Articles:

	What to give away
	Fine Art and business

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What to give away (written for Internet Day)
If you listen some time to all those wonderful lists and ezines, you get plenty of advice. This is why I subscribed to InternetDay, too. Over and over I read the very same suggestions, but something, I feel, is missing.

These brilliant success stories are all great. They are proof that certain ideas work. But how did the inventors feel when they did not know? How many businesses did fail in spite of great ideas and effort? We'll never know. And if it's so easy, why are we not doing well altogether? We're not too stupid, after all, to follow simple rules.

Keyword free: Some rules sell well these days, and one of them is: Give away for free to lure the customer. Use the word free as often as possible. Things can't fail then. Ok, that seems easy. What can I possibly give away for free?

Now I'm determined to sell art. Fine art. Real art, not kitsch. No craft either. This is something I'm an expert in. This should work.

But many malls and indexes don't even list art at all. Art is no topic. And if they do, it's just craft and kitsch. Maybe they can't tell, but there seems to be neither supply nor demand on the net. Is that true?

Fine Art is different: You just can't give away paintings in numbers like software. You can't ship half of the picture or let it expire after 30 days. It makes no sense to look for free stuff others have got to collect it and give away that. That's too cheap. A prospect for fine art won't be lured with bad tricks.

Also, it makes no sense making money from my experiences with the web. Or trying to live from artists and gallery owners without really caring about the customer. After all, I got a product. Bad situation. What could be done? I had no clue at all.

A model: Then came Wanda Loskot. Talked here at InternetDay about one single tiny topic only: What a simple email address can tell if you care to read. Most interesting. I had to look at her site.

Ugly. Lots of stuff crammed together. But I got stuck. Kept reading. Lots of fresh and interesting ideas. Lots of free stuff of her own. And fun stuff, too, the daily business cartoon. Really funny, leads you to the cartoonist's site, of course. And you can mail your friends as well, to brighten their day as she puts it. Wow. She's got it! I was really impressed.

The cartoon had got me. And here it was: My first idea. My first give-away. A blueprint from Wanda. I'll give away a genuine artist's drawing every day. Not to Wanda, to just everyone who cares. To spice up their sites. Or to just brighten their day. I read ever so often that people can't stand all those glitzy graphics any more.

Well, here's the abundance of creativity spilled out over the world! Good idea? Don't know. Should be delivered by email to make it easy. Would not make it just a classical newsletter, though. But I could deliver numbers. Not the original, but the electronic copy. Fits exactly into the scheme of the net. Daily Drawing. Alliteration. Well, no, I wasn't content yet.

Teach them: Wanda discusses one advertisement every day, too. What's good and what's bad and how to improve it. Now I could deliver a kind of creativity course. There are many people trying to be creative. Most are not content with their results, though.

I could tell them something! This would be much more work than just delivering a drawing. But I could do that once a week. Fine. Creativity Journal. Heck, that's already two give-aways.

Still not content, though. Comes the next idea. How about an Art Journal? People crowd the museums, they are really looking for something they hope to find there. Museums boom these years, it's a phenomenon! Many people are helpless with art, but they try hard. Hell, that's a real demand, isn't it?

Feeding the soul: I could tell those seekers something! Every week another masterwork to talk about. I like that idea. I'll start with Rembrandt's Bathsheba, Louvre, Paris. And indeed I started writing, got interested, then I stopped: That's way too much! I'll have to cut it in 3 parts and will easily write another 3 on Bathsheba alone. Well, that's ok with me! It's a great painting!

Somehow I remember the New List server and announce my journals. Some days later, the first subscriptions drop in. For the Art Journal only. I start delivering with 70 subscribers at hand. Later I find out, that the others were not announced of some reason.

More troubles turn up. People don't know what html mail is (InternetDay should know about this one!). Mail programs don't support html mail. Technical stuff. But I'm on my way. Will take a lot of hard work to get thousands of subscribers, though.

Ideas keep coming: Art Journal met a demand, so why not double that one? If you want to know what good art is, if you want to build your taste, if you want to grow, you will compare and judge.

