What are some ways for artists to effectively use social media? How do you get more eyeballs on your Instagram posts that will lead to serious potential buyers? Eric Rhoads answers in this week’s Art Marketing Minute Podcast.

Get your copy of Eric’s #1 Amazon Best Seller, “Make More Money Selling Your Art: Proven Techniques for Turning Your Passion Into Profit” here.

Listen to the Art Marketing Minute Podcast: Episode 140 >

Click here to listen to this week’s Art Marketing Minute Podcast!

Submit Your Art Marketing Question:
What questions do you have about selling your art? E-mail Eric at [email protected] (include your name and where you’re from) to hear your question answered on an upcoming Art Marketing Minute Podcast.

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:
So if you have questions, you can email them [email protected] By the way, artmarketing.com is a really great resource. There’s a lot of articles on there about marketing your art, and a good place to kind of poke around. And so check it out. If you guys ever want to come live on the podcast to record your questions. I do a lot of live on the weekday, Monday Marketing Show for art school live on YouTube. Here’s a question from Linda Jack from Virginia. I’m seeing these for the first time. By the way, the question is pricing and how to use social media effectively are always a struggle. Any suggestions? Well, those are two big questions, two questions that deserve a lot of time on their own. Pricing is the most difficult thing, other than learning to paint, that I think artists have to deal with and pricing has a lot to do with the environment that the painting is sold in. Keep that in mind that now if you were selling paintings at a high end show filled with multi millionaires, and they were selling $20 paintings there people aren’t going to buy them, because they’re not going to think they’re any good. And but if you’re selling paintings at the farmers market or the flea market or something, that’s going to be a different story too. So environment, the type of gallery you’re in, if you’re in a gallery, the environment makes a big difference. And so always think in terms of environment. Now you should, typically not, I don’t like to have rules, but I like to have guidelines. You typically should have your prices be your prices so that somebody, especially if you’re a gallery artist, if your paintings are in a gallery in Wisconsin and they’re in a gallery in California, and you can look them all up online. You want to have, you know, similar pricing, so that a nine by 12 is the same as a nine by 12. Now there are exceptions to that, because sometimes I’ll work on a painting for 100 hours, and I want to get more money for it. And so that would be an exception, because not not all paintings are equal, even if they’re equal in size. And then there’s all kinds of great books on pricing, but pricing is about kind of testing the market, putting it out there, starting a little higher if it sells well, move it up a little higher. More. If it sells well, move it up a little higher, more. If it doesn’t sell well, move it down a little bit. And also build in a little room for negotiation, because sometimes people need to negotiate. Some people can afford it, but they don’t. They won’t buy unless they can get a better deal. So just build in a little of that into your pricing, in terms of social media, in terms of effectively doing social media. You know, there’s, there’s courses on this. It’s not an easy task to just give you an answer to this, but I will tell you this, there’s a couple of things about social media. First off, what I’m learning is that post it depends on on what you’re posting on, so if you’re posting on X, formerly Twitter, then you can post 3, 4, 5, 6, times a day, because it moves very fast. If you’re focusing on Instagram, experts say once, maybe twice a day. If you’re focusing on Facebook, three, four times a day is fine, but it depends, because there are what we call time zones, or the times when people tend to check, you know, the masses. There are times when the masses are there. And the masses are typically there before work, during lunch time and after work. And so the busiest time for social media typically is after work. Now, different time zones are going to see things different ways. And so, you know, it’s, it’s nine o’clock in New York, it’s six o’clock in in Laguna. So you know you want to kind of time things to the time when the audience that you’re trying to reach is most important. And then keep your content focused on what you want your content to be known for. So if you, for instance, are a painter, and you want to be known as a painter for collectors or finished paintings, then you know, only put finished paintings on there, or maybe, maybe you painting in a location with that painting in the finished painting. I don’t like progress shots, typically, because most people don’t read that it’s in progress, and they look at it and they go, Ah, it’s not done. Or they’ll look at it and go, Oh, it’s it’s not good. So be careful about sharing progress shots. If you have a social media account that your primary purpose is to sell paintings, then don’t show pictures of food. Your cat. Keep it all about paintings, and then, you know, you can talk about the stories of the paintings. You can ask people for for comments. You can even say, you know, this one’s available. Sometimes I wouldn’t put that in the main post, but I put it in the first comment. So by the way, this is available, right? That way you’re not being too salesy, but that’s just a matter of opinion. So there’s a ton of other things social media is ever changing. It’s got to study it all the time. The you know, hashtags were all the rage now they’re not. They don’t matter anymore, because AI is kind of picking up and running with things, and so that that changes a lot.

Second question comes from Pat watam in Louisiana. Pat says, How do you get more eyeballs on your Instagram posts that will lead to serious potential buyers? Well, you know, it’s really the same question. The way to get eyeballs is to get people to to you gotta post. Post frequently. You gotta just because you post something doesn’t mean you can’t repost it. You know, I post things sometimes the same thing, 3456, times a year, at different times, because I want to be talking about things that are going on, or things that I’m doing, or things that are paintings that I’ve done, and you know you, you don’t always know who’s going to see them. So the algorithm at Facebook, and this is constantly changing, but Facebook, typically, if you have, let’s say you have 5000 followers of Facebook, is only going to show that to 200 maybe 100 followers. One, two, 3% maybe not even that. And if there’s a lot of interaction, if people make comments, if people if you’re responding to comments, if people are engaged, or if people share it a lot, then they will show it to a couple, a couple 100 more people, and then if that continues, they’ll show it to more and more. So the idea is you want to look for ways to get engagement, which is why asking questions. Do not be so bold as to say, Hey, give me a like or something like that, because that’s considered click bait. But you can just, you know, you can ask a question, you know, what does this painting remind you of? And that way you get engagement? Or does anybody know where this painting was done, or something like that? So you just get people talking and then make sure you respond. That’s one of the best ways to get eyeballs. Because I even learned recently that even if you have a Facebook group like I have Facebook groups. I have dozens of them for some of the various things that we do, like our we have a private Facebook group for fall color week, which is coming up, and as a result, only those people can see it. But Facebook doesn’t even push it out to all of them. I thought they did. They only push it out to five or 6% of those. And again, if there’s engagement, they’ll push it out to more. So you’re not even guaranteed that, if you’re in a group, that everybody’s going to see everything. So keep that in mind. Okay, well, anyway, that’s the art marketing minute. I do art marketing Mondays on my show art school live. You can find that on YouTube, and we do a whole lot more there. So anyway, there we go. 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.

The Art Marketing Minute Podcast has been named one of the 2023 “Top 25 Art Business and Marketing Blogs on the web” by FeedSpot.

How do you craft a compelling artist statement? Is it smart to make prints of your paintings, and if so, how and where should you sell them? Eric Rhoads answers in this week’s Art Marketing Minute Podcast.

Get your copy of Eric’s #1 Amazon Best Seller, “Make More Money Selling Your Art: Proven Techniques for Turning Your Passion Into Profit” here.

Listen to the Art Marketing Minute Podcast: Episode 139 >

Click here to listen to this week’s Art Marketing Minute Podcast!

Submit Your Art Marketing Question:

What questions do you have about selling your art? Visit artmarketing.com/questions or e-mail Eric at [email protected] (include your name and where you’re from) to hear your question answered on an upcoming Art Marketing Minute Podcast.

