Even if selling your art is not the main reason for creating it in the first place, you are probably still going to want to sell your work, even if only for purely practical reasons. If you are making art for a living, then not only do you have to sell it, but you have to sell a significant amount of it at a high enough price to pay your bills. Whatever the reason for creating art, most of us either want or need to sell it too, and no artist today can say they are doing this as effectively as they might without tapping into the vast online market.
The internet opens up a huge new audience for artists, potentially putting their artwork in front of millions of people from all around the world. The potential is clearly there, but not everyone understands what is involved in online promotion and actually getting their art seen by the art enthusiasts of cyberspace.
It is a fairly obvious thing to say that all artists should have a personal website to promote their art, but it is not quite as simple as that. I know lots of artist that have lovely looking websites that get hardly any visitors. If you have plenty of customers anyway and just want to refer them to your site as a kind of online catalogue, then that is fine, but that is not what I mean when I talk about promoting your work online.
The thing you really need is visitors from search engines. For example, if you make charcoal portraits, what you want is for someone entering �charcoal portraits?into Google to be presented with a list of websites, including yours on the first page. This gives you a steady stream of free visitors to your site, and you know they are already interested in what it is you do. Finding visitors who have been searching for something you offer is crucial, as they are far more likely to make a purchase than anyone else.
The other thing you should get from your website is an income. Your website should make you money even if you sell no artwork. Again, this depends on getting visitors. Any website with a good turnover of visitors can make money. As artists, most of us want to be independent and make money from our artistic endeavours alone. A good website can help you achieve this by becoming an online business in its own right.
In learning how to create a website for my own artwork, I discovered that creating the actual site was only a tiny part of what was involved in getting onto the front page of Google. My trial and error approach meant I spent an inordinate amount of time finding things out and having to re-do all or part of my site many times over. The problem was what is known as search engine optimization, which is about building your site in a search engine friendly way right from the start. Only by doing this can you be sure of having lots of free visitors from search engines.
The basic processes involved in getting a website up and running are relatively straightforward anyway, but there are lots of different things you need to attend to, and it can be helpful to use some of the tools and packages available that can seriously cut down the time and effort you need to put in. Unless you want to spend more time on your PC than on your art, a little help is essential.
Website design itself does not have to be complicated, and there are many tools that can make this part of the job easy. Help is also available with the various aspects of search engine optimization, and there is even a package that includes absolutely everything you need to create and promote your own website. With the right kind of help, you do not need any technical knowledge at all to create a profitable website, without paying for expensive web design.
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