Selling Art Online
As an artist or a photographer, there are many ways to sell art online. Many decide to sell through third parties, however, there are a number of steps you can take to sell directly and take back some control of your work. Here we will give you our tips and advice on how to get started and what you can do to increase awareness of your work by selling directly.
Website
As an artist or photographer, one of the most important things you should have is your own website. A website is your little space on the internet and provides the best place to showcase your work. Creating a website can be daunting, however, there are many online platforms and packages (such as Wix, or Weebly) which provide an easy step-by-step builder which makes it simple to put together. Furthermore, websites are relatively inexpensive to build and run. If you’re still feeling slightly worried about undertaking this work yourself, you can always outsource and have a professional create your site on your behalf. It is well worth the investment and you can then run and maintain from there.
A website provides an opportunity for potential customers to see your work easily from their own home whilst giving you full control about the message you want to portray. It is also the best opportunity for your personality to shine and for people to learn more about you and your work. It is also a very good idea to give information on your style and how you work (include photographs of ‘behind the scenes’ too!) People like to learn more about who has created the piece and the stories behind the work but keep it simple at the same time!
Things To Consider
There are a few very important things to consider with your website to create the best experience (and not turn people away!)
- Ensure your images are of a high quality and show the full piece of work you’re selling. If someone is considering a purchase, they like to be able to see in full detail what they are purchasing. If you feel necessary and are concerned about people stealing your images, include a watermark.
- Your images also need to load quickly, a slow running website puts people off. Furthermore to this, websites are seen more favourable by search engines, such as Google, if they run quickly.
- Ensure your spelling and grammar is correct throughout! This helps build trust and again, doesn’t put people off.
- Check out your competition! Take a look at other artist and photographer websites, what are they doing well or not so well? It’s worth spending a fair bit of time doing some market research to understand what you are up against to really improve your chances of selling your art online.
- Update your site regularly -perhaps through blogging online. Let people know what you are working on or how you work. It helps build a great connection between yourself and potential customers.
- Offer a mailing list sign up. This is a great way to capture who is truly interested and provides further opportunities to market your work. You can also encourage visitors to share your work through their social media to reach an even bigger audience.
- If you want to sell directly through your website, ensure you have a web package which offers an online shop and can take payments. PayPal is a great and simple to use platform for processing payments when selling art online.
- In order for your website to appear high up in search engines you need to implement some keywords. Large companies spend thousands of pounds each year on doing this, however, it is something you can manage yourself. Have a think about what people would search for in a search engine to get to your website. Use these words and phrases throughout the written content on your site. Keyword optimisation really pays dividends and makes your website more obtainable.
- Set up social media accounts for your work (we will look at social media marketing in our next post). However, in the interim, link your website to these social media accounts. Again, it’s a great and simple tool for ensuring search engines pick up your website.
These are just a few important factors to take into consideration when starting your website. All are very important and it’s easy to skip such factors.
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