Promoting Your ArtBoja Portfolio
ANNOUNCEMENT: Unfortunately, as of 2020, Artisan Colour will be unable to continue maintaining the ArtBoja platform. I’ll leave the notes below in place for now, in case they help you in working with promoting your work on another site, but ArtBoja itself will sadly no longer be available as a place to showcase your work.
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Want to Sell Your Prints? OK. How Are You Promoting Your Portfolio?
I’ve seen a few artists lamenting that they haven’t sold anything on ArtBoja yet. My first question to them would be: What are you doing to get your work seen? And is it being seen by the right people?
To help you start thinking more strategically about selling your work, I’ve put together a list of questions I’d like for you to go through. It’s not enough to just stick your art online and hope your work sells. Hope is not a business strategy.
So go through this list. How many of these things are you actually doing? And which of these could you put into action over the next few months?
#1 Have you actually considered whether or not your work is likely to sell as a print?
As I’ve pointed out repeatedly, some work just isn’t all that suited to hanging on the wall as a print or canvas. A lot of stuff is just more apt to fit the commercial market. I write about that here:
The kind of work that will sell as a print is going to FEEL like art you would probably hang on the wall. And you pretty much know it when you see it. I’m thinking for instance of clearly painterly work, or semi-abstract work, images that give us something pretty or interesting to look at, compositions that look “artsy.”
If your work tends to feature dark Gothic images of vampires and dragons reeling overhead — that’s probably not the kind of thing someone will hang in their living room. Art like that should be promoted to magazines or to book publishers (or released in a collection, as a book of similarly themed art), or promoted for other commercial purposes.
Similarly, if your work tends to feature cute images of your grandkids smiling at the camera … or images of sexy models pouting seductively … or images of homeless people sleeping on park benches … These are probably not the kinds of images that are going to sell as prints. They might have their purposes in other formats, but they’re just not something an average art buyer is going to hang on his wall.
So consider your material carefully. The subject of your work and how you render it — these are huge factors in whether or not your work will sell as a print. And it’s not a good thing or bad thing. It’s just a thing. Much of the work I like best, personally, would never sell as a print. It would be perfect in a book, perfect for a magazine, perfect on a series of post cards, perfect for an advertising campaign, but just not something you would put on canvas and expect to sell as a print.
Make sense?
All right then.
For the rest of this discussion, I’ll assume we’re only talking about work that would be a reasonable choice for someone to buy as a print or canvas.
#2 Have you taken the time to make sure your ArtBoja portfolio page is awesome?
Are you featuring only your best work? Is it thoughtfully arranged? Do your pieces have cool titles to them, and have you assigned them relevant categories? Have you taken the time to create a great profile image? Have you put a really slick looking signature on all your work (not a logo, and nothing big and gaudy like what a small town photographer might put on his graduation photos, but a real artistic signature)? Have you taken the time to write a great bio that positions you as a serious artist buyers will be excited to talk about later when they’re showing off your work? Have you cited any artistic accomplishments that make you seem more legit in a buyer’s eyes? Do you have links to your other websites or to a really cool artist’s page on Facebook or Instagram? Have you created a cool, memorable, artistically appropriate custom domain name of your own and set it to redirect to your ArtBoja profile page?
In short, how much effort have you put into making sure you look really, really good to anyone visiting your page?
#3 How much effort are you putting into creating other pages online to pre-frame potential buyers and drive them to your portfolio?
If you really want to sell your prints, you can’t just stick a single portfolio page online and hope buyers happen to find it and become instantly smitten with your work. That can happen, but it’s not going to happen often enough to build up any real sales.
Imagine instead having a separate website all about you and your work, with that linking over to your ArtBoja portfolio. Imagine having an incredible Facebook page or Instagram gallery that positions you as a serious artist and continually announces your best new work, with links over to where it can be purchased on ArtBoja. Imagine getting your work (perhaps all the stuff you create that isn’t quite appropriate for wall prints) published on other websites, in interviews with you, on various blogs, in magazines — where each of these then helps showcase you as an active artist worth paying attention to, and where each brings in more and more visitors to your page, helping build up your page views and the “likes” your images accumulate.
Getting your work published in our magazine Living the Photo Artistic Life is itself a great step toward increasing traffic to your page. But only if you A.) include your ArtBoja portfolio link for people to click, and B.) actively help promote the magazine so that it gets seen by more and more people every month.
