The Blackbird Sings

Selling Online | Part Three: Online Shops

I've finally been able to make a little time today to write part three of the 'Selling Online' series. Since I posted part two a couple of weeks ago I've received a lot of feedback once again, so I'd like to say a huge thank you to those of you who are reading and enjoying it, and please feel free to leave your thoughts, experiences, or any of your own tips and advice as a comment at the end of this post. It's lovely receiving them on Twitter but it unfortunately means that other people can't access that advice! By leaving a comment on the blog, the useful information stays in one place and can be read by lots of people. But I'm happy to hear from you wherever you like, and it's nice to feel as if I'm learning new things too.

If you'd like to read parts 1 & 2 of 'Selling Online', there are now permanent links in the right-hand column of this blog so the series will remain easily accessible in the future.

So, let's get on to part three...

Online Shops

 

[My computer desk. © Natasha Newton 2010]

Part Three is actually a continuation of the subject we started to discuss in part two: the best (and worst) online venues for sales. Of course, I'm speaking mostly from personal experience but I'll try to add any advice I've heard from others as well, especially if it contradicts mine! As I've mentioned before, different things work for different people: no two people are going to achieve success in the same way. The only thing I can do is give you some tips and new ideas to use along the way and tell you what has worked for me in the past - it's up to you to adapt this to your own circumstances or situation.

There are several online venues where you can sell your work. Some of the most popular are Etsy, Big Cartel, Folksy, Coriandr, Artfire, and of course Ebay, but there are probably many more and almost certainly some I've never even heard of! Personally, the venues I've tried have been Ebay (at the very start), Etsy (with real, enduring success), and Big Cartel (a recent venture). I can't tell you much about Big Cartel: although I like what I've seen so far, I've only recently set up the shop on there and haven't promoted it yet, so it remains to be seen exactly what I'll decide to do with it. I can however, tell you about my experiences on Ebay and Etsy...

Ebay

I started out on Ebay back in 2005. At this point, I was new to selling on the internet and hadn't heard of anywhere else to sell my work. After reading some art blogs I realised that several artists were having a lot of success by selling their work on Ebay and so I thought I'd give it a go. I had mixed success. I sold several pieces this way and it was a good introduction to the logistics of selling online, mailing the sold artwork etc., but the problem with Ebay was (and I think this still applies today) that art buyers on there are - generally speaking - not looking for fine art as an investment or to add to a collection, but the cheapest artwork they can find to fit in with their decor. What I would call 'disposable' artwork: good for a few years, only to be thrown away when you redecorate or change the wall colour. I'm an art collector as well as an artist myself and I would never buy work with a view to keeping it just for a few years. Fine art isn't just something that goes with the colour of your sofa - it's about investing in an artist, their ideas, their skill and technique. You're buying a part of the artist's mind, not just their work. Choose well and it should be an investment for the future, as well as something that gives you pleasure for years to come.

Aside from the odd few, I found that most "art buyers" on Ebay just wanted the largest canvases they could find for the least amount of money. That's not about art, that's about home decoration.

After several months of selling occasionally on Ebay (with a few pieces reaching reasonable prices), I decided it wasn't really for me. I felt it didn't show my work to it's best advantage, and listing work on there is time-consuming with little financial gain, to a general audience who wouldn't know quality artwork if it jumped up and decided to bite them on the butt. I've heard that things are even worse on there these days - apparently it's more difficult to reach a good audience than ever before.

So to sum it up: in my experience Ebay is good for handbags, not so good for art.

Of course, if you know differently, I'd love to hear about it...

Etsy

I first set up a shop on Etsy back in late 2006/early 2007 after hearing about it from a friend. I loved the idea of having my own proper little shop on the internet, somewhere listings didn't expire after a few days (unlike Ebay) and somewhere people were actually serious about buying quality artwork. I also liked the clean layout and the fact that it seemed fairly easy to list new items and to use in general, for both seller and buyer.