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 me your questions at [email protected] or you can go live if you want to, just let us know if you’d like to do that, and we’ll let you do it. The first question comes from Neil Patrick McMillan. Question is, how can artists craft a compelling artist statement and build a strong brand that reflects their unique perspective and artistic identity? Wow, that’s a tough question. You know, I’ve never really completely understood this artist statement thing. I hear a lot of artists ask me, what should my artist statement be? I don’t know where that’s coming from. I don’t know if galleries are asking for it, or if you think it’s something you need to have on your website, you know, I suppose. And I’ve seen artists statements on websites and it’s like, Oh, why? Why bother? You know, it’s, it’s, you know, does anybody really care? Sorry, I know you do. But, you know, do consumers really care? I think the question is, why do you do it? Why? What’s the purpose of doing it? And I would say, if you’re going to do it, then make it, you know, I’ve seen some that have a lot of platitudes in them, and they’re just kind of overly flowerly Look. Just talk, talk about what you do and why you do it. What, what is it that makes you unique and why you do it? Right? Because that’s that’s differentiation, right? So Neil Patrick McMillan, I don’t know what you paint, but let’s say you say, Hey, I’m a realist painter in the tradition of the 19th century, painters focus on making paintings that kind of harken back to those days, and I fell in love with the great masters, and so I want to interpret their style, but I want to do it in my modern way. I mean, that’s really what and I, by the way, I wouldn’t create a special page to say that I’d have that right there at the top of your website that says, This is what I do, because you want people to be able to assimilate very quickly, you know what? What is this website? What am I going to see here and make sure? Of course, everything kind of falls into that. Now also, you’re, you’re talking about branding, and I don’t know, you know slogans. I love slogans, but slogans don’t always work in branding, and sometimes, especially for artists, the slogan you know, Thomas Kincaid did painter of light that worked. And you know, you see people doing that kind of thing, painter of this, painter that you know, but I don’t know if that’s really all that necessary. Your brand is you. You are your brand, and your brand is your attitude, your life, your lifestyle, and you know what you’re posting on social media about your life, and you know if you’re trying to, if you’re doing a lot of plein air painting, and it’s a romantic life, and and you’re you’re out painting the world, then that becomes part of your brand. But really, your brand is your paintings, right? Your your paintings need to be consistent. They need to reinforce what you do, what you believe in. If it’s a style, you know, you’re the, you’re a modern impressionist, or you know you’re a, you know, hearkening to the past, you know, the, you know, Rembrandt style or something, whatever it is, reinforce that, you know, having a slogan, like Have it your way, like McDonald’s or something, isn’t necessarily going to do it. What does do it is reinforcing your work. Just, and branding is, I mean, we talk about branding all the time, and it’s branding is just, it’s who you are, right? And you’ve got to be who you are. You can’t make up some who you’re not. I mean, people are going to know. I mean, I would think so anyway. So just be who you are and just reinforce that. And you just have to be constantly talking about it, constantly telling your story, constantly letting people see your work, constantly promoting yourself, advertising, looking for ways to get visibility. I mean, that’s what branding is really all about. It’s it’s taking your message and exposing it over and over and over and over and again for the rest of your life, right? It never stops.

Next question from Janet Hall. I don’t know where Janet’s from, but let’s see what the question is says. I’m not even sure how or where to make. Prints in my art, which paper to use? How do I do that, let alone marketing? So I get so overwhelmed because I have so many questions I don’t even know where to begin, because I don’t know what. I don’t know, if you get my drift, thanks for letting me ask questions that are probably obvious to everyone else. Well, Janet, I you know, I you know, I don’t want to disappoint you, but I can’t answer questions about that because I don’t know the answers. I don’t know how to tell you where to get your prints made. I know what a lot of people do. I know what a lot of artists will go out and they’ll buy a good, a good printer, and Epson printer or Canon printer, and they’ll, you know, depending on the size prints they want, those are the two standards. And then you buy your you buy different kinds of paper. You can buy watercolor paper or print paper or photographic paper. You know, there’s a lot of different options. And then, you know, you mount them and do all that stuff. And you can find somebody who can teach you that I’m not probably best to do it. The question I would have is, is that what you want to do is, prints are, is marketing prints? What you want to do and and if so, real question is, if you have them, how are you going to sell them? Where are you going to expose them? Where are you going to put them? You going to do tent shows where you’re, you know, art shows where you’re, you know, everybody’s got a tent, and people are walking up down the street. Are you going to put them on a website? Are you going to put them in a gallery? You know, all those things matter, so you need to figure that out first, because that’s probably more important, because you can make the prints once you figure out how you’re going to sell them. And I would test it, because you don’t want to go out and buy a bunch of expensive stuff and spend a lot of money making prints if they don’t sell. So you got to figure out how to do that. I would say, though, really what I think you’re asking is, where do I begin? Right? Some basics. First off, when you’re first starting out, you know, you don’t know what to do. Read some books. There’s lots of great books on art business and art marketing. I wrote one. I don’t know if it’s great or not, but I tried to make it great anyway. Dip your toe in the water, right? And what I mean by that is, find out first, if you’re ready, get some feedback from somebody who knows, somebody who’s a professional, might be some other artists might be some gallery people try to get them to give you some feedback. Am I ready? What do I need to fix? Don’t tell me all the positives, just tell me all the negatives. What do I need to fix? And if you’re ready, they’ll tell you. You know, I I had a lot of years where I wasn’t ready, and I thought I was ready, and all my friends told me about it was ready, but the pros didn’t, you know. Now the pros say, Hey, you’re ready. Okay, so now I’m ready. Now, then the next question is, how are you going to get yourself out there? What are you going to do? How you put yourself out there? Well, I would say, dip your toe in the water of selling something, right? And so what does that look like? Well, it might be doing an art show. It might be putting your stuff up at a restaurant or local gym, or, you know, I like restaurants because there’s alcohol involved, and people get a little bit looser and and a little bit more open to art than they might be when they’re in a busy, you know, work mode, or workout mode or something like that, you know. So find somebody to do a show, and then, you know, sit through there and see what it’s like and and see if you like it. See if that’s the way you want to sell. Maybe you’re going to find a gallery or something, you know, when you’re first starting out less likely, but it depends on how good you are. And you’re of course, going to have to talk to some galleries to talk to them into it and and I’ve got a whole chapter on that my book. But most important is, don’t spend a lot of money yet, till you you get a feel for things. Test everything. Try everything. You know one answer does not apply to all you just got to see what works, and trying to sell some artwork and see if you get some response is a really good way to go. Anyway. I hope this helps. These are quick, but that’s why it’s 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.

The Art Marketing Minute Podcast has been named one of the 2023 “Top 25 Art Business and Marketing Blogs on the web” by FeedSpot.

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.

Get your copy of Eric’s #1 Amazon Best Seller, “Make More Money Selling Your Art: Proven Techniques for Turning Your Passion Into Profit” here.

Listen to the Art Marketing Minute Podcast: Episode # >

Click here to listen to this week’s Art Marketing Minute Podcast!

Submit Your Art Marketing Question:

What questions do you have about selling your art? Visit artmarketing.com/questions or e-mail Eric at [email protected] (include your name and where you’re from) to hear your question answered on an upcoming Art Marketing Minute Podcast.

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.

The Art Marketing Minute Podcast has been named one of the 2023 “Top 25 Art Business and Marketing Blogs on the web” by FeedSpot.

Is it wiser to represent yourself or seek representation through galleries? How can you create a marketing strategy that aligns with your goals? Eric Rhoads answers in this episode of the Art Marketing Minute Podcast.

Get your copy of Eric’s #1 Amazon Best Seller, “Make More Money Selling Your Art: Proven Techniques for Turning Your Passion Into Profit” here.

Listen to the Art Marketing Minute Podcast: Episode # >

Click here to listen to this week’s Art Marketing Minute Podcast!

Submit Your Art Marketing Question:

What questions do you have about selling your art? Visit artmarketing.com/questions or e-mail Eric at [email protected] (include your name and where you’re from) to hear your question answered on an upcoming Art Marketing Minute Podcast.

