You may know that Melissa Dinwiddie and I have been making some noise about changing the way that artists talk about themselves, their art, and their money. We’re tired of hearing artists complain about not being able to make a living – and we’re doing something about it.

Over the last two weeks, Melissa and I have held a series of conference calls that we’ve called The Game Changer Calls. Over three calls, Melissa and I talked about how she built an art career that crushed her poor creative spirit, and how she reversed the tide. We’ve talked about how the Internet has forever changed the way that artists interact with collectors and art buyers, and how artists can take advantage of the Web’s utility to form direct connections with fans. And finally, in the third call, we took several artists by the virtual hand and showed them exactly how to prepare their websites for online sales.

The calls have been tremendously gratifying. Emails poured in from all over letting us know how much people have enjoyed hearing that artists can indeed take charge of their career and create the life that they want.

We’re not done yet.

It is our distinct pleasure to now share with all of you that Melissa and I are continuing our work changing artists’ lives with the launch of ArtEmpowers.Me, a community for creative artpreneurs who have a burning desire to turn their passion into a career.

If you are familiar with the Abundant Artist Community, ArtEmpowers.Me is everything that the Community was, combined with Melissa’s fine work on helping artists bust the Starving Artist mindset. ArtEmpowers.Me is built to help artists of all stripes learn how to sell their art online, and turn their art business into a satisfying career.

If you are curious to see what it’s all about, check out ArtEmpowers.Me, and let me know if you have any questions! Registration is open until Friday night, September 16 at midnight Eastern Time.

I first met Elaine from Zazzle when I noticed she signed up for the Abundant Artist mailing list. I reached out to her and we had a great conversation about helping artists earn more money. Elaine is in charge of getting more artists to sell their work through Zazzle.com, as well as forming partnerships with other companies. She was very professional and my impression is that Zazzle works very hard to make sure that its artists find success. If you have experience selling art on Zazzle.com, let others know how it went in the comments. I was not paid for this article.

In today’s economy, it can be extremely difficult to make a living as an artist! Zazzle offers a way for artists to showcase their work on hundreds of different products and let us take care of all the hard work (manufacturing, shipping, customer service, payments). Zazzle brings 20,000,000+ monthly viewers from all around the world to your artwork. Creating your own customizable store on Zazzle is absolutely FREE and extremely easy.

What Zazzle Offers

• FREE fully customizable stores to showcase your work
• Name your own royalty
• 15% referral rate for any customer you send to Zazzle + up to 17% additional Volume Bonus payment
• Hundreds of products to put your artwork on ranging from real US postage stamps, canvas prints, invitations and business cards to shoes, iPhone cases, necklaces, t-shirts, mugs and even skateboards, just to name a few
• 20+ million monthly shoppers to view your work
• Bulk Image Uploader to upload many large image files at once

How Zazzle can help you sell your work

• Weekly Seller Newsletters – you can read tons of tips and advice in the archived newsletters!
• Entire sell section with tons of tutorials and guides on everything thing from creating a product using our design tool, to where and how to promote your work.
• ProSeller Program with special benefits
• Link building tools for your website or blog
• Flash panels, blog panels, banners
• Design Contests
• Zazzle forums where our amazing ProSellers and staff give pointers and answer questions and help you make money with your art!

Hi, it’s Cory again. I just want to interject and let you know that even though Zazzle offers many great resources to sell your art online, they are just one channel. I spoke to several artists who are selling their work through Zazzle, and they all let me know that to be successful, you have to do more than just put your art on Zazzle.com. Successful artists use Zazzle, their own website, and many other channels to sell their work. Having your art in as many places as possible is a good thing!

Here’s What a Few Zazzle Sellers Have to Say about Their Experience…

“WOW! Thank you for changing my life since 2005. My sales have increased every year. With your easy-to-use referral tools and helpful tips, I’m well on my way to earning even more this year. With my many stores here on Zazzle covering all kinds of designs and subjects, you have made it possible for me to leave my full-time professional career for someone else in need of a job during a bad economy.”

— Trevor - TDSwhite

“In addition to creating, marketing and selling designs for my own brands, Zazzle’s referral program is a great way for my business to earn more money. And with official merchandise from world famous brands like Star Wars, Hallmark, Disney, Harry Potter and more plus the quality content from international artists, illustrators, designers and photographers there is an endless opportunity to generate referral income and increase my earning potential.”

— Debbie - TheSpottedOlive

“The entire process from shop set-up to creating products, to cashing royalty checks is simple, intuitive and revolutionary. I’m a self-taught graphic designer making a living full-time with my Zazzle stores, and I have to say it’s such a great feeling to wake up in the morning to 5 or 6 “Sold!” emails! Zazzle has definitely changed my life.”

— Valerie - BeezKneez

How to go from Newbie to Zazzle ProSeller in no time

1.     Create your store – Sign up for an account on Zazzle and start your first store that will be a virtual gallery of your work

2.     Create products – Use our tools to upload your images, create hundreds of products and post them for sale

3.     Tags and Descriptions – These are extremely important! Be sure to add thorough and relevant tags and descriptions for all your products so that customers can easily find them on Zazzle and also on search engines like Google.

4.     PROMOTE! – The best way to start seeing significant sales is by promoting your work online and offline. Send an email to friends and fans, blog about your products, link to your Zazzle store from your website, Facebook, tweet it, etc! You’ll even earn a 15% referral payment if you refer a customer to Zazzle! We also offer free blog panels, banners, and link-building tools.

5.     Participate! – A great way to know what’s new at Zazzle and learn all of our tips and tricks is to subscribe to our seller newsletter, stay active in our forums, “like” Zazzle on Facebook and enter our contests.

Things to Keep in Mind as you Begin Creating Products

• Design with a customer in mind – You should be able to immediately answer the question “Who would buy this product?” For example, if you created a mug with a painting of a dog on it, you should be thinking about a dog lover.
• Keep adding products – Don’t just create a few products at the beginning and then forget about your store! Keep creating new products around different holidays, events, themes, etc to appeal to many types of customer.
• Tell People about your new products – Show off your designs and fancy customized store through email, Facebook, twitter, personal website or blog, and any other online or offline channel that you can think of! Best part of this is that if you create referral links, you will earn an additional 15% of each sale!
• Think at least 1 month in advance – If you plan on designing for certain holidays or events make sure to have your products up in your store at least 1 month before! That is when we see the most sales.

Additional feedback I got from interviewing artists who are having success on Zazzle

• Don’t jump on sales bandwagons – make the art that you are good at making. Just because you hear someone else is selling lots of puppy mugs, don’t go creating puppy mugs if you’re not good at it and don’t want to do it.
• Just like any other site, there are copycat artists on Zazzle who try to pass their work off as original. The Zazzle staff will take it down if notified, but some artists have felt that Zazzle could be more proactive about preventing copyright infringement.
• Sometimes Zazzle changes their layout and functionality without warning. Make sure you come back to the site frequently so that you are familiar with how everything works, or you might get frustrated.
• Take a partner – managing Zazzle and other online marketing sites can be a lot of work. If you have someone you can work with, then you can spend more time creating.
• The Zazzle staff is really helpful & approachable. Several artists mentioned that they received personal help and attention, which is pretty amazing considering how much business Zazzle is doing.

Any additional thoughts? What has your experience with Zazzle been like?

I spoke at Ignite Portland 9 last week and gave a 5 minute talk on how art stops urban decay.

I did make one mistake in the talk – Tom Bennett didn’t start the Paducah project, that was Mark Barone. All of you urban planning people out there might take issue with some of this talk. Believe me, I know how difficult it is to explain this stuff in 5 minutes. I wish I had 30. It was a lot of fun though!

I spoke at Wordcamp Portland this past weekend about how WordPress can be used to change the Art business model. The event was streamed live over the Internet, but unfortunately there was a technical glitch and my session didn’t get recorded, so I recorded it on my computer and posted it to Youtube.

For those of you who want to download and share the powerpoint slides without the audio, here’s the slide deck:

At Wordcamp Portland I did a presentation on how Artists are using WordPress and a little Twitter meme started. Check it out.

I’ve been so swamped with the new Abundant Artist Community opening. It was a lot more work than I originally thought it was going to be, but it was totally worth it. The launch of the site ran into one small issue when I sent out the initial email to everyone – I put the wrong link in the email! Some of you may not have noticed, but boy, a whole bunch of others did.

At any rate, after I got the link sorted out, we ended up with about 20 members of the Abundant Artist Community. I’m going to leave registration open at the current price ($15/month!) until the end of August. In September, the price is going up to $25. Also, if anyone wants to sign up for a lifetime membership, I’ll be offering that as well. It’s just $150 to be a member of the site forever. That’s less than a year’s worth of monthly pricing. Check out and sign up for The Abundant Artist Community

So far, there are two lessons posted, as well as the member forum. It’s been a fun discussion getting to know these artists who are very serious about their business.

What’s next?

For the past year I’ve been writing about selling art online. I’ve taken my corporate marketing experience and applied it to the art world and been as helpful as I could to as many as I could. I’ve made some great friends and learned a lot in the process.

I’m going to continue doing that, but I wanted to introduce something new to The Abundant Artist as well. For the past while I’ve been studying and reading research about how important the skills that artists have are going to be to the business world and to the US economy as a whole. I want to begin writing about that.

I’ll share some insights into the following:

• How the business paradigm is shifting from business as usual to creative enterprise. If a business can be outsourced, automated, or is a commodity, then that business must find a way to be more artistic in its execution, or risk becoming irrelevant.
• Why the skills artists have are so important. It goes beyond painting, writing, or performing. It’s about the essence of creativity itself – storytelling, empathy, emotional expression.
• How you can benefit from the new paradigm. Businesses need the skills that you have. I’ll talk about how you can turn your artistic skills into something for which businesses will pay you handsomely.

I’ll continue talking about how artists can sell art online – no worries there. If you want to a part of a focused group that is serious about building their business online, then the community is the place, but I’ll continue sharing online marketing insights.

In the mean time, I look forward to also exploring this new paradigm with you.

Serenity by Lesley Atlansky

Yesterday I posted that my Big Audacious Goal was to have 100 Artists Build Business That Support the Lifestyle They Want. Some of you shared some of your awesome B.A.G.’s.

So, here’s the power of sharing your goals, and here’s the power of communities. Lesley Atlansky (her website is here) shared that one of her goals was to be featured in the Oregon Art Beat, a local news segment produced by Oregon Public Broadcasting. It’s a great example of a goal that is measurable, doable, and …

something the community can help with.

Here’s Where the Rubber Meets the Road

The real power of gathering people around you is not only in motivating yourself to do more & do better, but also that the people you gather can help you accomplish your goals. So here’s a crazy idea.

Let’s get Lesley on Oregon Art Beat!

There’s no instructions for how they evaluate who should get covered, but you can submit a story idea here:

http://www.opb.org/programs/artbeat/contact/storyidea

They say that they get an average of 2 – 3 story ideas per day, which is a fair amount, but that’s nothing if those of you reading this all go after it at once and decide to help Lesley out.

If you like Lesley’s art, visit the story idea submission page and submit why you think Lesley’s art should be covered by Art Beat. If she makes it in, you’ll have done a good deed and helped out a fellow artist.

Lesley’s website: http://www.lesleyatlansky.com

Lesley’s Facebook Fan page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Lesley-Atlansky-Art/110741355625541?ref=search&v=wall

Some ideas for the submission form:

I’ve had the pleasure of interacting with Lesley a couple of times online and she’s just a really nice person. She takes learning her craft seriously, and she has even taken the initiative to start her own gallery cooperative in Estacada, Oregon. She is one artist that is dedicated and passionate about her work.

Oregon Art Beat has a Facebook page - post Lesley’s story there too! Just tell them that you “want to see Lesley Atlansky featured on Oregon Art Beat, because her work is full of beautiful accidents, and isn’t that what Art is all about?”

Can we do this?

When I started The Abundant Artist, it was an exploration of the idea that the starving artist is nothing more than a myth that artists self-perpetuate. It’s easier to believe that being an artist inherently means being poor, or bad at business.

Since then, however, I’ve met a lot of artists who are pretty good at business. They’re artists who have turned their passion into their work and have left the day job far behind. They have invaluable information to share.

