If you’re looking to diversify your income streams and make your career as an artist more commercially viable, then you may want to look at selling your art to a wider audience. Making your creative works more open to a consumer audience can help you not only make money but expand the reach of your brand and name, leading to further future opportunities. However, you have to ensure that you’re setting up the kind of online store that can really generate sales if you want to make it work. Here are a few tips on how to do that.
Reader's Roadmap
Decide What You Want To Sell
First and foremost, you have to think about what it is, exactly, that you intend on selling. If you’re selling commissions and individual pieces, then your site has to be designed around clients who are willing to pay more for these big-ticket items, which might see slower sales but can see you getting paid more for each. If you’re selling items like prints of your designs on merchandise, then you’re going to need to design a real e-commerce site designed to handle many more sales a day.
Highlight Your Aesthetic
Your online store is there to sell your art, whatever form it may take. As such, your aesthetic should be one of the core tenets of the website’s design. Use minimalist design where possible, giving plenty of room for high-quality images of your art to bloom in greater detail. Build page color palettes and structures around the art that you choose to feature. You might also want to include a featured artwork section on the homepage to draw visitors in with the variety of designs.
Optimize It For E-Commerce Success
It’s not the aesthetic of the site that’s going to matter, of course. The site has to work well. This includes incorporating varied and secure payment options and preventing checkout abandonment with the help of tools to accept Woocommerce payments, for instance. Designing a simple cart and checkout process that allows people to more quickly complete sales on the items they want can help you generate sales more easily, as well. Depending on how many different product types you feature, you may also need to set up an elaborate search function to make it easier for them to browse your collection.
Be Sure To Market It Well
Your store is going to need its own marketing efforts to work in tandem with the efforts you’re already taking to market yourself. Working with digital marketing teams to drive traffic and convert visitors into buyers can help you avoid having to do a lot of that work yourself. Spreading the word of your store on social media, through email marketing, as well as through collaborations and influencer marketing can ensure that your store gets the reach it needs.
As an artist, you have to work with intention. Setting up a store to sell their designs won’t work for everyone. If it does, however, then you have to run it like a business with the tips above.