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:

I want to tell you guys that you can send your questions to meet [email protected] or you can come live on the podcast during the marketing minute ask your questions. The other thing is I’m doing marketing Mondays now for my YouTube show art school live. It’s on YouTube and Facebook, and I’m answering questions there. And a lot of people are on there live too. So there’s a lot of options on our marketing and more to come. Whatever that means. Okay, so here’s the first question from Tim Matthews, who is near Myrtle Beach, North Carolina. I think that’s North Carolina, or is it south? Tim says, I’m a landscape painter. I’ve been painting for many years, and I want to use my passion to earn a good living. I’ve read your book on art marketing, and it’s a tremendous help. Thank you. In your opinion, is it wiser to seek representation, and sell through galleries? Or simply represent yourself? I’ve heard so many different thoughts on this. I’m not sure what to think I live near Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, there doesn’t seem to be much of an art market here. So I assume self representing would mean focusing mainly on online sales. I’m learning more about the art market every day and trying to do and make the best career decisions. I can, Tim, you’re a rockstar man. Thank you for sending in a question. Tim. I, I was I was talking to somebody yesterday. And one of my big frustrations is that I teach art marketing and have taught art marketing for a dozen years. And a lot of people pay attention. But a lot of people don’t do what it takes. And sometimes they don’t do what it takes this because they just don’t want to do it. Right. They want the results. They want the money, they want the sales, they want the customers, but they’re not willing to do what it takes. And this person I was talking to yesterday, was saying, you know, I’m doing things that nobody else is doing. Because they’re not willing to do what it takes. And I think that’s true. So the, you know, the thing you have to understand is if you’re going to do your own art marketing. Well, first off, if you’re going to sell paintings at all, or paintings or drawings, or whatever your art is ceramics or photography, you have to understand that you have to make a lifetime commitment to marketing. As long as you intend to make your living from your art. You have to have a lifetime commitment to marketing marketing is not a one time thing. It’s not like, Okay, I’m gonna run an ad and then I’ll have all the customers I need for the rest of my life. It doesn’t work that way. I wish it did. It’s a matter of fact, it takes three to five years, five years, seven years, 10 years. And the reason I put that in different packages is that, you know, you kind of get to different levels of success. You’re building momentum. It doesn’t happen overnight. And you know, I’ve seen things happen overnight. I’ve orchestrated careers that happened overnight, but there’s a lot of money spent to be able to do that and it doesn’t always work. So you got to do it in a very thoughtful way. So the first thing I always tell people is spend 20% of your time on your marketing and when you’re first launching, build up your your inventory of paintings and then spend 100% of you Your time on your marketing for a while, because you know you have paintings, you don’t need to make more paintings right now. So spend all that time doing all the things you need to do now, even if you have a gallery, or even if you have an agent, which is another option you did not mention, you still have to do a lot of work, you cannot rely 100%. Imagine if you had 100% of your income relying on somebody else. And that person decided to leave decided to get sick decided to die, you know, something like that all of a sudden, you have no income, right? So you as the product manager, product creator, you have to always make sure that you’ve got something going on. And you’ve got to be managing your gallery relationships. And you might want to have other alternatives as well. A lot of people do, a lot of people will sell direct, but you have to work that out with your galleries, because there’s certain things you shouldn’t do. But the idea is that you want to be responsible for your career, and you want to be working it so no matter what you do, you’re going to be working now, getting to your heart of your question, is it wiser to seek representation than sell through galleries? I think the first thing is, you know yourself, you know yourself and you know, am I going to be disciplined enough to do what it takes? Am I going to be willing to spend the time it takes do I am I willing to spend the time studying now the good news is you read my book, thank you for that. And you at least are applying yourself. And so I’d say you probably have a good chance of success, because you’re, you’re you’re already taking the right kinds of steps. So the reality is, you can’t rely 100% on anything. So you really need to do both, right, you need to represent yourself. But you also need to consider representing yourself to galleries. Now, like I said, there is the option of an agent, there are people out there who are agents who can help you get into galleries help you build shows help you do a lot of different things, they’re going to take some percentage of your income, in exchange for that, in some cases, they’re going to ask you to pay them a flat fee up front to get get started. That’s okay, too. But I think that, if I were, if I were starting from scratch, I would probably say, do both. And I like to I’m in three galleries. I’m about to leave one of those galleries and upgrade to a higher level gallery. And and the reason I’m going to be leaving the gallery is going to be closing. And so it’s good opportunity, I don’t want to have more than three galleries because I can’t give them enough work. Sometimes it sells sometimes it doesn’t. And sometimes that’s my fault. And sometimes that’s their fault. They always think it’s our fault. And and maybe it is maybe our paintings aren’t good enough. But you know, the reality is you want galleries who are going to be working at they’re going to be selling there, they’re going to be really trying to figure out how to do the best things for you. So I you know, and we all kind of go through this stage of first first level galleries, sometimes you have to get into a first level gallery before you can get into a second tier gallery or third tier gallery. And they’re not rated that way. But it kind of depends like if you know, a top tier gallery might be a New York gallery that carries, you know, Andrew Wyeth paintings. And to get in there, I mean, you you might have to be at that level and it might take you 10 years or 15 or 20 years or a lifetime to get there. So I think I would I would go for it. Get it getting into galleries, you know, I explained in my book, and that’s really an introduction process, you really don’t want to be approaching him directly. I don’t think so. I know how they, they feel about that. And that doesn’t usually work well with most of them, some of them don’t mind. But you want to just get to the point where you know you have you have some way that you can sell direct and you have some way you can sell to galleries. You know, my friend Chun Wong has a deal with his galleries is that anything under a certain size, he can sell direct. So he does the daily painting thing and he’ll you know, he’ll sell a painting every day. That might be an eight by 10, or a five by seven or something like that. But the bigger paintings go to his gallery, and of course the pricing changes for that. So I hope that’s been helpful. And let me know what happens. Reach out when you have your next question. Next we have a question from Evan crest in Tennessee. And sounds like we’re hitting the south this week. All right. We got North Carolina and Tennessee right next to each other.

