Entries from May 2007 ↓

What is the number one most pressing problem or need you have related to selling your art online?

I am writing a book that will answer all of your questions and everyone that adds their question in the comments below will receive a free copy when it is available later this summer.

Chris O’Byrne
onlineartsmarketing.com/blog

Find What eBay Buyers Want
How to Easily Find Niche Phrases
Build a Niche Store

This may seem like an unusual subject for artists. After all, what you do is based on your own muse and the pent-up creative energy that screams to be released. What an affront to think in such lowly business terms as niche and market. So to make this easier to swallow, let’s talk in hypothetical terms. Let’s invent an artist and call him Bob. Bob is a watercolor artist. Bob wants to make a living from his art, but no matter what he tries he has not been able to achieve this. Bob offers for sale his originals, prints, cards, postcards, coffee mugs… anything you can think of. But nobody buys anything from him.

This is not an unusual situation, both in and out of the art world. Hundreds and thousands of businesses create products that no one wants. They even have focus groups that tell them a product sounds great, but then nobody buys. And that is too often how the process works. Create a product (or work of art) and then try to sell it. The problem is that this is completely backwards!

Focus on a niche and the identify what problems or needs they have. From those needs, create a product that that they are willing to spend money on to satisfy that need or solve that problem. Does this sound reasonable? Why create a product and then try to find a market when you can identify the market beforehand and create a product you already know will sell.

Take this principle and then apply it to your work as an artist. Let’s go back to Bob the watercolor artist. Bob’s first step is to identify a niche that could potentially use his services as an artist. Bob has noticed that on many occasions he has gone to a restaurant or other business that has either a barren feel or has art on the walls that is completely out of sync with the feel of the place. One place in particular, his dentist’s waiting room, has pictures that are bright and warm and energetic. He talks to his dentist who agrees that he would rather have pictures that are more soothing. Bob is then commissioned to paint three pictures that will help calm and soothe his patients. Bob does some mock-ups, brings them by for approval, and goes to work. He knows ahead of time that he has already sold his paintings.

Leaving Bob behind, I can remember the Mexican restaurant that Sara and I went to with some friends the night before we left for our trip to Minnesota. This place was pretty classy and had obviously spent time and money on getting the right look and feel. Imagine my surprise when I looked on the walls next to our table and saw two paintings that were completely out of place. They were rather contemporary and had a scene of two American children with lollipops. Since they were a new restaurant, they probably were approached by friends to display a couple of their paintings for sale. I don’t think it would take much effort to convince them to put something much more fitting up on the wall.

I hope this gets you thinking about trying another approach to selling your art.

Find What eBay Buyers Want
How to Easily Find Niche Phrases
Build a Niche Store

Chris O’Byrne
OnlineArtsMarketing.com

‘Wealth’ is one of those words that both turns us off and, often secretly, excites us. Most of us want it, but we don’t really want to talk about it because then people might think we’re money hungry and materialistic. But what is wealth, really?

The first step is to define what wealth means to you. To me, wealth means abundance and having enough. I do not want to worry about or focus on money. When I had too little, I was always worried about getting enough to eat, paying rent, etc. If I had too much, I would worry about saving enough for emergencies, if I was investing it wisely, and even worse, wondering if everyone was being nice to me just because of it. I want to focus on my relationships and my work, the things that make me happy. I do not want to spend my time thinking about money.

One day I took these thoughts a little further. How much money is just enough? What is the least expensive way that I could live? I thought about Peace Pilgrim and how from the age of 45 until her death at 73 in 1981 she walked 25,000 miles to learn about and talk about peace. Could I live simply walking from one place to the next? I could! I could carry my laptop in my backpack,connect at coffee shops, and do all of my online business as an itinerant. Sure, this is carrying the idea to an extreme, but it also helps put things in perspective. “Enough” can be much less than we think. “Enough” does not have to be enough to maintain our current lifestyle… we have the power to change our lifestyle!

