Case Study: Artistic Opinions

As with all of the case studies involving projects that I attempted prior to 2010, what you’re about to read is the product of my memory, some notes that I’ve dug up, and some old website files that I kept in an archive. I hadn’t intended, at the time, to do a public case study on these projects, so please bear with me. Projects from 2010 onward are far more detailed.

Artistic Opinions
( 2007 – 2008 )

Artistic Opinions was originally a category here at Daniel M. Clark .com called Art That Doesn’t Suck (I know, clever, right? Exactly.) Each week, I would write a review about a piece of art that was up for sale at Imagekind.com. I decided to split it off into its own site in 2007. I did the same thing with another category here, Modest Opinions. I really shouldn’t have done that because it forced me to design, launch and maintain two additional sites for… what reason? It was my name on each, the sites were linked to from this blog, so… what was the point? I have no idea, to be perfectly honest.

I created Artistic Opinions for the sole purpose of affiliate linking to Imagekind.com. I had a minor interest in the art I was reviewing each week, but many were the occasions that I simply picked something at random, wrote three meaningless sentences about it, and hit Publish.

Shortly after I started the site, I decided that I needed an easier way to write the reviews and format them consistently. I decided to write a little PHP script that would scrape the page at Imagekind where the art lived and pull out some relevant information – title, artist’s name, appropriate URLs, and the price. That script became Review Builders, and there’s a case study devoted to it.

Side note: after spinning Modest Opinions, then Artistic Opinions, off into their own domains, I bought about a dozen other “opinions” domains. I owned things like GlobalWarmingOpinions.com, WindowsOpinions.com, and ComicsOpinions.com. Seemed like a good idea at the time; I let them all expire after their year was up.

What worked

The artists that I featured on the site were – in all but one circumstance – quite happy to have their work displayed. I usually got a link or two back from the artists’ own sites.

What didn’t

Technically, there was nothing wrong with the site. It was built on WordPress, everything looked nice, but it just didn’t result in many sales. I believe this is due to my complete lack of understanding of SEO at that time. I did not write reviews with the goal of attracting readers, I wrote them with the goal of selling the art. I skipped a step. My reviews were not very good, either. I struggled to come up with compelling descriptions, more often than not settling for variations of “I like his use of color”. Blah.

I also ran into the problem that besets anyone who affiliates for print-on-demand companies: the artists can’t sit still. They move the art around, they change the prices, they change the titles. I spent more hours than I cared to updating the posts with current information.

Verdict

You know how writers and artists are always told to write, paint or draw what they love? I hate reviewing art. The site was doomed from the start, really. Once I got past the somewhat interesting challenge of creating the Review Builders tool and incorporating it into the process, the whole thing became rather tedious.

By the end of its run, the site had made under two hundred dollars in commissions. Unfortunately, I do not have records to verify this; I’m going by memory. I quit the affiliate program after I shuttered the site, and no longer have access to the commission reports from ShareASale.