What are the safest and most effective ways to sell your art online? Is it too early to start planning holiday marketing? Eric Rhoads answers in this week’s Art Marketing Minute Podcast.

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FULL TRANSCRIPT of the Art Marketing Minute:
DISCLAIMER: The following is the output of a transcription from an audio recording of the Art Marketing Minute. Although the transcription is mostly correct, it is sometimes slightly inaccurate due to the recording and/or software transcription.

Announcer:
This is the Art Marketing Minute with Eric Rhoads, author of the Amazon best-selling book, “Make More Money Selling Your Art.” In the marketing minute, we answer your questions to help your art career brought to you by ArtMarketing.com, the place to go to learn more about marketing. Now, here’s your host, art magazine publisher, Eric Rhoads.

Eric Rhoads:

Send your questions to me [email protected] you ever want to come on live, you can do that too. We can probably arrange that or pre record you. The other thing I just want to mention is I’m now doing a thing called Marketing Mondays. And that’s on my YouTube show. If you go to YouTube, and look for art school alive, or you can find it usually on my Facebook accounts and some others. Anyway, we go live and I answer art marketing questions, you can ask to answer questions there or you can pre submit questions. We do them in both places, but marketing is so important. So anyway, we have a question from Lorraine Potocki what is the safest and most effective online ways to sell your artwork? Well, I you know, I’m gonna go backwards. Just a second Lorraine because a lot of people and I just constantly hammer on this and if I do it too much, I apologize. But a lot of people are like, you know, I want to focus on tactics and tactics are selling work online or selling work through advertising or selling work through direct mail or selling work through gallery you know, there’s a lot of tactics. And the reality is that you want to make sure you set your goals first because everybody’s easily seduced by all these supposedly sexy things, but they may not be really right for you or right for you for what you’re trying to do. Depending on how much work you need to sell what kind of work you’re trying to sell how well it looks online because some work I know an artist. This artist I met with had this absolutely incredible artwork I met in person went to his studio in Colorado. And his work was just so stunning in person, but when he sent pictures of but it just was flat, you know, the pictures didn’t represent it well. And so some artwork doesn’t represent well, in a social media environment, just keep that in mind. But some, especially if it’s really big artwork and a lot of big brush thick brushwork and paint, stuff like that. But so figure out what’s, what’s the right thing to do before you say online. Now, Online is a very wide variety of things. Of course, you know, there’s all the different social media, there’s online would be considered website would be considered online galleries would be even considered email marketing, and having an online store, you know, there’s a lot of different things. And they’re all effective, and they’re all ineffective. And what I mean by that is that they might be effective for you, they might not be, everything depends on if you use core marketing principles, if you don’t use core marketing principles, if you don’t know and understand them, go read my book, because it really talks about those things. It’s called make more money selling your art. And the reason is, that if you if you do an email campaign, and you don’t do the right kind of copywriting, or you don’t ask for the order, or you don’t do the right things, it’s not going to work. Same thing with a social media campaign, and so on, so on, you know, I am a big spender. On social media, I spent a lot of money, I can’t even begin to tell you how much money it is. But it’s a lot of money on social media, because it works really well for us. But you know, you see these artists who, you know, Facebook, or somebody will say, you know, just boost this post, you boost this post, and it cost you 15 bucks, and it doesn’t do you anything. And so you’ve got to really understand that. And it has a lot to do with the copy that you write and the images that you use, we test everything, we test them. And then we test them again. And we test them again, we test them again. Because a lot of things that we put out there on social media we’re spending money on they don’t work. And so and so you could do organic social media, you know, that’s putting a painting out on on your social media feed and saying that it’s available, sometimes that works really well that I think would you say the safest and most effective. There’s two different things. The safe part is there’s a lot of scams going around, I got scammed. I’m embarrassed by it. But I got scammed two different times. One time a company contacted me and they said, you know, we love your artwork, we love your posts, we love your paintings. And we would like to help you grow your social media. And so they, they I went through a full presentation with them, they got up got me on a zoom call. And they’re like three or four people, they were in suits and ties were credible. Looking at agency, they showed us a picture of their building. And they did this in depth presentation about how they were going to generate money for me with my social media. And that was a really cool thing. And so they said, Great, all you got to do is go in there and change the setting right now and put our name in there. And I did it, they took control of my Facebook account and locked me out. They went to that much trouble to do that. Okay, so there’s obviously good reason for them to do it. Because I spent so much money with Facebook, we were able to pick up the phone call them and they were able to reverse it and in about 15 minutes. But usually that’s not possible. And I don’t know if it’d be possible today. So be careful about promises that people are making, you know, we’re gonna run ads for you or ask you to run ads on your social media, etc. You know, we have we hear from a lot of people who are, you know, you get this email, it says My wife has or husband or cousin or whatever, you know, we have an anniversary, birthday, whatever. And I love your work and I want to surprise him or her and, or it and, and so they they say you know, they want to buy a painting and then they buy a painting from you and they overpay you for it. And then they say and then then you contact them you say oh, you overpaid me and they say well just Venmo me the money or whatever. And you Venmo them the money and then the other money never clears and then you’re stuck because you’ve sent them money and the other money never cleared. And that’s something you want to be careful. Make sure it clears your bank or your payment system or something. Make sure it’s not fraudulent and make sure you don’t ship it if they’re in an urgent you know, that’s the that’s the scam right? It’s a birthday, I gotta have it tomorrow you got to FedEx it to me, you know, they don’t even care if they get your painting even if they do maybe they’re they’re selling it. But the reality is, there’s a lot of that going on you got to be really careful talk to people bet them and then you know use a credible source for payment. That you know that if you know if the if you get a Venmo payment or PayPal payment or whatever it is you’re using Apple Pay, it’s probably going to go through but there’s always possibility they file a claim against you be careful about credit cards too. So there’s not a most effective there’s so much. I mean, it’s just really a tough question. I think that we all fall for this, this belief that our social media is a big deal. And sometimes it is, please don’t misunderstand me, I have on one of my accounts, I have a couple 100,000 followers on my Instagram. And that’s on realism dot today. And you know, so I reached a lot of people, but it turns out that some of them are not legit. Some of them are bots, you know, you hear from people like that all the time. You just got to be really careful. You think that you’re, you know, if I, if I do a feed, let’s say I do a post, and I think oh, all 200,000 people are going to see it. The reality is, that’s not true. Only 3% See it. Instagram met on Facebook, they only feed it to 3%. That’s a new number I just learned it used to be 7%. So and the reason they do that is because it takes a lot of energy to feed everything that everybody does. So they test it, they want to make sure it’s good. If it’s if they get a lot of engagement, a lot of response, then they’ll push it out to some more people, if they get a lot more engagement, they’ll push it out to more and more. But if you think that your 3% is a marketing strategy, think again, because it’s not. And so you got to be really careful about that. There’s also you know, a lot of great online galleries and a lot of scam ones. So you got to bet that stuff, talk to other artists find out what works for them. There’s also print services, you know, where you can advertise your stuff online. There’s a lot of things out there. You know, there’s people who provide websites and have some marketing services, some of them are good, some of them not so good. There’s, there’s people who are, you know, they’ll ask you to spend six or 10 or $15,000 upfront, and they’re gonna give you a lifetime of stuff and do all this stuff for you. And I’ve heard mixed reviews on that. I’ve heard some people say, you know, I spent all this money and I got zero results. I’ve had other people say I spent all this money and I got lots of results. So you have to be just checked with people. Always check everything, test everything. There’s not a an easy answer. I wish there was I’m sorry about that.