On the other hand, I strongly believe that we need to set goals of what we want and create that reality in our minds first. Have you watched “The Secret”? If not, get it and do so. How much money do you want to create each month? What kind of lifestyle do you really want? What is the least amount of money you can live on? What is the most that will cover all of your wants and needs? Set a monthly amount and make that your goal. Do you want $5000 a month? Easy. Really! How many people in the world are already making that much each month, every one of them creating it in a different way.

Is there enough money in the world for everyone to have $5000 a month? Why not? We’re not talking about everyone in the world getting $5000 worth of gold of which there is an apparently finite amount. Money is simply one of the physical manifestations of energy transfer. I know that is a mouthful, but what it really means is that money does not exist in a finite amount. Is the total amount of money in the world today more than the total amount 100 years ago? Of course. Why? Because there are more people and more minds filled with creative thought transferring their thoughts and energy (and the products that come as a result of those thoughts) to others.

This can be a difficult and deeply philisophical subject or it can be looked at very simply. MONEY IS INFINITE! There is more than enough for everyone and when we need more we simply create more. How does that work? Let’s say that you have created a loyal following of people that want to buy your paintings. Every time you create a painting, you sell it immediately. Normally you create one painting a month and get paid $5000 a month, enough to be wealthy according to how you have defined it for yourself. Now let’s say that your car breaks down and you need to buy a new one. Easy! You create two paintings that month and you have just created twice as much wealth. Yes, there is a limit to how many paintings you can create each month, but there are many other ways of creating more wealth. You could sell prints of your painting. You already have a loyal following of fans, you simply duplicate your work and create more money. Duplicating your work by creating prints is what is called “passive income”. It is passive because you already did the work and you are simply duplicating that work without as much effort, sometimes no effort at all. There are many more ways to create passive income and I will cover as many of these as possible in future posts.

Chris O’Byrne
OnlineArtsMarketing.com

I’ve been tagged by Diane Clancy for the meme of 7 random things about myself and then tag 7 more blogs of interest.

1. I’ve been playing bluegrass guitar, mandolin, and fiddle for over 30 years! (myspace.com/chrisobyrne)

2. I have a degree in chemical engineering and another in physical science teaching and almost a masters in Earth Literacy.

3. I taught high school for six years and helped start a charter school for the arts (Studio Academy) in Rochester, MN.

4. I have four beautiful children.

5. I’ve driven to every state capitol in the lower 48 states.

6. My hobbies include birding, geocaching, highpointing, camping, traveling, cooking, music, reading, writing, and very rarely, pen and ink.

7. Today is my 43rd birthday! (I’m back into my prime!!)

My 7 blogs of interest (that I do not think have yet been tagged) include:

1. Genius Types: Creative Live and Passive Income

2. Steve Pavlina: Personal Development for Smart People

3. Ryan Healy: On Copywriting

4. 43 Folders

5. Otto’s Random Thoughts

6. Clint Watson Blog

7. Alyson Stanfield’s ArtBizBlog.com

Chris O’Byrne
OnlineArtsMarketing.com

In Ryan Healy’s post, Trackbacks Continued, he talks about yet another useful technique: sending trackbacks to yourself. With that in mind, I am including a trackback in this post that sends a trackback to my last post discussing Ryan’s previous article, 3 Reasons to Trackback.

Round and round we go!

Chris O’Byrne
OnlineArtsMarketing.com
www.peacefulbirder.com

Here is a great review of the quintessential success book, Think and Grow Rich.

Brian Lee (of Genius Types fame) writes a review of the perfect length: short enough to easily read and hold your attention and long enough to give some depth and give you a good idea of what value the book holds.

This book was one of the first I ever read in this field and its wisdom has stuck with me, if not always in my practice, at least in my thinking.

You can purchase Think and Grow Rich at Amazon.com. At just over $13, it may be the best ROI you ever receive!