I closed my first shop in the Autumn of 2008 when I decided to launch my business The Blackbird Sings. I wanted to name my Etsy shop The Blackbird Sings too and I couldn't do that without setting up a new shop - once you choose a shop name on Etsy you're stuck with it, so let that be a lesson to you! It was a slightly nerve-wracking decision because I'd built up quite a following during the year and a half I'd been selling on there and I was frightened I'd lose my much-cherished buyers and followers. I knew it would take a little while for word of the new shop to get out and also that building the business up again would be a fairly slow process. But I also knew that if I had a strong brand identity and used creative and clever ways to get the name known, there was a good chance I would be more successful than before. Fortunately this has been the case and it's really paid off, but not without a lot of hard work and perseverance first.

At the same time as launching The Blackbird Sings Etsy shop, I also signed up to Typepad and created The Blackbird Sings blog to tie in with the shop and further strengthen the brand, and joined Twitter, in part to promote any new items in the shop and to make people aware of the name change (for lots of Twitter tips, please see Part Two of 'Selling Online').

Good tips for success on Etsy

* The most important thing is to have a great, high quality, unique and individual product. Etsy is literally awash with talent so you have to have something a little special in order to stand out from the crowd. Without a good product, you'll get nowhere. Except a feature on Regretsy perhaps.

* Choose a good name. Something memorable, evocative, relevant to your work or style, and something that is easy for people to spell or type. For example, I'm opening a second Etsy shop to run alongside The Blackbird Sings while I'm in Paris (starting later this month I will be dividing my time between the UK and France). This new shop will be open whenever I'm in Paris to sell any work I make while I'm there. When I'm in England, The Blackbird Sings will be open and the new shop will close temporarily. The name I've chosen for the new shop is Le Merle Noir. Le Merle Noir means "The Blackbird" in French, and it was chosen because it's basically the French version of my English shop! Why didn't I choose "Le Merle Noir Chante" ("The Blackbird Sings") instead? It would make sense, wouldn't it? Well, it would, but it doesn't trip off the tongue as easily when spoken out loud, and it's harder for people to remember, type and spell correctly when they're searching for my shop online. If they find it difficult to remember the name of my shop, then I'll get less customers - it's as simple as that. You should always consider this when choosing a name for your shop or online business; it's very important.

* Professional, clean, crisp product photographs. This takes practice, so I would suggest taking a look at what other people are doing and how they present their work; then go and buy a decent camera, find a good source of light (I always find natural daylight is best but I've heard that some people use light boxes - it depends upon exactly what it is you're photographing) and get snapping. It's only through a process of trial and error that I learned how best to photograph my work. You should be able to find some good tips on photographing your products in The Etsy Seller Handbook, which is also a fantastic resource for everything else you need to know about selling on Etsy.

* List new items regularly. Keeping your shop and products fresh and exciting will keep old customers coming back and will also introduce your work to new buyers. Every time you list something on Etsy it shows up at the top/beginning of the searches for a while - if you're more visible there, people are more likely to find your shop.

* Try to stock a wide range of products at different price points. At one point I sold only original artwork (paintings, illustrations etc.) and sales were good, but I came to realise that I was missing out on selling to people who have a very limited budget and can't afford to buy original work right now. Maybe they would appreciate a way to own some of my work too? So I started selling my little postcard packs and sometimes stickers too, all professionally printed and featuring my work. They've been a huge hit and I've found that when people start off by purchasing something inexpensive, they will often return at a later date to buy original work too. It's a great way of reaching a wider audience for your work. I've also started to customise Moleskine and Muji notebooks with my original designs - these are another interesting, different and affordable way for people to own my work. Be creative with the products you offer!

* Good customer service. Deal with orders and inquiries promptly and politely, always thank your customers and let them know when their item has been posted, and maybe even add a little extra something in their package with the order to show that you appreciate their custom. I usually add a postcard or two and maybe some stickers and little art business cards - just something small that they weren't expecting and which will bring a smile to their face.

* When you list new items, keep people up-to-date by posting links on your blog, Twitter page, or Facebook business page, if you have one. This will direct traffic (and potential customers) to your shop and allows people to see exciting new items quickly. However, try not to overdo it as nobody likes to feel as if they're being spammed! Moderation is the key.

