How To Sell Drawings Online By Building A Strong Online Presence

Many graphite artists do not think it is possible to sell their drawings online and think there is no market for them.

I am here to tell you that they are wrong, and there is an art market for selling drawings online.

Within my first year of starting my online graphite business, I had commissions ordered two years in advance.

I had people who purchased a commissioned drawing and knew they had to wait two years to complete it.

I could accomplish this significant feat because I started a successful online art business 15 years ago, so I know digital marketing.

You can sell drawings online.

The online art world is booming, and it is time for all artists to take advantage of the times.

All you need to do is find the people interested in the style of art you create and build a robust online presence.

When you are finished reading this post, you will have a clear understanding of how to sell your drawings online by building a robust online presence.

You will no longer be asking yourself, “Can I sell art online?”

Building A Strong Online Presence – Branding

Entrepreneur.com defines Branding as

The marketing practice of creating a name, symbol or design that identifies and differentiates a product from other products. An effective brand strategy gives you a major edge in increasingly competitive markets.

You can read more by visiting the Entrepreneur’s post Branding.

Branding your business is one of the essential steps you need to take to build an online presence.

Your goal is to have people identify your brand on multiple mediums like blogs, social media, and video.

Before developing a brand for your art business, you need to have a clear vision of what you want.

Start By Defining Your Goals

Do you want to find buyers for your drawings?
Are you planning on selling your drawings at local events and want to build a following?
Would you like to own a website and sell your drawings on your site?
Would you like to build a following on social media?
Would you like to sell giclee limited edition prints of your original drawings?
How much money would you like to earn from selling your drawings?
How many original and giclee prints would you have to sell to reach your goals?

Your art marketing strategies start by having a clear vision of your objectives.

Every plan you develop should direct you towards your end goal.

Related Resources:

How to Write Goals You Can Achieve Workbook
Annual Art Business Review Workbook
Artist Goals Planners
How to Write Goals online video course

Discover Your Unique Voice

The next step is to discover your unique voice so you can start to separate yourself from all of the other graphite artists online.

Start by answering these questions about who, what, where, how, and why.

Who are you?
What are your morals and values?
What message would you like to get across?
What type of personality do you have?
Are you known to be a serious person or someone who likes to joke around and have fun?
Does your artwork reflect your personality?
Why are you an artist?
Why do you use graphite as a medium?
Why do you want to sell your drawings online?
How do you create your drawings?
Where do you create your drawings?

The answers you provide to these questions will help you to create a brand that will reflect you as an artist and your artwork.

This information will help you to attract your target audience.

Who Is Your Target Audience

Now that you have a clear vision of who you are and what message you want to convey with your art, it is time to find your target audience.

Your target audience will be a group of people who are interested in what you have to offer.

The number of internet users worldwide in 2017 was 3.58 billion, according to Statista.

It is safe to say that with over 3 billion internet users worldwide, a group of people are interested in the art style you create.

I would lie to you if I told you that finding your target audience is easy.

To be honest, it is hard work, and finding your target audience will be something you will be working on for as long as you are selling drawings online.

To start, you will have to identify your niche.

According to Wikipedia, the market defines as:

The product features aimed at satisfying specific market needs, as well as the price range, production quality and the demographics that is intended to impact. It is also a small market segment. … Every product can be defined by its market niche.

Developing a niche marketing strategy will help you to identify and attract your target audience.

Answering the questions below will help you to understand who your audience is and where you can find them.

Who are the people interested in your drawings?
What do they do? Are they in school, or college or do they have an occupation?
What age group are they?
What are their hobbies?
Why would your drawings appeal to them?
Where do they hang out online?
Where do they live?
What is their household income?
What is their relationship status?
Do they have children?
What social media sites do they visit?
What blogs do they read?

At this point, you have enough information to create a visual brand that will connect you with your audience.

Study Your Competition

Learning who the competition is is an essential strategy for every business.

Benefits Of Studying Your Competition:

You can identify what marketing strategies are working well for them. You can create ways you can make those strategies better.
You will be able to find your target audience by following artists who have the same style you do.
You will identify the best social media platforms to market.
You will have a better understanding of pricing your drawings.

Finding who your competition is easy.

Go to KeySearch, click Explorer, type in the URL of your online store, and click search.

Scroll down to see a list of your top competitors.

Artist Brand Checklist

Below are the key areas you will want to focus on when creating your brand.

Use this list as a checklist, so you do not miss any important areas.

Logos
Banners
Symbols
Colors
Font style
Imagery
Illustrations
Mission Statement
Slogan
Content

If you are finding it challenging to build a brand, you might be interested in Create an Artist Brand Workbook.

Artist Website

Your artist’s website is your online store.

Your artist website will become where people learn more about you as an artist and purchase your products.

If you do not have a website, I strongly recommend building one.

Third-party sites were good years ago, but they are becoming overpopulated. It is becoming more cost-efficient owning your site.

One more reason you want to own an artist’s website is that you will have control of how you want to brand your online business.

You will not be limited to what other sites offer and what they allow you to do.

BlueHost makes it easy to start a WordPress site with its one-click WordPress installation. After purchasing your domain name and hosting from BlueHost, click on the one-click WordPress installation, and you will have your site live in minutes. It is that simple.

Learn how easy it is to start a WordPress website with this video.

Related Resources:

Artist Website Checklist

Here is an artist website checklist to ensure you have everything your site needs to perform properly.

A secure, well-designed theme for navigation and page layouts.

I have found StudioPress Themes for WordPress to be the best quality themes available, and they are the themes I use for my websites.

