How To Start An Art Business In 9 Steps

The artworld is booming thanks to the internet. A professional artist does not have to depend on the local market anymore. Today there are no boundaries for a sole proprietorship. Local artists can reach a larger audience with an online store. Any person with creative talent and the will to market their products and services to their target market will become a successful business owner.

How To Start An Art Business Today

Three key ingredients will build a long-term successful art business:

Planning
Marketing
Creating

Whether you are thinking about starting an art career or wish to earn enough money to support your crafting hobby, the internet has made it possible for creative people to accomplish their goals.

Over the years, thousands of successful artists have made an art career online, so can you if you are willing to work hard.

Artists who have created a full-time career selling art online know that there is more to operating a business than just making art and posting an image on Facebook and Instagram.

Developing a business plan and working on web design, social media marketing, blogging, market research, presenting their artwork at art shows, and creating newsletters has helped them grow their small business globally. The critical thing to remember is that most artists started exactly where you are today, not knowing much about starting a business.

Start An Art Business In 9 Steps

There are nine steps you will want to focus on if you art interested in selling your art online and promoting your local events.

The first step is to create an online art gallery where people can view and read about the art you create, purchase your original art and giclee prints, and learn more about upcoming events.

The good news is that designing a professional website is easy and affordable with WordPress and hosting services like BlueHost. You do not need to hire graphic designers or know code to build an online e-commerce site. If you can create a Facebook business page, you can quickly build a website.

Here is a video that shows you how easy it is to launch an artist WordPress website.

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There are other options available for building an online portfolio besides building a WordPress site.

If you are not sure you want to put in the time to start a new business and see if there are people interested in your work, you might want to consider opening an Etsy shop. Creating an Etsy shop is free, and you can see if there are potential customers interested in your work of art without investing time in building a website.

Here Are Some Etsy Articles To Help Get You Started:

How To Open an Etsy Store Step by Step

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How To Sell Art On Etsy – Complete Guide

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Visit 16 Best Artist Website Builders to learn more about the other options available for promoting and selling art online.

What It Takes To Become A Successful Artist

Uploading your products on an e-commerce platform is the easy part. The challenge is to drive people to your listings.

Building a long-term successful art business takes a great deal of energy. There will be extended hours and emotional ups and downs. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying to you. If you are seeking instant gratification, starting an art business might not be in your best interest.

However, if you are willing to learn about art marketing and work hard, you can achieve your business goals.

Do you have business goals, or are you just thinking about selling art online?

If you are interested in starting a small business, take a few minutes to write down what you would like to accomplish.

Your goals will be the blueprint of your business plan.

To help write your art business goals, download the How To Write Goals You Can Achieve Workbook today.

“To be successful, you have to have your heart in your business, and your business in your heart.” ~ Sr. Tomas Watson

Now that you have an online presence, let’s talk about starting an art business from home.

Here are seven areas you will want to focus on to sell your art:

Create Art
Find Your Niche
Learn Who Your Target Audience Is
Create A Mission Statement
Learn Art Business Logistics
Write art business goals
Design An Art Marketing Plan

Starting An Art Business – Get In The Studio

Before starting a business, you will need a product or service to sell.

It is essential to have enough art prepared before you begin promoting your art business online.

How many paintings do you need before starting a business online?

There is no magic number to how many different paintings, pastel paintings, or drawings you need to have in stalk before opening an online art gallery. However, the more listings you have available, the more people you can reach.

Offering prints, greeting cards, and merchandise is a great way to supplement your income and increase the number of products you have on hand. One painting could provide you with four or more products to sell by offering reproductions of the original.

While promoting and selling your artwork, it is essential to schedule studio time every week to create new artwork.

There will be times when you have to produce art even when you feel less than creative.

Painting Repeat Patterns by Hand: A Daily Practice by Cleo Papanikolas on Creativebug!

When you have those weeks, try to find different ways to keep yourself motivated. The important thing to remember is that the best way to sell more art is to have new work available for your art collectors.

Tips to help you stay motivated:

Have your goals, mission statement, and vision statement where you can see them every day.
Read art blogs
Look at other art
Force yourself to create even when you feel less than creative
Join art challenges
Join Facebook artist groups
Become an art collector
Take local art classes or online art classes
Read how to paint or how to draw books and eBooks
Subscribe to art magazines

Find Your Niche

Once you have an inventory of products uploaded on your e-commerce website, you will want to start focusing on driving the right people to your listings.

Online sales are increasing every year, which means more artists are trying to sell their work online. The amount of competition is rising every day.

Developing an art marketing plan that separates your art business from all other artists is the only way to build a following.

How can you separate yourself from other artists who paint or draw similar subjects?

The easiest way to get started is to focus on your niche.

A niche market is the subset of the market on which a specific product is focused. The market niche defines the product features to satisfy specific market needs, the price range, production quality, and the demographics intended to target. It is also a small market segment. (Source: Wikipedia)

The people who have a passion for your artistic style are known as your target audience.

