Planet13 - 6:53 pm on Sep 19, 2011 (gmt 0)

and there arent enough general painting subject blogs period to do this with (never mind specialist blogs).

She doesn't submit to painting blogs.

She paints pictures of widgets. She contacts sites that write about about widgets. There are plenty of sites that write about these widgets, but they don't have much visual media.

People who write about widgets seem to like her paintings, and are more than happy to link to her. Often in their posts, they comment freely on how nice her artwork looks.

Of course, I don't have access to her analytics or her ranking data, so I can't say how much of a boost in rankings it gives, or how much revenue it generates from direct traffic.

But for her situation (since she already has the paintings since that is what she sells, and has thumbnail size images of them already), it is a low effort, cost-effective method of getting links.

Maybe the original poster has some sort of media they can use in a similar fashion.