Webster's Dictionary defines an artist as “a person who creates art: a person who is skilled at drawing, painting, etc.” Many people can create art, but a lot of artists are not succeeding, even with the wide amount of tools and technology available today.

Four Visual Brand Development Tactics

1) Find Your Visual Diamond

“Your visual diamond” as an artist is the concept, style or message implied in your artwork that people are always prone to like on Facebook and share their thoughts by leaving comments.

Understanding the Audience Drawn To Your Work

Once you understand the type of audience drawn to your work, it will be easier to pinpoint what type of art you should continue creating in order to earn a living doing what you are passionate about doing. Many successful artists in traditional art, music, and entertainment know what kind of artists they are. They create art for themselves, but they also are aware of what people are demanding.

Watch the Re-Tweets & Likes

Visual artists can say they don't care about selling their artwork, but I am sure when they sell their very first piece of art they will be driven to create more art to sell. So being attentive to what kind of your art sells the most can be a key to success for artists. Observe the reactions to your work on Twitter and observe the number of likes and ratio of comments you also receive from your post. This will help you understand how to notice who your works are reaching and subject matters, along with styles you may want to invest more of your time in creating.

Example: Kenalmusic's Tweetreach Report

Re-tweet Rank – A great free source to track re-tweets and provides a premium analytics dashboard to track even more engagement.

Tweet Reach – An alternative that does about the same amount of analyzing data from re-tweets, but calculates impressions and more.

2) Demographics Are Even More Important

Filtering through your supporters and growing supporters by age groups and gender can also help narrow down your targeted group of viewers. The viewers who show you support and know who should be rewarded if anyone is to be considered for an award.

A site similar to this artist’s website is more popular with women, at least from looking at the statistics from Facebook and Google analytics.

An example of the information that Facebook allows users who have a fan page or business page to track analytics for their brand.

Placzek Studios Page Insight for the Monumental Sculptures On Facebook

3) Landing Publications

In this day and age, magazines, news publications and even well-established blogs are the way to go to get more viewers to see your art or creative services. It is about tapping into a group or network of people to which you have not yet been exposed. A lot of companies use the term “exposure” loosely. Truly, “exposure” can be categorized as anything, but it is the relevance of the exposure that is important.

The quality of the people who can be reached as possible leads is the most beneficial thing for any professional, business, or rising artist.

Contact publications, news outlets, and major blogs for which your work is suitable. It is generally more effective to write the editors or journalist first to see if a topic of interest would work with their publication or site before submitting images and a fully detailed pitch.

4) Learn Online Marketing Tools

Without materials, how can an artist create artworks? In a very similar way, a visual artist will remain a “starving artist” if he or she does not make the effort to learn new tools that can speak and work for them.

It has been proven that visual artists can be the most introverted and timid class of people because they tend to keep to themselves and often pull away from society. Pre-developed software and online systems have been developed to help everyone succeed online and socially.

Whether you are a visual artist, local boutique owner, or independent musician, there is not only a niche for your genre, but resources online that can help you succeed in your field. Below is a list of online resources that I have used not only to sell my artwork online, but to promote my music. Not everything listed is a free service, but the prices are minimal for the benefit that can be gained from using some of these resources.

Technorati: A Source Like Heaven

Technorati has made finding a list of quality and successful companies in your niche simple. The website's navigation is very well-structured, easy to follow and leads the way for viewers to find other companies and blogs that are producing similar content as they are.

The website serves as a great public database, structured for visitors to the website to find a wide amount of different sites relating to a specific niche.

Filtering through a list of blogs and other companies' ranking based on their productivity is free. You can either compile a list of people you want to work with, cross-promote, or have a negative mindset and view everyone as complete competition.

I like to refer to the website, especially when looking for blog-based sites to contact for features or, occasionally, a guest post submission, even though there are an incredible number of guest posting sites online.

Branding Awareness Needs Growth

Much more information can be found on the branding awareness category of Moz.