* Try to become involved in the Etsy community. Hang out in the forums a little (you can pick up some excellent tips there), talk to people and make friends. All of this helps your shop to become just a little more visible each time. Likewise, you can spend some time curating Treasuries (for those who don't know, these are basically collections of your favourite items by other Etsy members, often themed, and they're great fun and very rewarding to do). Treasuries help to promote the work of other people as well as your own, and if yours gets chosen for the Etsy front page, that's a bonus! The more you get involved in the community and help other people, the more they'll help you. It's a win-win situation.

[I'm sure there is so much more I could add to this list, but I hope that what I have written is of some use to you. In Part Four, I'll look at a few other issues that concern online sellers such as paid advertising, how to package artwork correctly when sending it through the post, and setting up and using a mailing list.]

Selling Online | Part Two: The Best (& Worst) Venues for Sales

Welcome to part two of my new 'Selling Online' series. Part one had such a great response (I really didn't expect it to be as popular as it was!) and many of you left interesting and useful comments telling me about your experiences, either on the blog itself or via Facebook and Twitter. There are now permanent links to this series in the right-hand column of the blog so that people will be able to easily access and refer back to it whenever they wish. I hope that with your input too, we can make this a really useful resource for people. I certainly don't profess to 'know it all' - I'm just happy to share my personal experiences over several years of building my art business on-and-offline, and you'll have to bear in mind that the things that have worked for me may not work for you, but hopefully some of them will! Everyone is different, and this is why it's great to have information and advice from others too - after all, you may have thought of venues / websites / ways of marketing that I haven't even considered yet! So please feel free to leave your thoughts at the end of this post.

So, which online venues are best for sales, I hear you ask?

The honest answer is: it varies, it's constantly changing, and it will differ for everyone. But what I am going to do is make a list featuring some of the main social networking sites I've used, and try to give you some advice, information, pros and cons relating to each one.

We'll start out with the first social networking website I ever joined, way back in March 2006:

MySpace

When I joined MySpace (recommended to me by a musician friend) it was at the start of what was going to be it's heyday. I hadn't been using the internet to promote or show my work for very long at this point - the first version of my website had been online for maybe a year or so, and even though I found myself reading an art blog here and there, I certainly didn't have one myself (or any other online presence apart from the website) and I was only just beginning to realise that the internet could be the the tool I needed to further my art career and promote my business. I remember feeling really excited by the possibilities.

I joined MySpace primarily to make friends and meet other artists. At that point, I didn't know many other artists in my area and I liked the idea of becoming part of a community of painters and illustrators I could talk to. I discovered that MySpace also had art groups where I could share work and gain inspiration and advice.

It started well: almost as soon as I signed up and added some images of my work, it got noticed and I gained a small but very loyal following. This grew very quickly - I remember being astonished by the amount of attention I was getting because I never expected it - and soon the small following became a fairly large following, and at one stage I was receiving so much mail on MySpace that I couldn't actually answer it all! Then the sales started to happen. Throughout 2006/2007 and maybe into the early part of 2008, a huge amount of my online sales came through MySpace. Whether they were buying directly from me, or going to my first Etsy shop (called natashacinnamon), most of my sales came through people who knew me on MySpace. I knew that I could post a bulletin on there about new work and always receive a great response and, quite often, sales too. This was because MySpace was so active back then - a huge amount of users were logging in throughout the day, and millions were joining up every month. Then a couple of years on from 2006, when sites such as Facebook and Twitter started to gather momentum, MySpace slowed down a bit and so did the sales coming directly from it.

The thing is, I wasn't too worried because by this time my sales in the 'real world' (for want of a better phrase!) were good and I was selling fairly well on Etsy and gaining commissions too. I was also looking at new online venues to promote my work alongside MySpace, and discovering the fun and possibilities of having a separate blog of my own too.

