The 17th of the first

Certainly not a paid advertisement!

I have been spending most of my time on Fine Art America and creating some of the best results I have found for selling art on the web in the last ten years.  A friend of mine asked my opinion them other day and I hope he joins me and the other 89,000 or so artists trying to sell something there.

http://skip-willits.artistwebsites.com/

Here is a portion of my response to him.

"Hey and how u doin? As they say say on the "Jersey Shore".  The FAA site it a wonder to me. I have been trying to establish something on line for years. Mostly to no avail. This site however is the best I have found.  Means, yep I actually sell some stuff. Have won two contests this month, and Saturday had over 400 hits alone. But there's 89,000 artists on the site.......so it's hard to compete. And they take about two months to pay. But if you can get a flow going, then that's ok. My fear is that some major framing company will buy them out and mess it all up. But while it's working is ok.

 Jeff, I have had my own websites, my own contributions to web sites for years and nothing has worked. It's all about getting your face out there or name that is. I saw one guy who sold 30 something prints of one image in one day from this site. But he is an accomplished artist well and beyond the web stuff. I have a Facebook page as you know, a Twitter page, and a Stumble upon page. A this page and a that page.  Key words, key titles, key paragraphs, key blog and all that stuff.  They all have to be worked on a daily basis. I took the day off on Sunday and had only 50 hits. I write a blog as well and try to keep that fresh each day or three and that is work. I have no idea how those that write for a living produce the stuff they do. It's like the duck carvers, how do they do that stuff anyway....lol.

The beauty here is that we don't have to carry an inventory. They do it all and of course in addition to charging us a fee, both annual (tiny) and per piece (is ok), they charge the buyer for the matting and framing. We get a little piece of that too, charged back. You will need a paypal account to make the money work but that ok as long as you don't maintain a huge balance that some hacker in his mother's basement can steal. I dont' participate in their chat rooms or blogs (no time) but the contests are easy and great exposure. Every time I do something on FAA, I also hit it FB and twitter. You can automatically hook up each listing with your facebook page, so that is very easy. I do, and this is the golden rule, contact people who leave comments, kudos, and the like. As well as the buyers. I try to keep it all personal as possible.

I never make a bad comment about anyone even though some of the people on any sight need to put down others in the misguided thought that it somehow elevates themselves. I just delete them and go on. They have no significance to me. I am not online to massage my ego. 21 years showing at the Easton Waterfowl Festival took care of any delusional, self engrandisement I might have entertained. I retired there last year and understand but heard it wasn't so good anyway. I am doing no more art shows. It started out as not doing any outside shows, but then was easy to say screw it and try to do it all sitting on my butt at the computer." 

This is one of my contest entrants and is a totally different topic for me.  Kinda fun to see how it competes.



Now I find that this too is work.  Funny about that there still seems to be no free lunch out there.  So to all my photographer friends who think that they have the next "Mad Bluebird", take a look at this site.  By the way, the Mad Bluebird image made in excess of two million way before the internet.

 Work it and you just may end up selling a lot more stuff that you expected.

OK, spell check isn't working so you'll just have to deal with it today.

Here is another fun site with good work I encountered on Twitter, so take a look.

http://wildlifeencounters.photoshelter.com/