When it rains it pours, not only for artist Amy Crehore, but for me as well. My two part interview of Amy Crehore in ArtNYC, my Art Blog on SYNTAGMA Online Magazines just got picked up by Boing Boing, one of the most popular Blogs in the Blogosphere.
Interview with Amy Crehore
Art NYC has a two-part interview with one of my favorite painters, Amy Crehore.
Me: Why are your Pierrots always wearing blue and sometimes have their faces painted black? Is there any symbolism?
Amy: Well, they started out in white, but ended up blue. I needed some color, I guess, to contrast with red. But, blue is appropriate, I think. Like Picasso’s blue period. My pierrot is a mischievous and melancholy imp. He gets into trouble a lot. But, the girl is fond of him and they have a sort of ambiguous relationship. The black face is a twist on the white make up that he usually wears and also relates to music/entertainment that was popular back in the 1920’s. And I think the black face adds something graphically to the paintings.
From a Web Metrics perspective, I’m frustrated that I don’t have a good Web Analytics package running on ArtNYC; nor do I have access to AWStats that is currently monitoring the blog (and I do not control the blog template of ArtNYC or Webmetricsguru)- so I can’t really say what kind of traffic my two part article on Amy Crehore is getting on ArtNYC. In Webmetricsguru.com, I have Sitemeter to work with, which is pretty good, the main limitation is I’m working with the free version.
I would add that most of the free packages like SiteMeter are good for general traffic numbers but lack the ability to segment traffic in meaningful ways - and when you buy a more expensive analytics package - your getting the ability to segment traffic as well as a larger set of urls you can collect data on.
I’m very happy how my interview with Amy Crehore came out and it also illustrates one of my SEO Strategies - a strategy that’s often overlooked. I wrote about Amy Crehore’s Pierrot paintings - and in Google, she’s number 1 result for "Pierrot Paintings".
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLG,GGLG:2006-04,GGLG:en&q=Pierrot+paintings (166,000 pages containing the words "Pierrot" and "painting" in Google).
Amy Crehore is rich in content to write about that could easily lend itself to blog posts and articles that residually drive traffic to her sites (because she’ll come up in Search Results for those terms). In fact, any collection of terms that has less than 1 million pages in search results for Google is probably an easy target to get a high ranking for (on the first page) and these terms, together, can generate a lot of traffic.
I happened to discover Amy’s site was #1 for Pierrots, but I bet she could be #1 for hundreds of phrases where the number of results are less than one million.
In a way, what I wish for is a search query generator that will take content from a site, construct a bunch of queries and find those who have less than one million results each in Google (don’t worry too much about Yahoo and MSN at this point - but they certainly could be considered as well).
One million results is the magic number - find terms that have less than one million results - and those should be pretty easy to dominate for providing you have good content, decent page rank and more than a couple good backlinks.
And while your at it - read my article(s) on Amy Crehore at ArtNYC and also take a look at Amy Crehore - Painter and Illustrator , an additional interview on the Celebrity at Work blog at SYNTAGMA.
