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.
