The Steps that Most Artists Take to Market Online

The typical artist goes through the following steps:

1. I want to sell my art online. Let’s try eBay. That didn’t work, let’s try building my own website. Wow, that cost a lot of money, but now I have a very pretty website. Now I’ll sell a lot of art.

2. Nobody goes to my website, so I’m not selling anything. I’ll do some research and figure out how to get people to my website. I’m learning about PPC (pay per click) advertising, blogging and social networking, getting links, and SEO (search engine optimization). Now I have lots of traffic.

3. Hey, I’m hardly selling anything! I’d better learn about marketing, choosing niches, and advertising to those niches. I use all sorts of tools to reach my target market.

4. I’m STILL hardly selling anything! I think I’ll go back to selling in galleries and just find a part-time job somewhere. It’s a lot easier than trying to figure out how to sell online!

Most artists, in fact, actually skip steps 2 and 3. They put up a website and then expect people to just find it. I tell them that their approach is like setting up your paintings in your backyard and expecting people to just come along and start buying from you. I rarely come across an artist that has figured out that there is a process for driving traffic to your site. Not that it would help. You still have to figure out who is most likely to buy your art and then get THEM to your site. Getting them to your site in the first place is difficult and getting them to buy once they are there is even more difficult. The problem is that this whole process is completely backwards!

Tomorrow I’ll talk about what steps you SHOULD take.

Read the book!

Chris O’Byrne
http://www.OnlineArtsMarketing.com/blog