Having your own professional art portfolio website is crucial if you are serious about running your business as an artist.
But that is just one shade of the spectrum. You can’t just hire a web developer to create your website, fill it with pictures of your artworks, and then just leave it as it is without doing anything at all.
As you build up your body of works, you also need to update the content of your website.
And of course, you need to keep track of your customer engagement on your website.
You’ll know if your content is substantial, and your marketing strategies are working if your customers are engaging on your site.
Customer engagement comes in many forms, and having an in-depth understanding of this concept is important before you can reap positive results from it on your art portfolio website.
What is User Engagement?
Simply speaking, user engagement revolves around catching and keeping your visitor’s attention.
It starts when your audience stays on your site, appreciates and absorbs your content, and finally converts.
Conversion depends on your goals – it can be through sign-ups or lead generation, or it can be in the form of sales, confirmed appointments, or bookings.
User engagement is a vital metric that you should look into.
When it is high, you will notice that your visitors become more loyal and your conversions are also increased.
And this could be attributed to the fact that your website is user-friendly and it is rich in valuable content.
Nevertheless, user engagement isn’t just about keeping the comments and shares coming.
Below are common types of activities that fall into engagement:
- Learning from your content: If a visitor checks your website and starts checking your pages and content, that is user engagement. That person is learning more about your business. And the more informed he will be about what you do, your credibility, and what you have to offer, the higher the chances are that he will inquire, subscribe, and buy from your site.
- Active participation: Comments and discussions fall into this form of engagement. And you can encourage active participation through the things that you put into your site. You can make use of quizzes, personality tests, surveys, chatbots, and many other types of interactive content. Having these added fun features on your art portfolio website will certainly enhance engagement, and your visitors are more likely to spread their experience with their friends.
- Clicking on the share button: Each time a visitor hits the share button at the end of your blog post that counts as engagement. As such, if you don’t have these social media share buttons, it’s high time that you add them to your website.
- Viewing of images and watching videos: Aside from your blog, you can also have a media page that is dedicated entirely to images and videos. And make sure that the videos and images are of high quality.
User Engagement Strategy: 10 Ways to Increase Customer Engagement
Increase the Speed of Your Site
With the overwhelming amount of information that is presented to the public every minute, it’s not surprising that the average global attention span is decreasing.
And whether it’s true or not that our attention span is now shorter than that of a goldfish, it’s still inarguable that these days people get easily distracted.
Visitors could hastily transfer their attention from one subject to another. As such, your site must load fast and smoothly every time a visitor lands to your page.
You could have the best website and most outstanding artworks out there, but if your site lags, then, you will certainly lose a lot of potential and even loyal customers.
Do you want to know how fast does your website load? You can easily find it out with GTmetrix.
Simplify Your Layout
Sometimes with our intention to make our site catchier, we tend to overthink and overdesign, which most of the time doesn’t really translate well.
You can save your creative juices to your artworks. As for your site’s layout, it’s better to keep it clean and simple.
Stay away from having too many details going on because these can be straining to the eyes. Once you combine all of these unnecessary details, they will make it harder for your visitors to go through your pages and your content.
Instead, you might want to consider using a lot of white spaces so your page doesn’t look busy, and your content can be easily highlighted.
And pay attention to your fonts and text sizes – your texts should be readable.
Make it Easier to Navigate Your Website
If your layout is clean and simple, it’s also easier to navigate your website.
And easy navigation can decrease your site’s bounce rate or the percentage of visitors who walk away from your site after viewing only one page.
The bottom line is that you want to make sure that a visitor can easily find what he wants to see on your website.
You can make use of blog categories, an easy navigation menu, as well as a search box to increase user engagement and encourage your visitors to stay longer on your site.
Enhance Your Inbound and Outbound Links
Adding inbound and outbound links to your blog posts isn’t just an SEO essential, it is also vital to increasing your site’s user engagement.
However, you should know how to properly add links. Make sure that you are linking to a descriptive anchor text; the text should be specific and the landing page should be relevant to where you are linking it.
And of course, you must test the link before you publish your post to ensure that your visitor will land to the appropriate landing page when he clicks it.
Write Longer Content
I’m not sure if you noticed, but I observe this rule religiously with my blog posts.
According to Forbes, “Blog posts with over 1,500 words are 68% more likely to be shared on Twitter and 22% more likely to be liked on Facebook, compared to shorter posts.”
So, if you want to strengthen your site’s SEO and user engagement, you should write blog posts that are at least 1,000 words.
Two of the major benefits of longer blog posts are – longer dwell time for readers and the search engine will have a better understanding of your content.
