Crafty Coach - Norm Lanier

I’ve been making art since I was big enough to stand. After earning a BS in Photography I began teaching photography for the Learning Annex and selling my photos at craft fairs. Like many artist I am creatively A.D.D. and got bored selling photos and started exploring other crafts. I learned to make hand-made lampshades and paper crafts which I sold at craft shows and craft malls and eBay through most of the 90s. During that same time I shifted my career from a photographer to a computer graphic designer at a time when computers where just appearing on the desktop.

Frustrated by the craft show grind I stopped selling altogether and studied watercolor painting at The Houston Museum of Fine Art’s Glassel School. You can see my watercolor paintings at www.lonestarart.com. In 2003 I saw an interesting product on eBay of an normal looking antique photo that changed into a monster as you passed by. Determined to figure out how I could make my own I struggled to perfect the process enough to put a few up on the internet for sale. In 2004 www.hauntedportraits.com was born.

Honestly when I made the web site live I only believed I might be able to sell a few around Halloween. Much to my surprise the orders started flooding in and didn’t stop after Halloween. It was during this time I realized to continue to succeed online I needed to learn marketing and fast. Since then I’ve studied under some of the most respected internet marketers today.

I’m also proud to say that I’ve created another non-art related internet business that I turned over to my wife which allowed her to retire from her school nursing position and stay at home while earning double what she was making previously.

The skills I’ve amassed together over the last 25+ make me uniquely qualified to teach other struggling artists how to better market their crafts especially on the extremely competitive internet.