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How to Market and Sell Your Art, Music, Photographs, and Handmade Crafts Online: Turn Your Hobby Into a Cash Machine

Copyright © 2007 by Atlantic Publishing Group, Inc.
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No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without the prior written permission of the Publisher. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be sent to Atlantic Publishing Group, Inc., 1210 SW 23rd Place, Ocala, Florida 34471.

ISBN-13: 978-1-60138-146-0

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Shepherd, Heather Lee.

101 businesses you can start with less than one thousand dollars : for stay-at-home moms and dads / by Heather Lee Shepherd.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-10: 0-910627-88-6 (alk. paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-910627-88-7 (alk. paper)

1. New business enterprises. 2. Small business--Management. 3. Stay-at-home mothers--Employment. 4. Stay-at-home fathers--Employment. 5. Self-employed. 6. Careers. I. Title. II. Title: One hundred one businesses you can start with less than one thousand dollars. III. Title: One hundred and one businesses you can start with less than one thousand dollars.

HD62.5.S5335 2007

658.1’1--dc22

2007029409

LIMIT OF LIABILITY/DISCLAIMER OF WARRANTY: The publisher and the author make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this work and specifically disclaim all warranties, including without limitation warranties of fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales or promotional materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for every situation. This work is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering legal, accounting, or other professional services. If professional assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought. Neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for damages arising herefrom. The fact that an organization or Web site is referred to in this work as a citation and/or a potential source of further information does not mean that the author or the publisher endorses the information the organization or Web site may provide or recommendations it may make. Further, readers should be aware that Internet Web sites listed in this work may have changed or disappeared between when this work was written and when it is read.

Starving artist is a cliché that reminds us of society’s opinion of people in the creative fields or, more accurately, of their ability to make a decent living from pursuing their arts. As a creative person, you have probably been told by well-intentioned but misguided friends, family members, career counselors, and teachers that, while creative pursuits are nice as hobbies, they are no way to make a living.

This is precisely the reason so many talented artists, crafters, photographers, and musicians spend their days working at jobs they do not like and in environments that do not inspire them or feed their creative natures. We are taught that art and music are not real jobs, so we settle for something that bores us, stifles us, and relegates our creative endeavors to hobby status.

Fortunately, there are now more opportunities than ever for artistic people to realize their dreams of making a living from their creative works. The Internet has opened up a whole new world for artists and craftspeople alike — a world in which creative people have endless opportunities to be seen and heard, no matter where they live or to whom they are connected. Artists no longer have to live in one of the world’s major metropolitan areas to have a chance at artistic success, neither do they have to be represented by a well-known agent. A musician in rural Idaho can run a successful Internet business just as effectively as a musician living in Los Angeles, and an artist in Copenhagen can sell as many paintings online as an artist in New York City.

Although the Internet has been instrumental in leveling the playing field for artists, selling creative works online is no longer as simple as it once was. In the early days of the Internet, an artist could simply put together a basic Web site and upload a few pictures, and visitors would come, browse, and buy. Now that the Internet has surpassed magazines, newspapers, and even television as our primary source of information, competition for online sales among artists, crafters, and musicians has increased exponentially. As a result, it has become more difficult for individual artists to establish a visible presence online.

To illustrate this point, let us look at one of the most common ways Internet users find Web sites that contain the items they are looking for — search engine queries. Using a search engine, such as those found on Google, MSN, or Yahoo!, is simple. Internet users type in a few words that capture the essence of what they are looking for, and the search engine returns a list of Web sites that, according to the Web site’s content, contain relevant items.

With that in mind, here are some search terms and the number of relevant items taken from Google that people use to search for creative works:

• Abstract art — 10,200,000

• Art photography — 23,100,000

• Country music — 66,600,000

• Cubist painting — 273,000

• Handmade crafts — 1,110,000

• Independent music — 15,700,000

• Landscape art — 58,600,000

• Rock music — 55,100,000

• Stock photography — 28,700,000

These numbers may seem a little surprising, but they are real numbers that reflect the sheer volume of Web sites trying to attract the same visitors and turn them into customers. This intense competition shows that more artists than ever have discovered the power of the Internet as a marketing and sales vehicle.