Evan says how do I create a marketing strategy that aligns with my goals? Well, you know, it’s that’s a difficult question because Evan strategy is as determined by your goals, and tactics are determined by your strategy. So let’s say that your goal is to sell 30 paintings a year at $2,000, a painting net net, meaning that that’s what you keep, right? That’s not you know, if you’re selling them through the gallery, you still got to figure out how you’re gonna get $2,000 painting. So you, you know, that’s, that’s $60,000 in income, right? Minus whatever your expenses are internally. So you’ve got to ask yourself, what, how do I get there? Well, if you already are there, you already are doing it, then you already know how to get there, you just rinse and repeat, right? But maybe you’re doing half of that. And you’ve got to figure out okay, how do I double it? Or maybe you’re not doing any of it? And you got to figure out how do I get there completely. So it’s tough, you know, launching from the beginning is, is tough. But you know, everything is tough in life. And anything that’s good, requires some pain and some discomfort, and you’re okay with that. So, if strategy is your plan of action, it is tied to your customer. So let me just repeat that strategy is a plan of action, it’s tied to your customer. So you need to know who is my customer, who is likely to buy my paintings? Well, the best place to find that out is if you’ve sold paintings in the past, who has bought my paintings in the past, you know, I have a deal with at least one of my art galleries. And I say to them, Look, I want to know, I want to know everything about the buyer, I don’t need to know their name. Although I do ask them to send me a you know, an address and a name. So I can send them a note card and say thank you. And I guarantee them, I’m not going to try to sell them something different, or at least go around the gallery. And I send them a nice, thank you note, but oftentimes, I’ll if I could get a chance to call them, I’ll call him and I’ll just get to know him, I just wanted to thank you for buying my painting and tell me a little bit about yourself, and then just shut up and listen. Because, you know, you’ll hear well, I’m a retired executive from, you know, some company and, and my wife is a retired executive from this company, or are retired lawyers, or we work as lawyers or you know, whatever it is, and you try to, you know, try to get a little information like, you know, what is it about the painting that they love? And where is it going to hang? And what is it about them? And then if you talk to five or six or 10 or 20 customers, you’re gonna start looking for patterns? Is there anything in common? Well, the one thing in common is, it seems to be the people who buy my paintings all seem to be over 50. And they all seem to be professionals. And so that tells you something. And now the question is, and by the way, they all seem to live in this particular community. And that might be related to the gallery, or it might be they’re all on vacation in this particular community. And they’re coming from different places. So you want to learn these things so that you can kind of design your your strategy, your strategy includes your pricing, your packaging, your advertising, packaging, I know seems odd. But when I say packaging, it’s like the back of your painting. How are you going to do that? How do you deal with your customer service for customers? Meaning customers meeting galleries? How are you going to deal with customers discussions with customers themselves? Your follow up your customer retention, your internet plan, your customer engagement, your website, all that stuff? It starts with who your ideal customer is, what do they want? What do they need? Where do you find them? And what do you do to take action to get them to buy what was it that put them over the fence and decided to buy that? And it might have been some little thing like the story? Or it might have been the colors? Or it might, you know, there are a lot of different things. And so you just want to be looking for patterns? And then you know, how do I reach these people? How do I find them? How much repetition do I do to reach them and so on. Now, it’s best to have some background, some experience in a particular strategy, but you don’t always get that benefit. So you can do some research. And the research can help you for instance, somebody was talking to me about wanting to reach retired people. And, and so I you know, I said Okay, well let’s research retired people and we went through and said, you know, okay, how many people are retiring in America every year and how many people who are retired actually have any money? And there are it turns out there are a lot of a fluid people who retire former professionals. And so where do they live? How do you reach them? What kinds of things do they like to do you know, if somebody’s retired doesn’t mean they’re old. And old is a relative term anyway. You know, a lot of people who are rich early retirement age, we’ll buy a new house downsize and they’ll say, You know what, I want all new furniture. That’s what my wife did. We didn’t retire. But it’s like, we bought a new house. And she said, I don’t want the old furniture anymore. I want all new furniture. We’ve had the stuff for 30 years. So that’s the kind of thing that that you okay, if if you’re looking for somebody who’s buying new houses, when they retire, what area are they in? How do you reach them? Where are they going to go shopping? What, what kinds of things are they paying attention to? Where can you put your artwork on display? Are there restaurants that they’re going to, you know, if their high end restaurants than regular retired, people who are on fixed incomes and don’t have any money, aren’t gonna go to those high end restaurants. So be in the high end restaurants where the money is, or in the country club or at the golf club, or, you know, wherever. So try to figure out where people are, and where they want to go. Now I had an artist, he told me, my strategy is to help people who could not normally afford paintings, but I want him to own my artwork, because I can’t afford paintings. I said, Okay, how’d that go for you? He says, Well, I worked really hard at it for a year, and I didn’t sell anything. And he said, because nobody could ever afford anything. And you know, I wanted to tell him, I probably did tell him actually. And I think the idea here is there’s an old philosophy. And the philosophy is stand in the river where the money is flowing it, Tony Robbins said something like this, I was on stage. I mean, he was on stage. And he and he said, no matter how good you are, no matter how smart you are, no matter how good your product is, if you are serving a declining market, or if you’re in an area where nobody buys it, imagine that you’re selling heaters, portable heaters in I don’t know, Mexico or Tucson or something. Your chances of people needing portable heaters is going to be slim. You know, it’s kind of like the idea of selling ice cubes to Eskimos right. So I think that you want to look for places. So this guy needed to stand in the river where the money is flowing. Once he switched his mindset to it, they don’t have to be like me, they just have to be people who love my artwork and want to buy it. Well, that changes everything. Stand in the river where the money’s flowing. So you know, it really boils down to where are they buying homes where they frequently frequently, frequenting restaurants, stores, etc. And then there’s tactics and tactics are okay, how am I going to advertise? Where are we going to advertise how much money I’m going to spend? How much repetition? You know, am I going to do newspaper ads local? Am I going to do the art scene local things? Am I going to do national publications like fine art connoisseur plein air. And it’s going to involve a lot of different tactics, because you can’t just do one thing, you got to do multiple things, because one thing might not work and everything takes time. So just keep in mind that it just got to think all that stuff through. And you know, I have some marketing courses online on paint tube.tv and some things that I’ve done art Marketing Bootcamp, they’re helpful. And they might be able to answer some of those questions for you. But you know, you just got to you got to just jump in and try things. Anyway. That’s the marketing more than a minute. I hope it helps.

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.

The Art Marketing Minute Podcast has been named one of the 2023 “Top 25 Art Business and Marketing Blogs on the web” by FeedSpot.

Can artists use giclee prints as a form of passive income?
Should artists hire someone to handle their marketing?
Eric Rhoads answers in this week’s Art Marketing Minute Podcast.

In the Art Marketing Minute Podcast with Eric Rhoads, you’ll learn how to sell your art, how to market your paintings, and everything else you need to know in order to have a successful art career. 

Get your copy of Eric’s #1 Amazon Best Seller, “Make More Money Selling Your Art: Proven Techniques for Turning Your Passion Into Profit” here.

The Art Marketing Minute Podcast has been named one of the 2023 “Top 25 Art Business and Marketing Blogs on the web” by FeedSpot.

Listen to the Art Marketing Minute Podcast: Episode 136 >

Click here to listen to this week’s Art Marketing Minute Podcast!

Submit Your Art Marketing Question:

What questions do you have about selling your art? Visit artmarketing.com/questions or e-mail Eric at [email protected] (include your name and where you’re from) to hear your question answered on an upcoming Art Marketing Minute Podcast.

