 Well, hello and welcome to this video. Now, if one of your goals this year is to sell more of your art, then you might well be wondering where to sell your art this year. Should you be putting your artwork out everywhere or finding perhaps one key place to focus in on? Do you choose online or offline? Now, in this video, I'm gonna be sharing seven options of where you can sell your artwork online this year and some of them are gonna be offline and some of them are gonna be online. So there's a little bit of something for everybody. Make sure to stay right to the end of the video too because I'm gonna share a little secret that's gonna help you choose which is the right option for you. Now, in case we haven't met, I'm Sophie, artist coach and entrepreneur, helping artists just like you to make more sales by building a profitable art business. Now, if you wanna learn more about that, then you're in the right place because this channel is full of videos around building an art business and there's just a few around my sketching challenge as well. So if you're a little bit nosy as to what I'm doing behind the scenes, make sure to check that out. Okay, so let's talk about making more art sales. Number one is your own website. Now, that might seem obvious. Now, if you're starting out, however, getting a good-looking website and a brilliantly functioning website is gonna take an investment, an investment in your time, an investment in your money and you might not quite be ready for that just now. So just a gentle warning and I unfortunately see an awful lot of it but a half-finished website or an unprofessional DIY website can actually do you more harm than good. Remember that your customer, your potential customer has just a few seconds, maybe even one second to make up their mind if they're staying or not. And if they click through from something, oh, they land on your website, however they land on your website, if it doesn't pull them in immediately, it's professional, it looks amazing, it looks wow, they're like, oh my God, that's it, I wanna go shopping here. They're gonna leave and they're never gonna come back. So please only put up a website when you're absolutely ready. You have the time, you have the resources and you have made a decision on what platform you're gonna use and I've got more videos coming out in the coming weeks around websites. So just look out for those but whatever platform you choose has got to work for your type of art business. So what are the benefits once you do have your own website where you can drive all your traffic to that website, right? And all the sales that you make, you're going to keep the profit from those. You can build a mailing list, right? You can see all your stats. You can retarget your audience with Facebook ads once you're running something like Facebook ads. You have a lot more control, basically. Plus there's no competition, right? When people land on your website, they're not looking at 500, 1,000, 5,000 other artists. They're just looking at your work and their decision now is which piece, not which artist, all right? So you've narrowed it down. I think ultimately this is gonna be the best strategy for most people but like I said, it's not an out of the gate beginner strategy. Number two is probably ideal if you're just starting out and that is what we call a third party gallery website. So they already have an audience coming to the site. They've probably got a nice setup where you can just upload your profile, your pictures, information. They've probably got some places where you can put links and it's like having a little mini website sitting on the big gallery website. Now obviously the pros of that is you can get set up straight away. It's probably no upfront fees. There's already an audience of people looking on that website. You can send people a link to your profile on that site. Immediately you could have the whole thing done in just a couple of hours. That's a massive benefit. Some of the downsides are, well, there's plenty of competition, right? People are looking on that site but they're looking through all the other artists and when they land on yours, they've still got suggestions to go elsewhere and look at other people's work. Obviously that gallery site is gonna take a commission usually around the 30, 35%. Now some of the other pluses might be they might actually handle the postage, the currying, that sort of thing for you. So you end up weighing it up. Yes, you gotta pay commission but actually they're hosting the site for you. The chances are they're doing some marketing as well. There's got an audience already there. So really I think this is a great place to start. So options would be things like you're here in Australia, we've got Blutharm, Art Lovers Australia, then in America you've got things like Fine Arts America, you've got Saatchi Art, you've got Art Finder I think is in the UK. Like you gotta do the research as to where you are in the world. There'll be set places that people will go to. So it's got to be a site that lots of people are already looking. So audience is already looking for art. Oh, I know, I want something for the wall. I'll go to Saatchi Art and have a look. But I think that's a great place to start. Now a lot of people are gonna ask me Sophie, should I have my work in both places? And I'm hoping by the end you might be able to see the answer to that question. So let's just hold on to that and we'll come to that towards the end. Number three, marketplaces. Now what do we mean by marketplaces? So marketplaces is a place where again there's an audience, there's a large audience coming looking for art related products, whether that's