions on where and how many links are allowed in artist’s press releases. Be prepared to add or subtract links, depending on the press release sites, as they are all different.

Artists should begin to formulate and plan how they can take advantage of this low cost form of self promotion and marketing. In future articles I will discuss keywords, keyword density, title tags and links as all being very important elements of an artist’s press release marketing campaign.