How to Sell Your Art > Is it necessary to have an artist website? What are some of the current email list do’s and don’ts? Eric Rhoads answers in this week’s Art Marketing Minute Podcast.
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Listen to the Art Marketing Minute Podcast: Episode #141 >
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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.
How to Sell Your Art
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 at [email protected], wherever you wanna send them. And if you wanna come on live when we’re recording this, you can do that too.
Here’s a question from Bobby Donahue. And the question is, how much value do you place in having a website to share your artwork? Is it a necessity? I am considering a website, but having a hard time justifying the cost in my head? Well, I think there’s a couple of things here. First off, I have, I have a whole lot of feelings about websites. I think things are changing. I think websites are still very important, but I do think there’s going to be a new breed of ways that artists are going to be found on the web, and I’m excited about that, but I can’t talk much about what’s going to be happening yet, but I think there’s going to be some changes. But the bottom line is, if you have a website, it doesn’t do you any good unless you have a strategy, an art marketing strategy, to get people to visit your website. Because it’s like, remember, in the old days they had a thing, it was a phone book. And in Los Angeles it was five inches thick. It’s like saying to somebody, Hey, I’m in the phone book. Well, nobody’s going to just, I mean, you’ve got to have somebody who’s going to specifically seek you out, but if you’re just hoping that somebody will randomly find you in the phone book, well they might randomly find you in the yellow pages of the phone book. Remember those. But the idea is, you want to drive people to your website, and so you have to be committed to marketing. You cannot expect the website to just deliver traffic. You know, a lot of that has to do do with what’s called SEO strategy. And SEO is basically search engine optimization. So you want to be able to show up in Google search or in Bing, or whoever you’re using, duck, duck, go. And so you’ve got to be putting things out there so that people can find you. Part of that means you’ve got to do fresh content on your website pretty much all the time, because if it’s not been updated, they’ll never push it to you. They’re looking for updates every week. And so I go to artists. You know, sometimes we’re considering an artist for something we’re going to do, a project we’re going to do, I’ll go to their website, you’ll find that old 1995 style website, or maybe 2000 style website, says, Enter here, and you’ll go in. And everything has not been updated for five years. You know, if you’re going to have a website updated, otherwise you’re wasting your time and your money. So you’ve got to treat it like it’s a precious commodity, and you have to update it, you have to market it, you have to promote it. Unless you’re selling artwork and you think a website is going to sell artwork for you, I think it’s pretty unlikely. Now, there are some people who specialize in websites for artists, or there’s lots of other options out there. This stuff has become a commodity these days. You know, it’s a good idea to preserve your what’s called your URL, like www.EricRhoads.com, that kind of a thing. And you should have one if you’re a professional. But or you need to have something that’s going to supplement that. Now, one of the things that supplements it is having your name and Instagram and Facebook that really is important, and it it might be important, depending on the demographic you’re going after, to be on other other sites, like like x or threads or Snapchat or other things, but you want to be able to be found, right? So the goal here is these days, instead of, you know, if I’m searching an artist, I usually go on Instagram. I don’t go on the web. Once in a while I’ll go on the web, but Instagram is where people are posting their pictures, and it’s a good place to get a feel for that. So I think, Bobby, it’s up to you, but there’s a lot more to it. By the way, the idea of – I’m having trouble justifying the cost. In my head, the cost is going to be 10, 20, 30, 40, bucks a month. If you, if you’re not willing to spend that money to sell paintings, to get customers, you’re never going to get customers. You have to be willing to spend money. The person who spends the most money gets the most customers ends up selling more than anybody else. It’s like entering art competitions. You got to spend money to enter them, but when you win, even if you win in a single category, like Nocturne painting for the month of January or something, then you have something to talk about. It’s something to help promote you. It gets other people to see your name. And Camille Przewodek said. It. She enters the plein air salon, for instance, every time she entered it, every month for 13 years before she finally won the main prize. But she won other prizes. She won some cash, but she had all this stuff to talk about. She said it was really important to her, so you got to be willing to invest money if your goal is to sell, if it’s an ego plane, you just want something to show you to your friends. Just use Instagram. Show your friends on Instagram.
