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Lesson Info

Make Money Selling Your Own Work

this is a similar segment to the one we did yesterday um on um the Fine art World. I'm gonna be giving you a lot of information. You're going to have time to answer questions. But um this is really input for you, this is information, this this session falls in this sort of research goal setting and planning wrong here. Um And I'm gonna give you information that's potentially gonna help you revise or change your plan or update your plan with information um so that you can take action. So In this segment and by the way I'm sitting right now because my 46 year old lower back was hurting from standing so much in the last two days. So I make it up in a little bit if I feel like I need to have some more physical energy. But for now I'm gonna sit. I hope um that this is a segment that is um exciting and interesting for you because again the internet, we're in this time where you get to take control over a lot of things that formerly somebody else had to do for you. And now the internet allows...

us um not just to promote our own work but to sell our own work and those things go hand in hand. So I'm really hoping that you get a lot out of this segment. And here we're talking about selling physical work. So Originals, Prince if you're a potter, your ceramic pots, if you're a photographer prints of your photographs, if you're a painter reproductions or originals or products that have your art on them. Um If you're a graphic designer products with your designs, posters with your designs not the rights to your work. Or images of your work. We're gonna talk that's um where somebody else buys them. We're talking about selling your own work physical things that you're gonna send in the mail to somebody as opposed to the rights to your work. Okay. Everyone understand the distinction. All right. Mhm. Okay. So the distinction here between selling physical work, actual paintings or drawings or print reproductions and selling the rights to images of your work is important. But another important distinction is selling your own work versus having a gallery or an art dealer sell your work. Which is sort of what we were talking about yesterday. You know that's why you get gallery representation. Um Or that's why you show your work at a number of galleries. Even if the gallery is not exclusive, these people sell your work for you have shows. Even when you don't have work in a show, they're still always working to sell your work. They take your work to art fairs. Um That kind of thing. But here we're talking about the direct sale of your work where you are acting as your own cellar. In other words through etc. Or other online venues which we'll talk about first through art or craft fairs. And I don't and I mean art a craft fairs with the small A. N. C. Things like renegade and bizarre bizarre and others. Um as opposed to art fairs with a capital A. Which are unique gallery representation for shows like art basel and the B. In L. A. And venice. Um Those are more sort of high end high brow art fairs were talking about in this case regular everyday craft and art fairs in your community through wholesale to stores and also through commissions. Okay so the first I think we're gonna talk about today selling through an online venue wholesale to a storefront. Either brick and mortar online. Now there are both some stores have both an online store and a brick and mortar. Brick and mortar means a physical storefront on a street in a city or town consignment commissions. Art and craft fairs like renegade. So 1st 1 sell your work online. Yeah so There are three different kinds of online venues. one is an online marketplace gonna talk about that first and the most common one is etc. Stand alone store solution Examples of that are big cartel or Shopify or even society six. Those are places where you can set up a shop but you're not necessarily part of a larger marketplace. Um E commerce on your site. That's where you build a shop into your site and sell your work directly through your website. If you have a shopping cart solution built into your website. Okay. Um Online marketplace. So important things to know in these situations. People can find you through the marketplace and that is because everyone who posts a listing on a place like etc. There work. They're listing is included in the, in the searchable database. Their inventory is included in the searchable database. So think of it as a giant online shopping mall. Another thing we also know is that these places our etc. Now has like some millions of sellers and they just changed their policy and now things don't have to be handmade. So there's all kinds of things going on with etc. I still love etc. Um I think that she's a great place and it has a great support network for people who sell and it's important to keep your shop uh updated um and to keep your stuff well promoted and there's all kinds of tricks to doing that. Um, but it's saturated so you're competing with a lot of other people in the search engine. Um, but there is a built in e commerce system, you don't have to know anything about anything. You literally set up your shop and all of, you know, you, I think you have to enter your Paypal account information and that's it and you can even, and then there might, if you want to take credit cards there might be something else you have to enter but really easy and it's all set up for you. Um I love the features and etc in particular that are like you can calculate postage when you're shipping and you can make shipping labels. Um you get data like in the moment, data about how many people are visiting your shop and where they're coming from, things like that. So, and there's all kinds of people there to help you, not just people who work at, etc. But there are all these forums, these seller forums where people are actually complaining about things they don't like. So there are all these kinds of ways that you can get support as a seller through, etc. Cost is based on listings, which is minimal and a percentage of your sales. So It's like 20 cents now per listing and you can post as many things as you want. It used to be cents per item. And now if you list five prints in a shop, it's 20 cents whether you list five or one and then a percentage of your sales. So the more sales you make, the more fees you incur. Um but they're they're not huge. They linked to social media. So sharing is easy. Again, similar to the blog. People can share your shop on their facebook page. Um and there's other ways for people to sort of favorite you and like you standing out can be