For today’s meeting, I’m going to discuss cross marketing and selling related items on your website. Photo by Tracy O
This is something you are well familiar with if you’ve ever shopped on Amazon or eBay. Other items that you may be interested in appear along with your desired product. A bit frustrating when as a seller you see other seller’s items appearing with your own, but it is what it is.
There are numerous tools out there to help you. On your website or blog, you have control over the related items visitors see. For the artist, the opportunity exists for you to resell your work whether it be as prints or other products. For my part, I’ve been rather successful with Zazzle. I’d say it’s been my most successful venture. I’ve liked the quality of their products. For me as a seller, I find the product set up easier than other sites I’ve tried.
For prints, I’ve recently signed up with ArtWanted’s print program. For $5.00 a month, what the heck. I was attracted to the fact that prints came in all sizes from 3” x 5” on up. They’re affordable. Set up is a breeze. After uploading a high quality image, the software chooses the best sizes and indicating the expected quality of the print. I’ll report back in more detail on this program in a later post.
Here’s an example of how I set up cross marketing on my website. I have links to some related products, including a product with the same image as the painting. I’ve also included a link for my ArtWanted print. There’s also a hotlink to the item in my online store.
I won’t kid you. This is a lot of work. Getting the image right is time consuming. (Hopefully you do keep a high quality image of all your work.) The Zazzle set up takes time. Coding the XHTML on each web page is work. I did set up a template to speed along the process. I also worked in one gallery at a time to cut down on repetitive typing. I’m still not done, but you get the idea.
We don’t have to be starving artists. With cross marketing and search engine optimization, we can succeed.
Its a great post and useful also because today everybody want to buy shopping goods online.
Thanks for such an helpful post.