Painted faux stone arch detail, Pittsburgh, a photo by John Hiemstra on Flickr.

“Final final” picture of the faux stone painting project I completed earlier this year in the Point Breeze neighborhood of Pittsburgh. This image shows some of the more detailed stone blocks, properly befitting the main entrance of the home :) and the “faux grout” treatment I added, using a custom mix of sand, paint, glue and the like. If you saw the “before” pictures of this job, you will recall that the stone “blocks” are three dimensional, carved in to this surface; my “grout” gently fills the incisions in the same way as real grout would with real stone block.

I’ve been using the phrase “inbound marketing” a lot lately and drawing a lot of blank stares and confused silences over the phone. I first heard the term used by Hub Spot and it made perfect sense to me; they are describing the “get new clients” part of websites and social media that still eludes so many people.

Its fairly obvious that if people can’t find your business quickly and easily when they search online for your kind of product or service, they are probably not going to become your clients. And while price, convenience, location, etc. are all important factors in your prospects’ final decision, if you can’t show them why you’re one of the best at what you do (if not the best), most won’t take the initial step of contacting you about your products or services.

Together, these are the essential points of inbound marketing:

• Getting found on the right searches
• Having compelling material on your site, so that when people do find you, they take the next step(s) in becoming your client -- calling, signing up for your newsletter, requesting an estimate or whatever- on their own.

So what makes “compelling material?”

I talk a lot about “making the most of what you already do” as a business when it comes to general website strategy, because I find that many people still look at marketing their business as a mostly separate activity from what their business actually does

Let me demonstrate here, where my digital services meet my analog ones.

In addition to my website and social media work this year, I’ve done one faux painting project here in Pittsburgh commensurate with the custom art work I was doing in California a few years ago. I would like to “get found” for more of this work online in Pittsburgh, but at the beginning of the year I ranked nowhere on any relevant search. But rather than pay for ads, or try and get links or mentions on relevant sites, I “made the most” of what I was already doing with faux painting: I took pictures of my work and published them as I blogged the story of my progress.

If that sounds anticlimactic, consider this: I only did three blog posts about the project in February and March, but together they’ve got me currently listed on the first, second, and third pages of the Google search “faux painting Pittsburgh”. You can try it yourself right now in a browser of your choice or check out this annotated screenshot I took two days ago:

I have maybe a hundred hours into this faux painting project, but the blog posts (without getting into required technical steps to get these results) took maybe an hour each including unloading the camera and sorting/editing pictures. That’s it, no outside help, no advertising fees, nothing.

So how does it translate to real clients?

Last week I got my first “out of the blue” email about painting work in Pittsburgh from someone who found me online. And if that sounds anticlimactic, consider this: most of my online art portfolio features older work from my ten years in San Diego, and over the 18 months I’ve lived in Pittsburgh, I’ve averaged 4-5 new contacts every month about faux, mural and custom art work from people in San Diego and southern California who’ve found me through search (I always ask) whether through this blog, my YouTube channel or my custom art Facebook page. It might not seem like that many leads, but since my average contract for these type of projects is around $6000, its more than sufficient. And, except for my recent “archive” updates of old jobs, those calls are from material I posted several months or even years ago. While I’ve had to flip those southern Cal jobs to my southern Cal artist friends, this is “inbound marketing” firing on all cylinders in a tiny niche market.

Imagine this working in markets with more demand, and you can see why I spend more time working on other people’s business websites and social media these days instead of my own!

Its been hard to get good pictures of the progress on this faux painting project because of the recent run of cloudy days here in Pittsburgh, its snowing again as I write!

Regardless, I’m excited because this faux stone painted finish is coming out so well. In person, it is warm and bright in an old house entry and stairwell with mostly filtered light, even when its grey and gloomy outside. These pics are about two weeks old now, but show off some nice moments throughout the first and second floor painting in different kinds of light: sunny, cloudy and artifical. I’ll put up new ones after the next bright day.

I worked as a scenic artist in San Diego and Los Angeles both the first few years after moving to San Diego in 1999.
 
