Free or Inexpensive Ways to Promote Your Artwork

My mom is a professional artist - more to come on that next week. (I plan on blogging about her art exhibit that is open to the public.)

Anyway, we are always looking for inexpensive ways to promote her artwork. Just wanted to share what we've found since these methods can apply to anyone for anything.

1) Use Your local papers. With just a simple email, I was able to get my mom's art show listed free in many local papers. It seems like local papers are always looking for stories - I'm considering submitting a money saving piece to a local paper and mentioning my blog. I think local papers are a great way to promote yourself and events.

2) Create Email Lists. Whenever my mom gets an email from someone saying how much they like her website or her art, she saves it. When she has an art opening that she wants to promote, she uses those email lists to let her fans, friends and family know about it. Email is a great way to keep in touch with your contacts - you just don't want to spam people. The occasional email seems OK.

3) Utilize Craigslist - I always list my mom's art opening on Craigslist. It's another free promotion spot for her event. You can also list your art for sale of craigslist or find art opportunities.

4) Take Advantage of Cheap/Free Printing Offers - We recently used VistaPrint and I can rave about it. We got 200 postcards with her art on them very cheaply, along with address labels. We also took advantage of the free business card offer. For the free business cards, you just pay shipping! They have the VistaPrint logo, but are very nice for free. We chose the slowest and cheapest shipping method and they got here in a reasonable amount of time. We were thrilled with how the cards looked with her art on them. I'm sure there are other cheap or free printing sites out there. I'm considering ordering business cards for the blog. I get asked by people so many times for blog's address and this would be so easy to hand out a little business card.

5) Use Community Bulletin Boards - We took my mom's art opening Flyer and posted it in many local stores. Around here Starbucks and our local library have bulletin boards and we posted the flyers there for free. It's just another free way to generate interest in my mom's art show.