As an artist, you always put a lot of effort into your creation to deliver the best graphics, video animations, or artwork to audiences. You may be good at creativity but how about selling them?
Art exhibitions and galleries aren’t effective enough in this digital age. This poses a big challenge for you to adapt to the changes and start selling your art online alongside the traditional method.
Which platform to sell your digital work? How to protect my products from digital piracy? We’ll answer all these questions to give you a clear idea of how to sell digital art online and make money.
Before going into the details, let’s briefly define what digital art is.
What Is Digital Art?
Digital art refers to artistic work that is done online. Artists will use digital technology and multimedia platforms to create or present them. It’s applied in some parts or the entire creative and presentation process.
Other names of digital art are computer art and multimedia art. There are various types of digital art, including graphics, animated videos, digital paintings, vector drawing, and tons more.
Digital art is divided into 3 main categories, consisting of Computer-Generated Visual Media, Digital Photography, and Darkroom & Digital Installation Art. Each has many subcategories as well. Artists can create their unique vision by combining these art types.
You’ve understood what digital art is along with the main types, now let’s move to the most important section of how to sell digital art online and make money.
#1 Sell Artworks on Instagram
As artists, sharing your art with the right audience comes as the most crucial part of making a living from them. Instagram turns out to be the hottest and the no.1 place for creators.
This social media platform receives love from millions of artists thanks to its visually-driven capability. Not only can you inspire followers with your artwork but it’s a great way to find your art-lovers globally. On top of that, it also allows you to directly connect with the art world.
Still, one main disadvantage of selling digital art on Instagram comes down to the number of your followers. It takes time to attract enough Instagrammers to follow your account and turn them into paid customers. You need to accept the fact that you may not earn anything at the beginning.
There are a few tips to keep in mind when selling digital art on Instagram.
- Provide high-quality images of your products
- Style your artworks, e.g. filters, background, light, language, etc.
- Write creative captions with relevant and trending hashtags
- Display an attractive bio
- Post regularly daily
#2 Teach Art Online via Courses
Running an online art course benefits you in many ways. You’re able to reach a wider range of learners all over the world. At the same time, you can prepare the training materials once then reuse them forever. It’s simple to adjust or update them too. This saves you a lot of time and effort.
Since there are lots of resources easily available on the Internet, your courses must stand out from the crowd and be valuable enough to engage learners to join. Try making your guides as detailed and specialized as possible.
If you’re just beginners, use platforms like Udemy and Skillshare to hold your courses. These platforms already have a high user base making your course easier to reach the right audience.
#3 Showcase Artwork for Sale on Your Site
One of the great ways to sell digital art is via your website. Though it may be difficult for you to attract users coming to your site at first, this would always be a long-term and effective method, especially for those offering digital downloads.
To have a good visitor base for your site and start making profits, you should write engaging content related to your work, publish consistently, and optimize it for SEO. Your articles can cover various topics, from how to be a master in your niche or interviews with artists. You can insert affiliate links to receive passive income from them.
The following tips give you a better idea of what you should include in your digital art website content.
- Opinions about new art trends
- Reviews of new art exhibitions and galleries
- Tips for beginner artists
- Interviews of art influencers
#4 Start a YouTube Channel
122 million active users stream YouTube videos daily with about 1 billion watching hours across the world, according to Global Media Insight. These numbers prove the popularity of YouTube as the promised land for promoting artistic talent and making money.
There are several ways for you to earn from YouTube, either joining its partner program, creating sponsored content, becoming an affiliate partner, or getting fans to pay you directly.
To achieve that, you need to grow your channel with a particular number of subscribers. You can record tutorial videos, film art supplies reviews, or simply show off your creative work such as prints or books.
Make sure you apply these tips while recording your videos.
- Provide high-quality videos: filming equipment, light
- Research keywords to make sure many people are interested in your topics
- Start a vlog of your real life as an artist
- Include affiliate links in video descriptions
This way of selling digital art doesn’t suit camera-shy people so you should consider it carefully before getting started. What’s more, it isn’t just filming the videos and up YouTube and earning money. There are tons of things to involve, from filming multiple times to choosing the best shot to edit videos.
#5 Sell Digital Stock Artwork
According to Vectorise.net, selling your digital art on stock websites helps earn from 15% to 60% of your revenue. These platforms free you from creating a site/YoutTube channel or building traffic/subscribers to it.
The stock photography market is incredibly huge. Not only can you sell designs and photos but fonts, digital stickers, and phone themes are also supported. There is a bunch of stock websites for selling vector designs and photos. Shutterstock, Envato, Adobe Stock, Graphic River, and Creative Market just to name a few.
Ready to Make Money from Digital Art?
Unlike normal art, digital art requires artists to use digital technology and multimedia platforms to create or present it. We’ve shown you the 5 best ways how to sell digital art online and make money.
You can create your website, YouTube channel, or Instagram profile and sell your computer art there. Before start making money, you need to grow your site/channel to form/receive a solid visitor/subscriber base.
It’s recommended to sell your digital artworks and products on third-party platforms such as stock websites.
If you’re selling digital files on your WordPress site, consider protecting them so that unauthorized users can’t find these products on search engines and access them illegally.
What’s your ideal solution to earn an income from your artwork? Share with us your opinion in the comment section below.
