Five Things Artists Need to Know About Sales Online: A blog about sales and art, discussing tips.
As an artist myself, I’m always trying to learn more about sales and marketing my work online. It’s a fascinating business and by far the most fun part of being an artist is self-promotion.
Trying to figure out how to promote my art online has been a real challenge because there are so many different ways to do it. To make things even more complicated, every field or niche has its own special set of rules and techniques that you need to know in order to be successful in that field or niche.
Thing is, as artists we all need to be aware of how sales work online because they aren’t like traditional sales. To be successful you have to understand the difference and approach sales from a different angle than you’re probably used to.
The following are 5 tips from an artist who has had success selling their art online.
1. Do not devalue your art. You put the time and effort into making it, don’t just give it away. People will often offer you a price that is less than what you are looking for. Do not sell yourself short; people respect artists who value their work. This means that if you are selling a piece of original artwork you do not want to list it as a free gift with purchase or a $1 print…
2. Be professional and respectful. If someone wants to purchase something you have listed on etsy and they have questions about the listing, be sure to answer them promptly and in a courteous manner…
3. Respond quickly to emails and messages directed at your shop. If someone wants to buy something from your shop you should respond in a timely manner…
4. Make your shop look appealing, but not cluttered. In order for people to find what they are looking for in your shop, it needs to be organized in an easy-to-follow way…
5. Promote your shop! Mention it on social media sites, talk about it with family and friends and make sure others know about it…
If you are an artist, you have to be a business person. It’s a necessity if you want to make money from art. Here are five parts of the sales process that artists need to understand.
1. You Have to Know Art
Sales is about convincing people that what you’re offering is worth buying, and that means understanding the market for art and knowing how your work fits into it.
2. You Have to Know Yourself
You have to know what kind of artist you are. Are you a painter? A sculptor? A cartoonist? A photographer? Knowing what kind of artist you are will help you understand how best to showcase your work and promote yourself.
3. You Need Business Know-How
In order to sell your art, you have to have the right information about your target markets and how they buy art. If you don’t know what they want or how they buy, then your odds of success will be lower.
4. You Need a Good Sales Pitch
You need a good sales pitch, which means being able to explain clearly why people should buy your art rather than someone else’s or no one else’s. That doesn’t mean talking about yourself; it means talking about the value of your work and how it relates
1. When you’re selling art online, you need to know how to use the medium specifically.
People browsing online are doing so quickly and often for specific reasons. They know what they want and go online to look for it quickly and easily. So when you’re selling on the internet, it’s important that your work can be found easily and bought quickly.
A lot of artists I know are frustrated by what they see as an inability to sell their work because they’re not represented by a gallery. I’m sure there are some cases where this is true, but I have a feeling that many artists who feel that way aren’t making the best use of selling their work online.
Artists are generally very informed about what their art should look like, but they aren’t necessarily as well informed about how to get the most people looking at their art. There is a big difference between an artist who has an amazing website with information about their work and an artist who doesn’t even have a website or any social media presence.
If you’re not sure how to use the internet to get people looking at your art, here are some ways:
Create a blog about your artwork or process. Post new things often (I try for once or twice a week) and
I’m a painter. Painting is my job, and I want to make money at it. So I’m always looking for new ways to get people interested in buying my work.
When I first started out, selling work was pretty easy. I’d stick my paintings in a pile on the sidewalk and they’d sell quickly. Then I got a real studio and had room to work with bigger canvases, so I gradually stopped doing that kind of thing.
Nowadays, selling work is more complicated. But it doesn’t have to be; there are plenty of ways to sell art without leaving home or having an expensive gallery show. Here are some tips for how you can use online tools to sell your art on your own terms – and maybe even make some money:
1. Sell online
The Internet is the best invention for artists ever! It allows you to market yourself and your work directly to potential customers without having to go through a gallery or other middleman.
If you’re just starting out, you can use it to get your name out there and build up a fan base of people who like your style and want to know about new work as soon as it’s available (one of the reasons you should have an online presence is so you can let people
The tips are:
5. Focus on visual content. Most art-lovers spend little time reading the artist’s statement or seeing what other people have said on social media. They probably won’t even read your description in a gallery setting. They’ll look at the image and make an instant decision based on that.
Telling a story with an image is far more important than the story you tell about yourself in the artist’s statement section.
4. Have a clean presentation. Don’t let the viewer’s eyes wander to areas of your site that are not related to your art or business, like stock photos or unrelated links. Make sure you include enough information so viewers can follow your work and gain insight into how you create it, but don’t go overboard with text or too much information — this will distract from your artwork instead of helping them understand it better.
3. Use high-quality images and graphics for your website, blog, social media and marketing materials to showcase your art effectively and help build excitement around it.
2. Be consistent in your approach to marketing and promotion of your art online through social media outlets, email marketing and blogging — even if they’re done sporadically over time or mixed with some personal posts, so long as there’s
I’ve been studying and selling abstract art for about 3 years now. I learned a lot from my first show, and even more from the 5 shows that followed.
I developed a better understanding of what works in an online gallery, what doesn’t, and why. I’ve also studied other artists who have had successful galleries on sites like SaatchiArt.com and Artsy.net, and scoured eBay auctions for examples of modern art as well as some of the worst examples.
Trying to make it as an artist is hard work, but not nearly so hard as people think. It’s just a question of how much time you’re willing to invest and learning how the business of art really works. Here are five things I’ve learned (so far) that I wish someone had told me when I started out:
