The Ultimate Guide to Selling Art Online

Ever looked for a comprehensive guide that you can use as a checklist to know what you should be doing to sell your art online? Here you go. This is a living list. As new techniques are added this post will be updated. Be sure to bookmark this post and come back often to make sure you’re covering every aspect of online marketing.

Keyword research. Before you build your website do some research to see what people are typing in to search engines when they’re looking for work like yours. You should be able to build a list of ways to describe your art that will attract buyers by matching what they’re searching for. Check out this post on how to do keyword research using Google’s Keyword Tool.

Pick the right domain. When starting out, most artists are only going to be known by their name, if known at all. You should pick a domain that matches your name exactly or is a close approximation to your name. If the .com version of your name is taken, you might try the .net, .me, or a country variation.

Write descriptions of your images on your site. I see a lot of artists who put their work on their site but don’t put up any descriptions. People want to know how big your art is, whether it’s on canvas, whether it’s oil, watercolor, and any other description you can give them. If your site is built on Flash you’re going to have a hard time doing this. In addition, the text on your page will help search engines know what your images are all about. Take advantage of image titles and Alt tags. Before you upload an image to your website change the name of the file to some sort of descriptive text. If you can edit the Alt tags of your images make sure you use descriptive keywords there as well. Here’s an in-depth guide to making your images found on the web.

Use high quality images that download fast. This is a slight oxymoron as high quality images have larger file sizes and take longer to load. You’ll have to experiment with what works best. If it takes longer than a second to download your page, however, be aware that potential buyers will move on to another site. Attention spans on the web are fickle. In addition, Google announced last year that they are taking load times into account when determining which sites come up in the search results.

Put up prices. This is especially true if you are selling reproductions. Everywhere you display a piece of art you should display a price. Even if your shopping cart lists a price after someone clicks through you’ll find that you get more sales by helping customers know everything they need to know before they click. Here’s a guide for pricing art prints.

Be social w/ social media & bookmarking services. Social media is the best thing that ever happened to art marketing. I know I sound like a raging fanboy, but I firmly believe it’s the truth. Art is sold on emotion and the more people you can form connections with the more opportunities you’ll have to affect them. In addition search engines are using social media to decide what ranks high in search results. Check out this post on how to sell art on Facebook, Twitter, Digg & more.

Create an email newsletter. I’ve written about email newsletters a lot. Your list is the most important thing you have as an artist. They’re the ones who care about your work. They’ve already told you so by signing up for your list. Contact your list each month with your progress on new work and potential opportunities to buy your stuff.

Blogging & guest blogging. Writing about your art helps you get clarity on how to present yourself, and it also gives you a place to talk about who you are and why you do what you do. In addition, if people like your stuff (or if they hate it) it will get shared around the web, giving you a wider reach and voice. Guest blogging on other people’s sites is an amazingly effective way of reaching a new audience. My email list increased by 30% by doing a guest post on IWillTeachYouToBeRich.com. Check out Why Are Artists Bad With Money.

Advertise (online and offline). This is obviously for artists who have a little bit of money, but advertising can be potentially lucrative if you have the right product and you know how to position it. Knowing what makes your art different and interesting is key to advertising. Investigating pay-per-click on Google, Facebook ads, or banner ads on niche sites are all methods I have seen work for different artists.

Tell them how to buy (Paypal, credit card processing). This may seem dumb, but telling your audience what to do is really important. If you get someone to your page, they need to know where to go. If you want them to buy your art, tell them to click here and state that they can pay via Paypal, Visa, Mastercard, or in some other way. Simply adding those buttons can increase your sales, even if you don’t change anything else.

Contact information. If people have questions about the payment process or about a specific piece of work then they’re going to want to talk to you or to one of your representatives. Make sure that your contact information is on your home page, a footer, or that there’s a contact page in your navigation.

Try lots of different websites. There are literally hundreds of websites where you can sell your art online. I see new galleries cropping up every week. Find the one that fits your personality and makes you feel comfortable – but don’t get attached. Different art sells well on different sites, so test for a few weeks and if it doesn’t work, move on to another site. Here are 15 sites that you can use to sell art online.

Team up with other artists. Just like guest blogging, teaming up with other dedicated artists is a great way to extend your marketing reach. Do shows together, host a web video series together, share each other’s work via social media & newsletters. It’s often easier to promote someone else’s work than it is to promote your own. Check out my blog post on Imagekind about forming mastermind groups with other artists.

Persevere. Sometimes you may be doing everything right and it’s just not working…yet. Your marketing takes time to mature. Your reputation will grow. Sometimes things that didn’t work before will work better at a later date or done in concert with someone else.

Did I leave anything out? Let me know in the comments.

Tagged as: blogging, newsletters, ppc, sell art online, seo, social media