For example, if you paint “horses,” your niche would be “horses.”

Promoting to people interested in horses will significantly increase the chance of you landing a sale.

Take a few minutes to think about what you would like to paint or draw for the next five or ten years.

Visit art that sells for more information about what style of art sells best for some inspiration.

More related articles about niche marketing:

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Learn Who Your Target Audience Is

Selling original paintings is a numbers game. Whether you are selling paintings at local art fairs, local businesses, coffee shops, art galleries, or online, the chances of you landing a sale increases when more people see your work.

Selling art online is different than selling at local art fairs. People visit fairs to discover new handmade items, and they tend to see every booth at the events.

People searching for original art online will not visit every artist’s website. They might notice new paintings on social media, Pinterest, or in the search results. Still, it is difficult for contemporary artists to build name recognition with all of the competition online. Even the most talented artists find it challenging to develop a following at first. Your job is to find various ways to get your creations in front of people passionate about what you create. Developing an online marketing strategy is more complex than setting up a booth at a local art fair.

The easiest way to get started is to discover who your target audience is.

The information you collect will help you to create content that will drive them to your website.

What you should know about your target audience:

Age
Gender
Where they reside
Occupation
Household income
Their interests
Where they hang out online

The data you collect will help you write blog posts and social media posts they want to read.

Here are some articles to help you learn more about your target audience:

Simple Strategy For Finding Your Target Audience

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Online Target Marketing Tutorials:

Digital Marketing: Define Your Business Purpose & Target Audience

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Create A Mission Statement

A mission statement is a sentence or two describing a company’s function, markets, and competitive advantages, a short written statement of your business goals and philosophies. A mission statement defines what an organization is, why it exists, its reason for being. (Source: Entrepreneur)

Why is it necessary for a fine arts business to have a mission statement?

An artist’s mission statement will help you stay focused on what is fundamental for your business.

There will be times when you will begin to derail and lose focus on your vision as your business grows. The chance of making bad business decisions will increase when you lose focus on your goals and philosophies. The mission statement will remind you what your objectives are to help you make better decisions for the future.

Not only is a mission statement beneficial for your small business. It also explains to potential buyers what you stand for and what they can expect when they conduct business with you.

Download the Artist Statement Workbook to help you write the perfect artist statement.

Art Business Logistics

You might be asking yourself, do I need a business license to sell my artwork?

Every state has different laws about small businesses.

The best business advice we can give you is to do some research to decide if you want to classify your business as a sole proprietor or a different business structure that will better fit your business.

Visit the IRS, your local Clerk of Court’s website, and your local town hall to see what steps you will have to take to make your business legal. After spending a lot of time building your business, the last thing you will want to have happened is to find out that you are not following your state’s business laws.

Business Name

Deciding on a business name is a challenge for some artists. The name you choose should reflect your mission statement, and it should be easy for people to remember.

If you are selling your work online, you will want to include searchable words that describe the style of art you create.

Ask yourself the following questions:

What style of art do I create?
What medium do I use?
Who Would be interested in my art?
What words would potential buyers use to find my art online?

Visit, How To Write Perfect Art Business Names if you are having difficulty deciding a name.

Write Art Business Goals

It is impossible to write an effective business plan if you do not know what your objectives are.

Why are you starting a small business?
What products or services will you be providing?
Are you interested in having a full-time artist career?

Business goals create a business plan. Write down precisely what you would like to achieve and where you would like to be in the next five years, then develop strategies to help you get where you want to be.

It is a good idea to review your goals annually to see if you are on track to build a successful career faster.

Design An Art Marketing Plan

Every business starts with goals and a marketing plan.

What is a marketing plan?

A marketing plan outlines advertising and marketing strategies.

What strategies are you going to implement to reach your goals?
How much revenue do you need to generate?
Are you going to sell your art at craft shows, in galleries, or online?
How mediums are you going to use to build brand awareness?
How much time can you devote to blogging and posting on social media networks?

Once you know how much time you can devote to blogging, social media, writing newsletters, maintaining your artist website, and creating art, you can start to block off times during the week to get the job done.

Keep in mind that you are the CEO of your business. There will be nobody to tell you what needs to get done.

You are in charge, and you will have to keep yourself motivated and organized to grow your art business.

If you have a difficult time with time management download, Get More Done In Lees Time – Part Time Artist.

For more information about writing an art marketing plan visit, How to Write an Artist Marketing Plan That Works

Online Digital Marketing Plan Tutorial

Create a Simple Digital Marketing Plan

Pricing Strategy

Pricing art is one of the most challenging responsibilities artists face.

Figuring out how to make a profit can be challenging, but if you plan on starting an art business, your main objective is to make a profit.

Before You Can Make A Profit

Before you can decide on a price for your art, you will need to know the business costs.

Make a list of all the costs associated with operating your art business, including paying your salary.

