If art is your business you may find that having an online presence can help build business, sales and followers. While it can be beneficial for people to see your art in person at a gallery or a storefront, getting your work online will allow even more people the chance to enjoy your craft and may even make you some extra sales.
Many artists chose to post their work on sites like DeviantArt, where like-minded individuals can share their work. Others work towards selling their art through Etsy, and other online storefronts, but there are a lot of tricks of the trade when it comes to successful online sales.
Make a Plan
If you want to do more than just sell on an alternative site’s system, you can create your own website with a cart. You can also sell via some social media sites, like Facebook. Before you start trying to make sales though, you should take some time to make a plan.
Your plan should include what you want to sell, where you want to sell it (will shipping be involved) and how you are going to get your items online (from cost to photography). Don’t even start designing a website until you know what you plan to include on it. This will make it a much smoother process.
Get a Website
It’s fairly easy these days to set up your own e-commerce website. Through website creation places like Wix you can easily set up a storefront and so much more. Don’t just use your website to sell your art, but also to engage your customers with a blog.
Make sure you include a lot of photos for your artwork, not just in your storefront. The draw for art collectors is seeing what the art has to say to them, which means you need to have high resolution, clear and well-lighted photos.
Market With Social Media
Last, but not least, utilize social media to your best advantage. Not only can you share your blog posts and e-commerce site on social media, you can also do direct sales. Really all you need is some sort of payment app set up, like Paypal.
Social media also calls for those well lit photographs of your artwork. To be safe, you may want to add a watermark to any photos you share online so that no one can use them without you getting credit for them.
Share your art with others any way you can, and utilize all of the options that are out there. According to this blog post from Park West Gallery, “The selling of art is an art itself.” For this reason, it’s important to put your heart into how you sell your art, just like you do the art itself!