If you’re an artist or photographer and you want to make money from your work, you need to get it in front of as many people as possible. Depending on how much time and effort you invest, with a little bit of luck you can even end up earning a decent amount of money from your creative pursuits. In this article, we’ll explore the main ways that you can promote your art or photography online and provide some hints and tips to increase the chances of your work getting noticed.
How to Cross-Sell Your Online Customers
Tips for Using Social Media to Drive More Traffic to Your Website
You have several different options for selling your work:
- Sell through one or more of the established art portals
- Create prints of your work and produce unique items
- Offer your work through store fronts like Etsy, Amazon or Ebay
- Design your own online store for your art or photographs
Sell through one or more of the established art portals
There are several websites that specialize in selling art and photographs. Customers can browse these sites and purchase items as high quality images or have them printed out, framed and shipped. In return, the portal will take a commission from selling your work. Popular websites for selling art and photographs include ArtPal, ArtBreak, ArtFire and Art.com. You can review each of these sites to find a portal that works for you, as all of them will have different terms, conditions and rates of commission.
Create prints of your work and produce unique items
You don’t have to limit yourself to just producing prints and canvasses. Websites like Zazzle and Cafepress allow you to upload your original work and use it on a huge variety of different types of products. Whether you want to put your images on a mug, a mouse mat, a poster or a tote bag, there are dozens of options for creating unique items. You will normally pay a base price per item to these websites and you get to keep any profit made on top of that.
Offer your work through store fronts like Etsy, Amazon or Ebay
Etsy, Amazon and Ebay all provide pre-configured, eCommerce stores that allow anyone to sell a wide variety of products. These store fronts are quick and easy to setup, so you could be online and selling in just a few hours.
One of the main advantages of these sites is that they have large numbers of customers, so you already have a built in audience that could be interested in your work. Etsy in particular specializes in arts and crafts, so they could be a great place for you to start. Spend some time looking at how other artists and photographers are marketing their images to get some inspiration for your own shopfront.
Design your own online store for your art or photographs
If you’d prefer to have total control over how you sell your art online, you can use a site like Shopify. That will allow you to design, setup and configure an eCommerce site exactly how you want. You can then promote and display your work to your exact specifications. You can adjust every aspect of your site including color, fonts, layout, navigation and more to help your customer find exactly what they need.
Hints and tips on selling your art online
Create unique, interesting, refreshing art and photographs – Use an original approach. This will help your work stand out and get you noticed.
Promote your work on social media – Share your latest creations in online communities, groups and social media channels that are interested in art and photography.
Create stunning images of your artwork – Make sure that you get high resolution images and use them when sharing your work .
Create lots of work – The more pieces that you have, the more likely you will be to sell them, so keep creating!
Title and describe your work correctly – Titles and descriptions will help with both search results and customers looking for something specific.
Build up a following – Create a reputation and personality for your photos or art.
Try lots of different price points – The amount of money people want to pay for art can vary tremendously; offer different sizes and types of your work at different price points.
Link to your work from elsewhere online – Creating backlinks to your work from other sites will help it to appear in search results, especially image searches.
In closing
Making a living from your work is definitely possible. Dedicating some time and effort to making your art available online is a great first step in the right direction.
By Paul Maplesden