Selling your art online. Easy enough surely? Well, yes and no. I always wanted this site to be both shop and a blog. I enjoy writing so I want of course to write about my own work but also about art in general. That’s the easy bit. The shop though is, to say the least rather more complicated. I’ve sold online before, in a small way on EBay, but mainly on Etsy. That arcane art called SEO or Search Engine Optimisation, is however much more complex on your own site than on market places like Etsy or Folksy. That’s an issue but also an opportunity of course, but it still takes time.
I’m slowly adding new items to the shop, but it is much slower than I hoped. So please bear with me for now while I work my way through the listings I’ve brought over from Etsy. For that reason I’m retaining the links to my other online venues for the time being. Eventually I will move them to the About Me page because I want this site to be the centre of my online existence. One of the wider lessons I learnt from selling on Etsy is not to dilute your brand. It’s my art I’m selling, so my brand is me. When I talk about selling your art online, I mean my art of course, but if I have any lessons to share I will try to do so.
Lessons I’ve learned
I don’t feel comfortable writing a blog post that claims to offer the answer because I don’t have the level of expertise to do that. I will however post from time to time to talk about what I’ve done and why. So bear in mind this is not advice. I’m the one following the advice!
- This post title has links to other parts of this site and to external sites. As I understand it a good variety of internal and external links helps persuade search engines the site is reputable. Bearing in mind my comments about brand, those other sites also use variations on the same artist name.
- There’s a relevant and unique key phrase used in the title, in the text (including near the beginning which gets more weight in search engines), in the page meta description and in the SEO title. This last took me a while to grasp but it is what shows up in search engine results. It needs to be long enough to explain and short enough to show up in its entirety.
- A good chunk of the key phrase should also appear in the url.
[…] written before about some lessons I have learnt about selling online. This post is about the more concrete aspect of getting a consistent and attractive presentation of […]