This update introduces more new features and hints at one on the way, which will boost consumer marketing efforts. Also, we’d like to introduce two new members of the Imagekind team, who bring a wealth of marketing talents and design expertise. But first, I’d like to thank you all for your feedback and participation in the growth and refinement of our Imagekind marketplace. In the few weeks since we opened for business we’re fast approaching 2,000 new gallery owners and traffic is growing very steadily. So much, in fact,that we think we are currently the fastest growing print-on-demand art site on the web! So, we thought we’d send out a newsletter and let you know what else we’ve been working on. Most feature updates we implement come from you, our members!
Annual Pricing Saves Money!
Bling! Due to popular request, we have implemented an annual pricing. For $94.99 per year you get a Platinum Account, with unlimited galleries and 800MB per month upload allowances. No more recurring charges AND it saves artists 20% over the monthly bill. You get unlimited storage and unlimited galleries for the next 12 months. Wow. That’s a great deal!
New Artist Administration Features
Move it! Due to popular demand, in addition to dragging and dropping within galleries, we have added the ability for artists to move images from one gallery to another. If you are a Pro or Platinum member with multiple galleries and wish to reorganize, you can now move any individual image into another gallery by clicking on “Set price and design” and going to the “Move Image” control underneath your image thumbnail.
Replace it! Many of our members have wished to update their gallery images with originals of higher quality. Now you can just click the replace button to upload a new image and preserve your tags, price and default mat and frame combination. Your unique image URL remains the same too.
What else? We’re working on updates to the member admin to allow you to set pricing for all images in a gallery with one click. But, the new system will also KEEP that pricing setting for images you later load into the gallery on another day in the future. In fact, we’re working on a whole new member admin! It will look better, work better and be much easier to use. We’re also working on a desktop upload client for really big images!
What do you want to see? Have good product feature ideas? Send them to us! The best one (as chosen by us) will get implemented and the artist that submitted it will get spotlight promotion on our front page!
New Marketplace Settings Control Panel (Public vs. Private Galleries)
Go Public! We see a number of stunning images in galleries that members may have forgotten to submit for inclusion into the public marketplace. If you have missed this important step in opening your Imagekind gallery, login and go to your Gallery Management page(s) and submit your gallery for review. We’d love to see more of your best images in our public marketplace.
These are a few of the reasons why all galleries begin as “private” galleries. Once artists are finished building their galleries and it’s time to open for business, they can submit their gallery for review and inclusion in the public marketplace. A real person, our chief curator, reviews these requests on a daily basis. She checks for offensive or copyrighted content, any obvious image flaws or resolution issues and subsequently “turns on” the gallery in the public marketplace. This can take 24 to 48 hours depending on the time of the original request.
New Profile and Gallery Layouts
Improvements have been made to the layout and function of gallery and profile pages. Most notably, we are auto-generating content which boosts “searchability”, a good thing if someone is Googling for your art. This content can easily be customized and replaced with a personalized bio and gallery description in the Account Info and Gallery Management pages of the member admin. So, type your bio!
Link Up! Many members show their work online at many other Web sites including their own. Be certain to add your personal Web site URL into your profile by logging-in, going to your Account Info page and typing it into the “Web site” field, right under your “Screen Name.” This might even be a Flickr.com or MySpace.com account.
Marketing Programs
Affiliate Program! To bring the Imagekind marketplace closer to hundreds of Web sites across the internet, we have been building out an extensive Affiliate Program. Look for more news on this in our next report. This will ultimately drive more traffic to our artists.
Search Engine Marketing ! You’ve joined Imagekind and in return we’re going to drive traffic to the site on your behalf. Imagekind has allocated a great deal of money to begin Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing through paid search engine listings. We have a significant budget for this over the next 12 months and we’re really excited to bolster our already incredible word-of-mouth traffic.
New Team Members
Kevin Saliba joined us from Expedia this month as our new President and Chief Operating Officer. Kevin was previously Director of Strategic Initiatives where he was responsible for many of the new partnerships and innovative new product launches for this popular online travel site. Kevin knows a thing or two about marketing world-class consumer internet properties and he’ll be putting that knowledge to good use for all of our member gallery owners.
Finally, we’d like to welcome Keith Harper as our new Art Director. He’s taken over the design reigns from me and is responsible for all the great work you’re seeing on the site these days. Keith is an award winning designer, having recently received recognition in the prestigious Communication Arts magazine.
Well, that’s all for now. We want to thank you again for being a part of this very fast growing new art community. This site isn’t about us. It is about you. So, please keep those recommendations coming!
Kind Regards,
Kelly Smith & Your Imagekind Team
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