Going with Stephen on this one....
Going with Stephen on this one....
Joe,
Pics and how they are marketed are so individual
its a waste of time asking others about selling on Etsy because other's
opinions and experience don't matter when it comes to YOUR pics.
Just do it and be open to modifying your approach if sales don't materialize.
Stephen
Key words in Stephen's post bold in red... and in general, this echos my thirty years of marketing experience.
Interesting how many posts here imply that "If it were me" attitude.
Marketing to derive income has nothing to do with your own personal philosophy. If you want to make money in any endeavor and are willing to be open in what you choose to do, and you do the work necessary, then Market Research will be one of your most important tools. It will be as important as any other tool in your bag of tricks.
I just did a brief check on volume of items posted just in photography on Etsy. Never saw the site before.
In the category of Photography there are about a dozen sub-categories. Most categories have well over 300 pages. Most pages have over 50 - 60 items on the one page.
There may be a simpler way to get a total, but I wanted to get an overview of the photographs and prices as I gathered this information. So, it appears to me that in photography alone, there are about 216,000 items listed for sale.
Now that's 5 minutes of work and very rough. But it's encouraging enough to want to find out more, and I will be looking at it. It would be nice to know the volume of sales, average sale amounts and other information, but as I indicated, for me I saw enough to find out more, or simply take it for a spin.
If you want to be financially successful at any endeavor, success has very little to do with your opinions, and about the same as to the quality of your work. We all know some pretty shabby work gets sold for some serious money. That's marketing, it's not the photographer or the level of the work. Some photographer's recognition and collector status comes from have a superior Marketing skill, or a superior marketing agent/agency.
Success in selling has far more to do with what research says about the dictates of any particular marketplace, including the vehicles that serve to expose your work to a chosen market, and the support you must offer to maintain a place in the market.
I particularly liked the post that implied that Etsy was a bit feminine, that it was perhaps a bit "new age" (my interpretation of the post), and prices too low.
Well, of course we all know that "new age" people don't buy anything valuable, and that women have no money to spend, and that low prices per item don't generate significant income. How arrogant is that?
Looks to me like Etsy may deserve a longer look.
Lastly, I will put forth that one of the ego trips that seems to cause some people to shoot themselves in the foot is the strong desire to have a personal visible presence on the internet in the form of a web site. My personal belief is that a web site is essentially a waste of both time and money, if one uses the systems that already exist for presentation AND sale closures.
Frankly, I think that one of the underlying reasons for a fancy Web Site is a feeling that perhaps ones work is not strong enough to compete in an open market. Hence the desire to capture people to just one's own work for viewing.
Frankly, I believe in competition. It's the reason that all the successful art galleries generally gravitate to an art district in a community. So should one, when marketing on the internet, mingle where people find other art. In this case, photography. The advantage is that when people go looking for photography, they will tend to go to the most active, largest marketplace. ie, the success of shopping malls, with may competing similar businesses located throughout the establishment.
Don't think about forcing the market to purchase your art your way. Think like a shopper. It's not difficult to see that, is it?
I personally think that if your work is not co-mingled with the same venues and work of others competing with you, you are going to be hard pressed to draw traffic to a one-off custom web site. Just an opinion.
If you don't want to do the research, there are plenty of places to find researchers who will provide reports. If you go to the community pages on eBay and look at the site map, under third party marketing sources listed there, you have a bit of a start.
