Learn to sell your art online.

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E-junkie is an incredibly cheap and powerful online service for selling both downloadable and tangible goods. At it’s most basic level, E-junkie is a shopping cart program. But this is a shopping cart that does a lot more.

E-junkie provides several buttons that you can install and use, and they provide you with all the snippets of code that you need and then help you install them. But what is really cool is WHERE you can install them. Not only can you put these buttons on your own website, but you can put them into your MySpace pages, eBay, Craigslist, and most other sites where you would normally not think of inserting your own personal shopping cart. Think of how useful it would be to include a “Buy Now” button for something you were advertising on Craigslist or to include your own mini-store on your MySpace page.

E-junkie allows you to sell both downloadable items (ebooks, reports, prints, audio, video) and tangible goods (the stuff you pack and ship yourself). For downloadable items, you store those directly on E-junkie so when they are sold they are delivered immediately to the customer. You can also include all sorts of discount and promo codes, download links that expire after a few days, and a list of codes that are stored and doled out as each product is sold. What I am referring in that list item, the stored codes, are such things as pin codes to be used for downloadable calling cards or keys for software. You can also use a packaged product feature which allows you to sell, say, mp3s for one price and the entire album for another price. (They also collaborate with SwiftCD which will create and deliver physical CDs as they are ordered, sort of a print-on-demand setup.)

You can also sell your tangible goods with E-junkie, you just pack and ship them yourself. The great thing about E-junkie is that you can include all sorts of options for each product; such as size and color. It also has both packaging and shipping calculator. The packaging calculator is set up with your own specifications. For example, you can say that up to 4 prints can fit into the same container, but if there are 5 to 8 prints, they have to pay for two containers. It then uses the USPS tables for shipping and a shipping table that you help set up for international orders. You can also choose one rate for the first item and then another rate for additional items. There are enough choices to handle any combination that you want to throw at it.

This next part is where I think you will really be sold on E-junkie. For each product, you can configure a thank-you email, instructions or any other follow up message you can think of. Once someone buys a product, they are automatically put into the buyer group for that product. You can then send as many follow up emails or newsletters as you want to everyone who bought that product. If they refund the product, they are automatically removed from the buyer group. You can also add people manually to any buyer group so they are included in the follow up emails. You can also view and download a log of transactions, including buyer emails, so you can send your own follow up emails outside of the E-junkie system. This kind of interaction and follow up with your customers is very important, as I discuss in this week’s Marketing Monday article.

There is one last feature I want to discuss to conclude this review. E-junkie also includes an affiliate program that you can set up with any product. This allows you to pay a commission to people for selling your product. You determine which products are included in the program and you also decide if you want the seller to receive a percentage of the sale or a flat fee. Once you set it up, E-junkie handles all the rest of the details for you. Affiliate sellers sign up for the program themselves and the system automatically assigns them a referral link they can use to sell your product. Whenever they make a sale, E-junkie handles the payment and you do not have to lift a finger. It is a very effective way to help other people sell YOUR product.

E-junkie has many more features that I just did not have time or room to discuss. Go take a look and decide for yourself. Oh, I almost forgot to mention… the price is unbelievable inexpensive! If you sell 10 different products or less, you only pay $5 per month. And that is only after a one-week free trial. Isn’t that a crazy low price? I thought so.

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Chris O’Byrne
www.OnlineArtsMarketing.com
www.YourArtMarketing.com

This week’s featured artist is Kathy Edds, a multi-talented and phenomenal artist from Green Valley, AZ. She is adept in watercolor, photography, papier mache, stained glass, and so much more. She is also an ‘Anusara-inspired Yoga Instructor’ which requires years of teaching, immersions, teacher trainings, an intensive reading and study list, and hundreds of hours of practice with a Certified Anusara Instructor.

Kathy’s website can be found at kathyedds.com where you can see her gallery, information about her yoga instruction, pictures from recent trips, and a short biography. Kathy’s work can also be found in the Otero Gallery in Tubac, AZ and Mardon Frost and Casa Bella in Tucson, AZ.

As a special treat, I have a half-hour interview with Kathy where we talk about her art and what marketing methods have really worked well for her. Click below to listen:

 

 Interview with Kathy Edds [30:10m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (78)

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Last Monday’s Marketing post had “How to Start Selling My Art Online” as the title. That seemed like a good title for an entire series of posts and I will start that series this coming Monday. I’m a very organized person, I can’t really relax until I have things in order, both mentally and physically. What this means for the series is that I will start out with an outline so you can see the general plan. I’m also a big fan of mind maps, so I may find a way to incorporate one into the series. There will be a special page you can access from the top menu that will have resources to accompany this series and I will have a separate category so you can easily look at all the posts for the series within one page.

