Don’t restrict yourself to selling your art at only one location i.e. your personal web site, or one online gallery. It’s all about providing maximum opportunity for buyers to find you. The plus side from selling at many online venues is that when a buyer does an online search on your name, to check you out, their search returns many websites connected to your name, rather than the few. Hence the impression is that you are an established artist rather than one just starting out.
Some artists worry about the cost of joining multiple online galleries or setting up their own website. Well my answer to that is that while there are plenty of free online locations for posting your artwork, you also need good solid online galleries to be selling your artwork, as they will present your artwork professionally and make it easy for the buyer to buy.
Additionally, as with any business, you have to set aside a budget to market your art. It’s no good doing everything on the cheap. Art will not market itself – you need to have a strategy. If you’ve recently sold an artwork, put some of that sales proceeds into a marketing budget and use that. From this one sale you could create many more sales. If you’ve recently had no sales, well the marketing budget still has to come from somewhere, so get thinking! Without a marketing budget you are always scrimping around trying to do things only if they are free, so your progress is limited.
With a marketing budget you have set aside a certain amout to promote your art, so you want maximum ‘bang for your buck’. Do a search on Google for the search terms you think someone would enter when searching for your type of art. If you don’t know what these keywords are, use the Free Google Adwords Keyword Tool. Enter some descriptive words that you think people will search on, then fill in the Captcha letters that tell Google you are a human and not automatic search, then click on ‘Get Keyword Ideas’. Then sort the results by clicking on the fourth column to sort in order of average search volume. Now you see the most searched for terms for the kind of artwork you do.
Then go into Google and do a search for some of these terms. Remember that Google will find sites from the country you are searching from i.e. if you are in the UK, Google will show you sites for that keyword but with a UK bias. This means that you may miss some of the big sites in the USA that are receiving all the visitors that your Keyword tool research was referring to. To sort this you can change the search string so that you can see US results also. Here’s how:
- If you are in the UK, do a search on your keyword via the default Google.co.uk. You will see most of the top search results are .co.uk ending. That’s fine if you just want to sell in the UK as these sites are getting the top search results for this keyword. If you want to sell to US and worldwide you need to check your keyword on Google.com. To do this simply go up to the address bar in your browser window and change the .co.uk to .com:
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=contemporary+art&btnG=Google+Search&meta=
Change to:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=contemporary+art&btnG=Google+Search&meta=
Then hit the Enter button. This will show you results for the chosen keyword on Google.com.
So any online galleries featured high in the search engine listings for your keywords are obviously receiving more traffic from people searching for that particular art. Also you need to remember that if an online gallery is a very large site and has a forum attached to it, then a lot of the search traffic can be from other artists using the site.
Now you need to do a bit of research into the online galleries to see that they fit your requirements with regards to presentation, professionalism, cost etc. Also consider that although an online gallery may be receiving lots of web traffic for a particular search term, how easy is it for the buyer to then find that type of art within the site. This can be particularly difficult when an online gallery is very big, where an artwork can be lost in the pure volumes of other artwork. You can additionally research your online gallery of choice by asking in forums or seeing what has already been recommended in Art forums by other artists.
So there is a bit of leg work in doing the research on where to exhibit your art online, but this will hopefully pay off when your art is reaching a larger audience of art buyers.
To your Continued Artistic Success!
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