In continuing our ArtSmarts 101 discussion of what you need to become a successful artist, no matter the genre, we now look at building your own site.

In the last post we presented and over view of what it took to build a successful photography career. This post will look at the Top 10 reasons why an artist website is a must!

• Professionalism

Owning your own website looks more professional. You can control every aspect of it and ensure that it looks exactly how you want it to look.

• Build your own brand

You can use the design of your site to build a personal brand around yourself and your work, which makes you more recognizable online and makes your work more likely to sell.

• Customize your domain

You can register and use your own domain name [i.e. www.yourname.com] and have a custom email address related to that too.

• Stand out in the crowd

Your hub website only features a gallery of YOUR work so you won’t get lost among many other artists, a big problem on large showcase or shop sites. Having your own site can help you stand out in the crowd.

• Focus

Having your own hub website gives you a FOCUS for all your marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. Your promotion efforts, focused on this one site, can build up over time to great results.

• Build your list of people who love your work

You can build your own mailing list of people who are all interested in your work and ready to buy it when you release a new piece. This is a great way to steadily build interest in what you do. This list is yours to keep and build.

• Freedom

You have complete control over what is shown on the site: galleries, contact, other links, etc. You are also free to change shops or galleries as often as you like with no problems.

• Offline opportunities

You can concentrate on promoting the site offline. If you get promotional items printed up advertising your site and work, you need to make sure the web address you are printing is going to stay the same over time. With your own website and custom domain name you can keep on promoting your work in the real world, at exhibitions and art fairs. This way you can capture sales after the event has finished too.

• No commission

You don’t pay commission. Anything you sell through your own site is commission free. [Although you will have to pay a small fee to the company who handles your payments i.e. Paypal].

• Endless possibilities

You can keep adding satellite websites to your little solar system and increasing the traffic to your hub website to increase your chance of sales.

Setting up your own website may take a little more time and organization but if you are serious about selling artwork online or setting up a creative business it is a crucial step that will pay dividends in the long run.

While you are setting up your site, you can begin work on collecting contacts for your email list. I’ll address that in more detail in the next Post.