Chris O’Byrne
OnlineArtsMarketing.com

I think there is still A LOT of people out there that do not know about subscribing to blogs. In order to understand this concept, you first need to know that there are things called newsreaders out there. Let’s say that you  read several blogs every day. A newsreader takes all of those blogs and lists them on the side and then shows you which ones have new posts. To read the posts, you simply click on their title and they show up in the same window. You do not have to go to each blog and check for new ones, the newsreader does it all for you. There are several newsreaders out there. Some you use online (such as Bloglines and Google Reader) and others are programs you install on your computer. I personally use a free Mac program called Vienna and I love it.

What does this have to do with the price of tea in China? If you look in the upper right of the screen, just above the search field, you will see I have added a new little gadget that shows you how many people subscribe to this blog. Not many. You can change this. Right now. Click on that sucker and go to town!

Thanks to Ryan Healy (again) for making me aware of this gadget. He wrote a post on how his readership has been rising ever since he installed a similar gadget on his blog.

Chris O’Byrne
OnlineArtsMarketing.com
www.peacefulbirder.com

Here is an excellent post by Lisa Call about defining success as an artist. They say it takes one to know one. I used to work as a chemical engineer and I really resonated with this post as the engineer in her really comes through. I’ll quote the post first and then add my own comments afterwards.

” Today Alyson Stanfield linked to my post about respect from her blog with some of her thoughts about when it is time to move on from juried shows. Interesting read.

I’ve been thinking about this prickly topic quite a bit the last few days (okay I couldn’t resist adding an image from my recent trip to the Desert Botanic Garden in Phoenix).

Because I am a requirements engineer by day I started thinking about what type of use case one might have for becoming a successful artist.

From the wikipedia article linked above: use cases allow description of sequences of events that, taken together, lead to a system doing something useful. Each use case provides one or more scenarios that convey how the system should interact with the users called actors to achieve a specific business goal or function.

So here’s my take on a simple use case for how to become a successful artist

Actor: Artist

Preconditions:
1. Artist has a desire to become successful
2. Artist has a definition for their idea of success
3. Artist has motivation to become successful artist
4. Artist has time to do the work to become successful artist

Main Flow (Artist definition of success is obtaining quality gallery representation):
1. Artist creates a strong body of quality art (and continues to create throughout the entire duration)
2. Artist creates quality materials to promote the art (and continues to throughout the duration)
3. Artist enters work into juried shows to build resume
4. Artist researches galleries and selects appropriate galleries
5. Artist approaches galleries
6. Artist has work accepted by gallery
7. Artist sells work with gallery
8. Artist repeats steps 4-7 until satisfied.
9. Artist is successful

Alternative Flows:
I. Artist definition of success is selling enough work over the internet to live comfortable
1. Artist creates a strong body of quality art (and continues to create throughout the entire duration)
2. Artist creates quality materials to promote the art (and continues to throughout the duration)
3. Artist researches online sales opportunities and selects appropriate venues (including ones own website)
4. Artist approaches online venues
5. Artist has work accepted by online venue
6. Artist sells work online
7. Artist repeats steps 4-7 until satisfied.
8. Artist is successful

II. Artist definition of success is making quality art
1. Artist creates a strong body of quality art
2. Artist is successful

etc (add different flow for each definition of success)…

Post Condition: Artist is successful
Well, that’s maybe not my best requirements work because I’m being very general.

But what I really want to talk about is why and where an artist might fail, or in the use case world these or often called exceptions - things that might happen that don’t result in the post condition being met but the flow ends anyway.

I really don’t know - not having failed nor planning to. But if I had to guess I would think the preconditions (which are things that must be true or the usecase can’t be started) are a big hold up for many people.

Figuring out just want it means to be successful as an artist is really rather difficult. Why are we doing what we do? What is our end goal? Maybe we have multiple goals. I think that different goals require different actions to reach that goal and not understanding the what the goal they are trying to reach can really trip someone up. There are so many options in the artworld I think trying to narrow down our focus to 1 or 2 can be very difficult.