Do not let these numbers scare you away from setting up your art business online, though. The good news (for you, anyway) is the vast majority of these creative souls do not know how to use the Internet to its fullest potential. For each search term, there are only a handful of Web sites that are able to effectively attract a steady stream of visitors. These are the ones that appear on the first few pages of the search results and especially those that appear on the first page.

Getting a Web site into one these top positions is no accident. It requires careful planning, a bit of research, and a specific goal that carries through all aspects of building your business online.

To be successful selling creative works on the Internet today, a crafter, photographer, or musician cannot simply rely on the fact that he or she is adept at creating art that is pleasing to the senses. An artist must also be a skilled businessperson and must understand the nuances of attracting visitors and converting them into paying customers. Without approaching online sales with this sort of keen focus, you are unlikely to operate a successful art business on the Internet.

This is why this book was created. It would take an artist years to learn how to properly use the Internet as a marketing vehicle and discover all the resources necessary to make an online art business profitable. Working artists do not have the time to endure the trial-and-error process while they are trying to make money online with their creative works. They need a resource to provide them with a blueprint to success so they can spend more time creating and less time analyzing marketing errors. That blueprint is contained within these pages.

This book is a guide to understanding how to use the Internet to market and sell art, music, photographs, and crafts. It is not a collection of vague theory, nor does it presuppose a reader already possesses a certain level of knowledge about Internet marketing. Instead, it starts at the beginning and provides specific, step-by-step instructions to create, maintain, and expand a successful online business.

Within these pages you will learn:

• How to select the right computer and other hardware

• How to use software programs to help you build your clientele

• How to create a Web site that showcases your creative works, has a professional look and feel, and makes visitors comfortable with the idea of buying from you

• How to use low cost and free advertising to drive visitors to your Web site

• How to use online auctions to gain rapid sales

• How to use other Web sites to promote your artworks, crafts, photographs, and music

You will also learn how to accept payments online so you do not have to go through the tedious task of matching up mailed checks with orders for artworks and many other tips that will help you build a successful online business.

You hold in your hands the key to becoming successful online as a creative businessperson. It will take hard work and a fair amount of patience to accomplish this, but, if you follow the steps, tips, and techniques described in this book, you will have a tremendous advantage that you can use to make art not only your hobby, but also your career.

Let us begin with the first question that an artist must pose when embarking on a career of selling creative works on the Internet: “Why sell online?”

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Ask the average person what he or she envisions when thinking of a successful artist, and he or she may tell you about paintings hanging in a gallery or sculptures placed on white block stands while the artist mills about, wearing black and drinking expensive lattes. Ask the same person about craftspeople, and the response may entail people selling handmade crafts at flea markets and county fairs. Ask about musicians, and his or her mind will conjure up images of professional recording studios and CDs lining the shelves of record stores.

What people do not think of is an artist running a Web site with frequent visitors and brisk sales or a musician with a large body of musical works available for download. The Internet is still on the periphery of segments of the public’s mind, especially among those who claim to take art seriously. However, as noted in the introduction, the Internet now plays a crucial part in the marketing, sales, and display of artistic works.

For the artist, musician, or crafter, there are several distinct advantages to establishing a presence in the online marketplace. You have the ability to reach a global marketplace; you can reach millions of people for a fraction of the advertising cost needed to reach an offline audience; and you can sell your works much more quickly than you could if you were selling art or music offline.

Reaching a Global Audience

Let us consider two artists: One artist, preferring the traditional method of selling his or her artworks, submits proposals to art gallery owners, enters works into local and regional art shows, and develops print advertising to reach potential customers. The other, understanding the power of the Internet to market and sell artworks, develops and implements a marketing plan based on a business Web site, online auctions, networking with other online artists, and regular e-mail promotions.

The traditional marketer will spend a considerable amount of time writing query letters to art galleries and filling out entry forms for upcoming art shows. He or she will also invest considerable time in developing print marketing — flyers, postcards, press releases, and business cards. For all this effort, the artist will be rewarded with the capacity to reach a relatively small audience. This audience consists of the people who are inclined to respond to advertisements for fine arts, crafts, and photography; the people who wander through the galleries where artworks hang; and the people who attend the art shows to which his or her paintings have been accepted.

