Ways For Artists To Make Money Online

You can have a dozen online stores, all filled with fantastic art, but what good is it if no one can find your online store? In order to actually make money from your art online, you need to also know how to make your online store stand out from the crowd and be seen in the search engines, so people can find your stores.

Every online artist should have some marketing training. I myself tried dozens of things to get more traffic and sales to my online stores, and was ready to pull my hair out in frustration. It just seemed like no matter how hard I worked, nothing helped.

Then in total frustration, I decided to get into affiliate marketing and put my energy into that rather than wasting any more time on my art, which just wasn't selling. I started studying how to do affiliate marketing and after a lot of false turns I started thinking maybe affiliate marketing was just as difficult as selling my art.

Here is the thing, I am the worlds biggest skeptic when it comes to all these programs and systems for making money online. The truth is that most of them are just scams that help the guy selling the program get rich, but don't help you actually learn how to do it yourself. Then there are the other ones that might work if you have a few thousand dollars to invest...well I sure didn't.

A friend told me that a program called "One Week Marketing" was different and had changed his life as well as changed the way he marketed his products online, and that making those changes had actually worked and he was really making money online. He also told me that this wasn't a "get rich quick" scheme, that it was more like a shortcut that actually gives you the tools you need to succeed online and get real traffic to your sites.

Well, I finally broke down and purchased "One Week Marketing" myself...and yes it really did change my life and the way I marketed myself online. The thing I like about "One Week Marketing" is that the marketing methods you learn can easily be adapted to promoting your own products, which if you are an artist like me, is your artwork. This program teaches you how to get real traffic to your online stores, which equals sales, which means you are finally really making money online.

I don't normally endorse anything like this, because most of the "make money online" stuff is a scam. This is different, it's more like a tool box with instructions that actually teach you how to use the tools inside. As a fellow artist you know that having the right tool to do the job makes all the difference. You can't pound in a nail with a wash cloth and you can't wash the dishes with a hammer. So if you're tierd of broken dishes, check out One Week Marketing today!

I've been using cafepress for quite a few years now and really like it. It was one of the first t-shirt print on demand companies out there and it gets a lot of traffic. It also has a lot of artists making designs, so the competition is pretty fierce. So getting traffic to your particular store requires you to also create outside links through blogging and advertising, but there are lots of free ways to do that.

Cafepress offers a very small free store, but I recommend getting a premuim shop. It only costs a few dollars a month per shop, and it enables you to offer so much more. Plus once you start making commisions, they just take the small fee right out of that.

Some people like to have lots of different cafepress shops, each with it's own little specialty. I've tried that, but found the cost per shop was eating up my profits. For me, having just one gigantic shop works best.

Imagekind is a sister site to cafepress, where artists can display their artwork in online galleries. Imagekind then offers print on demand copies of your artwork to the online world. The also offer framing, matting, high quality greeting cards and lots of print options for people interested in purchasing your art.

Image kind offers one free gallery, but you can purchase a gallery upgrade for a low monthly fee that gives you unlimited galleries, so you can display different types of art.

I love all of Imagekinds framing options that make the artwork look really nice. Imagekind prints look fantastic and just like the other print on demand companies, you can set your own pricing for your commision on all sales.

I love Zazzle...It's even easier to use than cafepress and zazzle offers a much wider selection of products you can put your art on. Zazzle also has excellent easy ways to help artist get more traffic to their stores.

Zazzle is fun to use, with lots of model choices for your designs and easy ways to change the background color on your products. And it's totally free to open a big multi-product store.

Check out all the cool things you can do with your art at zazzle!

There are a lot more sites just like the ones I use that specialize in showcasing and helping artists sell their artwork. I just showed you the tip of the iceberg by showing the sites that I personally use.

These sites are fantastic places for artist to show off and sell their art. Most of them offer free or very low cost galleries or stores. They also have easy to use formats that make it fun to put your art online. Most of them also have marketing resources that you can use like buttons and banners for your blogs and websites.

Getting traffic to your new stores is the trick, and for that you need to spend some time learning how to get the search engines online to find your stores and direct people to them. For that I personally recommend One Week Marketing which is actually an affiliate marketing guide, but the methods you learn can easily be converted to driving more traffic to your online stores.

I like etsy for selling the originals of my artwork and for selling my other types of art. I use my etsy store to showcase my Art Quilts and chrochet work.

There are all kinds of hand-crafted art at Etsy. From beadwork, to dolls, to hand sewn clothing...if you hand-make it, then you can sell it at Etsy.

Starting an Etsy Store is very easy...you just upload photos of what you want to sell and add a description and price and you are good to go. The shop itself is free at etsy, but they charge a tiny fee per item that you list. I listed almost 100 items one dat for less than $10.00, so it is very affordable. Etsy doesn't charge monthly fees, it's just the one time tiny listing fee...pretty awesome.

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The Artist has complete control over what they write and how they present it. Squidoo has an easy to use format that makes the lens posibilities endless.

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