So you've made an awesome showprint for a band you love, hung them up all over town to get fools out to the show, and placed copies in the hands of the bands and the club owner, now what?  How do you get rid of the rest of them in exchange for cash money?

I've been making showprints for about 4 years as Five in One Serigraphy and I do it primarily for the thrill of seeing my prints up at our local record stores, head shops, coffee outlets, and high profile storefronts.  Primarily for that thrill but it's no secret that ink and paper and emulsion and time all cost money, so while I mostly do it for love of the game, there is a selfish interest in making back a few of the dollars I put in and maybe even getting a little extra to buy Cheetos to eat while I'm designing and printing the next one.

This website is one method of making my showprints available for purchase to show goers or band lovers after the show, but in a world containing etsy, ebay, and a bazillion other methods of selling handmade goods, it is difficult to get traffic to your own site.  Take alicatstudios.com for example...after taking the time to figure out a new CMS and arranging a payment system to work within it, we then had to figure out some way to actually get people to the site.  It's not so easy.

Some people swear by the blog post method - you go to blogs that talk about something similar to what you do and comment on how awesome their posts are, then you leave your website info in the signature field.

Some folks like the SEO method by which you try to give search engines all the information they like and thus increase your page ranking.

I think the best way to get people to your site is to use a combination of the above methods and whatever else you can think of to stir up word of mouth.  Nothing will ever beat a one on one referral and you will build much stronger customer relationships (repeat offenders) when there is a personal connection between you and your consumers.

This is a long way around to talking about two super cool resources that I use for getting people to this site...I don't remember how I happened upon GigPosters.com but I was certainly late to the game.  I only joined them about a year ago. In GigPosters.com I found a place to post my showprints and link back to my site and it was easy and non-exclusive - by that I mean to say that there's a bunch of crap up there, but there's also tons of posters (132609 at the time of writing this) from super-pros like Frank Kozik, Gilbert Shelton, and Jermaine.  That's not any kind of surprise that the big guys would be up there, afterall, anyone with a computer and a photo of a print can post, but I did get excited to find that lots of these guys participated in the GigPosters forum.  If you're new to the showprint game and want to find out some of the unofficial rules the forum is a great place to gather information.  I have academic training in printmaking and know a lot of the propers, but there was some stuff addressed there that learned me up real good like.  The are also (mostly) nice to noobs.

Rock Show app as seen on the iPad

Ok, enuf about how awesome GigPosters is - the other one I found is kinda weird, but cool.  It's weird because it's really only meant to be seen on an iOS device, ie an iphone, an ipod, or an ipad.  The app is called Rock Show and they sell showprints.  The handle all the technical back end of getting the prints in front of people as well as the money stuff - they send you an email if someone buys one - all you do as a printmaker is make the prints and mail them off to who ever buys one.  The app looks nice and works well, but they ask designers to upload super large images of the prints, so unless you're on a real fast WiFi, it does take a long time to load.

The Rock Show app is free and as more designers get there stuff up there is will be a great resource for the niche market of Showprint collectors.  Your mom probably won't ever get the app, it but that freaky dude that collects set lists and drumsticks will be downloading it and maybe even buying stuff.

Rock Show does do have a website, but it's difficult to get to the posters, as the website is primarily there for the purposes of connecting with designers and printers and giving them a place to set up accounts and upload posters.

So that's what I've got.  If you have any awesome resources that I don't know about, please lemme know...I'm always down for getting the word on the streets.