As such, there’s a higher chance that your post will rank higher than those with a lesser number of words.
Pay Attention to Your Post’s Readability and SEO Score
In connection with the #5 strategy, it’s also essential that you know how to keep your readers engaged and interested that they won’t notice that they already absorbed at least 1,500 words.
If you are using Yoast on WordPress, you will know if your content is readable or not.
Make sure that each post has a good readability score. You can achieve it by dividing your article with several subheadings, and by avoiding long paragraphs.
You can also break up the monotony of reading long content by adding photos, infographics, GIFs, charts, and other visuals that can keep your reader’s attention until the very end of your article.
Moreover, apart from getting a good readability score, your article should also have a good SEO score. And you will also know it if you have installed Yoast.
Below are some simple steps to increase your SEO score:
- Add relevant inbound and outbound links
- Use your keywords in your title, and beginning paragraph
- Use your keywords in your subheadings, meta description, and in the alt tag of your featured image
Display Content Suggestions
Have you tried to shop on Amazon? I’m sure you noticed that they keep on showing you related products from what you are looking at to encourage you to continue browsing and adding items to the cart.
And even if you already finished your purchase, you will also see product suggestions that you might want to look into.
This isn’t a new tactic. It has been used not just by eCommerce websites, but also of blogs ever since.
So, there’s no reason for you to skip on this tried and tested strategy to increase your site’s user engagement and your sales.
Ensure that Your Site is Mobile-Friendly
Based on the study conducted by Statista, as of February 2019, “Mobile devices accounted for 48 percent of web page views worldwide.”
And the global mobile data traffic is expected to increase nearly sevenfold between 2017 and 2022.
This only shows how a lot of Internet users are accessing content online through their phones. As such, I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to ensure that your website is mobile-friendly.
You can make use of a mobile responsiveness tool like Google’s mobile-friendly test.
And of course, you can also check other tools if you want. These testing tools will tell you why your site isn’t mobile-friendly, and they will also offer suggestions on how you can improve your site to ensure that it provides a good user engagement across all devices.
Add a Call to Action
You should not undermine the power of adding an effective call to action in all of your blog posts.
You can do this by asking questions, encouraging your readers to share their experience or to add some comments.
You can also ask your readers to click on a link if they want to avail of a limited-time discount or to subscribe to your mailing list so that they will be updated on your latest posts and offers.
Check out this article if you want to explore more Call-to-Action Examples for lead generation.
Use Interactive Content
There are several interactive contents that you can take advantage of to ensure that your visitors are engaged.
Some popular examples are quizzes, games, polls, an interactive map, 360 video, interactive infographics, assessments, and a lot more.
Feel free to read this article if you want to learn more about some of the best interactive tools that can increase your site’s user engagement.
Ideas for Art Portfolio Themes
Choosing ideas for your art portfolio themes is synonymous to deciding the type of audience that you want to target with your artworks.
Your themes should definitely rely on your intuition and your interests as an artist.
Just to give you a head start or a direction, below are some ideas for art portfolio themes that you can consider:
- Politics and Social Order
- Spirituality
- Stories and Histories
- Daily life of an Artist
- Invention and Fantasy
- Nature
- Emotions
- Advocacy
- Food
- Humor
- Nostalgia
- Romance
- Fashion
- Current Events
- Heroes
- Holidays
- Sexuality
- Abstract Concepts
These are just some ideas that you can ponder upon, and if you want to explore more themes, feel free to click on the links below:
For a more detailed explanation of how you can decide on a theme for your art portfolio, you can check this useful guide to subject matter selection.
Keep Your Spirit Up
Driving traffic to your art portfolio website and keeping your user engagement high are just two of the major hurdles that you’ll have to face, especially if your site is still new.
But everyone will have to go through this phase. Hence, aside from being consistent in creating high-quality content, you should also be patient.
Your site won’t appear on Google’s first page overnight. Some leaders in a certain niche took them years before they landed that much-coveted spot on Google search.
Don’t pressure yourself to do all the changes on your site all at once. You can take small steps at a time, but just be consistent in improving your site and your content.
As they say, slow and steady wins the race. Make use of Google Analytics, Hotjar, and Finteza to analyze your site’s data and user engagement.
You can also check out this article if you want to learn more about customer engagement tools that you can add to your website.
Did you find this article helpful? I’d certainly love to hear your thoughts. And if you have some content suggestions, feel free to drop them in the comments below.
I’m sure you’d love to equip yourself with more useful information so you can make the most of your online presence, strengthen your authority, and widen your reach. So, I am encouraging you to check out these articles below:
