Increasingly, websites and services require you to establish a username (often your email address) and password before you can access the good stuff they offer. While we used to worry about handing over email addresses because we feared we would be spammed, these days you’ll find most sites you choose to visit are reputable and do not share your email address with others.

What becomes a nuisance nowadays, is trying to remember all those web passwords we create.

You don’t want to use the same password all the time, as it is a better practice to vary it. I used to keep a piece of paper near my computer listing all the different sites and usernames and passwords I had. What a mess!

Then I discovered this free program you can download called Whisper32.

This program will save all your usernames and passwords to one file. You need to memorize one password to access the file.

Admittedly, I am not brave enough to put my Internet banking password on a Whisper file, but Whisper does provide a handy way to keep track of web passwords that aren’t connected with any exchange of money or highly personal information.

www.claudinehellmuth.com OR www.collageartist.com(same site - two domain names)

Don’t be intimidated when you visit Claudine’s site. It is AMAZING! It helps that she used to be a web designer before she turned full-time artist. (Now you don’t feel so bad, right?)

Claudine’s blog generates remarkable traffic. It helps that she blogs nearly every day.

Claudine says, “Blogging is the best free PR tool an artist can use…I know because it is what landed me on national TV — not once, but twice! And the last time I was on the Martha Stewart Show! Wow!” (Claudine uses Blogger.)

Just finished reading David Allen’s Getting Things Done; the Art of Stress-Free Productivity.

Allen prescribes a way of developing lists and keeping them, along with all your other papers and “stuff” organized at your work space.

I need to be efficient just to ensure that all my different businesses and projects keep running smoothly. I pride myself on being organized, but there is always room for improvement. So I bought the book and read it in a couple of days. And yesterday I went shopping for in-trays, files and folders. (WOW, was I excited to find these beautiful cherry-red fabric covered stacking trays on special for $2 each! I love a great sale, don’t you?)

I set up a beautiful stack of trays with labels according to David Allen’s suggestions. His system demands that you write on lists absolutely every task that needs tackling. You keep a “Next Actions” list instead of a prioritized “Things to Do” list. You have other lists to do with projects and work that isn’t necessarily so urgent, but is still planned. And there’s a “Someday/Maybe” list for the stuff that you are still ruminating over. Some of your lists get reviewed weekly, but the “Next Actions” list and your calendar are the things that drive your day.

Allen proposes that, if you have written down everything you need to do and stored it in a place where you can easily find it again, your mind is free to truly relax when you are away from the workspace. You no longer spend time worrying about whether or not it will all get done when it needs to. You know what you are doing and what you are not doing. Decisions you make about how you spend your time are informed decisions (not ad hoc based on a sketchy memory), and this gives you more confidence. It also frees your mind for more creative thinking. We like creative thinking!

I thought this book made a lot of sense and I’m looking forward to putting the system into practice.

I have to mention another book on time management that I love - Eat that Frog! by Brian Tracy. This gives you more of a psychological approach to tackling your workload. Tracy reasons that you should start your day working on your biggest, most urgent task, even if there is a tendency to want to procrastinate about it. His book examines our personal motives for doing, or not doing our work. It is a quick read and I find it inspiring.

If you are in need of a productivity overhaul, I recommend both these books.

Last year I signed on for a fantastic teleseminar series called the SmArtist Telesummit. What a fantastic leap of faith that turned out to be! The speakers and their handouts were great and everything was backed up with a recording that I downloaded and saved to my computer. I’ve listened to a couple of those presentations two or three times since.

What is the smARTist™ Telesummit?
If you are a professional artist, the Telesummit is on again starting 17 January 2008. I believe it can have a huge impact on the way you operate.

Over seven days, 13 experts will give 15 keynote presentations, with numerous detailed handouts. Everything will be recorded and put online, so you never have to worry about missing a session here and there.

Marketing, selling, business skills and creativity and time organization are the key topics.

Given my own experience last year, I assure you that the presentations and handouts will cover the most complete range of art-career and marketing information ever delivered anywhere, online or off.

Go take a look at their website. (You’ll even see my photo near the top of their main page as I’ve provided a testimonial, I was so impressed with my experience in 07!)

Every email you send out is an opportunity to promote your creative business. If you have a blog or web address, it should be provided as a live link in a signature at the bottom of your emails. This is a line or two of text that is automatically added when you compose a new email. You can change the text color if you want your signature to stand out. You can even add images to your signature in some email programs. Just be sure to keep images small in dimension and with a screen resolution of around 72 dpi.

Signatures can be easily updated! So besides your web link, you can use them to promote upcoming exhibitions, classes you are teaching and so forth. In some circles this is known as “shameless self-promotion”. And you know what else? It costs nothing.

If you aren’t using an email signature - why not? If you are, consider how you might update it so it works better to promote you.

