How To Successfully Sell Original Art Online

The advent and evolution of the Internet has created many new avenues for selling goods online. To many consumers, buying plane tickets, books, DVD’s, and making hotel reservations online has become second nature. If you are an artist, have you ever considered selling your original artwork online? If not, you may be missing out on a golden opportunity.

Having a website to showcase your artwork provides you the chance to reach a vastly larger audience than traditional forums such as gallery showings and art fairs. Although these are still viable vehicles to sell your art, the Internet is filled with hundreds of millions of potential buyers. A sharp looking, easy to navigate website is a perfect way to display your artwork. Now that you’re convinced you need a website, it’s time to build one. You need not only just a website, but one that potential customers can find.

The Internet is filled with nice looking websites that have lots of “bells and whistles” that are ultimately unsuccessful. It’s sort of like putting the Taj Mahal in the middle of a cornfield in Iowa – its looks great, but there’s no one there to see it. Websites are similar to brick and mortar businesses in that a key factor to success is location. If those hundreds of millions of people on the Internet can’t find your website, they can’t buy your artwork.

This leads us to your website development. When you are building your site, you need to construct it in a way that makes it easy for major search engines like Google and Yahoo to index your website so visitors can find you. Making your site search engine friendly is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO encompasses all of the various techniques you can use to help your site gain a higher ranking for specific search terms. For example, if you were selling oil pastels, you would want to optimize your site for the term “oil pastels”. Proper optimization of your website requires following a basic formula intelligently and diligently. You can use helpful software programs like Wordtracker to discover the search terms that are most popular for your particular business and employ them in titles, content and images.

After you select your Domain name, you can begin optimizing your website by implementing the following practices:

· Keyword Analysis
· Creating Title & Meta tags
· Content Writing
· Link Building
· Blogging

If you are pressed for time or uncertain of the proper SEO techniques, you might consider hiring an SEO professional to optimize your site. Another effective method to bring in more traffic to your website is using Google’s Pay Per Click (PPC) services. You can create ads using Google Adwords to promote your artwork. You will pay a set price (from a few cents to a few dollars) every time a visitor “clicks” on your ad. Depending on your budget, this can be an effective way to drive traffic to your site.

Using online art galleries to showcase and sell artwork is a popular, but generally ineffective method. The major drawback with this approach is that you get lost in the crowd. Online art galleries like Gallery-Worldwide.Com have thousands of artists in their fold trying to sell art. This is a hit or miss platform that is not very effective in providing either sales or leads. You are much more likely to succeed with your own effectively optimized website.

A proven and effective marketing tool is to create a newsletter that you can email to site visitors. Develop a contact form for them to fill out to receive your “free” newsletter. This not only gives you useful contact information of potential customers, it also allows you the opportunity to directly market your original artwork online. The newsletter allows you to direct them to a specific page on your website, display current work you have created and let them know dates you’ll be appearing at art fairs or gallery showings. You will be pleasantly surprised at how many people fill out these types of forms to receive free information.

Once you have your site looking good, functioning well and properly optimized it’s time to start selling your art. To both protect yourself and give your customers confidence and trust in you, make your payment page as professional as possible. Don’t take checks unless you know the individual well. This will save you many headaches in the long run. Use Pay Pal or another means of electronic payment. Assure customers their information is safe by displaying secure payment logos such as locks. Also, join your local Better Business Bureau and get a Dunn & Bradstreet number and display their logos on your payment page. Every little thing you do to increase customer trust will help your sales.

If you follow these tips, you should have a successful career selling your original art online for many years.

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