I know in my path as an artist my end goals have changed many times over the years and I’m not the only one that struggles with this. Paula McCullough left an interesting comment about this topic on my last post - pondering about what success really means. I recently found Paula’s blog through her comments here on my blog and her work on artsocket and really enjoy reading her thoughts on her blog about her adventures in becoming a successful artist.

Long ago my end goal really didn’t exist and I couldn’t even imagine how I might have goals as an artist and I wandered aimlessly not really ever getting any where. Now I have very specific art business goals. It’s taken years to refine these goals and to define what I feel is my definition of success but I feel with them I have a road map that I can follow that will lead me to my desired end goal.

I also think the preconditions for having the time and motivation to reach the end goals are important. When I lose motivation or run into periods where I have no time for the art career things really stall out. Keeping motivation, staying in the studio and office - these are keys to success. I believe success is mostly about hard work, not about divine intervention and getting discovered.

Back in my respect post I was countering the argument that quilters aren’t making it in art world because they didn’t make statement art. I see all kinds of art getting respect out there in the world - not just statement art. So when I look at step 1 of all of the flows - making quality art - I don’t see there needs to be any kind of restrictions on what type of art that is. I think there is room in this world for successful artists of all kinds, working in all media and styles.

So I guess I’m just repeating myself because I don’t see that the type of work is what prevents an artist from becoming successful - I see it as the actions (or lack of actions) of the artist as the stumbling block.

Although the other thing I have to add is that I think without step #1 (making a body of quality of art) it is really hard to get very far. You can’t promote what doesn’t exist. So I think that means I need to stop rambling and get back to my studio.”

My Comments:

I think it is extremely useful to go through this process of defining what success means to YOU. Define what success means to you, then determine what specific steps you need to accomplish to get to that point. My addition is to do this in a series of success-determining steps. Decide on a lesser goal of success, perhaps simply producing a certain amount of quality work, and detail the steps to get there. (I would also suggest reading Lisa’s previous post on defining her business goals.) From there, determine your next goal towards success and define the steps to get there. Before you do all of these little steps, however, still determine your overall definition of success. Each of these little steps will lead you towards that goal. My suggestion is to get a big sheet of paper and start representing everything graphically.

Chris O’Byrne
OnlineArtsMarketing.com
www.peacefulbirder.com

I listened to a great teleseminar last night, a interview with Clint Watson (of FineArtStudioOnline and FineArtViews fame) by Alyson Stanfield (of ArtBizCoach and ArtBizBlog fame) about how to become an online art magnet. The main focus of this talk was how to get more traffic to your art site by the smart use of links, search engine optimization, and blogs. Clint and I share many of the same views and opinions about art marketing and I wondered if I was actually going to learn something new. I did. Quite a bit. Well worth the money I spent for both this teleseminar and a recording of his previous one on “How to Create a Website that Sells”. You can purchase both for the reasonable price of $25.

Chris O’Byrne
OnlineArtsMarketing.com
www.peacefulbirder.com

Rather than reiterate what Ryan has already so succinctly written about trackbacks, I thought I would just send you to his post.

Trackbacks work differently with my blog. People can use MY trackback with no problem, but for me to use someone else’s trackback just doesn’t work. The reason is that I use RapidWeaver for my blog. I love WordPress and am a certified WordPress Customizer (okay, I made that up), but I wanted to play with RapidWeaver in case I needed to use it for someone else. There is a third party plugin for RapidWeaver called RapidBlog that I use for a few of my clients. This set up is even better because it automatically synchronizes with someone’s Blogger account. That way they can write in their own blog whenever they want and the blog text will automatically insert itself into the website I have designed for them and follow the same design as the rest of their website.

Okay, if you are reading this you will see that I have switched over to WordPress. Fortunately, the new version allows me several import options, so I was able to bring all my posts with me. Hurray for WordPress!

Chris O’Byrne
www.peacefulbirder.com
OnlineArtsMarketing.com