My wife, Karla Norquist, is a fantastic oil painter. It’s been her dream for a good portion of her life to make a living painting full-time. So of course I couldn’t be happier to help her do just that.

Our whole approach to her web presence is minimalist. Aside from her paintings, Karla is not a content creator like me. She didn’t want a big blog to manage or website maintenance tasks to constantly deal with.

My solution was to borrow from some research I did a few years back on how to create artist portfolio websites with Divi. You can read part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, and part 5 on the Elegant Themes blog if you’re so inclined.

Her website consists of three main pages–Portfolio, About, and Commissions. Her portfolio entries are extremely simple. The painting itself and a few lines on medium, materials, and the painting’s subject/client.

In terms of content marketing the plan is likewise simple. Identify the ten most relevant keywords for her business and write high-quality, long-form, evergreen articles on those topics. Ideally we will only need to update them occasionally while benefiting year round from their search rankings.

 While we’re putting together that essential content, we still wanted to be able to actively drum up enough business to keep Karla busy with commissions this year. For that, we’ve decided to partner with local doggie daycare centers and animal shelters with either discounts for their customers, affiliate commissions for sales generated, or portions of each painting going to raise money for their non-profit.

As of this writing we have one partnership agreed to but we’re still creating the print materials to leave at the doggie daycare.