As the Brazilian artist, Romero Britto once said, “Art is too important not to share”.
In the era of the internet, it’s rightly said that there is something for everyone. As an artist, designer, or illustrator there’s some extra good news for you. The digital age has brought about powerful and never heard before opportunities for you to share your art and monetize it.
Technology has connected art lovers around the world with artists. At the same time, it has opened up a plethora of new and exciting business opportunities. You are no longer limited to selling your artwork and prints, you can sell your designs printed on several media.
And, with print-on-demand dropshipping, you spend far less time worrying about the hassle of logistics, supply chains, and order fulfilment. You will be solely focused on creating great work and promoting it to your audience.
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Traditionally, artists make their living from selling their work in galleries, but the new non-traditional method of selling your art via an online store has various benefits as well.
Cost-Effective
At the risk of stating the obvious; it is much less expensive to sell your art online than it is in a gallery. This is one of the most obvious ways an online store can be beneficial for an artist. As the name suggests, the purpose of an online store is to sell things.
While physical brick-and-mortar galleries have a certain charm and will always serve a crucial purpose in the art world, just presenting your art in them costs a fee. On top of which, if you make a sale, a hefty commission is charged for letting you sell your art on the gallery’s premises.
With on-demand printing options and drop shipping, you avoid the hassle and losses that come with surplus inventory. You also avoid the cost of warehousing your products. For most portals that allow you to sell your art via an online store, a monthly subscription fee is all that is required to set up shop.
Easily Accessible
One of the major upsides to using an online store to sell your artwork is that it makes it easier for people to find and buy your work, worldwide. Online stores are designed to make your artwork easily accessible by keeping Google and other search engines happy. How? Online stores do this by ensuring optimum site speed and having their own hosting services, increasing the odds of ranking it well on Google.
Most online store portals also come with built-in SEO-optimization services which ensures that your online store will give you a preview of how all your webpages are appearing in search results. This ensures that you have all important information correctly displayed.
You can also opt for plugins to optimize your images. This will greatly improve your odds of your art ranking well on Google and other search engines and being found by potential customers.
Promotion Made Easy
One of the brilliant features of having an online store is that you get to exhibit each and every piece of art that you make. An online store opens an entirely new world of marketing techniques for you to promote your online store. Some of the marketing methods that can be applied to an online store are:
- Email Marketing
- Snapchat Story Ads
- Google AdWords Smart Shopping Campaigns
- Facebook Ads to build new audiences
- Facebook Ads to retarget your existing customers
- Affiliate Marketing
The good thing about these marketing methods is that you can decide your daily budget. You can gradually increase your budget so you do not need to pay more than you can afford.
You can reach a much larger audience with these techniques.
These are a few reasons why an online store is something each artist should have. Having your own e-commerce store will give you unrivaled control over the design and the look and feel of your store. You can also choose to assign a custom-made URL to your store which gives you a valuable personal touch to your store.
Hopefully, this article gave you a flavor of the business opportunity presented to sell art online as print-on-demand merchandise.