The Starving Artist, and Why Discounts Don’t Work
As an SEO and Web Designer I get more than a few calls per year from artists (painters, sculptors, pottery makers, etc) who dearly want a web site. Most of them start off their conversations with me the same way: “I don’t really know anything about computers”. Though I started this post to refer only to artists, the same is true for any small business owner who thinks he or she needs to be cut a serious break. It’s just not a good way to do business on either end, and here’s why:
In the past I’ve told them I can help them (for a good low price – hey, I’m a sucker for artists. My mother, my stepfather and step-brother are or were all artists – but they were also business owners, so I had built in sympathy for small business owners as well). I expect that for any lower price deals though that the starving artist or struggling business owner must contribute his or her full fair share of the work. This is because without your help the time I’m limited to in order to keep paying bills won’t bring your site up to where you want it to be against your keyword competition.
SEO is all about function including how form affects function. Take a great looking performance car and look underneath – it’s not quite as pretty under there as it is from up above – but it needs heavy doses of engine optimization because the pretty body and leather interior aren’t going to make it perform competitively.
Page one in Google means getting to the first several spots against hundreds of thousands or tens of millions of competitors. You as a small business owner do not want to have discount optimization work done that you haven’t heavily contributed your own time and effort to and then expect to send it out into a race. No top notch mechanic in the world wants his reputation tainted by a string of losing cars on his or her record – and no SEO wants a string of sites that are only 1/4 optimized in his or her portfolio of example optimized web sites.
Get optimized – yes, but get prepared first with a proper optimization budget to invest so you can expect, and see, real winning results.
@Ellen Zucker
Of course, yes, I see your point. It was a bit presumptuous of me to paint all artists with the same brush by writing that “I won’t be taking on any more artists as web design or SEO clients”. And certainly there are lot of really good artists out there who are computer and internet savvy as well. I therefore amend my position and will only take on artists as clients if they can accept SEO work for what it is as a necessary evil, use their own computer to help perform some of the “creative” work (if it’s expected to match the artist’s style and level of expertise), and accept that form must follow function and not the other way around.
I am both an artist and clued into the internet world, and I have seen the psychology you are talking about. If that were my experience I’d write them off, too. But not every artist is like that. You can wirk with the ones who “get it” and that will be apparent from your conversations with them.