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:
So you guys can send your questions to me [email protected]. Or you can come live on the podcast if you want to do that. And we can pre arrange that just let us know. So I have never seen these questions. I’m doing this stuff off the top of my head. The first question is from Trish Dorton in Columbus, Georgia. Question is about passive income, for example, giclee prints of works? Does that impact your brand and marketability as a fine artist? And can it be done in a way to accentuate your career? Well, I think that, you know, there’s really two questions in this maybe more questions. The first question is about passive income. Let’s talk about that. Before we talk about prints. I think that every artist needs to look for an opportunity to find passive income, passive income are things that that you can do without. It’s essentially leveraging yourself right. So think about this, if you’re a doctor, you only have so much time and you can only see so many patients. But if you’re a doctor who has some other special skill, maybe it’s something you can train people and then you have the opportunity to create passive income so passive income as an artist isn’t necessarily teaching right. So teaching in person is taking up your time. Right so if you’re teaching online, or you’re teaching in person workshop or you have a class on a Thursday night or something like that, that’s, that’s really not passive income, that’s income. It’s important income. But if it takes your time that it’s not passive, it’s active, right? So passive income would be like, if you came to streamline pink tube, for instance, and you created an art instruction video with us, that’s passive income, you invest a few days of your time, a little bit of planning time. And then we sell it and it continues to sell over years and years and years and years. And you get a check in the mail every month, hopefully for 20 or 30 years. Right. So that’s passive income. The same thing would be true for a print market, or something else. But of course, what you have to figure out is how do I make it passive? So if you decide you want to go into the print market, which a lot of artists do, then how do you? How do you leverage it? Well, in one way, or print is a leverage of an original right, so I had dinner one time with Thomas Kincaid, and he said to me, my biggest regret in life is that I sold a lot of my original paintings. And he said, You know, I, I didn’t make prints of all of them, because I didn’t know how to do it. I don’t even have photographs of all of them. But he said, in a world where I can make prints, he said, I keep my originals, I don’t sell my originals, they become more valuable. And then I make prints off of them. And so I can potentially make prints off of one painting for for decades. And I’m sure even though he’s passed, I’m sure somebody is still doing that. And so, you know, there was when I first got into this, there was a lot of people who were dissing the idea of doing prints, and because it cheapens the artist. But you know, I know a lot of artists who were very successful doing that, and in in a couple of ways, John Stoll Bart was a dear friend of mine, John was a multimillionaire. And he became a multimillionaire by selling prints. John had full page ads, if you can imagine, running in the New York Times, selling prints. Well, he didn’t sell a few, he sold 10s of 1000s of prints. Now, John was leveraging himself because he was on PBS at the time. So some people knew him. He was at the peak of his career, you know, he was very popular and well known. And even if he wasn’t, you know, he advertised a beautiful print. And people would buy them. That was what I call direct marketing, right? He ran an ad and had a place that you could, in that particular case, you could fill out the form on the ad, cut it out, put it in an envelope and send a check to him, and he would send you the painting and return. Nowadays, of course, you can do that all online. You know, nobody has to send checks, everybody can just do it online. And it’s easier. There are lots of artists, I’ve got a friend in Texas who does. He has a huge print business he’s got, he does his own printing, he does his own framing, he makes his own frames. And it’s, it’s a huge income for him. Now, the way he sells them, though, is he does these art shows. It’s taking his time. So it’s active, not passive. But he has art shows where he’s selling originals, but you’d see an original and it’s a two or three or four or five or $20,000 original, you go well, maybe that’s not for me, but I love it. And so somebody goes, well, here’s a print for $50. And, you know, and he knows that his cost to create that print is $16 or whatever. And so he’s making good money on it. And if he sells 100 of them an art show, hey, that’s better than not having them and because sometimes you don’t sell an original. So I think it’s perfectly fine. I think that you need to talk to the people who support you. Meaning if you’re in an art gallery, how do they feel about it? Some art galleries don’t feel good about prints, and some do, but I would encourage everybody to say, okay, in what ways can I create passive income? What can I do one time and repeat it multiple times where it doesn’t require me to be there physically, that’s leveraging yourself that gives you passive income. And I think it it can be very valuable. So what the question that is that Trish said is is can it be done in a way that accentuates your career? Well, I don’t know what that means. Is it going to build your brand? Probably not. I mean, likely somebody buys a print and they don’t even know who did it and it gets framed and hung out. a while and they might see your signature, they might know who you are, they might not. Same thing, by the way is true even with an original song. It’s it’s sometimes that just happens. And I even have paintings on my walls that I’ve forgotten who, who did them, and I shouldn’t. But it’s just kind of the reality. So I don’t know if it accentuates your career, it accentuates your income. And if you have income, then that buys you freedom, right? Freedom buys you a lot of things. So income, I look at income, not as do I need that income, to be able to pay my bills, and to be able to go on trips and travel the world and all that stuff. Yeah, I need that. But I also take a percentage of my income. And I use it in other ways, right? So like, I might want a percentage of my income going to, in my case tithing to help other people. Or I might want to say, look, I’m going to take 20% of my income. And I’m going to devote that to advertising. My giclee prints and setting up a direct marketing thing. So that people can click on these ads and see him and by him, or I’m going to use percentage of that income towards advertising to build my brand and to get more collectors familiar with me so that they know who it is. They’re hanging on the wall. So I hope that helps Trish.

The next question is from a user whose name is @paintpot7623. I have difficulty following through with any marketing. Welcome to the club. I’m older, I’ve struggled for over 30 years to chase up money for sales. Should I keep trying? Should I hire myself to hire somebody to market for me, or just concentrate on the art itself? Well, you’ve touched on a big nerve. So I was watching something on X last night on Twitter. And it was a speech from a woman in Silicon Valley who was talking about growing a business. And one of the things that she said, really struck me, and that is that you can’t grow. Without help. You can only get so far on your own. Because you are limited in what you know, you’re limited in your abilities, and you’re limited in your time. So I have a staff of 55 people. And I used to have no staff, right. And as soon as I could afford one person, I hired one person and I said, Okay, this is what you’re going to do for me. And then that person got to the point where they were maxed out. And if I wanted to grow and I wanted to do more things, I had to figure out how to afford a second person. And a lot of that, of course, is sales. If you have somebody to help you with sales, then that funds everything else, right? You don’t want a bunch of employees and are not generating income, you want people who are helping you generate income. So should I hire someone to market for me? Well, you have, I think a couple of options. There are a lot of artists out there who are doing marketing with a marketing professionals. Sometimes it’s an ad agency, sometimes it’s an agent, sometimes it’s a husband or a wife or a friend. If you can find somebody that you know and trust to do your marketing, then you’ve got to figure out, okay, how do I pay them. Now, you might pay them as a percentage of sales, that’s one opportunity, you might just say, I’m gonna pay you a flat amount of money, here’s what I need you to do for me. And by the way, if you don’t understand marketing, you might not even know what you need them to do for you. So I’m a big fan of other people helping you first off it, it’s going to leverage you because the the one thing that painters forget, you know, I, I get so frustrated because I see I see painters who are pretty good. Who could be getting to the next level if they were putting eight or 10 hours a day into it. But instead they’re they’re getting distracted by income distraction. Right? So an income distraction is I got to figure out how to do my own shipping. I gotta figure out how to package these paintings. I gotta figure out how to frame them. I got to figure out how to sell more. I got to figure out how to deal with gallery relationships or get a gallery or I’ve got to figure out how to sell more stuff online. I got to do more social media, so I sell more stuff online. All of these things are shiny objects, and they’re distractions. I’m not saying you shouldn’t do them, but if you had somebody to doing this Social Media for you, if you had somebody helping you with your marketing, if you had galleries representing your work, you’re leveraging yourself, there’s that word again, leveraging, right? Because you can only do so much. But you know, you picture a fulcrum, right? There’s a rock, there’s a rod, and you don’t have to push very hard on that fulcrum to lift something heavy. Well, that’s what other people do for you. So if you can do it, if you cannot afford it, then find a way to get somebody to help you do it temporarily. AND, and OR for a piece of the income. Now you want to be careful with that. Because if you’re given up pieces of income, next thing, you know, you don’t have any everybody thinks that that’s an easy route. My dad told me something when I was very young, he said, don’t ever have partners. And I immediately went out and got a partnership. And so immediately, B and another guy were splitting things 5050. And, but I was doing a lot of work, I was doing all the sales, he was doing all the product. And it seemed like a really good relationship. And it was until it failed. And then all of a sudden, we went from, you know, 100 miles an hour to zero because he decided he didn’t want to do it anymore. Or, I’ve had other situations where I’ve seen people say, Well, you know, I have this, this guy is going to help me I’m gonna give up 10% of my company for him. And then there’s another helper, I’m gonna give 10% for them, and then another helper, I’m gonna give 10% for them. And if it’s actual stock in your company, then one day, if things don’t work out, which sometimes they don’t. Next thing, you know, you know, your company’s more valuable, you got to buy him out. And so that’s why I’m a little bit reluctant about that. Be really careful about just giving away the farm. It’s much better if you can hire somebody and pay them a fair fee or wage for the product that they’re producing for you rather than giving up equity. Because someday you’ll regret it. It doesn’t seem like much. Now, you know, you might say, well, I don’t mind giving up 10% To somebody now, because I’m only making $1,000. But what if you were making $100,000? And you realize you gave him 10 to $10,000? Or what if you’re making a million dollars, and you were given him $100,000 And they’re not working that hard anymore? So those are the things you have to keep in mind. Yes, leverage yourself if possible. Find a way to get somebody to help you with marketing. A lot of artists, you know, my big frustration, I teach marketing a lot. I’ve got a website devoted to it. Art marketing.com. I’ve got a book, I’m going to be teaching at the plein air convention, I’m going to be teaching Lunch and Learn art marketing sessions. And my big frustration is that artists want to be artists. And they don’t really want to learn marketing. They know they need to learn marketing. You need to understand it and learn it even if you have somebody else doing it for you because you need to control your messaging and make sure you’re not getting perceived as sleazy or otherwise. But I think that just just keep that in mind as you’re as you’re progressing. Anyway, that’s been the art marketing minute. I hope it helps.