prints, posters, or whether that's artwork on bags, books, t-shirts, sweatshirts, all of those good things. So that immediately sites that come to mind would be Etsy, Redbubble, Society Six, Sazzle, eBay, Amazon. These are all sites that have massive amounts of traffic coming to them. People are already looking to buy. Now you're not gonna be buying original art on there, but they are gonna be buying art related products. So if that's something that you offer or you're thinking of offering, this is a brilliant way, again, of getting started. For example, to set up an Etsy store costs you nothing. Even the listings that cost something like 26 cents a month per listing. Yes, of course, setting up an Etsy store is a huge piece, just like the website, just like any of it, right? But if you've decided, okay, this is what I do. I actually sell prints or I make stickers or I make downloadables. I'm doing the stuff already and I'm trying to sell them through my website, but nobody's coming there. You really want to put them in a place where there's already an audience. Now, like we've said, there's gonna be competition. I've got massive competition. You're gonna need to be really good at marketing, really good at SEO, and your profit is gonna really get much smaller, right? Because your artwork is being printed onto something. There's a third-party company that's gonna fulfill that for you, and then what you get left is the profit, and it might be quite small, but let's think about it for a moment. You've created a piece of artwork. Maybe you sold the original. Maybe you've sold some prints and now you've got that same image and you're selling it on tote bags, on nice notebooks, on cushion covers, on shower curtains, on t-shirts, on yoga pants. It doesn't matter what it is, right? It's gonna work for you, but that painting you painted once, maybe it suits to be created into different things. So for example, and I think I showed this book as a pretty awful example, but I sold the original painting, I've sold prints, and here it is on a phone cover. One piece of artwork once doing multiple different things. So definitely consider marketplaces. If you have a smaller product or you work with a third party, sort of drop shipping, print on demand type of model. Now, if you're really enjoying this video, please make sure that you subscribe to my channel so you don't miss out on any more videos. And if you like this one in particular, please give it a thumbs up because it helps it to be seen by more people using YouTube to find out how to grow an art business. Okay, so let's move now into strategy number four. Those first three you'll see were online strategies. These next four are offline strategies. And this is exactly what I did to build my successful business back in the day. So number four is galleries, of course. Again, brilliant way to sell your original artwork. It's hands-off. You literally hand your artwork over and you walk out the door and thank goodness, they hang it, display it, market it, package it, sell it in different order, but you understand. Sometimes this is a perfect model for somebody who just doesn't wanna do social media, who doesn't wanna do marketing, who just wants to create artwork and find a really good gallery or galleries to work with who have a list of buyers who particularly like what it is you're offering. And that can be a really good win-win. So galleries, yes, they're totally hands-off. They're gonna likely take a large commission which is absolutely fine and they should do because they are doing all that work for you, right? You're not paying for all these different things. You're not using your time to do all that marketing. You're not spending money on ads. You're not doing all of that stuff. Unfortunately, a lot of artists and not people watching my channel, I'm sure, complain and there's a bit of a whinge and moaning going on about galleries taking such a large commission. But you have to remember, they're paying for premises. They're paying for staff. They're paying to ensure your lovely artworks hanging on the wall. They're doing all the marketing and the selling. Now, if they're not doing any of that very well, I suggest you move to a different gallery but primarily a gallery's there to sell your work and you want a really good connection between like a win-win situation. So you want to price your work accordingly so that you can allow yourself a good enough profit once that commission has come out. So if you're not sure about how to price your art, make sure to check out my video. And I never know. Look, I do this, I've done this. I think it's that side. Check out my Buddha card up there to my pricing video because I've got a six-step formula to help you price your art. So you want to do the research to find that right gallery, follow the application process, et cetera. So it's usually a numbers game. So until you find that kind of perfect fit. And the downside is I would say that you really can't build your list because obviously it's the gallery who's going to build the list of the buyers. So this is going to work for you if you want to be hands-off. You want to create and just drive it like I used to drive it to the gallery and hand it over. Bye. And then you just wait for the check used to get in those days. All right, number five, art fairs. Now these are a great way to get seen in a local specific area where there's a larger number of art buying public. You might live more rurally. So for example, when I was in the UK I used to do London art fairs. And I didn't live in London. I had to travel up to London instead of a night, sometimes stay two nights in a hotel if it was a three or four day event, set up at