challenging as I mentioned earlier, there's so many people selling stuff and at the end of this segment I'm gonna talk about tips for, for having a successful shop, whether it's on Etsy or anywhere. Um there's a catch 22 You join our marketplace like Etsy and people may find you who have never heard of you before. I would say probably 50% of my sales are people who just who aren't coming from my website or instagram or blog or whatever. They're just searching for art that I've managed to, I have enough keywords, you know, that they're looking for, that, they find me, you know, they might be searching for um inspirational quotes and I do sell a few of those in my shop and I've tagged things and because I have a fairly active shop, my stuff comes up pretty high on the search results. So, um standing out can be challenging. But um, the great thing about etc. Also is that it's a fantastic, fantastic opportunity um, to um, to share your work with people who may never have seen it before, including people like curators and art directors. They don't necessarily go to etc. To buy things. They go to Etsy to find talent, people who want to wholesale things. Look on Etsy. So lots of different reasons that people, we'll find you on Etsy. This is a screenshot of my Etsy shop. Um, you'll see here, this is a screenshot of Claudia Pearson's Etsy shop. We we talked about Claudia yesterday. You can see that my Etsy shop and Claudia's Etsy shop look pretty much the same except our headers are different, They're the same size and that's one of the things about etc. That is fairly limiting, right? You can't design it yourself. Everything looks the same the way your shop looks, everybody's shop looks the same. Your products are different, your header is different, but your customer service messages may be different. Your descriptions are different, but it's a very sort of standard format and it actually hasn't changed a lot in the last few years. Okay, so, so that's another thing to know about etc. If you want to have a site or a shop that has a really unique design, you need to go to another format. A lot of people, as I was saying yesterday have both an Etsy shop and a built in store solution. Or they have an Etsy shop and big cartel shop so that they have and there's a place, there's multiple places for people to both find them and options for where people want to buy. Some people don't want to sign up for an Etsy account. They don't want to buy original artwork and at sea they feel better about buying it somewhere else. So you might consider having two different kinds of shops. So in addition to the marketplace, Etsy is the most popular, we have stand alone store solutions. So a standalone store solution is something like big cartel or Shopify. It's a great option if you're not interested in a cellar community like Etsy or a marketplace like etc. And many people would prefer to stand alone, but not necessarily have a shopping cart integrated into the code of their own site. Examples of standalone shopping solutions, Big cartel Shopify. Um They offer design templates, hosting and shopping carts all in one. So again, super easy to set up. You um you pay based on what the shop options you choose. I used to have a big cartel shop, I don't anymore. I decided to integrate everything back into my auntie shop. It was just easier for me to manage with my busy schedule and I thought big cartel was great. Um but so when you sign up, you it'll say it'll say do you want, there are different kinds of accounts and it might be like gold, silver and bronze. Let's just say, I don't think that's exactly what it is, but something like that. And if you sign up for the gold account, you get all the bells and whistles, you can list unlimited products. You can, you have probably more options in terms of um the freedom is you have to design, make the design your own um the more expensive the account you sign up for, the more options you have, if you have a standard account, you can maybe only list a handful of things. Um and your people can only see, you can only maybe upload like one or two pictures of the item. So your options are more limited, so you pay for what you get, But when you sell something, there's no fee taken away. Your fees are all about like the monthly fee you pay and I was paying about $10 a month. I think I had like the lowest cost option that they offered. Um, and your design expertise can come in handy. I'm going to show you next, a screenshot of a really awesome big cartel shop. You can really personalize now through sites like big cartel, especially if you pay money for more bells and whistles. Um, some offer marketing tools, like social media sharing and stuff. But the downside compared to a place like Etsy is that you are responsible for driving the traffic to your shop. It's not, you're, you're, people might, people can only find you outside of the marketplace where in etc. They find you inside the marketplace. People who don't already know who you are. Another option is e commerce on your site. So that just means you're hosting your own shop on your own site. With a built in shopping cart solution really can be very expensive to hire a developer to integrate a shopping cart into the code of your website. So just know that sometimes like five figures. If it's something if you're at a point in your career where this feels really important to you and your brand, especially if you sell products and not necessarily artwork and you really want your shop to be integrated into your brand and your site and you don't want people to be leaving your site and you want to keep all the traffic on your site. It can be a great investment. They have great features like automatic emails and inventory systems that don't necessarily exist in some of these other stand alone and marketplace systems. Um and the best part is I mentioned is that you can completely integrate your shopping into your brand, keeps people on your site and not going to places like big cartel er etc. The onus is on you to drive traffic to your shop and if you have a built in audience for your work, um this is great. Um this is my friend, Claudia Pearson, stand alone, just a screenshot. She has an Etsy shop and a built in shopping cart solution. She does a lot of wholesale. She um you know, has a lot of people who come to her site and so she's integrated a shopping cart solution into her website in addition to having an Etsy shop also. So there's a couple different ways people can buy stuff from her. Um and I'm sure that you know that she's probably gonna have some systems set up to make sure that she's tracking the inventory in both places.