Back when I was in school I began selling my art on Ebay. At this time the site was just booming and my art was selling like hot cakes. I was able to pay the bills and pay my university tuition. My boyfriend at The time and I were both able to quit our jobs and live off of my art sales alone. And all while barely out of high school and with no experience running a business!
And then 9/11 happened. For a while sales went down and I quickly realized that if sales dropped in the one place I was selling my work I may not be able to afford food or electricity or even rent. So, I set forth on a quest to learn all I can about other places to sell my work, sales in general, running a business, and marketing. I picked up jobs that would teach me these thing. I sold cars, managed restaurants and even became a marketing manager for a real estate company. This along with my own research in how to sell, finance, and where to sell online has equipped me with an arsenal of information and tools to run my own business doing what I love to do most, Paint.
One of the most important things I learned is not to have only one venue for my work. The thing is that if that venue is slow that month you will go hungry. Anyone who invests knows that investing in the market you should use what is called "Dollar Cost Averaging". This is where you spread out your investments over several different stocks to reduce your liability and protect your assets all while building your investments. This is considered one of the safest ways to invest. I applied the same theory to my art sales plan. If I have several sites and brick and mortar locations with my work in them, then when one venue is slow one of the others can help make up for that. Now I currently sell my work in 6 brick and mortar locations, over 5 sites and on social media. This strategy has proven to help not only increase my sales and commission work, but to to keep me going during the slower months.
This isn't something you can just jump into, it has taken time and patience to build each venue, and although I have only been consistently using this strategy for less then a year, since I quit my job the be a full time artist, I have had much success. So much in fact that I have been asked to teach a series of workshops on the subject in a local artist community I am part of. And I am more then pleased to be able to help other artists build their business by teaching what has taken me over a decade to acquire.
If you live in the DFW area and would like to attend these workshops please contact me, either by
Email, or on
Facebook. Right now I am only teaching locally, but I hope to start some online seminars soon. To be informed of workshops and seminars in the future please
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