Picasso was granted such a comparison after World War II, he could hang his works side by side with great masters in the Louvre. This served as a model for the next journal. Pablo - The Louvre Test. Show pairs of great works side by side. Nobody ever did it before. Its easy on the net. Should be great fun!

So that's it: A whole bunch of ezines to give away! So many, most lists won't register all at once! But this is the first step only. After all, you got to sell! Next hot tip, equally top-secret these days: Run your own affiliate program! This is the real knack! Rumors are that companies grew by 25% for 18 months in a row.

Affiliates: It's the next problem, too. If marketing art is not easy by itself, how do you expect affiliates to do it right? They ought to be able to make some fast bucks or you better forget it.

So let's put up another ezine to tackle that: Money Making on Art. There are technical problems: How to link the visitor to the affiliate. Rarely the visitor will buy spontaneously, maybe a poster, but not a piece of art worth thousands. So you have to keep track of that relation over a long time. But if you do and big money is spent, commissions are fine, too!

Colors cannot be presented good enough to represent a painting. This could be coped with by a long term unconditional money back guarantee. Would be a good idea anyway to reassure the customer. Who is to take the risk involved in such a guarantee? An affiliate can't take it at all.

Risks: All the affiliate can be asked for is to wait for the commission until the money back guarantee is expired. So you have to find a time span for that giving both the customer and the affiliate what they need.

Now comes the hardest part: How to support the affiliate so that s/he can possibly make a lot of money through this affiliate program? Not small money, big money.

But that's another topic. The bottom line so far is: Things are not as easy as people will make us believe. We'll have to work hard. Nobody can tell if we will succeed. We'll have to take the risk unless we'll never know. If we succeed big, everybody will applaud and try to copy. If not, nobody will care. But that's life, isn't it?

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Fine Art and business (written for Trade Secrets)
Did you ever notice that there is hardly a bare wall in any home or office? How come?

Think of a bare wall and you get the idea of a cell. "Small room in which a monk or nun lives / A room where a prisoner is kept" says my WordWeb thesaurus.

Today I visited a hospital. They have cells, too, but pictures everywhere for healing purposes. Mostly kind of kitsch, but when we entered the newborn tract (now you know why we made this preparatory visit) I noticed posters of great museum art. Picasso, Kandinsky, Miro.

I felt the power of those paintings. The other stuff was nice all right. But not real. Candy colored flowers. Landscapes serving well as illustrations of children's books. And so on.

I had a second look at the poster of Picasso. A work of late age, showing pigeons in his study with an outlook to the mediterranean. Sure one of his weak works, but still great in detail. The original is surely better, but this poster made it here. You can tap the power just by looking at it. Great art doesn't wear off. Enjoy!

And most people do. Van Gogh is very popular, Modigliani and some more, Warhol, for example. They are decorative, too. But this is not all art can offer. Think of music. Blue grass and country is all right. But if you know Beethoven, Schubert and ... you get the point.

You don't learn this in school. If you are lucky your parents know. Or you get a mentor. Or ... try one of my ezines. I open up a path for you. Take the Art Journal, for example. 7 issues on Rembrandt's Bathsheba, mistress of King David as told by the Bible. Next I'll talk about Chagall's Cattle Dealer.

So art can enhance your life very directly whether at home or at work. Big biz knows for long. Art sponsoring is in. When the Deutsche Bank built their new office towers in Frankfurt, they spent 12 million DM on contemporary art to decorate their walls. Good for the image, too.

Today I visited the web site of the second giant on the German banking market: Dresdner Bank greets you with a mall-like image featuring "Kunst & Kultur" (art & culture) placed very prominently.

If you click on it you see that this is no hype. They have several foundations including a veritable collection and use art to open their minds for more than just making and managing money.

Late industrialist Peter Ludwig spent his whole private life collecting all sorts of art and donating works all over the world to museums bearing his name (i.e. see Museum Ludwig Cologne), even in Russia and China, compensating and enriching his business life.

Check out if this is something for you, too. You don't have to be rich to cope with original art. All you need is some curiosity, gumption and a little guidance. I'll be glad to help you along.

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