a big stand and be there for the weekend. And they were really lucrative but not only were they great for selling but they were great for building the mailing list which we didn't really do in that same it was all pen and paper back in those days. We didn't really do it in the same way but now you have a massive opportunity to get feedback on your work to build a list of people who are interested perhaps not quite ready to buy just now and of course, obviously to find customers. Now I used to do four to six art fairs a year. It's gonna depend where you live. Here in beautiful WA, we don't really have what I call an art fair. There is one that is deemed an art fair and it's almost there. It's looking good. It's getting there. It's definitely on the way up but it's not in comparison to what I'm used to back home. So it is gonna depend on where you are, where you live and what you can tap into. Like you need a big city that's got art fairs running. So have a look, see where you are in the world and see if that would work for you. Now obviously, one of the downsides are it can be totally exhausting to do a long art fair if you're standing around. Sometimes we used to stand for four days. One of them I think we did two private views. I had no idea why. Thursday night, Friday night and then we were standing by the stand all weekend. It was draining. Thousands and thousands of people coming through. Really great exposure. Really, really good if you're in the right area and you've got the energy to do that and you haven't got enormous work because let's face it, your stand will be a certain size. So if you've got smaller work, one or two bigger pieces and you can get a fairly good number of pieces in, then that's okay. But if your work is sort of ginormous and you get one painting, it's not really gonna work. So you're gonna think again as to whether your work would fit an art fair. You can also, I had an agent and she took my work to the affordable art fair. So if you're in a gallery, sometimes the gallery will also take your work to a larger kind of gallery-owned type of fair. So you can see this is a completely different way of selling your work from having a website or having a third-party gallery website. It's a different energy. It's a different way of doing business and it's just gonna depend on how you want to do things and what suits you best. The other thing to the art fairs is usually quite a large upfront cost. So again, probably not a beginner strategy. You want to be a little bit further down the track. You want to be selling already. Maybe have your own website and then you want to add to that presence by being in certain locations at certain times of the year. Number six, open studios. It's probably how I grew my brand initially. That's kind of how I started out or one of the strategies. Number six and number seven was how I really got going and that is open studios. So you can open up your own house or your own studio or your own garage wherever it is you work and you can set it up immediately, right? You could say, okay, I'm gonna have an open studio next month. You could find a nice place in your premises to have a little mini exhibition. You could market it really, really well and get some PR and you could be open and selling four to six weeks from now. So again, if you're just starting out and you don't have all these other things, you haven't got into a gallery. You haven't got the resources to build a website. And sometimes this can be a really great way to start. Now again, this is gonna depend where you are in the world. Are there already open studio or open house trails that you could plug into? So you could get onto Google and find out. Likely you know in your area whether you've got that or not. I was lucky enough to be doing this in the Brighton area of the South Coast in the UK and of course we had a massive Brighton festival and artist open house and I became a trail leader and actually set up a trail just outside of Brighton. So I was a massive part of that whole scene for many, many years. And that really helped to actually progress my own art and my own art career. So sometimes you can plug into those things from an angle you weren't expecting. It wasn't expecting to set up and manage a trail either but it kind of happened and it definitely worked for me. So you could consider doing that. You could consider starting a trail in your area because it definitely puts you at the name at the top of things. I think I've got other videos on open studios. If not on this channel, I certainly have in my membership for sure. All right, you're gonna keep the profit, right? There's nobody else taking your money. You are doing all the work however. So remember that you're doing all the marketing, you're doing the setting up and the manning. So again, it's time and money. You can also do things like you do some live painting which you could be videoing. You could offer workshops so you're not just kind of sitting there with your cup of tea, waiting for someone to walk through. So number seven, the last one and that is group shows. So this is again, brilliant starting strategy and especially if you don't have a lot of work. If ever you're waiting to create this big collection, this big body of work and you say, but I've only got 12 paintings Sophie, it's not enough for solo show. It's enough to go into a gallery. It's just about enough to put on your own website. It's probably enough to put on a third party site so it's better to have larger stock for that. But you could join a group and then you only need to put some in. So what are some of the benefits of doing a group show? You've got other artists who are gonna help with