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.

In the Art Marketing Minute Podcast with Eric Rhoads, you’ll learn how to sell your art, how to market your paintings, and everything else you need to know in order to have a successful art career. 

How can artists manage social media junk queries versus actual buyers? And how should you price your framed oil paintings? Eric Rhoads answers in this week’s Art Marketing Minute Podcast.

Get your copy of Eric’s #1 Amazon Best Seller, “Make More Money Selling Your Art: Proven Techniques for Turning Your Passion Into Profit” here.

The Art Marketing Minute Podcast has been named one of the 2023 “Top 25 Art Business and Marketing Blogs on the web” by FeedSpot.

Listen to the Art Marketing Minute Podcast: Episode #135 >

Click here to listen to this week’s Art Marketing Minute Podcast!

Submit Your Art Marketing Question:

What questions do you have about selling your art? Visit artmarketing.com/questions or e-mail Eric at [email protected] (include your name and where you’re from) to hear your question answered on an upcoming Art Marketing Minute Podcast.

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:
You can send your questions to me [email protected]. And by the way, that’s a great resource artmarketing.com has lots of great articles for free. Okay, so the first question comes from Nancy Tyler in Dallas, Texas. I love going out to paint plein air and sell my work as a means to finance my trips and supplies. Many sales come through Instagram and Facebook from people that I’ve made connection with. Through my travels at outdoor events and finding the painting in their neighborhood. A question is how do I continue to engage these wonderful collectors on social media while discouraging the many many offers from those wanting to offer me ridiculous sums for my work as NFTs, cryptocurrency, bla bla bla bla bla. And it has become exhausting, explaining that I don’t deal in digital file sales and crypto and deleting their posts. Well, Nancy, it’s, it’s funny because it’s comes on the heels of my colleague Ali sent me a note that I had been somebody had hacked my account, and was pretending to be me and telling people that they had won prizes. And if they clicked on this link, they would collect their prizes. And then of course, it was some other kind of a scam. And I said, that’s the price of popularity. I mean, that’s the price of success, I suppose. And that is that you can’t avoid that stuff. If you’re on social media, and you’re getting some followers and people see that you’re eventually going to get hacked, and you’re gonna just have to deal with that stuff. As far as NFT’s go. The whole NFT thing is kind of, I don’t, from my perspective, kind of over maybe it’s not but, there’s a lot of artists are hearing from people saying, oh, I want to do NFT’s of your work, and then, they end up getting scammed, or I don’t think there’s very many people out there legitimately reaching out to artists and saying, I want to do NFT’s of your work. But quite frankly, I mean, you can do LFTs generate them with with AI now and come up with some pretty cool things and who needs who needs to do that. So, the people who’s spent millions or hundreds of million dollars on NFT’s most of them are burned pretty badly. Now most of them are you know, it’s not recovered. That could change. I don’t want to be a Luddite and say never, never say never. But right now, that kind of stuff is happening and, the whole idea of crypto. I love crypto. I think it’s really cool. But, it’s really easy to get scammed through people you there are legitimate places to go if you want to do nfts Do NFT marketplaces, if you want to do crypto do it yourself, do crypto marketplaces, but steady, steady. Be careful who you take advice from. I personally have been scammed. And I don’t want that to happen to you. But I do want to bring something up that you said I just want to you know, you said you love to go out painting and plein air and use it as a means of financing your trips and supplies. I think that’s that’s wonderful. But, you can go further than that if you want. And I think it’s nice that you look at it and say okay, this is a way to finance my trips and supplies but maybe, maybe you can do more with it. You can make more of a living with it that depends on you and what you want to do. But you also mentioned something else and that is let’s see here that that. Oh, let’s edit that out. So I want to touch on a couple other things you said your plein air painting and you’re selling via Facebook and Instagram from people you made a connection with when you were out plein air painting at events or otherwise, it’s worth pointing out because the sales that you’re getting from Facebook and Instagram may have more to do with the fact that you were out there they worked, saw your work in person, they met you in person you connected with them, they followed you, that may have more to do with it than just putting yourself out there on social media and hoping that somebody’s gonna spend money, it happens, it’s happened to me, it doesn’t happen a lot, it happens to some of my friends frequently, some of them not frequently, I think it depends on how good you are at working social media. But, there’s a lot of phony buyers out there, too, every single week, not a week goes by where I don’t get, hey, I love your artwork. And usually, it’s coming from social media, I love your artwork. And I’d like to, we’ve got a special anniversary coming up, it’s my wife’s birthday or something. And then they say they want to buy your painting, and then they cut a deal to buy your paintings and they send you a check, and you send them the painting, and then they overpay you on the cheque. And then you they say well just Venmo me the difference, I must have misunderstood, then you Venmo the money, they’ve got your painting, and then the cheque doesn’t clear. And this is a big scam. This is going on, every week, every week you get it. So it’s kind of like the Nigerian prince, it’s same kind of a thing. So be careful out there. But there are fundamentals in marketing that, no matter what the the hot thing of the moment is, these fundamentals really matter. We’re attracted to shiny objects, we assume because we have a few 1000 followers, or maybe even more than that, that everybody sees every post. And the reality is, it’s not true 2% to 3% of your followers ever see your posts ever? And only if you can increase your engagement levels? Do they start seeing a more if if Facebook or Instagram, same company, see you increasing the engagement levels? How many people comment how many things you comment back, that type of things, how many people share, then those engagement levels drive up, then you might go from 3% to 4%. And, if there are lots of things, lots of comments, lots of engagement, they might go to 5%, sometimes they go higher, but usually, we get a mistaken belief that we have a lot of followers and those people see everything we do, that’s just not true. It they’re people who have millions of followers, they have great results, because a small percentage of their people see every post or if they’re super, super popular, and it’s good for the platform than Instagram or Facebook will push them out more. But, when you have big numbers, you get small percentages, it still makes a big difference. When you have small numbers and you get small percentages, people not seeing things. So be careful about that, social media changes every three months, they’re always updating the algorithms, things always are changing. And most of us don’t have time to keep up on that. So there are experts out there that help you. But there are also experts out there that are willing to scam you. So be really careful about that. You can sell on social media, people do it. And don’t, don’t put it into things you can’t control. Put it into things you can control. There are things that are tried and true that have tribes of followers that are very specific to tribes of people who buy paintings, like the pages of, of my art magazines, the people there buy paintings, so you would kind of know that the likelihood of selling a painting is going to increase by being there. Whereas, you’re being random, just because you have a lot of followers doesn’t mean they’re people buy paintings. They might be other artists they might be who knows, there are a lot of people who, who, who follow for no reason. So they might like your artwork, but they’re never gonna buy anything. So keep that in mind.