I like that this is an interactive website and I have come to respect, admire, and appreciate my wonderful readers. Please let me know what you would especially like me to address in this series.

Peace,
Chris

For most of you, the weekly video should work fine, now. I have them hosted at Screencast.com and they are in Flash format, so they should play on everyone’s browser, regardless of operating system. Here are two troubles I found:

1. I had trouble playing in my MacBook using Firefox. Turns out I needed to install the latest Flash player from Adobe and that solved that problem.

2. My server cache is slow to update. What this means is that I can make a change to the website and even though I hit refresh on my browser, the change still does not show up until sometimes an hour later. This means that this delay is occurring on the server end and there is not much I can do about it. Diane had trouble getting the link to work for the new video. Well, that’s happening because my server still has not updated the link! It should work fine if you access the video from the front page and then after a while the other page should eventually update.

Thanks for your patience!
Chris

Wow, this has turned out to be much more of a pain than I thought! I have figured out the best way to record the screencasts, but how to present them to you is the current sticking point. I am trying out Screencast.com and thought that was working, but the file I uploaded was an avi file and I had trouble watching it on my Mac. I’m now working on uploading it as a Flash file which should hopefully do the trick. If I was dealing with “normal” video that could be streamed through YouTube or Blip.tv or… any of the other video hosting sites, there would not be a problem. But a screencast has to be large enough and of high enough quality to see the words on the screen, hence the difficulty.

I appreciate your patience as I get this worked out. It’s been a great learning opportunity and will have to be the subject of a future series of screencasts!

Peace,
Chris

I signed up to have new posts sent directly to my email. When I received my first one this morning, I saw how incredible weird it looked! I accidentally chose a template and it came with a bunch of extra stuff by default. I just got done removing that template and when you receive this post in your email (if you’re signed up, that is), it should hopefully look normal. If it doesn’t, send me a quick email to chris@onlineartsmarketing.com.

The second technical difficulty is the weekly video podcast. I’m starting a series on customizing WordPress and it consists mostly of screencasts that SHOW you what to do instead of just talking about it. My first video is 122 Mb and needs to be viewed rather large (the little screen on the front just ain’t gonna cut it!). So I’m trying to figure out the best way to do this and will spend the whole day working on it until I DO figure it out. So keep checking back and I’ll make another News post, also. And if you Twitter, you can follow me at twitter.com/peacefulbirder.

Thanks for hanging in there!

Chris

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The Art of Writing a Winning Headline

Who do you want to read your blog? Your friends? Other artists? Potential customers?

How you write your headline is determined by for whom you are consciously or subconsciously writing your entire post. It will also help determine who reads your post. I specifically chose the title of this blog because I want it to show up on the search engines when someone looks for the phrase “how to start selling my art online”. Do you want to reach the customer who is looking for a painting of the Southwest desert done with oils? Then be sure to write a title that contains those key words, perhaps “Saguaros at Sunset: Oil Painting of the American Southwest”. With this title you will also attract those people who are looking for “saguaro” and “sunset” in addition to “oil”, “painting”, “American” and “Southwest” and any combination of those.

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How to Start Selling My Art Online

I do not want to disappoint the reader who came here looking for more than just how to write a great headline. I am in the planning phases of a writing a new book. Can you guess what the title of that book is going to be?

I am asking for your help. What kinds of stuff did you wish you knew when you first started selling online? If you are not selling online, yet, what would the most helpful to you?

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Chris O’Byrne
www.OnlineArtsMarketing.com
www.YourArtMarketing.com

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I spent a beautiful Sunday completely redesigning OnlineArtsMarketing.com and I am very happy with the results. There have been a lot of changes, such as:

• Categories have been streamlined and consolidated. I removed such redundant categories as “Art” and “Internet” because after all, that’s the whole point of this site! There are five main categories, not including “All Posts”.
• I moved the site from the /blog folder to the main root folder. If anyone goes to www.onlineartsmarketing.com/blog, they are automatically redirected to www.onlineartsmarketing.com. If you have any links to specific posts, you should relink because those have also changed.
• There will be three main features each week. Mondays will see the longer post on marketing, Wednesday will be the day I release the video podcast (soon to be on iTunes), and Friday is still the featured artist post. Any posts that fall out of the realm of those will be placed here in the News section.
• The RSS feed should work the same, but you might want to keep an eye on it in case it doesn’t. To be sure, you can always unsubscribe and then resubscribe.