Question number two is from Crystal H in Tennessee. Okay, so can I address some email list do’s and don’ts? Well, yeah, I can. I do a lot of emails. You probably know, email list do’s and don’ts are different than email do’s and don’ts. First off, do not send an email to a mass group of people unless they have done what’s called opting in. If they have not opted in, that means they subscribe to something where you had a chance to give them a chance to subscribe. Then it’s technically illegal. Now you can send anybody an email, one on one, one at a time, but if you’re doing a mass email list, then you have to have ops, opt ins. And sometimes people forget they opt ins. And the second thing is you have to have a way they can easily opt out. They can get off your list immediately. That’s really critical. You do not want to get investigated by the authorities right on something like that. And in terms of other things with your email list, you have to check deliverability if, if an email is not being delivered, let’s say that you send an email to me and I change my email address and I no longer have that old email address. If it shows up as undelivered, it actually hurts you, and so when you go to send it, first off, a lot of the email providers will not send it if you have a history of a bunch of stuff going out. That’s bad. They want you to have, a, what’s called a clean list they want to have. They want to have people that are opening emails. And so if you’re if people are not opening your emails, then it becomes less deliverable than Google isn’t going to deliver it, or whomever, or the suppliers aren’t going to deliver it. So there’s a lot of stuff with that. So you got to keep your fresh up, your list fresh and up to date now related to sending emails in terms of do’s and don’ts. Make sure you’re sending something that’s of value that people want. Make sure that you’ve established trust. They know who you are and they know why you send them things. Make sure that they always have a chance to opt out. The key to email marketing is a strong subject line, that little, tiny subject line, those 3, 4, 5, 6, words. If I pick up my phone and I look at the subject line on my phone, it’s only showing about four words, and then it cuts it off. If it’s on my browser, it shows more words. Most people check their email on their phones, about 80% so you need a subject line that’s about four words long that is going to grab people’s attention. You could have, you could be given away a million dollars inside your website. Nobody would ever visit it because they wouldn’t know. So your subject line gets people to open it. Now, the next thing that’s most important … There’s a lot of statistics on this, the set. The first most important thing is the subject line. Do you know what the second most important thing is the photograph, the photograph. Now, the third most important thing, and equally important if you don’t have a photograph, is your headline. You want to have a strong, easy to read, bold, stand out headline that’s going to really get a lot of attention and make you want to read further. So there’s a technique that was come up. The guy that came up with it was a guy named Gary Benson, gay was one of the great copywriters of all time. I don’t know if he’s alive anymore, but he’s not. I don’t think he’s writing anymore, but he’s written a couple of great books that you can find, and he talks about the slide. What you want to do is pretend you’re at a child’s playground, and you’ve got to get people to climb to the top of the slide, and when they get to the top, they slide all the way down to the point where they’re ready to purchase your product, right? So the slide is a strong subject line, that’s one rung in the ladder, a strong headline. That’s another rung in the ladder. The next is a strong photo, the next is a strong first paragraph and then a strong second paragraph. You know one thing rate relates to the hierarchy. So once you get a strong first paragraph and a strong second paragraph, typically, all of a sudden they get to the top of the slide and they read through. Not everybody reads everything. People will skim. That’s why it’s important to have some things bolded, or some headlines, or some sub headlines, and then, you bring them down. And then the next most important thing is, is a call to action. If you’re trying to sell something, right, or you’re trying to get them to come to an event, that might be different, but, it might be make your reservation now, that’s a call to action, or click the Buy button. That’s a call to action. So there’s a lot of different things you can do in that regard, but you want to have that there. And of course, if you’re selling something, the other thing that’s really critically important are testimonials. It’s better people trust other people more than they trust you or me. And so if you have Mary from Sheboygan or something, and you have a testimonial and she likes your product, that’s really good, very important to study the Federal Trade Commission rules, because there are certain things you cannot do in testimonials. One of the things you cannot have if, let’s say you had one customer who bought your product and they were like, they made a million dollars, you cannot highlight them unless that’s the average customer. So, you’re thinking, Oh, I’m going to highlight this person, because they made a million dollars when everybody else made $1 Well, you have to highlight the average customer. So you have to be really careful about that stuff. It’s very complicated. Okay, well, I hope this helps.
This has been the Marketing Minute with Eric Rhoads. You can learn more at artmarketing.com.
The Art Marketing Minute Podcast has been named one of the 2023 “Top 25 Art Business and Marketing Blogs on the web” by FeedSpot.
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