the setup and of course the cost you can split it between you. Now it can be a lot of fun, can be a lot of hard work and you have to also find the right people and the right work that fits together. So you need somebody in that group who knows how to curate and hang a beautiful show. Okay, so these are seven solid ways for you to choose to sell your artwork. So let's talk about that little secret of choose. It's gonna help you choose the right option for you, right? So that you can make the most art sales this year because if you hop off the video now and you go, I know I'm gonna do this one, this little thing that I'm gonna walk you through right now could make the difference between whether that's gonna work or not. So the most important thing that you want to make sure that you know before you make that final choice is where are your audience already hanging out and shopping? If they don't do marketplaces and they just don't search online, it's not their bag, right? They may be a different generation, they prefer to walk into a gallery and make a choice. If you decide you'd like to be on a third party site and you'd like to build a whole empire on Etsy that your audience is over here looking in a gallery or going to an upmarket art fair, right? There's a huge mismatch and it's not going to work. So you 100% need to find a, you've got a profile who your target audience are, who's the ideal customer? Don't forget I've got resources for that below this video and you've got to be really clear on where they are. So make sure to check out this video and that's how to find your audience so that you really know what you're doing. So things to consider are where are they searching? Are they looking on Google? Are they looking on sites like eBay, on Etsy? Are they on those online galleries, the Fine Art America, Blue Thumb, et cetera? Or are they looking in their local area? And they know that there's three galleries in their particular area and every weekend they like to go around those galleries and see what new art is in there. Do they like to go to the art fair every so often they're happy to take the train to go to wherever this art fair is because they like the ambiance of walking around a lovely building and looking at people's art. It's an event for them. They spend the whole weekend in whatever city doing just that. It's really important for you to work that out first because otherwise you can put all your energy and effort in one direction only to find you don't make any sales. Maybe you've decided that you like the sound of Open Studio and you think, oh, I've got a great big studio in the garden. I'll do that. But you live in some rural back of beyond and your audience is in the city 100 kilometers that way and they're not gonna travel and they're not gonna come and look at Open Studio. So before you do anything, all right? Jump off this video and make sure that you're clear. Don't forget you can get what I call my ideal customer avatar worksheet from below here so that you can fill that out and get clear on your ideal customer. But you need to understand that target audience to check that video out first so that you're really, really clear. And then last but not least, you need to be really aware where you are on your art business journey. Are you a beginner or are you a bit more experienced? This will also kind of help you make that decision. From there, you can make much more solid decisions about what is gonna work best for you this year in terms of making art sales. So one thing's for sure, you really want to fill up your planner with events, whether they're online or off. So what do I mean by that? That means art fairs, group shows, exhibitions if you're going offline and then it's special offers, launches, new products, things that are happening online. When I left my job way back in the day, the very first thing I did was fill up the coming up three months of my planner, was like, oh, that's on, I can enter into that. Great, that fair's on there. I'll do an art open studio. I filled it up so that I knew I had all these sales opportunities because sitting at home in the studio, painting the work is lovely, but it doesn't bring the money in, okay? And last but very not least, should you be in multiple places at once? So this is a question I probably can't answer for you, but what I do know is if you're in the online world and you're on a third party site, you've done that probably because you're starting out or you really like the fact you haven't got to build a website. So there's probably no point having both. Once you've got your own website, you probably don't need the third party site. If you're on those marketplaces, sometimes it's quite nice for people to hop across and look at your website, but generally they don't do that. So again, probably a mismatch. However, if you're in that gallery or in that you're gonna do that art fair, people are gonna look you up on Google chances are. And if you can get your website really well ranked, you'll find that you can come to the top of search for lots of search terms. I think having a website, if you're in a good gallery and you're doing nice art fairs, I think would be essential. All right, I think you can probably see by now you're working out where you fit in all of that. Okay, so I'm super excited to know what you choose. Do let me know in the comments what strategy and what you're gonna focus on this year. Thank you for your patience on this long video again, but I hope it's been super, super useful. And don't forget to check out this audience video because it's absolutely critical to your success. All right, thank you so much for watching. I'll see you on another one. Bye.