If you’re going to sell your art online, you need to be at least passing familiar with how things work online, both technically and culturally.
Doing research is important because you’ll understand how other artists are already selling their art.
I’m not talking about researching what art to make. You should make whatever inspires you.
You can start with a simple Google search for the kind of art you make. For example: bug art, plein air ocean, or pet portrait painting.
Make a note of the top websites that you find in these searches.
What do you like about their websites? What do you dislike?
What is their pricing?
Do they talk about successful sales?
From a collector’s point of view, is all of the relevant information there? Size, price, shipping, descriptions, etc
There are some neat tools that will allow you to figure out a little more about how successful an artist’s website is.
The Moz toolbar shows you domain, page authority, backlinks, and social shares of that page.
From there you can look at the artist’s social media activity.
Do they interact with their fans? Which social media accounts are the most active?
Do they have any social media promotions? Common hashtags? Who do they follow?
Take a look at Instagram. Use the search tool to look for art in your niche. Click on the hashtags that they use.
Other tools:
similarweb.com
Facebook graph search for pages liked by your friends, pages liked by people who like your page, groups your friends have joined
look at the blogs of artists you like, who is on their blog roll or who do they talk about?
Just did a google search and thought I’d share some interesting results with you. I do a lot of Judaic art so that’s what I searched for. The sites that showed up didn’t seem to be individual artist sites. They seemed to sell everything from kiddish cups and mezuzah covers to ketubahs and paintings. All of them had prices, most told the medium and what it was done on. Only one had artist info. I had to move to an image search to find individual artists, most of whom are on etsy. The problem I found with most of these paintings is that they’re all either the very traditional detailed oil paintings, or they’re the modern abstract cartoonish looking paintings, which is fine if that’s your thing, but that seems to be the extent of the Judaic art world. The other problem is that all the paintings are $150 – $250, and barely any prints.
So apparently the Judaic art world need me and my different style. Being a digital artist, I can offer smaller affordable prints to people who don’t have hundreds of dollars to spend on art, and larger embellished canvases at higher prices. So until I have the money to get the painting program I need to build portfolio again, I’ll do my research and build my marketing and website plan.
Awesome Shalev! Let me know how it goes!