Selling online can be a very lucrative and satisfying way to sell your art. It allows you to reach both national and international markets without spending alot of your hard earned capitol. Online sales of all types of goods are increasing at an exponential rate as more and more people discover the convenience of online shopping. Now is a great time to consider selling your art online!
The conventional way of marketing art is to put up a website with a shopping cart and wait for the buyers to visit your site and buy. There’s only one problem. Not enough people find your site!! With the increasing competition in the art world, it’s not surprising that it can be difficult to attract traffic to an independent website.
Some artists have chosen to market their creations on Ebay. This can be a potentially lucrative market, although it’s difficult to get your asking price in an environment where many people are searching for bargains. With the recent fee increases initiated by Ebay, it’s becoming more and more difficult to make a decent profit selling art via online auctions.
Fortunately, there’s an affordable alternative. You can sell your jewelry through an online gallery. The advantages to selling through a gallery are:
1. The online gallery will promote the site by getting high placement with the search engines and by direct advertising. This takes some of the burden of marketing your site off of you. You can concentrate on producing your art.
2. Buyers who come to an online gallery are generally motivated buyers. They are looking for a special gift or a unique piece of art for themselves. They don’t have to be sold on what you have to offer since they’re already in a buying mood.
3. Exhibiting in an online gallery gives you credibility as an artist. When buyers see you have a presence in an online art gallery, they think of you as being a true artist rather than just another online retailer. After all, people are accustomed to buying art in the physical world from an art gallery which makes them more comfortable dealing in a gallery setting.
4. When you sell your art in an online gallery, payment processing is generally handled by the gallery. This means you may not have to deal with getting credic card privledges which can be a hassle as well as an additional expense.
5. You can market your online gallery at art shows and exhibits by including your online gallery address on receipts, business cards, flyers etc. You can even send out a regular newsletter that highlights new additions to your art gallery.
Even though the online gallery settingcan help to boost sales of your art by bringing motivated buyers to your listings, you still may need to do some self promotion to boost sales.
The best way to attract traffic to your listings is to optimize the keywords you use in in your titles and descriptions. You want to use SPECIFIC terms that people might search for when looking for a particular type of art The more focused and specific, the better. For example, in your title, you wouldn’t simply be “painting”. You’d want to say “floral painting still life with roses, flowers”. This would allow you to pick up buyers looking for floral, still life, rose, and flower painting. The more focused you can be with your keywords, the more motivated traffic you’ll draw to your listings.
There are lots of other ways to promote an online gallery including free classified sites such as Craig’s List and US Free Ads. These are two of the higher traffic sites that really do get results. You can write articles on how to choose and care for art work. Publish your articles to some of the online article databases along with a link to your online gallery. Articles are a proven way to get targeted online traffic.
Now that you know the importance of building an online presence for your art work, do a search for online art galleries and start researching the best site for your creations .It may be the beginning of a very successful online career as an artist!