Okay, the next question comes from Sally Dixon in Maine. I’m an impressionist plein air artists with 30 years experience. I have an art show coming up in November. How do I price my framed oil paintings? I have a website to backup my work. I’ve been in the Portland Art Gallery in Maine. I really want homes for these ocean scapes and landscapes and floral paintings. It’s a local art show at our library. So I want to price them reasonably well. I’m not sure what the question is. But let’s just talk about a couple of things. First off, let’s Congrats. Congrats on getting into an art show. That’s big deal. Thank you for pointing that out. How do I use set? How do I price my framed paintings? Does that mean that you also we’re gonna put paintings in the show that are not framed. I want to talk about frames. First off, the only things I believe, there are no rules. But the only thing I believe that you should be selling are framed paintings. Or if you have something unframed, and that might be matted prints, a lot of people sell matted prints at art shows and things like that. And you should be able to make a 600% markup, that’s the average automatic print, the cost of printing, unframed, you can make some good money on that, and to have a low price point, you might have $7 in it and sell it for $50, or something like that. So I want you to think of frames as a way to increase your profitability, and a way to increase the status of the painting, which increases your profitability a friend of mine recently sold. Recently, he told me he spent $7,000 to frame a painting, why would do not just put a $40 frame on it? Well, because he’s a high level artist he’s selling at a high level show is selling to people who have big money and big homes, and they want the best. And so you put a, you put a good frame on, it matters. I have a friend that owns a gallery, he had a painting in the gallery as a $2,000 painting, he had a frame on it didn’t sell for years. So he decided to send it back to the artist. And then he thought, now I’ll try a new frame. So he spent $4,000 on a single frame, put it back in the gallery, he said, Well, if I’m going to have a $4,000 frame, I need to raise the price. But he thought, well, it’s a beautiful frame, it looks completely different now. So stead of selling for $2,000, you put a $14,000 price tag on it 10,000 For the painting 4000 to get paid back for the frame sold first week, frames make a difference. I think that anything unframed devalues your work, if you have unframed paintings and you’re selling them cheap, you have frame paintings, you’re selling them for more money, it’s going to devalue your painting. So even if you’re saying these are my studies, these are not my best work. Don’t, don’t do that. So don’t stack them up and put them in a pile, don’t set a bunch of stuff on the ground, just treat them like they are paintings that deserve to be purchased. If they’re going to be in the show, put your best work out there and put, if you have to stack with more, or paintings, then frame them up and hang them up when you need to replace the others that are sold that have red dots on them. You also mentioned you want to price your work reasonably what does that mean? What is reasonable? Is, is reasonable. What’s reasonable to you? is reasonable. What’s reasonable to Bill Gates or Elon Musk? Is it you know, a lot of people say well, I want to price my work so that the average Joe who’s like me can afford it. But what about getting properly compensated for your time and your education and the amount of time you’ve spent learning paint learning painting? What about getting what if? What if this idea of pricing your paintings reasonably is more about your insecurity, that you can’t get a good price than it is about getting a good price? What if it’s about something completely different? You know, I hear this a lot people say I want a reasonably priced so just anybody can afford my work. But then they’re saying, Well, I would like to be able to go to the plein air convention or something, I can’t afford it. Well price your work higher, so you can afford it. And this is the big problem. Most artists I know underpriced their work. Most artists I know could double and or triple their work price and get it and probably not have any more price resistance. But most of them are like well, I don’t know, I think I could only afford this. So I want to make it affordable for everybody yet somebody could walk into your gallery and spend $40,000 on a painting, or 140,000 or 400,000. So just keep that psychology in mind that you might want to be thinking about why is it that you want to price things the way you are? Does somebody who’s going to a local library have no money? Yes, but there’s also people who go to a library local library who live in a in a $10 million house. So keep it in mind. Just try to think through what is being reasonable mean. Now, I want to meet my market. I want to give good value, but I also know that there are people who want things that are the best. There’s 10% Of all people who want the best. And so you might want to have something that those people want and price signals value. It’s documented, it’s tested. If you walk into an art gallery, and there’s $150,000 painting, next to an equally good painting, that’s $10,000. The $150,000 painting is the better painting and someone will buy that before they’ll buy the $10,000 painting could be an almost identical painting, but there’s something wrong with it, because this one’s 10. That one is 150,000. So just keep that in mind. All right. Anyway, that is the art marketing minute. Remember, pricing is emotional. So keep that in mind.

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.

In the Art Marketing Minute Podcast with Eric Rhoads, you’ll learn how to sell your art, how to market your paintings, and everything else you need to know in order to have a successful art career. 

How do you price your paintings (and not set the price too low)? And how can artists use AI for their business? Eric Rhoads answers in this week’s Art Marketing Minute.

The Art Marketing Minute Podcast has been named one of the 2023 “Top 25 Art Business and Marketing Blogs on the web” by FeedSpot.

Listen to the Art Marketing Minute Podcast: Episode # >

Click here to listen to this week’s Art Marketing Minute Podcast!

Submit Your Art Marketing Question:

What questions do you have about selling your art? Visit artmarketing.com/questions or e-mail Eric at [email protected] (include your name and where you’re from) to hear your question answered on an upcoming Art Marketing Minute Podcast.