The redesign is part of my overall plan for OnlineArtsMarketing. I will share that plan with you sometime in the next few days.

Peace,
Chris

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Although it is wonderful that video is becoming more popular and we have so many camera to choose from at prices that are at their lowest ever… it leaves us wondering exactly which camera to choose. The answer to that question depends on what your intended use is and what you might use it for in the future.

If you only plan on doing some low-budget video blogging while you sit in front of your computer, you will only need a standard web cam. I use the built-in web cam on my MacBook for my video blogging and it works just fine.

If instead you want a camera that you can take anywhere you go and easily capture decent video (decent, not excellent), you fall in that middle range. You are probably most interested in a camera that is easy to use, highly portable, and not very expensive.

On the higher end of this spectrum is the camera that is good enough to shoot prosumer (professional consumer) quality video. If you are looking at these camera, you might be interested in shooting film that you will eventually sell or that will give you the ability to hire out your services.

Let’s take a look at all three levels along with my recommendation for each.

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Level One - Logitech Quickcam Communicate STX

There are many web cams available, but you do NOT want one of those super cheap models you can pick up at K-Mart. If you spend too little, you will end up with video that is too dark or choppy or fuzzy and you will be very frustrated. Logitech still makes some of the best web cams and the one I chose for you has an excellent rating and is still very affordable. Web cams are extremely easy to use and if you are only going to do a video blog sitting at your computer, this is all you need. Well, almost all you need. You also need the software to record the video. If you are using a Mac, just fire up iMovie. If you are using a PC, you can use Windows Movie Maker. Since this is only a post about video cameras, I won’t get into the details of the software. There are a lot of tutorials out there, though, so just Google away.

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Level Two - Flip Video Camcorder

These small portable video cameras are SO cool! Barely 4″ by 2″ by 1″ in size, they run off of 2 AA batteries and can record up to an hour of digital video on the built-in 1 GB of memory. It plugs into either a PC or a Mac via a USB connection and includes both a wide range microphone and a speaker. Just think of the fun you could have with this! You could record yourself anywhere and anytime. You could take video of people at parties, at the grocery store, at the bar… even out birdwatching. The extremely small size and portability of this camera open up a whole world of possibilities.

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Level Three - Panasonic PV-GS320

Now with this camcorder you start getting into the higher end machines. If you want a picture with really decent quality, you want a camcorder with a 3-CCD sensor. 3-CCD camcorders are what the big shots use and an you do any less? This camcorder is one of the most affordable 3-CCD cameras out there, but is still from a reputable brand. You also get a high-quality Leica lens and we all know that the quality of the glass is one of the most important features of any camera. One more thing, you can also take 3.1 megapixel still shots with this camcorder which saves hauling a separate digital camera around.

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So there you go, a range of affordable camcorders that will get any of you video blogging in no time. Make sure you let me know where to go watch!

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Chris O’Byrne
www.OnlineArtsMarketing.com
www.YourArtMarketing.com

I came across a great blog yesterday called Confident Writing by Joanna Young. Her latest post is about a group writing project where everyone that wants to take part writes a post about “My Love Affair With Writing”. It sounds like fun and I definitely have a love affair with writing, so I’m going to give a go.

I fell in love with writing when I was in elementary school. And not just the creativity, but the actual act of writing. I would practice my penmanship whenever I was bored and eventually my printing became very, very neat. I once was told that my printing could be its own font!

I also practiced writing what I thought was calligraphy. I didn’t follow any formal standards of calligraphy, I just created my own. I still use that style when I write on the envelopes of greeting cards and other “formal” situations.

This is not to say that I am not in love with writing for the process and creativity. Writing is satisfying on so many levels. I love the process of communicating with someone through the written word and it often seems that I can communicate more clearly through writing. As with Natalie Goldberg, I often feel that writing can be a deeper vehicle of meditation for me than zazen. Writing helps me reach a place deep inside of me that is often hidden from other forms of meditation.

I love writing.

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Chris O’Byrne
www.OnlineArtsMarketing.com
www.YourArtMarketing.com