Okay, second question comes from Caroline Gavin in Maine. Nice to hear from you, Caroline. Thinking ahead. When should artists start or holiday marketing? Are there other holidays? It makes sense to market art? Well, I think these are really great questions, Caroline. I think you know, this is this is the beginning of August or July, late July. And this is the halfway point for the year right. So December is is coming up in well, holiday season really starts kind of late October, although the stores will start putting Christmas things in before Halloween probably. So I think you want to be thinking about it. The reason is, is because if you have a mailing list or if you have a newsletter, you can be posting things like hey, by the way, Christmas is coming up and and if you have us a special photo from your vacation that your your wife or your husband or your partner or your kids or somebody really loved and you want me to do a custom painting for that, now’s the time to engage me to do that. So it’s ready and dry and varnished and framed by Christmas. And here’s the deadline to get that stuff in and you’ll you’ll remarkably sell a lot of people that’s also true for commissioned portraits. So now is the time to be reaching out. The other thing is now’s the time to be planning start planning your new year. I like to get it planned at least by the fourth quarter but now’s the time to be thinking about what you want to accomplish things like that. But you know holiday planning is great but there’s also keep in mind that people have birthdays, any excuse you have to get out their Mother’s Day. You know people are thinking about what can I get my mom and a beautiful painting or a beautiful drawing or a beautiful photograph or piece of art ceramics whatever you know get them thinking about that way in advance on Mother’s Day not too far in advance but if you’re doing Commission’s yes you’re doing family Commission’s family portrait commissions you gotta have some advanced time but every holiday is an excuse but don’t do it the day before holiday do it you know in time to order in time to come by the studio you know and do do holiday shows you know pick pick the holidays that are most likely for gifts like you know you could do a studio tour Valentine’s Day studio tour get involved in studio tours for Christmas. Those are around Thanksgiving and you know there’s a lot of things like that you can and should be doing so I think plan in advance for gift Commission’s especially and I think that will serve you well. I think that will help. I hope that helps. Anyway, that’s been the art marketing minute.

How to Submit Your Art Marketing Questions: What questions do you have about selling your art? Submit it at artmarketing.com/questions to hear your question answered on an upcoming Art Marketing Minute Podcast.

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