MySpace today is a different proposition entirely. I still have my original page and many followers (about 2500), but it's a much quieter place in 2010. I still update my page and add new friends or comment occasionally, but that's about it. In 2006 I put an awful lot of time and effort into building a network of friends and fans and it paid off. I'm still very fond of MySpace, but I've realised that (for me, at least) it's not a place I can rely upon for sales now. It's good for exposure, but as is the case with all things internet-related, things change, you have to accept this, and you have to keep moving on. Maybe your experiences have been different - I'd be particularly interested to hear from people who find that MySpace is successful for them now, in 2010.

Facebook

I have a love/hate relationship with Facebook. I resisted the urge to join for a looooooooooong time, and in many ways I still see it as a sterile, less interesting, less individual, less creative version of MySpace. The reason I caved in and decided to join is because I heard about the business pages (they used to be called 'fan pages'). I wanted to set up a business page for my art because I'd heard so many good things about them through the forums on Etsy: how they are a great way of keeping people who are interested in your work informed of what's going on, and that they're successful at driving more traffic to your shop and gaining more sales.

I've had my page for nearly a year now and I'd have to say: the jury is still out.

I gain fans/followers on Facebook at a much slower rate than anywhere else - I have a respectable number, but nowhere near the amount of followers I have on other sites, or this blog for that matter - I have around 345 on Facebook, compared to 2500 on the blog, 1400+ on Twitter, nearly 1300 on Etsy, and 2500+ on MySpace. I also find that sales coming from Facebook are few and far between. People on FB are fairly keen to comment and offer support (which is lovely and worthwhile), but for some reason this just doesn't translate into sales for me. Despite what other people have said about the success of having sales via their FB page (some even say there's a direct link between setting up an FB page and the success of their Etsy shop!), it's only an occasional thing for me and it's one of the least successful venues for me personally. Give it a go - it may work for you, but I'm not that impressed!

Twitter

Ah, now here we have something really special.

It's fast, it's endlessly interesting, and it's easy. And most importantly (for this article, anyway) I have found it to be one of the most successful places for selling my work currently available on the web. I could literally talk to you about the wonders of Twitter all day. How it's great for quickly sharing news and funny/interesting links or photos with friends (people I know in 'real life' as well as online friends I haven't met in person yet), how I've discovered new and inspiring artists on there - even people I'm going to be collaborating with in the future, how I find illustration opportunities, how the community on there is so incredibly supportive that they've done more to promote and share my work with others than I would ever have the time to do myself, how I laugh out loud several times every day at the funny tweets my friends have written, AND how you can talk to some of the famous people who tweet and - get this - they actually even reply sometimes!

If you're not yet on Twitter and you've heard people say that all other people use it for is to tweet mundanities about how they're eating a sandwich or that they went to the loo five minutes ago, let me tell you one thing: THEY'RE TALKING ABSOLUTE RUBBISH. Do not listen to them. They don't understand what Twitter is or what people are really using it for. If I'd listened to these people I would think that Twitter was the (excuse what I'm about to say) biggest pile of narcissistic shit ever. And I would have missed out on the one thing that inspires and entertains me without fail every day.

I will just say this: if all you did was tweet about eating and pissing, you wouldn't have many followers.

So, how can you use Twitter to promote and maybe even sell your work? Firstly, don't just tweet about your work and nothing else. People won't like it (nobody likes the hard sell) and they will unfollow you. Then you'll end up with no followers and you'll be tweeting into thin air. Personally, I don't follow anyone who ONLY tweets about their work or what they're selling. It feels like being spammed.

Here's what I tend to to do on Twitter:

* Tweet about your life, funny anecdotes, things that are happening (not eating or pissing, we've already discussed that).

* Sometimes it's ok to tweet about food if it's a really, really nice piece of chocolate and you want to let people know where they can buy it. Public service broadcasting.

* Share photos of your life and your work, because people love anything visual. I once posted photos of a piece of work in progress, updating it via Twitpic, and it gained a lot of interest.

* Share links to interesting news stories, music, films or programmes, new artists and their work, great blog articles etc.