SEO Friendly

I recommend Yoast SEO Plugins for WordPress SEO. There is a free and a premium plugin to choose from.

Artist blog

The content you write for your artist blog will be the fuel that drives traffic to your site. No matter how nice your site looks, you will not sell drawings online if no one visits your store.

Take the 28 Day Blogging Challenge for Visual Artists to build an artist blog that generates a lot of traffic.

Social Integration

Make it easy for people to follow you on the social media platforms you are marketing on. Studio Press themes provide social integration.

Social Share Buttons

Make it easy for your readers to share your content on their favorite social media sites.

I have tried many social share plugins over the years and found Social Warfare to be the best.

Store module

WooCommerce makes it easy to sell products on WordPress.

How To Add And Manage Products In WooCommerce

How To Add WooCommerce WordPress Categories

Portfolio Module

A portfolio will make it easy for your audience to see your drawings.

About Me Page
Contact Page
Email Optin

OptinMonster is a powerful plugin that makes it easy to collect emails from your site.

Related Resource:

How To Create A Successful Art Newsletter

If you want to sell original art online, you must make an online presence.

You need to have your drawings seen by as many people as possible.

Social media is a great tool to help you build brand awareness.

The first step is creating a profile on all major social networks.

You will not start posting on all of them at first, but you want to set up accounts on them.

When you have finished setting up your accounts, take some time to review them and find where your audience is.

Search for graphite artists on all of the platforms you have joined and note how their audience interacts with them.

Now pick one social media site you would like to start with.

Before posting on the platform, take some time to listen to the social conversation.

Study the top graphite artist’s pages on the platform you will be working on.

Are they engaging with their audience regularly?
What type of content are they publishing?
Do they publish text, images, videos, drawing in progress, and blog posts?

Learn how to market on the platform.

You are ready to start a marketing strategy that will produce positive results.

When you feel your social media page is running on autopilot, follow the same steps on a different platform.

Marketing Art On Facebook

Facebook is a social media powerhouse and might be the best social media for you to start on.

I do have to mention that it is becoming more challenging to build a following on Facebook, but there is still an opportunity for you to make a solid fanbase.

Related Resources:

Marketing Art On Instagram

Instagram has become very popular with artists and photographers.

It only makes sense because Instagram is a visual social media platform.

People will follow you on Instagram to admire your Instagram art gallery.

Related Resources:

Promote Your Art On Pinterest

Even though Pinterest is not a social media platform (Pinterest is a search engine), you will want to take advantage of the platform.

Pinterest will drive tremendous traffic to your artist’s website if you develop a Pinterest marketing strategy.

The best news about Pinterest is that a Pinterest scheduling tool (Tailwind) will schedule your pins at the best times so more people will see your drawings and blog posts.

Related Resources:

Sell Art Online Free With An Artist’s Blog

At this point, you have built a website and accounts set up for all major social media platforms.

The next step is a step you will be working on every day for as long as you sell your drawings online.

You will be focusing on generating traffic to your website.

This is accomplished by writing content and a lot of it.

Your artist blog will be the fuel that drives traffic to your art listings.

Why do people go online?

According to Moz:

There are three types of search queries people generally make:

“Do” Transactional Queries: I want to do something, such as buy a plane ticket or listen to a song.

“Know” Informational Queries: I need information, such as the name of a band or the best restaurant in New York City.

“Go” Navigation Queries: I want to go to a particular place on the Internet, such as Facebook or the homepage of the NFL.

You can read more by visiting How People Interact With Search Engines

Your job is to create content that will be valuable to your target audience.

You do not have to post daily, but you should be consistent with your posting schedule.

Here are some blogging strategies to help you get started:

What type of topics should graphite artists write about?

Write about your art journey
What inspires you to be an artist
Artists you look up to
Your artwork
Your artistic style and techniques
About the subjects, you draw
About the tools you use
How to care for drawings
Write well-written art descriptions

How to write content your audience will read?

Write for your audience, not you
Don’t be perfect, be yourself
Write original content

Take the 28 Day Blogging Challenge for Visual Artists to build your following faster.

Related Post – How To Sell Products Online Free

Keyword Research

It takes more than just writing blog posts for free organic traffic (traffic generated from search engines.)

Have you heard the term keywords?

SEO keywords are phrases in your content that make it possible for your target audience to discover you via search engines.

Your target audience uses specific words and phrases in Google’s search to find new art.

They will never discover you online if you do not use the exact keywords. They will find the artists writing blog posts with those specific words.

How can you find the best keywords for your art blog posts?

There are many SEO and keyword tools available.

Free Keyword generating tools:

Google Search Console
Google Keyword Planner
Ubersuggest
Manual Google Search

Premium Keyword Tools:

SEMRush

Final Thoughts On How To Sell Drawings By Building A Strong Online Presence

Selling drawings online can be very rewarding, but it does take a lot of hard work to separate yourself from the crowd.

Stick to the basics and build a solid foundation for your online art business.

What we went over might seem overwhelming and can be if you try to tackle it all at once.

The best strategy is to tackle one project at a time.

When you complete a task, move on to the next project. Before you know it, you will be selling your drawings online.

When you have finished every task on this post, visit Art Business/ Art Marketing Resource for more articles that will help you to grow your online art business.

How to sell drawings online by building a solid online presence overview:

Branding
Discover your unique voice
Who is your target audience
Artist website
Artist website checklist
Social Media
Artist Blog

Now that you know how to sell drawings online by building a solid online presence, it is time to take action.

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How To Sell Drawings Online By Building A Strong Online Presence