No part of these materials may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever
without written permission of the author, Carolyn Ellingson.
© Carolyn Ellingson, June 8, 2000, all rights reserved.
www.artgroove.com

Focus:

The tremendous potential market for selling your art online, the skills and information needed to begin selling your art online by yourself, how to begin on this path toward entering the global marketplace and how to get up to speed.

Think about this:
This workshop offers an alternative to agreeing to be represented on a dealer's site where there may be hundreds of other artists!--I counted sixty artists in the "A" section of the alphabet alone at Guild.com and that's one of the smaller sections of the alphabet there. Would you really want to be there? You'd likely have to tell your collectors to go there and look for you--you could just as well tell them to go to your own showcase website.

What to expect from this workshop:
This workshop is not guaranteed to make you a Web Wizard--or to assure you any kind of online art sales success. However, I have been selling my own art online for some time now and am familiar with the groundwork needed to begin, the big and little things that will make for successful transactions, and the pitfalls you may experience if you neglect to cover all your bases.

You Will Learn what steps to take to:

• Get your business structure in place
  
• Develop an online presence with your art
  
• Take control of your own pricing and sales
  
• Learn to manage your own website
  
• Sell more art by putting up auctions
  
• Build name recognition
• Increase your mailing list with willing subscribers
  
• Use your website to communicate with your collectors
• Give your collectors added value through lower prices
  
• Show and sell in the global marketplace

Topics covered:

• The tremendous potential of the Internet for selling your art - why you should begin planning for it now and start investing in the things needed to begin.
  
  
• Your online business as an adjunct to your regular "bricks and mortar" art business, how most of the same principles apply for success either place, but how doing business on the Internet is different in certain ways.
  
  
• The need for thinking through and firming up your present art business structure and policies:
  • business license, resale license
  • sales taxes (yes, sometimes, even on the Web)
  • recordkeeping
  • customer service - the most important thing!
  • great ideas for developing your mailing list and email lists
  • merchant credit card capability
  • trademarks, copyrights
    

Topics Covered (continued)

• Getting ready:
  • your own website--do it yourself or pay someone else to do it while you learn enough to take over
  • why you should eventually learn to manage your website yourself
    
  • computer capacity needed when you do web work yourself, other "hardware"
  • software - what to use and where and how to learn to use it
    
  • other skills needed:
    • learn to use and be comfortable with your computer
    • learning HTML - why you should--even with special web design software
    • photographing your work and processing images - covered below
    • file management! Organize those files! This is critical to keeping things manageable.
      
  • setting up your own domain name
    • what's involved (not everything, but a few important things)
    • why have your own domain name and your own website?
    • building name recognition
  • your website
    • what should it contain?
    • how should it look and work? principles to keep in mind.
    • how can you use it to communicate with your collectors and potential collectors
    • getting your web pages to your ISP server (FTP)
    • search engines and metatags (not everything, but a few important things)
      
  • Images
    • Artists have great content! Artists can always keep producing more!
    • Photographing your work and digitizing images (some tips)
• 35 mm camera - photo CDs
• digital camera - from camera to computer
• lighting
• organizing your images on your computer
• jpeg vs. gif (and what is png?)
• slide scanners and flatbed scanners (some reasons to have)
• edit your work!
  

Online Auctions:

• Why they are a good thing
• Where's the best place to do art auctions?
• Some tips to get bidders to look at your auctions
• A good ways to keep things organized when offering many items at once
• Making sure your work is in good condition before you put it up for auction
• Following through with paperwork and communication with buyers
• Maintaining a presence online through online auctions

Mood Lifter
Oil on canvas - 48" square
sold on eBay

Dividing your time between producing art and working with the computers

• Why it's a good thing to invest some of your time in marketing your work
• Why artists can and should learn to use computers.
  
  

Reference Materials and Bibliography

Full of Fun, IV
Monotype with painting - 22"h x 30" w
sold on eBay

Location:

My studio at Hunter's Point Shipyard
San Francisco, California
(See Map for directions).

Hours:

From 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. or tailor it to your individual needs. An hour break for lunch--bring your lunch and eat in the studio or go out. It might be best to bring your lunch as there are no places to eat that are really close. If you know the area you might be able to make it to somewhere to eat luch and get back on time, but bringing your lunch would be safer time-wise.