The ability to turn passion into beautiful or exotic looking art is a dream of many aspiring artists. Some people truly have a gift for conjuring an image in their mind and transferring that image to paper or canvas. Unfortunately, the ability to create amazing illustrations, paintings, or the like and marketing those works are two very different skills entirely. Here are four steps every artist should take when selling their work online.
Every Artist Needs a Web Presence
The whole point of being a professional online artist is to produce art that is viewed and hopefully embraced by an appreciative audience. When an artist’s works are displayed online, this provides them with an opportunity for global recognition. For this reason, an artist must have a visually appealing website, and they must be featured all across social media and through other online avenues to attract interest in their work. Developing the proper web presence may require the help of professionals in the areas of SEO and traffic generation to keep an artist and their work relevant to an online audience over the long term.
Getting Your Art Objectively Appraised
Before an artist attempts to market and sell their art online, they will want to have their art professionally appraised to establish its actual value. This can be performed by professionals who actively appraise and collect art. Such individuals typically know how to value and price art in an objective manner that meets with current market perceptions of how to value art. Rarely is it a good idea for an artist to do this part of the process themselves, because too often an artist will tend to confuse emotional and sentimental value with actual market value. This can lead to their overpricing a piece of art far outside what the market would be willing to pay.
Displaying and Marketing Your Art
An artist will need to do a great deal of research into how other artists are displaying and marketing their art online. One area of concern is in how to best display art and preventing that art from being copied. These days it is easy for computer-savvy individuals online to digitally copy and rip off pictures of an artist’s work and attempt to mass-produce these works themselves for sale or redistribution. It may be necessary to speak with intellectual property protection attorneys to find out the best way for an artist to prevent these kinds of problems and what to do if their intellectual property has been compromised.
Sale or Auction
The interesting thing about selling art online is that there are a few different ways to approach this end goal. An artist may hire themselves out and be commissioned to produce a truly unique piece for a private buyer. Instead, they may have their art mass-produced and sold at a fixed price per copy. Alternatively, they may attempt to auction off their work to drive niche collectors into a bidding war to raise a pieces perceived market value. It is important to keep in mind, however, that using these diverse marketing approaches, across the span of numerous works of art, can help to make an artist’s work both popular and desirable.
When push comes to shove, an artist has to eat and provide for their family. Many artists sometimes feel that profiting off of their talents in some way compromises their principles and takes away from the quality of their art. Yet, on the other hand, selling their art online for a decent profit can help to cement an artist’s reputation among the great artists of their time. To be successful as an online artist, it is important to be able to figure out how to come to terms with the reality that these two viewpoints are not necessarily as diametrically opposed to each other as they may seem on the surface.
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