Earlier this week, I encouraged everyone to head on over to our Facebook page to let me know what their primary questions are about selling art online.
The very best set of questions came from the artist Ruth Collis.
I would guess that many of these questions are your questions too. Let me see if I can break it down for you, question by question.
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Some questions going through my mind at the moment…
***Can we attract wealthy collectors to buy online and not need a gallery to where they can see even 3-dimensional art? Like if a video showed all the angles.
Yes. It happens, but less frequently at higher price points (which is true offline as well, btw). The truth is that most art sold online is lower priced (probably below $10,000), but there are certainly exceptions. Unfortunately, the art world is notoriously secretive about their sales, but I personally know a handful of artists who have sold pieces for prices ranging from $10,000 – $100,000, all online, without having seen the piece in person before.
Normally, these kind of sales don’t just happen out of the blue. The buyer usually has a prior relationship with the artist, perhaps because they purchased from the artist before and really trust the artist’s work. Alternately, the buyer might trust in someone else’s opinion, like the gallery owner or a collector friend.
Either way, big ticket art sales happen by building a relationship with your collector. The video idea is a good one, but you can’t just use video. You also have to do things that build relationships with your collectors, and that takes time.
***How do you find higher end art collectors that would appreciate quality?
There’s not a magic trick to it. Essentially, it comes down to showing your art to as many of the right people as possible, and having conversations with as many folks as possible.
Identifying your target audience is a bit of a guessing game when you’re getting started. You can do some research by looking at existing artist websites with art similar to your art, and that will give you an idea of the kind of language that they use.
Beyond that, you can find Facebook groups around the kind of art you make, as well as tangential interest.
But the best thing you can do is start having conversations with people, and ask them questions about their reactions to your art.
Here is a blog post about finding your ideal collector.
We also talk about this quite extensively in our How to Sell Your Art Online course.
***Is there an automated process to send collectors through a funnel (like email series, and what if a painting sells, then you have to update your email series to send the next wave to a painting), or does it work best to post on social media and do the same work for each prospect?
You can certainly automate a great deal of your marketing. Sending all new email subscribers through a series of emails that let them get to know more about your history as an artist, and an overview of how to understand or think about your art, is an ideal scenario.
In our How to Sell Your Art Online course, we talk about this extensively. Three of the lessons are on email marketing, and we actually give an entire example series that you can adapt for your own audience.
***Could we ideally hire a person to do our selling/answering phones, to keep us focused on art output?
Of course. First of all, I should say that the person who answers the phone is not necessarily the same as the person who does the selling. If you’re going to hire someone to do the selling they need to be really good at selling. Really good sales people are usually terrible administrators.
For sales, you have a couple of options.
You can partner with an art dealer, or you can hire and train someone.
If you partner with a good art dealer they usually have existing connections that will help you sell quite well. Look for a dealer who has sold art similar to yours before. Unfortunately good art dealers are usually quite busy, and the only way to find one is by asking people in your network and building relationships with the ones who like your art.
Artist agents also exist, but they’re far less common. These are usually companies who will handle marketing for you for a fee. The Abundant Artist is testing some of the services out with a handful of artists right now. If you would like to know more about that you can contact us.
The other option is to hire a young person who is good at talking to people, and is enthusiastic about your art. You’ll need to pay them hourly until they get trained up, but then you might be able to pay them on commission when they get good at it.
All of that said, you still need to understand the basics of successful selling yourself, so that you know whether your dealer or new trainee is doing the right things for you.
***How does one find the source for getting their art in hotels (in bulk amounts) before the building is even built?
You’re looking for an art director or a commercial art dealer. Architects, and contractors, hire art directors for new construction projects. These art directors source artists from their existing contacts. I would recommend googling art directors in your local city and begin reaching out to them with a link to your portfolio.
***When a piece does sell, what do you do with the web page to still make it profitable? Put AdSense on it? But then you are taking the viewer away from that which you worked hard with SEO to get them there. What if the traffic were already your list members somehow… then what is a good way to monetize those pages of art that do sell? The pages are taking up space and you’ve referred to them over the web and in books, reports, etc and wouldn’t want to take them down really.
Sell prints or other reproductions! If you’ve already done the work of marketing a particular page, and its receiving significant traffic, add an option for people to buy prints. You can offer prints on demand through a variety of service. Here’s a link to our Print on Demand Guide.
***Is there a way to build a following faster than doing joint ventures that are not often in your particular style?
You can:
– pay for ads
– partner with charities
– partner with public work projects with your local government
– ask someone with a large audience to talk about your art
– court the art press, especially locally
(we talk about how to do these last two in our How to Sell Your Art Online course quite a extensively)
Thank you, Cory, for all this and making the next day visible too, to get a big picture idea, and to get ahead when my schedule permits.
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If you have additional questions about selling art online, click here to ask. We will be doing these Q&A’s until October 8.
In the mean while, we would love to have you in our course, How to Sell Your Art Online.
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