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Daily Paintings by Justin Clayton |
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Frequently Asked Questions Last Updated:April 2008
Below are some of the most common questions I get about selling art online followed by my answers. Selling Online How do people find out about your website? Most of the visitors to my website or my blog find me through print or online press and other blogs/websites that are linking to me. When I first started the blog I contacted other bloggers who like to write frequently. Not necessarily other artists, just other bloggers who I came across and thought they might be interested in what I was doing. So I'd contact them and send them a link. Sometimes they would post a link to my page or write a little blurb describing what I was doing. This type of exposure would often lead to other bloggers finding me and then linking to me, so on and so forth. It was a good way to start promoting my art without having to pay for the promotion. In some cases having visibility on other blogs has lead to opportunities in print like the July/Aug 06 issue of Domino Magazine. As far as I can remember the writer of that article found me through a home décor blog. Something to keep in mind is that there are thousands of bloggers out there looking for interesting content to write about. If you have something interesting to share, you’re bound to find someone who will link to you or share you with their readers. How long did you have your site up before people started buying your paintings After a few weeks I had some people buying; Mostly friends and family. After about a month I started to get sales from people with whom I didn’t have any direct connection. These people would tell others and I continued to get orders from people I didn't know. It was and still is a very viral process. Did you sell directly from your site before using eBay? Yes, most of the paintings I sold at the beginning were through PayPal using “buy now” buttons on my website. Every so often I would put a painting up on eBay to test the waters. Some sold and some didn’t. As interest grew I gradually put more paintings on eBay, but even then most were still selling through my website. Eventually most of the paintings sold and it was then that I started putting the paintings up on eBay everyday. This is how I am currently doing it. How are you getting people to view your eBay listings when there are so many items for sale on eBay? It seems that my listings are buried in eBay and no one can find them! A common misconception about selling artwork on eBay is that by simply listing it on ebay you’ll get a lot of views. Most likely this won’t happen. From my personal experience and also from observations of artists who sell regularly on eBay, most of the views come from people on their email list and/or visitors clicking through from their website/blog. In actuality, the auctions are “buried” just like everyone else’s; it’s just that some of the groundwork has been laid. The larger the email list and the more people visiting your website/blog the more hits your auctions will have and the more potential for selling your artwork. That said, there is a percentage of people who will find you directly through eBay. Roughly 15 percent of visitors to my auctions find me this way. So, for example, if someone does a search within eBay for “red apple painting” and I have a red apple painting listed they will be able to see my auction in the search results (unless there’s like 1000 red apple paintings listed then I might have a problem). This is assuming the words red, apple, and painting are in the title of the listing. You can use the “feature plus” option on eBay, of which I use occasionally, to get better visibility. Basically with feature plus you’re paying $20 more to stand out. Sometimes this turns out to be a wise investment. Why a blog? Some people like to view my art from the blog while others prefer the website format. It’s nice to give people a viewing choice. Search engines like Google and Yahoo love blogs. Meaning blogs often show up higher in searches because they are updated frequently. Other benefits of having a blog: 1. Most blogs are easy to set up. 2. A built in rss feed. 3. Fairly easy to integrate an email distribution list using a Google Group or Yahoo Group. More on this below. A few free blogs:
Email Lists What do you use to send out your email? I am using a Google Group to send out emails. Since it is a free service it’s a good way go if you don’t need all the bells and whistles. Yahoo groups is also good. If you’re looking for something more sophisticated you might consider paying for something like Constant Contact. How do you send the daily paintings to your Google Group? I would like to set my group up the same way that you have yours, but I can't figure out how to do it. I tried, but it went out as an attachment instead of the actual photo just popping up. Does that make any sense? When I post a painting to my blog on blogger.com it is sent to my Google Group automatically, then from the Google Group to all the members on the list. If you do it this way make sure the email address you signed up with in blogger.com is a member of your Google Group and has posting rights (you can set posting rights in the management section of your Google Group). Then when you post to blogger.com it's as if you’re posting to your blog and your Google Group at the same time. Make sense? Some artists post to their blog through their email but I haven't done this as of yet. You might want to try inserting a picture into the body of your email rather than attaching it. That may fix the problem. I’m a little worried about using Google Groups as my email list because I don’t have control of the email addresses. Aren’t you worried about this? Google Groups has an option to export the members of your group as a .csv file which can be opened in programs such as Microsoft Excel. This contains all the names and email addresses of the members of your group and can easily be transferred to any other email distribution software if you choose to do so. It’s a good idea to backup your list regularly.
Other Questions Do you have an automated way of posting to your website, blog, and eBay all at once? No. I have some action scripts I’ve set up in Photoshop that automate some image resizing for my website and I also reuse templates on my website and eBay listings but that’s about it. Oh, and the images of my paintings seen on all three sites are being referenced from one location so I don’t have to upload images to each site. So it takes about 20-30 minutes total to take a picture then post to eBay, the website, and the blog. If you have ideas on how to make this process quicker I’d love to hear them. What are you using to get your work online, a digital camera? If so, what kind of camera are you using? Yes, I use a digital camera. I use a Canon 350xt Digital Rebel. Any decent digital camera will do but I would recommend getting one with manual controls. How do you know how many people are looking at your website? Web Analytics… which is statistical information on all sorts of things related to your website/blog including number of visitors, location of visitors, what web browsers their using, etc. If you are at all serious about selling online, knowing these things are crucial. Any of these are good:
Any other suggestions for someone who wants to start selling online? -Whether you setup a blog or a website, make it easy for the buyer to purchase your work. -Keep it simple. -Use sticky shipping labels. You can get like 800 of these labels on eBay for around $15. -If you’re using USPS priority mail to ship, you can order free shipping boxes online. -just do it:)
How did you come up with the idea of daily painting? Daily painting is not my idea but a practice that's been around for a long time… I don't know how long really. My first introduction to it came from an instructor of mine, Nathan Fowkes who has been doing daily paintings for a decade (or longer) and he encouraged me to start doing them. Before I put the website together I was doing small sketches almost daily. Nathan has thousands of these small painting sketches he’s done over the years and it is an inspiring body of work to behold, to say the least. You can find some of these on his blog. In (2005) I came across Duane Keiser and his "painting a day" project. He brilliantly combined the practice of painting daily and a simple and effective way to promote and sell online, although I don’t think he was doing much promoting as his work seemed to promote itself. For more information and discussions on the topic of daily painting you can check out the Daily Painters Google Group. You must be a member of the group to view the discussions but it’s free to join. Justin http://dailypaintings.blogspot.com
Some other good links:
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