(It baffles me that when I promote the magazine over on the Photoshop Artistry Facebook page each month, only a small handful of our AWAKE artists will take the time to even “Like” the post, much less leave a comment or “Share” it on their own timelines. For all the time and effort and money that goes into producing this magazine every month, and for all the immense good it can do to everyone in AWAKE just by bringing more and more attention to our artists and, ultimately, more and more visitors to the ArtBoja portfolio site, it’s astonishing how few of our AWAKE artists do anything to help promote it.)
Each month you should be looking for ways to get your work published online somewhere, get yourself interviewed, get your work talked about, and generally promote yourself and your work so that more people come to see you as a serious artist and want to visit your portfolio to see your work.
How much of that are you doing?
#4 Are you building a mailing list? And are you nurturing it?
One of the advantages to having other websites (a gallery site, a blog, or even a social media page you actively curate and grow) is that it enables you to build up an email list of people who like your work. You can either invite them to opt into your email list (if only to receive your newsletter, though if you can offer something more compelling that will further support your positioning, all the better), or on a site like Facebook you can actually “target” people who have “Liked” your page through boosted posts now and then.
If you are exhibiting your work locally, you should have a means by which you are actively collecting email addresses. That could simply be a pretty book for them to write their name and email address in if they’d like to learn more about your work. But get creative. If you have a booth somewhere, and it gets regular foot traffic for instance, you might consider hiring a smart well-dressed teenage kid to manage it for you, talk to visitors, hand out something attractive and beautifully printed with your information on there, and get people’s email addresses so as to send them something from you afterward — perhaps an invitation to upcoming exhibits, perhaps the link to your upcoming magazine appearances, etc. Any legitimate excuse to get their email address.
Over time you should be building up a list of interested fans and potential buyers. And you should nurture it. You should write them with updates on anything exciting you’re doing, invite them to read articles in which you’re featured or any interviews with you posted online. If you come out with a book of your work, you should be sending them a link to see it online and order a copy. If you just updated your portfolio to include a series of new works, you might want to send them a link to a piece you wrote about the photo shoot you conducted and your inspiration for the series.
You are cultivating your positioning with your audience. Everything should be thought through and executed deliberately. But you can only do this if you have an audience. And it needs to be an audience you can reach out to again and again.
So you can bring them back to your portfolio again and again.
You can start this process with something as simple as MailChimp or look into Constant Contact or AWeber. But start. If you want to really start taking your artistic career seriously, you need to be taking steps to continually build up your audience and then nurture them — always with the intention of amplifying your positioning, showing yourself to be the kind of artist whose work they are going to want to buy.
#5 Have you ordered any prints of your own work yet? And are you doing anything with them to accentuate your positioning?
Here’s an idea. Order some of your own work as prints. (You can order it at cost, and even with a discount 15% right now through https://artisanhd.com/ by using the coupon code LOYALTY at checkout.) Then . . . be sure you DO something with the prints. Here are some ideas for you:
— Take your prints around to some cool places and get some great photos of them on display. Even if they’re only on “display” long enough for you to get the photo. The point is to have some great photos of your work to show off on your blog, on your Facebook page, over on Instagram, in any of your promotional material, etc. Art buyers want to buy art other people have bought. It’s a matter of social proof. If someone sees your work hanging on what looks like a gallery wall, they assume your work must be in galleries. But even beyond that, if someone sees your work hanging above a beautiful living room as if right out of the pages of Architectural Digest, they’re going to start imagining that work hanging in their own homes. Taking the time to get some really professional looking photos of your work on display goes a long way (even if it’s just “on display” standing atop a picturesque table with some flowers next to a window with lace curtains). The better you can showcase your work displayed “in real life,” the more compelling it will become to a buyer.
— Take your prints (or a beautifully done book presenting your work and all those gorgeous photos you took of your work on display) around to galleries and other potential venues that might allow you to exhibit your work. Specifically, to exhibit your work in front of buyers who actually have the taste (and the money) to buy art. Not only will this potentially lead to sales in and of itself, but it will bring with it several additional benefits. First, it will give you another credit you can put at the bottom of your artist’s bio and add to your printed list of exhibits when you go around lining up more of them. Second, it again gives you a great opportunity to get photos of your work actually on display. Third, it helps you further promote your online portfolio, which you’ll of course have listed on all of your marketing handouts, cited on any relevant websites, mentioned in any local publicity, etc.
— Enhance your prints to make them stand out as being special, as being important, as being unique. This could mean issuing a “Limited Edition” of numbered prints. It could mean offering a limited series of signed prints. Or if you’re especially artistic, it could mean physically enhancing them in some way through incorporating mixed media, making each print wholly unique and “hand-crafted” in that sense. Even if you were to sell few of these, just having photos of them on display and listed as being available at a very high price will increase your positioning and make you look more impressive your audience.