I’ve copied instructions from my version of Microsoft Outlook below. If these instructions don’t work for your email program, search in Help for “create signature”.

“A thousand mile journey begins with one step.” - Chinese Proverb

If you are gonna begin your web journey anywhere, let this be your first step: register your name as a domain name.

The domain name or url is this thing - http://www.yournamehere.com

When you set up a website you need three things -

- a domain name

- a web hosting service

- the designed webpages

Most people organize to get all these things at once. But you don’t have to.

Even if you are not yet ready to set up a website or a blog, you should get your domain name now. Get the name you want before someone else does. A .com domain name costs less than $10 per year. That’s peanuts, so there’s no reason to delay doing it.

Do this:

1. Skip over to www.GoDaddy.com and type your name in the domain name search form box. Don’t add spaces. I would type staceyapeitos .

2. Click the GO button

3. What’s the result? Is your name available as a .com name? If so, REGISTER IT! (And don’t feel you have to sign up for the extra stuff they try to sell you as you step through the registration process, especially the web hosting. There are better hosting services out there.)

As an artist, your name is a promotional asset. People will search for your name on the internet. There is a common expectation that artists and craftspeople, writers, musicians, experts, coaches, consultants … will have their names registered as .com domain names.

If you trade under a business name, register it, too. Yes, you can have more than one domain name - fancy that! You can even have multiple domain names pointed at the same website or blog.

One of my clients makes art and runs artist retreats. She has an artist website registered under her art  business name. There is a section of the site devoted to her retreats. I suggested she register three new domain names: Her own name and the names of both of her retreats. She can use a process called domain forwarding to point her own name at the homepage of her art business site. And she can point the domain names for her retreats at the appropriate retreat pages within her website.

When this artist promotes one of her retreats, she can provide that retreat’s domain name. This makes the event appear more professional. It is also easier for customers to remember the retreat name than the artist’s business name.

Through a trick known as masking you can even hide the true url name of the pages from the viewer so that the forwarded domain name is shown when they arrive at your website. You can set all this up through your domain name management panel at Go-Daddy or other domain registrar site.

For my Australian readers who are wondering about getting a .com.au name, that’s fine,  if you feel your marketplace is exclusively Australia. You have to register through an Australian domain registrar though, and the minimum registration period is two years. Don’t pay more than AU$40 for a two-year period! If you hurry over to www.SmartyHost.com.au right now you can take advantage of their November special and get domain registration at just $12.99 per year. Bargain!

Time for another field trip.

 This time head over to www.elance.com and start by watching the video of Timothy Ferriss, (who, by the way, wrote a very cool book called The 4-Hour Workweek.

Timothy will briefly explain how elance can help you hire other folks (web designers, writers, graphic artists, etc) to help you get work done.

On the other side of the coin, you might like to use elance as a means of finding work for yourself!

From Stampington, the publishers of Somerset Studio, check out Artful Blogging.

It is 144 pages in length and retails for US$14.95.

This is’nt really a how-to publication, but more of a showcase of blogs by artists - female makers into mixed media, textiles, art journaling . . . all the stuff I personally love, I do confess. Wonderful photographs.

What interests me most about Artful Blogging is not the content, but the fact that Stampington determined there is already a market for a publication like this.

I am only mildly surprised, mind you - blogging IS huge.  Recent statistics show that over 147 million American adults use the internet, and 57 million of those people read blogs.

Along this ilk, a book published in 2006 by Snowbooks Ltd is called The Crafters Companion, tips, tales, and patterns from a community of creative minds. It features 17 bloggers - mostly indie textile artists - and one craft project from each of them.

www.simondegroot.com

Simon Degroot is an artist based in Brisbane, Australia.

His website is clean and bright to showcase his work. Navigation is so easy. Is he a man of few words in real life? He is on his website. Text is minimal.

Simon has an email list subscription form. Excellent. And check out the YouTube video on his news page. Very savvy indeed!

I’d like to see a media kit linked somewhere. Otherwise, top marks.

I keep a notebook on my computer desk where I jot down ideas, questions, and other matters relevant to my business. Some of the entries relate to promoting and growing the business. This notebook is also where I keep my “things to do lists” and where I write down contact names and numbers as I playback messages left on my telephone answering machine.

When a notebook gets filled, I date the cover and file it in my filing cabinet so I can refer to it again later if I need to.

I also make good use of the bookmarking or favorites facility in my browser. Because I have a laptop and a desktop computer, I set up a Google bookmarks account which is featured in my Google toolbar. This is free, and means I can access all my bookmarks from both computers, so long as I am signed into Google. I could even access them while traveling and using internet cafes and kiosks.

Set-up categories for your bookmarks like artist blogs and sites, art organizations, sales opportunities and promo opportunities.