How to Sell Your Art Online by Cory Huff

How to Sell Your Art Online by Cory Huff

Author:Cory Huff
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-04-22T00:00:00+00:00


ART MALLS

Too many artists are spending their time building someone else’s business.

In the United States, malls are a large building where they throw a bunch of stores together. Department stores combine with smaller clothing stores and everything starts to look the same. Malls are the home of mass-produced, low-quality, overpriced stuff that nobody needs. Malls are the opposite of what people think of when they think of fine art.

There are lots of websites that act like malls. These art mall sites throw hundreds, even thousands, of artists together into one site. They make it easy to create the illusion that an artist has a “Web presence.” When they upload all of their work to an art mall site, it makes artists feel like they are finally getting their work online. What you’re really doing is creating more content for these sites to sell, with no investment on their part. You could be doing the same thing for yourself.

There are a number of reasons to have your own website instead of using an art mall. First, and foremost, you look like an amateur if you don’t have your own website. It’s so easy to get a website now that it should just be counted as part of the cost of doing business. More on how to do this later in this chapter.

You are an artist, not a commodity. If you are on one of these online art malls, you are one artist among thousands. Browsers will click right by all of your stuff because something flashier is right next to you. Even if you get featured as an artist of the day and have a few thousand people look at you, that attention is gone within a couple of hours.

You can build your fan base on your own site. When you are on someone else’s website, you had better believe that they are benefitting more than you are. In professional marketing circles, this is known as digital sharecropping. When you share a page with a friend on Facebook, it links back to the art mall. With a little bit of work or a small investment of cash, you can build a site where people play directly with you, not with others.

Below are some of the primary reasons you should have your own website:

You have your own domain name. If your website is something like YourName.ArtMall.com then you are leaving a lot of opportunities on the table. A real domain name (www.YourName.com) costs about $8 to $10. There’s no reason to not have a custom URL. In addition to it looking more professional, you will do better in the search engines.

Be sure to pick a domain name that reflects who you are or a personal brand. YourName.com is great. If that’s not available, then Your NameArtist.com or something similar. If you sell a specific type of art that is easily identifiable, then you might add that to your domain as well, e.g., YourNameWildlifeArtist.com or YourNamePetPortraits.com.

Control over your look and feel. If you



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