Monday, June 29, 2015

If you want to sell on the internet, you have to be on the internet

A neighbor recently opened an etsy shop to sell her paintings. She asked me a bunch of questions about the process, which I was happy to answer. Then she asked me the essential question: "How do you get people to find you on the internet?"

Getting people to find me on the internet is the central struggle of my career. It’s a constant battle that I’ve been fighting every single day, with some success, for the past five years. But of course I didn’t tell my neighbor this, because I didn’t want to scare her off. So I suggested she start by posting her new shop on her Facebook page. “Well, that’s the thing, I don’t do Facebook.” Twitter? Nope. Instagram? What? We didn’t even get to the idea of submitting work to blogs.

I had a sudden flashback to a conversation with another artist a few years earlier, who complained that twitter wasn’t working well for promoting her work. “I tweet a lot,” she explained, “But I don’t actually READ tweets.” Dear fellow artist,



This is not to say that twitter is the only way to go, or that artists have to spend as many hours a day on the internet as I do. They probably shouldn’t!



But really, selling online has a lot in common with selling offline. You need to put in some time. You have to get out there and forge relationships. You need to know who the players are. I’m going to call this Banks’ second theorem:*

If you want to sell on the internet, you have to be on the internet.


If you had a brick-and-mortar shop, you would know the other shopkeepers in your neighborhood, wouldn’t you? Well, if you have an online shop, the internet is your neighborhood. Get out there, take a walk every day, and say hello. Read some blogs. Read some tweets. Make some intelligent comments. Then say, "here, have a look at what I'm working on." Repeat. 


*I’ll get to the first theorem later. My blog, my rules. 

3 comments:

  1. Truer words have never been spoken. I hope this makes it clear: having an Etsy shop or an online store in your website is not the end of it. You have to man the operation, be at the store, manage the inventory, while putting out the good word at the same thing. And getting the word out has never been easier, since you can use social media to reach out to your followers and potential target audiences. Thanks for sharing your thoughts on the matter. Good day!

    Rachelle Edwards @ All Digital Branding

    ReplyDelete
  2. You couldn't be more on point about this. Bottom line: your stuff won't sell itself, and certainly not in a venue such as the internet where there are a lot of other people catering to a particular niche. In fact, your virtual store is not only the one you've got on Etsy. It's on Facebook, on Twitter, on Pinterest on Tumblr, in your contacts and your interactions, and the blogosphere itself. It's up to you to be online enough to coordinate each of them. Good luck!

    Chris Hatcher @ Red Stick SEO

    ReplyDelete