17 Surprising Ways Artists Can Make More MONEY Online in 2024

I'm going to talk about 17 things that you can do to make more money in your art business online right now. Here's what this video is not. This video is not go sell on Etsy, go do a commission. I don't want you missing the focus. The focus for you is to sell your work. And so that's what we're going to be talking about. How can you sell your work on your website and make more money online? By the way, if you haven't met me, my name is Lennon. I'm very fortunate to have worked with hundreds of artists and creatives and creators. I have a company called Stop the Starving Artist and these are things that we've been talking about in my heart based sales accelerator program recently. And it's helping them make more money. And so I wanted to just share them with you guys. Also. This is not one of those channels where you're gonna get a ton of fancy edits. If that's what you need, go elsewhere. But I'm also not going to waste a lot of time because we got 17 things to cover. So let's jump into it. The first one is to have a low ticket or low priced item. I would consider this something maybe under 60 bucks. The second thing is to have a mid priced item. And yes, we're going to put all these things together for a power tip here in just a second. But have a mid priced item, this might be something that's between 250 and $500. And then of course have a high priced item. This would be something 1,000 and above. So just having each one of these price points is going to be helpful to make more money because you're covering different spectrums of buyers, which totally makes sense, right? When we look at any company that does well making money, they have a myriad of price options because there's a great statistic that talks about how if you have let's say $100 product and 100 people that want to buy your product, 10% of people will buy a thousand dollar product and then 10% of that 10%. So now one person will pay 10x that. So it's a really fascinating thing to think about. And as a seller of your work, I just want to remind you that you're going to work way less to find one person that'll pay you $1,000 than you will to find 10 people that'll pay you $100. Okay, so let's bring this into number four, which is what's called price anchoring. So price anchoring is something that we see all the time. Let's do a simple, simple version of this. You go to the grocery store and you buy cereal, right? What's going to happen? You have the cheaper cereals on the bottom shelf and the more expensive ones are on the top. And then in the middle you're likely going to have the things that are on sale. So why does this work? Because when you look at the cheapest thing, nine times out of ten you're like, well, that's probably lower quality. Like, I'm not really into that. But you look at the most expensive thing, you're like, I don't want to go that high, but I'll definitely pay this, like middle road. So when you take this idea of having a low ticket art item, a high ticket art item, and then the thing you're really pushing is the one that's in the middle, people are way more likely to purchase that thing. Which brings me to the fifth item, which is to do all of this on your own website. Get off of sites like Etsy and redbubble and all this stuff as fast as you can. Why? Because when you think about this price anchoring, if someone goes to Etsy and they see your 300 or $1,000 product, they are automatically price anchoring you to someone else on the site. Idea number six, sell someone else's work. Like, can you partner with another artist and pitch their things to your audience? If you have an audience, right? If you have an email list, why is this cool? Because you could say to them like, hey, I'll pitch your stuff and you know, give me a 30% commission or a 50% commission. And this can be a great opportunity for you to share other cool work to the collectors in, you know, your space, in your sphere. And that brings me to number seven, which is quite obviously like, ask them if they'll sell your work to their audience. And this is something I don't see enough artists think about. It's like, why couldn't you do this? You know, if you have a contact list of art buyers, like, why wouldn't you have every opportunity to sell whatever work you can sell to these people? I think especially visual artists could, could do way more in terms of collaboration with one another and exchanging of audiences and things like that. Okay, so I think we're on number seven here, which is have some sort of priority list. So this is what I teach in my art based sales accelerator. When you're about to sell something.

Run it and say, hey, if you want this, I'm doing a priority list and it's going to be first come, first served. So I'm going to make this offer to the people on this list first. So if you want to be on that list, let me know. Why is this powerful? Because you're allowing people to raise their hand and say, yes, I'm interested in what you're doing so you can reach out to them without feeling guilty or slimy or salesy. Right. The other side of that is that when you do this, you are building your email list and that's something every artist should be thinking about. I don't care if you're a musician, photographer, like visual artists, you should all be thinking about how can I grow my email list. Which brings me to number eight. When you're running this promotion to your priority list, you could do a limited run of something. I'm only printing 10 of these vinyl or I only have 10 of these prints or there's only one original. Or another version of this for number nine is you could do it for a limited time. Hey, I'm only going to have this available for the next week, two weeks, right? Or you could run a sale and you could combine all these things. Like I'm doing a sale, it's going to last for one week, I'm taking 20% off and I'm going to only have 10 of these available. So you can see when you kind of stack these things together or just use one, it just creates more, more excitement around the thing that you're offering. So the next thing you can do is what's called an upsell. So let's say someone buys from you off your priority list. As soon as they buy from you, you can send them a follow up email or a follow up message where you say, hey, you liked this. So what if I offered you this thing at a discount, right? And this just puts something else in front of them where they're getting a great deal on it as a thank you for buying this other thing that they just purchased. And for our next one, what about a downsell? Now what is a down sell? So an upsell is when someone buys something and you make them an offer after they buy. A downsell is when someone doesn't buy and you make them an offer because they didn't. So let's say you do your promotion to your priority list and nobody buys. And so what can you do? You could offer a downsell. You could say, hey, I know that maybe this print wasn't the right fit for you, but if you'd like, for the next 48 hours, I'm offering this one and maybe it's even a little less, right? So this is a great way to get rid of those things that are just sort of sitting around your studio promoting an old album that you haven't looked at in a long time. You know, any other opportunity to just pull out old work and still get it in front of your audience. And here's a key thing. If you want to make more sales of your work, reach out directly, right? This is a powerful one. Can you email someone directly? Can you send them a video? Can you send them a voice note on Instagram? What can you do to personalize their experience? And especially as you're growing, this is so, so powerful because you're going to learn a lot. You can ask questions, you can find out, like, what they really love about your work, which ones they really like the best, what's their favorite song, what's the things that they're, like, really attracted to. What content do they like of yours? Like, all these different things. It's powerful stuff to build relationships directly with your people, right? And why wouldn't you, like, these are the people that are supporting you. Like, what a beautiful thing to be able to connect with them directly. The next thing is testimonials, right? Can you get videos or pictures of previous clients? Can you get interviews with them? Can you do little things that highlight and show off these amazing supporters inside of your community? This is what a lot of people call social proof. People want to see, like, are they actually a professional? And part of what makes you a professional is seeing that other people have purchased from you before. And the cool thing about this kind of stuff is, like, it doesn't need to be super high quality. It can be a cell phone image of them just holding your piece or holding your album or whatever. Like, the more DIY kind of the better because it's just showing that it's real people doing real people things. Here's a power tip for number 16. Keep sold work, at least some of it on your website. When you're doing these sales, have some sold pieces or sold out things still on your website because again, it shows that proof of the work that's already been sold. And it's a really easy lift. It's an easy thing to do. And for number 17, maybe the most important one, because many of you are like, well, Lennon, I'm not getting in front of a lot of people. That means you need to expand your content. Because if you're just making process videos or you're just showing your art all the time. That's the equivalent of like the coffee shop social media account that only shows pictures of the coffee and the baristas like making it. There's no real connection there. You don't follow those accounts because there's nothing there for you to be engaged in. I have a whole masterclass that will walk you through what kind of content you need to make and not only that but how to turn all that stuff into a 30 day sales plan. You can go to stopthestarvingartist.com and watch that masterclass right now for free. So go check it out and if you found this video valuable would you please leave a comment and let me know. I just want to know if I'm on the right track for helping you guys out because my goal is to help 1,000 artists make money online by the end of 2025. So sending you guys tons of love. I'll see you in the next one.