The online marketer will also spend a substantial amount of time developing marketing materials — an attractive and easily navigable Web site, artwork photographs and descriptions, and promotional articles and Web log posts. Unlike the traditional marketing artist, though, he or she will have the opportunity to have his or her artworks seen by not just hundreds or even thousands of people, but literally millions of potential customers all over the world. People who would never think of setting foot in a brick-and-mortar art gallery or craft mall will happily go online to browse for a new painting for the home or office, handmade crafts to decorate a living room, or a framed photograph to hang in the library.

These are people who may not feel comfortable inside an art gallery but who still appreciate original, unique arts and crafts. They may not be the target market for high-end gallery owners, but they can certainly be your target market.

Aside from the ability to reach millions of potential buyers each day, having a global presence online gives a working artist several key advantages.

The Internet Never Closes

An artist marketing his or her creative works online does not have to deal with the constraints of typical gallery or studio hours. Artworks can be purchased online any time of the day or night, and the artist does not even have to be in front of the computer to complete the sale. This means that while you are sleeping, not only can night owls in your country see and purchase your artworks, but people halfway across the world who are going about their daily routine at that time can also buy your art.

People Have Different Tastes in Art

When an artist markets through a gallery in a local area, he or she is limited by the tastes, attitudes, and opinions of the local culture. For example, if you paint artworks that draw influence from surrealism but the local community is primarily interested in impressionism, you likely will not have much success marketing your artworks locally. You will need to either change the style and subject matter of your artwork or be content with enjoying your artwork in your own home.

When you market via the Internet, you are not constrained by the tastes and preferences of the local art-buying public. It does not matter if the style and subject matter of your artistic works are not in line with your local community’s tastes and preferences, because you will be able to reach people in other states and even other countries. Although your artwork may not appeal to people in your home town, it will appeal to someone, and that person may be in the next town over or several time zones away.

For example, one artist living in the Midwestern United States found that a series of his paintings, characterized by rich textures, abstract patterns, and bright colors, received a cool reception in his home state. By marketing online, however, he noticed a large percentage of works from this series found buyers in Mexico. Had he stuck with traditional offline marketing, he would have never found this pool of buyers for that series of paintings.

A global audience creates more opportunities to reach different types of buyers.

An artist in his or her hometown may be limited to a certain type of buyers for creative works, such as renters or homeowners looking for artworks or crafts to display in a residence or individual buyers seeking to purchase a CD for personal use. Although these certainly represent viable markets for an artist, they are not the only ones that may benefit from access to creative works. A global presence gives an artist access to not only individuals, but small businesses looking for artwork to display in office waiting rooms or reception areas or corporations seeking large works to display in lobbies, company cafeterias, board rooms, and employee work areas. Similarly, the worldwide presence available through Internet marketing gives a musician the opportunity to attract clients seeking music to use in advertisements or other promotional materials.

Minimizing Advertising Costs

Another major advantage of marketing online is you can reach a large number of potential customers with a much smaller advertising cost than if you marketed to customers offline. Online advertising can be a cost-effective way to reach the people who want to buy your artworks, crafts, photographs, and music.

With traditional marketing of creative works, an artist can spend a significant amount of money on the design, printing, and distribution of business cards, postcards, flyers, and other printed marketing materials. For example, even if you choose one of the many all-inclusive services available on the Internet, such as www.cheep-cheep.com, the cost to print 5,000 art postcards can be nearly $2,000 — and that does not include postage. If you want to include several images on a folded brochure, the price can jump to almost $2,500.

In addition, some art galleries charge hanging fees or display fees for each piece of artwork placed on display in the gallery — these can range from $15 per artwork in smaller galleries in the Midwestern United States to well over $100 per artwork in a New York or Los Angeles gallery. Craft malls also charge fees for the rental of the space necessary to display craft items, although they do not charge a separate fee for the display of each item.