I worked on several San Diego projects for an LA company, Scenery West, as well as spending some fun time in their shop in North Hollywood working on crazy scenic stuff that went all over the world for rock concerts, commercial shoots, theme parks, retail stores and trade show booths. This picture in another view of the Cirque de la Mer tower at SeaWorld that was part of my onsite paint charge duties during the installation of the show in 2001.
 
I had a lot of fun painting for SceneryWest from 2001-2003 and getting to live in Los Angeles part-time for awhile (Los Feliz).
 

I’ve spent as much time on different WordPress development jobs as I have painting on this faux stone project over the last week, but there’s no eye candy like this from web design, and its so soothing to NOT be working in front of a screen for a few hours a day. Here are some progress pix from last week taken with the Canon on a pair of reasonably sunny days out, all the natural light in the stairwell is heavily filtered. I’m happy to say that this finish is stubbornly bright and warm on cloudy grey days- this week I’ll find out how it looks at night under indoor lighting as I detail the main entry, more pix to come.

Its been a slamming busy holiday and New Year since I last blogged, with post-holiday letdowns wonderfully crushed to nothing between a group of exciting projects in process and the Pittsburgh Steelers hitting their stride in the playoffs.

I’m going to start with this project, partly because its sort of the most unlikely candidate, given how much website design and social media work I’ve been doing here in Pittsburgh, and partly because it makes use of one of the simple digital publishing strategies I frequently recommend to my small business web design clients.

After a few false starts last year, I am now actually engaged in my first real custom art project here in Pittsburgh, a painted faux finish in an old home in Pittsburgh’s Point Breeze neighborhood.

The proposed finish is on the left, the freshly primed surface to be painted is on the right. The surface was last painted 40-50 years ago, and appear to be a heavy plaster float that’s been incised with stone block pattern; the “grout” lines are fully dimensional.

A found piece of alabaster was the inspiration for the finish itself, you can see more images of samples with source and original finish on my Flickr page, which brings us to the publishing strategy.

I uploaded these first pics a few days ago actually for the purpose of sharing with clients currently in Florida, and getting their approval to go ahead with the work. (Small Business Hint!)

I find it easier and faster to upload pictures and have them well displayed on Flickr than anywhere else, and a basic account on Flickr is still free.

And its infinitely easier to make an online album of related pictures and email a link to someone than it is to process pics in to web format, attach pics to email in compressed format, get delivered thru random email programs and then get properly unzipped on the other end for viewing.

After communication-over-distance solution, the first bonus is that I’m actually on Flickr writing this right now, and after I finish talking, Flickr will post this for me to the page you’re reading right now. All I do is hit ‘Post’, Flickr does the work for me, formatting, everything, with every photo, anytime I need to quickly and easily get something up online, share with collaborators, clients or clients-to-be (Small Business Hint!)

There are several other bonuses to using Flickr that I teach to artists, small businesses, non-profits and other clients looking to streamline their digital publishing, social media and internet marketing workloads; I’ll try to illustrate here as this project continues into February.

Pittsburgh, to be honest, has turned out to be a very rich place and robust place to put down business roots in a generally cold and uncertain business environment and at almost exactly one year to date of my arrival here fresh from the San Diego cityscape mural project, I feel like those roots are somewhat settled in for some real growth now.
 
Today, I’m actually balancing two different demands from two different businesses that are both my own, and the demands are mostly for new work in new opportunities on top of current obligations, both consulting and painting.
 
What I’ve come to realize (among other things) is that the two endeavors are more similar than is obvious, given the project design and production sequence and skills involved in custom service.
 
It is of course, truly wonderful to have appreciative and serious demand for your services as an independent business in this day and age, and as biz grows and work distribution shifts to larger team (coming soon, I believe) I’m looking forward to doing more kinds of stuff that’s had to wait in the life remodel of the last 18 months.
 
Near the top of my list is to edit and release literally tons of video and photos of some more cool San Diego custom art/contracting projects to satisfy that business itch, and in the anticipation I realized I had never shared this faux finish video I made back in 2007. A reasonably successful marketing experiment with 12,000 page views on last three years and consistent traffic drip to my main site with little to no help from me-- this is first time in either painting blog, website or other social media (I just posted tonight on my Facebook page, too.)
 
So check it out and just ignore the outdated titles for now-- I just made a new set for new video project on the way soon.