* Always reply to people who write to you, and engage others in conversation by commenting on what they're doing. I see Twitter as a giant conversation and if you use it in this way, you'll have a lot of fun with it. Do NOT ignore people. It's as rude as blanking them face-to-face in real life.

* Post links to new work so that people can see what you're up to, and links to new items/pieces in your online shop. Every time I do this, my lovely Twitter followers either 're-tweet' the links for me (meaning that they're sharing my link with their followers, therefore reaching a much wider audience), or they visit my shop, or they buy or commission work. If they're following me because they like my work, they enjoy seeing the new pieces and lots of people like to know when work is available so that they don't miss out.

The most important thing is to let your personality shine through. Just be yourself, because the truth is that people like to know a little about the person they're buying from. It's all part of the experience. It's much more fun to buy a beautiful piece of artwork if you know the person who made it. It adds to your interpretation or understanding of the work, and it's great to be able to tell your friends a little about the artist when they see the painting hanging in your house.

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That's all for part two - in part three I'll talk about Etsy and other online shops, how to use them to your best advantage, and what has (and hasn't) worked for me. See you soon!

Selling Online | Part One: The Mystery of Internet Ups & Downs

To start this new series, I thought I'd write a blog about something I've been noticing for a while now, because it would be interesting to hear your views and experiences on the subject too. I'm also hoping that it might contain some useful information for those of you who are thinking of setting up a business online.

I've been selling my work on the internet since 2005 and during that time I've noticed one thing: it's never stable and never stays the same for any length of time. It always seems to be 'feast or famine' where sales, views of the website, new customers, and illustration or painting commissions are concerned. This applies to sales outside of the internet too, but not as much as it seems to online. Personally, I'm lucky because I don't just sell my work on the internet and so I'm not relying on it totally for my income; I was selling at galleries and taking on commissions in the 'real world' long before I decided to sell online.

I also have income from many different sources:

* Galleries

* Commercial illustration work

* Painting commissions

* Royalty payments from the licensing of my images

* Online sales in the shop or from work found via my website

Selling and licensing my work in a variety of ways means that if one area is a little quiet for a while, I find that I'm still receiving an income from another area, so it keeps things ticking along nicely. Can you imagine if I chose only one way of selling my work? If that particular source of income dried up for a while or if there was a quiet period, I'd be in real trouble financially!

Anyway, what I really wanted to talk about was the irregularity of exposure (by which I mean new people finding, following or buying your work) and selling on the internet. Take my Etsy shop for example: the month of May 2010 was (I believe) my best month ever for sales on there, and yet as soon as June came along I sold nothing. Not a single thing. Until today, when I sold one of the larger original illustrations! But Etsy has always been like that for me from the very beginning: I'll have a flurry of sales or a really good couple of weeks and then.......silence. You can almost see the tumbleweeds blowing across the screen. Then - as suddenly as it stopped - it starts up again with a new flurry of sales.

And that's the part I just don't get. WHY? I've tried to work out whether I'm busier at certain times of the month or year. I don't think so. I don't think there's really a pattern. Is it because I've been featured somewhere, for example, on a popular blog or art website? Sometimes that can help, but these little 'flurries' of several sales often seem to come from nowhere and for no reason.

I would have thought that it's far more likely that I would have one or two sales every day or every couple of days, in a very 'regular' way. But no matter how established/well-known I have become, it's always 'all or nothing'. Of course, this isn't necessarily a bad thing - the days or weeks where I'm selling lots of pieces manage to tide me over during the times where I'm selling nothing. The total volume of sales over the course of a year isn't a problem (although of course there's always room for improvement and I wouldn't say no to more sales; never resting on your laurels is part of the fun of running your own business!), but it's just perplexing as to why it's like this! I'd be interested to know if any of you experience the same thing, or whether you find that your business is much more 'regular' in terms of sales.

As I mentioned at the beginning, it's the same with website views, new people finding my work, and even the type of pieces that are selling or where those sales are coming from. We'll talk more about that - and the venues I've found to be most successful - in the next part of the series.