How To Sell Your Art (pt2)

On-line E-Tailers

Being an on-line E-tailer specialising in canvas art, we are regularly contacted by artists and designers interested in selling their art and images. Some are interested in selling one off pictures,whilst others are interested in selling the image rights of their art for re-production purposes. Depending on a deal you can make with an on-line E-tailer, this second option is often the most lucrative.

When approaching a company, act professional. Either email or call them to enquire weather they accept outside artwork. If you intend on emailing them, introduce yourself including a short bio about you and your art. Most say you should add in any training you have in art, but personally I don't look for training, some of the best artists I've met have none or little, there just naturally gifted or hard working! Always include a link to your on-line portfolio or website so the company can see your artwork, if they respond you can at least hope for some compliments or constructive criticism. Under no circumstances must you mention money in the original contact and if your art may be offensive in any way (e.g. nudes or political motivated art) mention this in the email before the link to your site. Some companies won't sell certain so as to not offend potential customers.

So what kind of deal might you expect to get? It all depends on the company involved, and the profit margins on the products and images. Some will offer to buy images out right for a fixed fee (e.g. £20 or $40) and they are then free to sell your image as many times as they can. You will of course not get paid until the first image has sold. The other option is percentage or fixed rate per canvas sold. For example, if you get a deal where you get £10 ($20) for the image up front, then a small amount per image sold you stand to make a lot more money. Some companies will offer a bonus payment or increased percentage if your art sells a set number of images. For example, sell 10 and get another £10 ($20). This is only an example and should not be taken as gospel, if a company decides to sell your artwork they'll come up with the payment and you'll need to agree with it. Don't set your sites too high as a beginner, if the company is selling canvas prints for £100 ($200) don't expect to be taking a massive percentage of this, they have a lot of overheads and there doing as much as they can to sell your work.

Selling on-line through an E-tailer has its advantages. Help improve your chances of selling your images by marketing your images on the E-tailers site. Through your own site, forums, communities, social book marking sites and even emails you can increase traffic and hopefully sales of your images. This will mean you receive more money, and so does the company selling your artwork. This then might result in an increase in the cut you receive from each sale. Work hard at marketing your artwork and you'll see more money coming in.The E-tailer should also be marketing their whole site and with new artists comes new ways for them to market their site. With both parties marketing the images you should both see a nice return.

Like real world galleries, have a look through the sites you intend on approaching before you approach them to see if they sell similar styles to your own or have a wide range of art without your 'niche' currently available.

Driving on-line traffic to your Art

Marketing websites is big business at the moment but its not as hard as you may think. Its all about getting the maximum possible viewers for the smallest outlay. After setting up an on-line portfolio you want to start doing some SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to promote yourself. This will give Google (the largest search engine on the Internet) a better chance to see you, and see how relevant your images is to specific searches. The more relevant it thinks you are, the higher you will be placed in the search results.

The best places to start are social bookmarking

sites (Digg, Mixx and Stumble Upon all have an Image Upload) and you can always Stumble on your own site. Getting on these sites has a 2 fold effect, firstly it can help get some traffic to your site and secondly it helps you get some of the crucial back-links to your URL. Another great tip for anyone with images Is to make sure they are correctly tagged up (Alt tags - height and width description tag) This helps Google know what the

image is and helps you get a higher placing on Google images which is a potential gold mine.

If you have a unique style of process to your artwork, write some articles on it. The best thing about art is its much easier to create a fully interactive web 2.0 web site. This again helps with your SEO as Google is open to giving higher ranks in its search engine to sites which give a user interaction. Make some videos of you painting in your style and upload them to You-Tube. Add images, lots and lots (of correctly Alt tagged) images. Search around for some open source interactive flash add-on's so you can let your views get into your site, hopefully come back and most importantly, buy your work!