One of the things that has been amazing to me is that there are thousands of artists online desperately seeking to connect with the information that these artists have, and yet only a handful of people who are sharing that information in any sort of useful, studied way.

There are various art forums around the Web, many of them with a marketing section attached, like some sort of afterthought – but where are the places that artists can go to really study and get feedback on their business? Where’s the community of business-minded creatives?

Can I Bring Together A Stronger Community?

For the past year (plus a little), I’ve been bringing business savvy artists to the Abundant Artist blog through interviews. They’ve shared their information, but because of the limited nature of blogging, there can’t be a lot of discussion back and forth on the ideas discussed there. Blog comments only go so far as a discussion and learning forum.

Ever since I had a discussion with Carol from one  of my first group coaching programs I’ve wanted to bring an online community together for artists that would enable artists to get the training that they need to succeed online, as well as create a place where those who are really serious about learning how to sell art online can gather to discuss what works and what doesn’t.

I’m nearly done with the bare bones of this new part of The Abundant Artist and I can’t wait to show it to all of you. I just have a few questions:

If you were going to be a part of a community of artists focused on learning to sell art online, what kinds of things would you expect from the site? What would you want to learn right away? What would you want to learn down the road?

Yesterday a new acquaintance of mine mentioned that he visited this website. The conversation went something like this:

Him: I visited your website.

Me: Oh?

Him: Yeah, it was pretty cool!

Me: (thinking to myself) Why are you visiting my site? You’re not an artist… (Out loud) Did you like it?

Him: Yeah…(awkward pause). It was pretty cool!

The End.

Are Your Website Visitors Art Collectors?

Later as I was walking away from that conversation, I realized why it was so awkward. My new friend had visited my website because he knew me and was curious, but he isn’t the person that this site is intended for, so he felt awkward about engaging further.

Is this happening to you?

I see a lot of artists falling into this online trap. They jump on Facebook, Twitter, or other places online and start following other artists. Other artists follow them back. Soon everyone is caught up in ‘engagement,’ which feels good because you feel like you’re doing something, getting responses.

The problem, of course, is that if you are only reaching other artists and you’re not selling any art, then you’re mostly just spinning your wheels.

How to Tell If You Are Getting the Right Kind of Website Visitors.

As a general rule, social media visitors don’t buy much (though you can get them on your newsletter, where they’ll buy later), referrals from other websites are a little better, search engine visitors are better still (someone doing a Google search for Bronze Buffaloes for Sale is probably going to buy them if you have them for sale), and people who visit from your newsletter are most likely to buy.

The following are some key indicators that will tell you about your visitors and whether they’re the right people.

Low Sales. The primary indicator, of course. If the right collector is looking at your art, but you’re never selling anything, then perhaps you need to figure out where they’re all coming from, and go find them somewhere else.

Newsletter subscribers. You do have an artist newsletter, right? If nobody is signing up for your newsletter, but you have website traffic, then you either aren’t getting the right visitors, or you haven’t done a very good job of making your newsletter easy to sign up for.

Bounce Rates & Time On Page. If you’re using tracking software like Google Analytics, then you can see how much time people are spending on your website.

If the average time per page is less than one minute, it might mean that the people visiting your site aren’t the right market (it could also mean that your art isn’t very interesting – but that’s another discussion entirely). The Bounce Rate is the percentage of people who click back on their browser within 30 seconds (they realize right away that they don’t like your stuff).

Ask them. Sounds simplistic, but it’s so easy to do. Put up a survey on your website, asking people what kind of art they buy, whether they buy art regularly, whether they are artists themselves. SurveyMonkey.com allows you easily create an embedded survey form

Monet’s Vader with a Parasol from Limpfish

Who says Art has to be serious? I love silly, whimsical things like this. It made me smile.

I found this piece while goofing around the Internet on Stumbleupon. If you’re a Stumbleupon user, you should add me as a friend. If you notice in the comments on his site, Limpfish’s readers are all saying they’d love to buy a print of this image, so he’s obviously doing something right.

Have a happy Friday and enjoy selling your art!

Also, check out the tools & resources page that I just put up yesterday. There’s tons of useful links for learning how to sell art, both offline and online. If you know of a resource that should be there that isn’t, let me know and I may add it.