How to Market Art Online and Become a Favorite Artist

Everyone knows that if they want to market art (such as textile/ rug design patterns) online, they have to start with their website. However, everyone has a website these days so if you want to sell art it's important to also market that art in many other ways online. Some of these ways are designed specifically to bring people to your website, whereas other ways are designed to directly attract a buyer for your products. You should make use of as many online marketing tactics as possible if you want to market your art well online.

But let's get down to the basics. You want to learn how to sell art. First of all, before you market your art in any way online, you need to have a great website. Much of your online marketing is going to be about getting traffic to your website so you need to make sure that what the customers see when they get there is something that they'll want to buy. You should also make it easy for them to buy through the website using some form of online cart and ordering system. Additionally, you should make sure that your website is keyword-optimized for search engine friendliness so that search engines will pull it up when people look for items related to your art. (For a textiles company, this means including a lot of content with keywords like "textile", "textile design", "rug design", etc.)

Related to your website but to be used as a separate marketing tool is creating a blog. You should create a blog that you update daily with information related to your company. This blog sets the tone for your product but more importantly, it brings people back to the site on a regular basis. You want to know how to sell art; this is it. If they're at the site, they'll buy. If they come back often enough, you just might become a favorite artist of theirs. You can use the blog to boost your keywords. You'll also need to do online marketing for the blog. This is done through the use of social networking sites (such as Digg, StumbleUpon and Del.icio.us). It is also done by visiting blogs related to yours and leaving comments on them.

The next thing that you'll want to do to market your art online is to develop a link building campaign. The goal of this campaign is to get other high-ranking sites and blogs to add a link to your site. This can be done through making use of your existing contacts as well as through direct marketing to these sites. You can develop a short letter of introduction as to why this site should add your link and offer to add a reciprocal link on your site.

This leads to the next type of online marketing that you can do which is an email campaign. Gather together all of the contacts that you have and email them regularly with information about your company. This may be an announcement about the company (such as a first anniversary or new design), a promotional special, a link to a particularly good blog post or anything else that people you know might be interested in reading. Send these out on a regular basis (monthly is good, weekly may be good if you can come up with enough interesting content). Make sure your email signature has your website and blog url. Also make sure to remind your email contacts to pass along the information to their contacts if they like it. You may not even know that you're their favorite artist but they'll still spread the word.

You should also begin to make use of different classified advertisement sites to let people know that your work is out there. A great one is Craig's List. They have a community section for each city and within that is a link for artists. Artists check this out to see what's going on in the community. You can post regularly about new designs that you have, collaborative work you would consider, your own favorite artists list and anything else that might interest the artist community.

These are just a few of the ways that you can go about marketing your art online. The options are really only limited by the time that you have, the effort that you are willing to put in and your knowledge of Web 2.0. Do your research regularly into updated tips for online marketing and commit yourself to developing your online business. You should see your success grow! And that's how to sell art online.