These fees do not include gallery commission amounts that are charged against the sale of each artwork that finds a buyer through a gallery. Gallery commissions are a percentage of the sale price of each artwork or craft item — they can be as much of 50 percent in some galleries.

It is easy to spend thousands of dollars building your presence in brick-and-mortar galleries with no guarantee you will be able to make the money back through the sale of your creative works.

Let us compare this with marketing your creative works online. The cost of registering the domain name for your Web site may be between $10 and $20, and some Web site hosting providers, such as www.ibuilt.net and www.ixwebhosting.com, will waive the cost of registering your Web site’s domain name when you purchase a hosting package through them.

The cost of hosting packages varies according to the features the hosting provider offers and the ability the Web site owner has to customize and update his or her site. Some providers, such as www.godaddy.com, offer basic hosting packages that you can purchase for less than $7 a month, as well as other hosting packages that include Web site design software and even professional Web site design. Other hosting providers offer more robust Web site design features, such as the ability to include forms to capture visitor contact information and deliver it to your e-mail in-box — www.ibuilt.net offers such services for $19.99 per month, and www.sitekreator.com offers a similar service for $29.99 per month.

Aside from your Web site, there are various art, craft, and music cooperative sites that you can subscribe to for a nominal fee. For example, www.ebsqart.com gives you access to exclusive online art shows, artist community bulletin boards, charity events, and contests for $7.50 per month.

If you are willing to take the time to do some research, you can also use pay-per-click search engine marketing to help bring customers to your Web site. Realistically, you can spend as much or as little for this type of advertising as you want, but if you bid on the right keywords, you can gain exposure for as little as five cents per click.

There are also marketing techniques you can implement for free, such as writing online blogs, participating in discussion board threads, writing articles for online directories, building links to your Web site, and optimizing the content of your Web site so it will appear high in the rankings of search engines such as Google, MSN, Yahoo!, and others. Chapters 4 and 5 of this book provide a wealth of information on how to use these techniques to increase visibility and drive traffic to your Web site.

It is possible to build a well-crafted online marketing strategy for less than $100 per month — even less if you are willing to do some of the work involved in creating your own Web site and optimizing it for high search engine rankings. You would be hard pressed to develop an effective advertising strategy for this amount in the traditional offline marketing world, but online, it is possible.

Selling Your Artwork Quickly

Art galleries move works rather slowly, partially because of the lack of significant daily traffic through the gallery’s doors and partially because people tend to just browse when they are visiting a gallery. Craft malls and music stores share the same challenge — for every craft item or CD that sells on a given day, there are perhaps hundreds of others still awaiting a buyer. Unless they are displaying your works entirely on consignment, art gallery owners and craft mall owners are not particularly motivated to sell your art, because you are already paying them for the privilege of displaying your creative works in their retail spaces.

When you sell your creative works online, you are in control of how quickly you sell your art. It may take time to build a steady stream of traffic for your Web site, but there are several ways you can use the Internet to achieve impressive sales while you are building a loyal customer base online.

The first way is through using online auctions. Although you are using search engine marketing, blogging, and other tools to attract visitors to your Web site, you can also use auctions to sell artworks within a matter of days — sometimes you will find buyers have placed bids on an artwork before the paint is even dry.

Another way that online marketing can help you enjoy frequent sales as an artist is by allowing you to display more artworks on a single Web site than you ever could in a physical gallery. You can have hundreds of artworks, craft items, or photographs available for sale at the same time, which gives your visitors plenty to choose from — they are not limited to the small number of works that a gallery owner or craft mall manager is willing to let you display. Even during your initial traffic-building phase, more choices means more sales.

A third way you can use the Internet to increase the speed and frequency of your sales is by displaying your artwork in many different places at one time. If you are hanging your art in a physical gallery, that is the only place people can see it; however, when you are selling that same artwork online, you can display it on your Web site, in an online auction, on your blog, on an artist’s cooperative Web site such as www.deviantart.com, and in discussion board postings (if permitted by the discussion board moderator).

Now let us move on to the next chapter of this book, which will cover the first topic of learning how to successfully sell your works online — selecting the right hardware, software, and support for your online business.

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