If you are an artist, or if you want to be, the best way to sell your art online is with a blog about how to sell your art online.

If you have no interest in becoming an artist, there’s nothing here for you; it isn’t really your problem.

If you do want to become an artist, but don’t want to put in the work that goes into becoming one, then you’re not an artist. You’re a kind of parasite who lives off the artists and takes credit for what they do. You are not the kind of person I want reading this blog. Go away.

In fact, go away if you aren’t an artist. Because if you aren’t an artist, then my talking about selling your art online is just going to sound like a bunch of random words strung together with no particular meaning. And I don’t think either of us wants that.

So let’s stipulate: You are an artist and you want to make money by selling your art online.

The title of this post, “The best way to sell art online is to write a blog about it,” is an example of a classic journalistic style. If you are an artist, or just anyone who makes stuff, and you want to sell that stuff for money, then read on, because there’s something you can learn from the classic style.

Telling people how to make money from your blog is a classic journalism story. All journalists do it. It is part of their job. They are paid by people who want them to tell other people how to make money. Some journalism stories might even be true.

Telling people how to make money from your art is a journalist story too. Artists are always telling each other how to make money from their art, and they are always wrong.

This article is not one of those journalist stories. This article tells the truth; it will tell you the best way to sell your art online is to write a blog about it.

So, how do you make money selling art online? Start by setting up a blog. A blog is like a website, only more personal. It’s light and easy to set up and maintain. It’s cheap to host. And because it’s just text, it’s not very difficult to update.

But in order to attract viewers, you’ll need a lot of content. This means writing: blog posts, articles, tips, tutorials and more. You’ll also need images: photographs, illustrations, diagrams and other visual media.

You can try posting your own work at first, but don’t expect people to pay much for art they could get for free elsewhere. What you really want is someone else’s content that you can sell your own on top of. The best way to do this is with stock photography, which has two advantages: it’s cheap, and there are no royalties or fees involved. You can license photos from providers like BigStockPhoto or iStockPhoto for as little as $1 per image; if you’re lucky you might even find high-quality work for free at a place like Flickr or Wikimedia Commons.”

So, you’ve got some art. You’ve been putting it up on social media and getting comments from friends, and even some “likes” or “favorites” (you really need to come up with a better name for that; when was the last time you actually “favorited” something?). And then one day you post something and the next day you see it on another site, or even in a book, without your permission.

Thing is, no one knows how to sell art online. There are a few people who make a living selling prints online, but they usually started out in some other medium like comics or illustration or pin-up art. That doesn’t help you if all you’ve got is original art. And we’re not talking about just making money; we’re talking about making enough money to support yourself doing what you love.

The problem isn’t that art’s hard to sell. Everyone has opinions about what’s worth buying and what isn’t; so does everyone have opinions about what’s good and what isn’t. Be realistic; people don’t just buy stuff because it’s pretty. They buy things because they like them. The problem is more that there isn’t any way to get from “I like this”

I’ve been in the art business for over fifteen years, and I’ve sold hundreds of thousands of dollars of art. And I’m still selling art every day, on Etsy and on my blog. I know that because I write my blog posts first and then use the text in my Etsy listings.

¶A while ago, someone on Reddit asked how they could sell more art. This post is the answer to that question. But it’s also a longer explanation of what I do to sell art online, which is different from what most other people do. My strategy works for me but it might not work for you.

¶If you’re an artist who wants to get better at selling your own work, my advice is this: Sell some first, then read this guide, then try again. If you don’t make any sales during that period, please come back to me later and we can talk about how to improve your strategy.

¶This guide assumes that you have some artwork already made, but haven’t yet sold any of it. It doesn’t cover topics like “What if you want to become an artist?”, “How do I get inspiration?”, or “Where can I find galleries?” The answers to those questions are outside the scope of this guide.

Hello, I’m the artist of this image, and I’d like to tell you how you can buy it.

More than 100 years ago, a guy named Luther Burbank figured out how to make plants that were bigger, tastier and more profitable. He didn’t try to patent his methods. He just put them into the public domain. His goal was to help farmers compete with the big corporations that were growing most of America’s food at the time. But in a way he succeeded even better than he had hoped, because today his methods are used by everyone – including most of the big corporations.