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:
Okay, So we have a thing here. I don’t see the questions. I don’t prepare the questions. I am taking this off the top of my head, so I may completely blow it. But I’m basing this on a lifetime of experience in marketing, not necessarily all art marketing, but a lot of marketing. You could send your questions to meet [email protected]. Which by the way, artmarketing.com has a lot of really great stuff on it for free. Or you can come onto the podcast sometime and ask your questions, but just send a note to us, [email protected]. First question comes from Marine Shelton Wallace in Tennessee. And the question is, how do you know how to price your paintings? How do you know how to price your paintings and not price oneself too cheap? Well, pricing is the most it’s the biggest question I get, I get literally hundreds of questions about pricing all the time, nobody knows how to do pricing. And pricing is all emotion of very little logic. And the reason for that is that art is not something that is easy to compare to. I mean, it’s it’s easy to say, Okay, there’s a difference between a Volkswagen and a Honda, and a Rolls Royce and a Bentley and Lamborghini, and so on. There’s a difference. But a lot of that is actually psychological. I mean, what why is one car $30,000 And another car is $130,000. And another one is $600,000. At some point, there’s not that much better car under the hood, or that much better paint job. As a matter of fact, I heard a statistic this is probably dated, I know it’s dated. But at the time I heard this statistic a BMW seven series was selling for, I don’t know, let’s say $100,000. And a Bentley was selling for 250. And this the Bentley, the body and the chassis are very, very close to the same. And there was only at the time and $18,000 difference between manufacturing the BMW and the Bentley, made by the same company, yet one was twice or three times the price. Why is that? Well, Bentley is about status. I was looking at cars, it’s like a giant picture frame around you. Some people identify a you know, with a gold frame, other people identify with a, you know, no frame. So pricing is emotional, it’s about status. But it’s also there is some measurable quality, especially in a world of realism. In the abstract world, there’s, it’s hard to measure quality, because it’s all about pure creativity, where as you can tell if someone is good at drawing are good at painting. And of course, there’s a lot of different styles and what you love is going to resonate with you in a different way. But ultimately, there is a little bit of measurability, but not a lot because you have seen paintings and I’ve seen paintings, and I won’t mention names. But you’ve seen paintings a year ago, how did that person get so famous because their paintings don’t, to me don’t seem very wonderful. And yet people are spending big money on him. We have we see that all the time. I had an argument with not an argument. I had a discussion with an art gallery I was in and I went into the gallerist I was invited in and I said they said well, okay, what about pricing? I said, I would like to be the most expensive artist in the gallery. And they said, but you’re not the best artists in the gallery. I said who’s to say? And they said, Well, we don’t think you’re the best artists in the gallery are good, but you’re not great. I said, Well, I get that but someone is going to walk into that gallery who doesn’t know the difference? Who sees something that emotionally resonates with them and they’re gonna go, I want that. And if that person happens to be somebody who doesn’t have any price sensitivity than that, it really doesn’t matter. Now, they’re the things that you can do to elevate your price. Our branding, branding elevates your price if you are TL and Lawson You can get a whole lot more money for your paintings typically than I could Right, because everybody knows he’s a brilliant painter, everybody knows his work sells for big money, everybody knows that this guy is at the top of the game. And a lot of that happens over time, because of doing a lot of shows, developing his work. And also galleries and others advertising the work and branding the work and so on. Well, Lee, that’s not a word, he deserves it well. But there are people out there who can simply advertise their work and increase their prices, because people recognize their name. And when you’re in a situation and you have painting a and you have painting B and you have one who is not known, and one who is known and you like equally, the two paintings, you’re likely to choose the one that you know, because it’s like, when you go into a store, and you could buy a t shirt with no logo on it, for the same price as a t shirt with a logo on it, and you happen to identify with that brand. You’re sometimes you feel a little weird buying something without a logo on it. I’m the opposite. I don’t like to wear logos. I don’t like to advertise other people’s stuff with my money. But anyway, that works. So how do you price your work? Well, first off, when you’re starting out, you’ve got to get a feel for it, you just got to get used to selling work. And the environment has everything to do with the price that you’re gonna get, you’re not likely this is I can’t say this is totally true, but you’re not likely to get a 10,000 or $20,000 price for an eight by 10 or 2016 by 20 painting until you’ve got your brand developed or until you’re in a gallery that is selling other 16 or $20,000 painters. If you’re in your put at doing an art show in the local art center, everything in those in that environment is likely priced low. So, you might see some $50 paintings or $300 paintings. And if people are coming in there for Christmas sale, some people who don’t know the artists are going to just pick something they like, and they’re going to pick something that’s priced within their range. Other people are gonna go, Hey, I have no problem paying 350 or $1,000, or whatever it is. But when you start getting into the bigger money than other things factor in so if you’re like, just starting out, just start showing your work somewhere. And what I used to do is I just say to people, make me an offer. And the reason I did that is because I wanted to know what the market would bear. And while some people would come in and make me an offer of $50. And I’d take it and some people would come in and make me an offer $500 And I’d take it and sometimes I I’d say you know, that’s probably not enough. I was out painting in Banff and Lake Louise one day a guy came up to me and he said, So how long? Did it take you to do that painting? And I knew exactly where it was going. And I said, well, two hours and 20 years. He said What do you mean? I said 20 years to learn how to do it in two hours. And he said, Oh, okay. And he said, What would you take for that painting? I said, Well, I don’t really feel like I want to sell it because I’ll take it back. I want to keep it it’s a memory but I’ll take it back frame it, probably send it to my gallery, they’re gonna sell it for quite a bit of money. But, he says Well, would you take $50 for it, I said, Thank you know, but to him $50 was probably a lot of money. So you got to be really sensitive to those things. But, I think just experiment. If you read books on pricing, one of the things that they talk about is that you keep raising your prices until things don’t sell and when they don’t sell then you’re back off one step and that kind of determines your pricing TV companies do that all the time. So I think you just got to hit and miss try a lot of different things. There’s not an exact formula but if you want to sell things and advertise them brand yourself and do it over time, it doesn’t happen overnight. People don’t see everything every time you got to be out there. And environment makes a big difference. If you’re selling at a flea market, it’s a whole lot different environment than if you’re selling at the Palm Beach art show right? Is somebody who walked into the Palm Beach art show drop a quarter of a million dollars and not bat an eye where somebody might bat an eye spin and 20 at the flea market so environment makes big difference. brand makes a huge difference.

Okay, next question. We have had a lot of questions from people about AI. So we don’t have a specific person on this AI to help your marketing, how can AI help your business? Which AI software tool should I try? Well, first, let me just say this. A lot of people are coming out against AI, a lot of people think it’s terrible thing, that it’s gonna ruin the world, that it’s copying and stealing your stuff. And there are a lot of lawsuits flying around, and there’s gonna be a lot more of that before it all settles out. The same kind of thing happened when Macintosh first came out, and Photoshop first came out and the laser printer first came out, this is gonna be the death of graphic design. And, in some ways it was because a lot of people could do their own, but it just changed things it didn’t, it wasn’t necessarily the death of the reality is you can go into a program called mid journey, which I use all the time I use it pretty much every day, mid journey, I went into mid journey, and I said, I would like you to generate an image of two women standing by a lake with a mountain in the background, fall leaves on the ground and fall color. I would like them dressed in 1950s outfits. And I would like it to be in the style of paint by number. And it spit out four images. I didn’t like them. So it’s been up for more informed, more informed more, and I picked one and I used it to promote fall color week. perfectly legal, perfectly able to do that. And it was it was almost perfect. Sometimes they’re not almost perfect, but it’s getting better and better. In terms of ways to do it. There are AI programs now that you can use to build your social media. The key to all AI is what they call the prompt. And the prompt means that how you ask the question is how you is going to give you the right response. If you say, give me an image of two women painting by a lake. That’s one thing if I give them more specific instructions, and that’s another, so I use AI on a lot of different things. First off, I use AI to write things for me. If I have a long presentation I need to create, I’ll go into AI and I’ll say build me a presentation and I want a heading over each paragraph and I want 10 paragraphs. And I want 10 steps towards this particular thing and write it for me. And you know 80 percent of the time it’s like really, really good. Sometimes it’s not. And so you can use things like that for preparing presentations, you can actually use them to build slides. Now you can use them to build video. There are programs that you can use to build out your social media, I have gone in and said okay, this is the message I want to send build me 15 social media posts. And then it’ll give me ideas for images, it’ll, it’ll build the social media posts, and then it’ll give me ideas for images, then I go into another AI program like majority mid journey, I’ll say, build me this image. I have not yet figured out how to build my own image into those images. But it’s coming AI has that capability. I did get very close with mid journey. And so there’s a lot of things, I use a chat GPT I have a membership, I use my journey. I am really in love with one called barred by Google that was really, really terrific. And again, there’s API’s for a lot of different things, we have AI programs that work with some of our software. So if somebody’s buying a video, that, that ai ai will say, Oh, you bought a portrait video, here are three other portrait videos you might like. So it’s a recommendation engine, this is changing the world, it’s changing marketing, it’s gonna get to a point where it’s going to be really, really, really a good tool, and it’s already pretty good. I probably save all right now I probably save 10 hours a week using AI that’s 10 hours that I’m getting back to use for other things. And I can see coming to a point where it’s going to save me 50% of my time. You can even say build me a calendar to do this to do that. Schedule this I mean, you can use it for almost anything it’s going to get to a point where it’s going to become very valuable. So you could you could do it say build me an ad, use this image and build me an ad concept. Give me 13 headlines. I went through I wanted to chat GPT He, and I needed some quotes for social media. So I said go to my, my daily show on YouTube, art marketing, I mean art school alive, and go in there and pull 50 quotes from that. And it did. And I had them in three minutes. And then I said, Okay, go into my blog, send a coffee, and pull 50 quotes from that, and put my name at the end. And it did. And so I was able to use those in social media. And then you can use AI to import them into Canva. And Canva will create images at Canva has AI now, so there’s a lot of different things you can use. So I know it’s not specific. It’s very random, but it’s going to change things. The all things change all the time. And change is good. It’s beautiful. It’s nothing to be frightened of. is AI going to take over the world and eliminate human beings? Well, some people think so. And if so, it’s been nice knowing you. Okay, that’s the art marketing minute. I’m Eric Rhoads. I hope it helps you.

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.