How to sell art online

Affirming, over and over, “I am now creating a successful career (or whatever) in an easy and relaxed manner, in a healthy and positive way” will over time overcome a huge number of your doubts and fears.

Marc Allen

I have never sold a painting online, or anything online for that matter, not even a tube of superman toothpaste on ebay. I have very little experience of selling full stop. But as the song goes, there are certain inalienable truths that do not change and the purpose of this article is to remind you, and me of them, and how they relate specifically to how to sell art online. I will keep them short and to the point.

First Inalienable truth, people like to buy things from people they like. To like a person you have to know the person on some level. So placing your art up on a website and carefully centering the prices underneath is not going to sell your work to an online interested party. There are just too many brochure sites up there. People are bombarded with images, constantly.

You need to interest and engage the buyer. You do this in the same way you would in a non-virtual situation – you talk about your work, your inspiration, you talk about you and your story in a genuine manner. If the work speaks to them, they’ll be interested enough to take the potential purchase further, if not, there is nothing lost. But you need to open your mouth, virtually speaking. Which leads to the second truth.

There no such thing as an undiscovered genius. Either online or off-line. It just doesn’t happen. If your waiting for your work to be discovered and the money to start rolling in, let me save you time and tell you now that’s not going to happen. Marketing is a dirty word but someone has got to do it, and that’s your job. The only person who can really sell your work is you, no matter how mono-syllabic you feel your sales pitch to be. You’re the one who created it, only you have the real inside story. You have to share it. Which ties in with the above truth.

Find a way, online, that suits your personality to promote your work. For some its twitter, or for others it could be Face book or blogging. If you’re the mono-syllabic type described above, make a you-tube video of you producing your work and mime. There’s always an avenue, you just have to find the one that best suits your strengths.

Final inalienable truth (for now). If you believe that the internet is chock-a-block full of frustrated artists hawking mediocre work, and you are not going to succeed in the same way they are not succeeding. You are right.

If you believe that the internet is a great opportunity to present your work to a large audience, and that lots of artists are doing it very very successfully and you too are going to be very very successful. You are right.

The problem is you can’t be right on both trains of thought, choose the correct one and move in the right direction.

Have some new thoughts on this topic?

Do you have a angle on this? Share it!

Click below to see contributions from other visitors to this page...