As an artist, I'm always looking for ways to improve my marketing, especially online.
Because "Big Brother" is always watching, the fact that I have been searching for ”art marketing online” and similar things, has resulted in my being served me up a whole new set of advertising (and occasional spam e-mail) relating to ways to help artists sell their art online.
Of course I have nobody to blame but myself for the fact that I have occasionally clicked on some of these ads to find out more, as a result of which certain sources have really ramped up their efforts to get me to buy one of their packages or services.
The sad thing is that most of these allegedly "helpful" services are unlikely to actually help artists sell more art. As far as I can tell, they might work well for the complete neophyte in art marketing, but if you have even the beginnings of a clue as to what you are doing, they're basically charging you a lot of money to do what you're already doing.
Which leads me to the only possible conclusion that if you can't figure out what exactly somebody is selling that's supposed to help you the fact is that you are the product, not your art!
The other thing I've noticed is that most art marketing services are extraordinarily expensive!
For example, one company called Art Storefronts charges as much as $1,800-$3,000 just to set you up with a professional website and then likely an additional $100 a month from that point forward, plus a percentage of your sales! In the context of the reality that most artists are starving or just scraping by... and likely doing their work on a part time basis who the hell has a spare $3,000 laying around?
The only thing I can really say for this experience of researching art marketing is that perhaps I can adapt some of these ideas I have seen — that others are selling — to what I'm already doing for myself.
I'm also open to the possibility that maybe I'm being ignorant to the fact that I have more technological knowledge than the average artist. After all I have worked in both the IT field, as well as fairly extensively in both marketing and advertising, so none of the logistics of doing this really scare me.
As such, this has been a good exercise in identifying precisely what it is that I need, which is something I expect would be a challenge for most artists, including myself.
One "defined" need that has emerged is how to translate a fairly successful art business in the context of selling face to face — my work is well liked and sells quite well at arts and crafts fairs and juried shows — into online sales where the art is somewhat "esoteric," and not based around anything people are likely to use in regular common search terms.
I suppose it brings me back to lessons learned in marketing when I was back in college, specifically that in order to solve a problem you first have to define exactly what the problem is.
In the case of art, simply saying ”my work isn't selling!” isn't actually the problem; the problem is how do I get people to actually show up and look at my work.
One thing is for certain: the business end of being an artist is always challenging, and often more challenging than finding ways to harness and express your creativity!
That said, it is something we have to deal with… because simply sitting around ”hoping that somebody will discover you” is a bit like planning your grocery store budget around winning the lottery — it’s pure wishful thinking!
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