— Offer your prints (when they’re not officially on exhibit) on loan to someone local, where they can beautify their business, their office, their professional practice. You might get a small, discreet card placed alongside each with your portfolio link, which might lead to a sale. You might get them to put a link to your portfolio on their website. And once again, you can certainly take advantage of their placement by getting some great photos of your work on display. Or here’s another idea: is there a way to get your prints offered up for auction for a particularly noteworthy charity, where they will be displayed in front of your ideal audience of potential buyers? That can be a great way to not only get yourself a great deal of relevant exposure (including a link back to your online portfolio in their program or on their website?), but also do some good in the world.
#6 Are you actively working to build any mutually advantageous partnerships that will generate income, commissions, referrals, and boost the buying traffic to your ArtBoja portfolio?
This goes back to how I got started myself, which was by teaming up with a highly successful wedding photographer who worked only with very rich clients. I was an assistant photographer and I designed all the wedding albums. But then I started doing artistic bridal portraits. And before I knew it … everything grew from there. Private commissions, by referral only. (All part of my positioning.) But I never would have gotten that opportunity if I hadn’t partnered with someone who was already working with my target clientele.
Who is on your list of potential partners you intend to approach? And what’s your plan for approaching them? Are there successful wedding photographers you could meet with (or mail something to), show your work, and offer to do some artistic portraits on spec? Are there highly successful portrait photographers you could approach?
If you look around, there are a lot of old-school photographers who are brilliant at what they do (medium format film portraiture, world-class landscape photography, upscale architectural photographers), but what they don’t have is the artistic skill to turn those photos into something more. All of these are candidates for partnerships. Not only might it bring you some immediate work, but it will further your positioning, potentially get you in front of the right kind of buying audience, and help you drive more and more traffic to your portfolio.
Another great kind of partnership you could be looking to cultivate: interior decorators! Imagine working closely with a handful of interior decorators who love your work and who can begin incorporating your canvases and prints in their recommendations to their clients.
How many of these kinds of partnerships have you begun to nurture? Do you even have a list of potential partners you would like to approach, and a plan for how you can make the best impression when you do?
And speaking of that plan . . .
Isn’t it time you started to create one?
If you really do want to sell your prints and canvases, then you need to start doing the kinds of things that will make that happen.
You can’t just sit around and hope the right people will stumble upon your portfolio page and buy from you. Sure, you might sell a print here, a print there. But if you really want to make a success of this, you need to start approaching it like a professional.
But this should encourage you: Since so FEW artists out there ever approach promoting their work in this way, the “competition” is altogether negligible.
There is very little competition at the top. The vast hordes of “aspiring” artists are all mucking about down at the bottom, stewing away in their daydreams and blind hope, complaining that “no one buys art anymore.”
Don’t be that kind of artist.
Take control of your future and engineer the kind of career you want for yourself.
Maybe it’s not even to sell prints and canvases. Like I keep saying, there’s a huge market out there for commercial work. You just need to put together a plan and start working it.
If you want to sell your prints, then what I’ve given you here is more than enough to get you WELL on your way. Use the ideas here to get started.
Be brutally honest with yourself, and ask yourself these questions:
— Am I producing the kinds of images that will likely sell as prints or canvases?
— Have I really made sure my ArtBoja portfolio looks top-notch?
— Am I actively working every month to promote myself and my art online, get my work published, and build traffic to my portfolio?
— Do I have a system in place by which I am beginning to build an email list, and am I nurturing my list and further enhancing my positioning with them every month?
— Am I exhibiting my work locally, capturing exceptional photos of it on display and regularly putting those in front of my audience? Am I getting my work seen? Am I getting my work talked about?
— Are there specific high-value partnerships I am working to put in place and turn into successes through my involvement with them?
Those are the six things I covered here. It’s hardly an exhaustive list, but it’s a start.
How are you doing on them?
If you’re not doing much, maybe it’s time to sit down, form an initial plan, and get busy putting it into action. You don’t need to do it all. Just pick a couple things, make a plan, and BEGIN.
No one says you have to sell your prints and canvases. It can just be fun having an online portfolio for its own sake. But if you do want to sell your work … stop waiting for the world to beat a path to your door. You must look for ways to stand out. Your work itself must stand out, obviously. But you as an artist must stand out as well. So much of this comes down to how you position yourself and how well you are able to get yourself and your work in front of the right audience.
And that rarely just happens by accident.
Go create a plan.
Work the plan.
And then just refine it over time.
You do that, and you really are living the photo artistic life.
– Sebastian