Sometimes when marketing art, people get really focused on traffic, as in "how much traffic does this site receive?" But I think when it comes to marketing art, less is more.
I was recently reviewing a thread in an art internet marketing forum and the debate largely centered around online art marketing sites such as
art.com,
artbyus.com,
etsy.com etc. I believe the discussion was started by reviews of some of these sites posted on a blog called
Empty Easel.
Most of the contributors were debating the amount of traffic these various sites generated and in particular how much more traffic etsy.com generated as opposed to several of the others.
But does it really matter?
As an individual artist, y
ou really only need to market to those few people in the world who are specifically interested in your artwork. Relatively, that group is fairly small. While a particular site may generated hundreds of thousands of page views per month, that is, for the most part of little use to an individual artist. My service,
fineartstudioonline, generates huge traffic as well if you add up all the traffic of all the individual artist sites, but that's not the approach we take. We break out each member into their own full-featured website and thus, the traffic numbers are spread across lots of
different sites.
You see, I owned a national art gallery for 11 years, I was one of the primary salespeople and engaged in directly marketing original art during those years. I regularly sold six figures and the gallery as a whole had sales in seven figures. Here's the important part -
most of the sales each year came from less than 100 people.
I've come to view marketing as a series of steps, and the first step is a baby step -
Capture your visitor's contact information - that's
the real goal of your web site. You need this information to engage in a systematic, regular marketing plan of
nurturing your prospective customer - that's what I did at the gallery.
So back to the "traffic" discussion. A couple of people in the forum had it right. They considered any money spent showing their works on sites like etsy.com, boundlessgallery.com etc as
advertising expense. If something sold, fantastic, but mainly they are trying to capture just a bit of all that traffic and get a "hot" prospect who can then be nurtured via email, snail mail, your own website, your blog, etc.
Since most of those sites have low or free costs, it's pretty easy to sign up and "advertise" on several of them (although a pain to have to upload your work to a bunch of different sites).
One last point -
you need your own web site. The online galleries can be a decent venue for "advertising" yourself, but I've always been (even when I owned a gallery) a firm believer that every artist should have their own "home" web site that can be the permanent "official" site for the artist.
You need to control your online presence. Once someone finds you from a magazine ad, a forum, an online gallery, a referral, or any other method, you need to get that person to your "real" web site and get them signed up on your email list.
That's when your prospects become part of an exclusive "club" that centers around
you. The number of people in the club may be relatively small, but the potential is great if you nurture your club. Sure, your personal web site will have a lot less visitors than etsy.com, but, in this case, regarding the importance to your future, less is more.
Sincerely,
Clint Watson
Software Craftsman and Art Fanatic
PS - If you don't have a web site, feel free to give our service a try. It's available at:
http://www.fineartstudioonline.com
via web