Example of art business expenses:

Art supplies
Studio costs including water, electricity, and heat
Marketing supplies including internet, smartphone, and advertisement
Craft show fees
Shipping supplies
Shipping fees
Hourly wage

To learn how to price your art for a profit, download Art Pricing Guide – How To Price Art To Sell.

Create An Online Presence

Selling art online is easier than you might think.

All you need is a product or service that people want.
A way to let people know the product or service is available for sale and a place where they can purchase the product.

It is really that simple.

We have even better news to share with you. It is easier to build brand awareness now than ever before.

You have the internet at your fingertips.

You have the potential to reach over 4 billion active internet users around the world.

Develop a strategy to build an online presence and start showcasing your art to your target audience.

A notable example of two artists who built a successful online presence would be Melanie and Nicholas Beall.

We stumbled on Melanie and Nicholas’s website by simply doing a search on Google for “original horse oil paintings.”

Ranking number one in the search results was Melanie and Nicholas Beall’s artist website Melanie & Nicholas Horse Paintings by Commission.

Melanie and Nicholas’s site does not rank first in Google’s search results by accident.

They have spent a tremendous amount of time and energy on their website and blog.

The work they have done has helped them to outrank 1,300,000 results.

There are a couple of points we would like to mention about their site.

Melanie and Nicholas have done a wonderful job making their site easy to navigate and find detailed information about their services and procedures.

The other point we would like to highlight is their daily artist blog.

They understand the importance of creating content that will attract their target audience.

Ranking number one in Google’s search is proof that they have become masters at building an online presence.

Create An Editorial Calendar

If you have done any research concerning marketing, you have probably heard the phrase “content marketing.”

Joe Pulizzi, the founder of CMI, is a master of content marketing.

Joe describes content marketing as:

Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.

Take the time to learn everything you can about content marketing.

Artists like Melanie and Nicholas have become successful because of their willingness to learn about content marketing.

You can become as successful as they are as long as you are willing to put in the time and effort.

Creating an editorial calendar will help to keep you focused on your mission.

The calendar will make it easy to review what you have already published and what you should be writing in the future.

To learn how to create an editorial calendar visit, How to Write an Editorial Calendar That Will Generate Traffic.

Keyword Research

Now that you have your editorial calendar, you will want to fill the calendar with blog post ideas to drive organic traffic to your artist’s website.

Organic traffic is free traffic generated from search engines.

When a person is searching for something online, they go to Google or other search engines and type in a couple of words in the search bar.

The words that they type in the search bar are known as keywords.

Google will recommend the best content that relates to the query typed in the search bar.

The person will then scan through the results and click on the link that looks like it will provide them with the information they were searching for.

As a content creator, your job is to write content that your target audience is searching for in the search results.

The first step is to learn what your target audience is interested in learning about your art business.

The next step is to discover what keywords your target audience is using to search for that content.

Tools like SEMRush will show you exactly what keywords people are using in search and how many times they are used per month.

Online Keyword Marketing Tutorial

Bootcamp On Keyword Research

Take Care Of Your Customers

By now, you know:

What your business goals are
What platform you will use for your online gallery
How to price your artwork
All of the logistics of doing business
How to create content that drives traffic to your site

Once your site starts generating traffic, you will want to develop strategies to keep them coming back.

The easiest way to keep your visitors coming back to your site is to write high-quality content.

The next step is to make sure that every post you write has a call to action.

What is a call to action?

A call-to-action tells your audience what to do after they have finished reading your post.

Your call-to-action might be to visit your art gallery, visit another post, or signup for your newsletter.

Your objective is to keep your visitor on your site to learn more about you as an artist and become familiar with your artwork.

For more information about the call-to-action, visit:

Call-To-Action Strategy That Generates Sales

Providing valuable content and providing a clear call-to-action is one way you can give excellent online customer service.

Another way you can provide excellent customer service is by having a contact page.

A contact page is a page that provides a way for a visitor to contact you if they have any questions about your artwork.

For more information about contact pages, visit, Should Art Blogs Have Contact Forms?

Another strategy that works well is to have a FAQ page that answers the frequently asked questions about your art business.

Give the best customer service that you can. Your business and reputation depend on them.

Related Post: How to Get Customers to Refer Your Art

Final Thoughts On How To Start An Art Business Online

Successful art businesses start with art business plans.

It has been said that 50 percent of small businesses fail within the first 2 years.

The most common reason so many businesses failed was that they didn’t have a plan.

Starting a business as an artist has never been easier.

Artists no longer have to have someone represent them like an agent or art gallery.

All of the tools and resources are at your fingertips.

Now that you know how to start an art business online is time to take action and get started.

Online Art Business Overview:

Create great art people will want to purchase
Learn who your target audience is
Study your competition
Develop an art marketing plan
Review and revise your business plan
Search for new opportunities
Make a presence online by blogging regularly, frequently posting on social media, and pinching your content on Pinterest.

For more information about art marketing, visit Art Business – Art Marketing Resource.