New earrings using an old technique with new materials
I’m doing my very best to absorb some of the most relevant information about selling products online. The internet has literally exploded with blogs about selling your art online, and with handmade craft shopping sites. When I first joined ETSY several years ago, it was a very new venue, not much traffic and lots of promises. Today, ETSY is the site to go to for unusual handmade items, and if you’re an artist or craftsperson it’s the place to be seen and to sell you wares.
There are thousands of artists on ETSY, finding your niche and actually selling your art on ETSY is an art itself. I’ve been on the site for several years and I still haven’t mastered the techniques I need to make it. Fortunately, I do art shows here in my city, that makes up the bulk of my business. Because I’m a competitive person, I really want to make it on ETSY, I want to be one of the star sellers, I want to be interviewed for their blog and I want to be able to cut down on my local shows and do more online selling.
So I’m reading the blogs about selling, advertising, writing and etc…Some of the best I’ve found are:
ArtBizBlog – Alyson B. Stanfield is a former museum curator turned artist coach. She teaches artists how to promote themselves and their art. Something I certainly can use in my ETSY venture as well as my career offline. Although the two, online and offline are meshing into one more and more. Anyway, check out the ArtBizBlog for yourself, you’ll be very happy you did.
This link is from the ETSY forums, if you’re not familiar with the ETSY forums, and you sell on ETSY, you’re really missing one of the best free tools available for marketing your site and for finding resources from other sellers. Take for example this list, people on ETSY are very comitted to helping each other, their dedication really impresses me. In some ways, it reminds me of the Polymer Clay community of artists from years back, sharing freely of our experiments and techniques as we explored this new medium. The link above is comprised of places to advertise, list and market your art, lots of work went into the list, it would take you days to compile such a list on your own.
And finally there’s Meylah, the mother of all how-to sites for artists selling their wares online, in fact that is their mission statement:
Here at Meylah, our goal is to help creative folks succeed in building their businesses online. We know it can be tough, but with our weekly entrepreneurial advice and social networking know-how, you’ll be one step closer to success.
You could probably limit yourself to this site only, and you would have all of the advice you ever need to start and be successful online, really, the links alone will keep you pretty busy. So, what are you waiting for? join the party and explore how to sell online or how to pump up your sales on ETSY or one of the other selling venues. Next time, I’ll explore some of the most popular selling venues with pros and cons of all of them.
