Become a Profitable Artist

If you have a passion for art but feel like being an artist is difficult to make a living with today, we have you covered. This section will go over the ways that you can turn your art into a lucrative business and make use of new tools that will allow you to duplicate yourself and your time.

The most important thing to keep in mind when trying to turn art into a business is that you will need to get your name and services out there on a large scale so that people can find you. When you are starting out the first thing you will want to do is create a site that you can market your work on, sell some pieces you have made, and allow people to contact you for custom pieces. You can check out our how to make a professional website section to learn everything you need to know about creating a site for your business. You can check out some of the most successful current artists’ sites to get ideas but keep in mind that it should be built as a gallery that can show off your work and the different types of art that you specialize in. This site will be where you drive traffic to from the marketing we will talk about next.

Once you have your site built up, you should create 2 TikTok accounts, 2 Instagram accounts, a Facebook Page, and a Google account for posting to YouTube. With these profiles we will focus on making short form content to post to these platforms. You will use reels with Facebook and Instagram, and YouTube shorts on YouTube. Every day you should work on some art and film yourself over the shoulder or from above making your art. You can then create timelapses of you creating your art in software like premiere pro or the free online version Davinci Resolve. From here you can simply speed up the videos you record and make them into short clips that you can add attention grabbing audio too. Go on these platforms we have gone over and search #art and check out the most successful posts to get a good idea of what music and styles of videos are performing at the highest level in terms of likes and views. Keep in mind that not all of your videos will get traction like those but with consistency and quality art, you will get something to go viral and that may be all you need to get more customers than you can even handle. If you make 1 piece of art each day and focus on posting 3 videos of that art to all your accounts, you created then you will be sure to gain traction and customers very quickly. Just make sure that the ends of your videos mention the link to your site in your bio which you should obviously post there so that they can find your work and get in touch with you. Once you have enough customers where you are finding it hard to get all of your orders done, you will simply raise your price until it becomes more manageable. This is how artists get to the point where they are making a fortune for their art, so do not be afraid to ask for more and believe that you are worth as much as any artist that has your skills!

Another way to get some business and money in your pocket while you build up customers on social media is to post your art services on platforms like Fiverr and Upwork. I recommend focusing mostly on the social media marketing strategy because it will allow you to gain more demand for your work and charge more money. But these freelance platforms can really help if you are ever short on cash to pay your bills. Search Art on these sites and look at the descriptions and titles for the posts with the most reviews and orders. These will give you a good idea of how to create posts for your art services. You make multiple posts under different categories, and you can even make multiple accounts to post from to give yourself a better chance of someone reaching out. You just have to make sure you are checking each of these accounts frequently so that you don’t miss any new customers. The key to these freelance platforms is to be the first person to respond because people will typically message multiple sellers at once and work with the cheapest or quickest to respond. Get back to your messages as quickly as possible. You should also be searching the job post sections frequently where people post work they need done. Submitting quotes for these jobs is free and can help get you some extra work that you wouldn’t have gotten otherwise.

I know the last thing you may want to hear about as an artist is AI generated art but to thrive in business these days you have to adapt with the changes in an industry. Think about Blockbuster and Netflix. Blockbuster went out of business because they did not choose to buy Netflix years ago. As we have laid out before it is not a necessity, but it can help you get some easy tasks done quickly especially for jobs on Fiverr for example. I personally use Mid Journey for a lot of ads and material in general. In my opinion it is the best out of any that I have used, and it allows you to pick any aspect ratio simply by adding –ar 9:16 at the end of a prompt. You must create a discord account and join their group through midjourney.com. Once you have done that, you can go in one of their text channels and look at how some of the other people are using the prompts. It will give you a great idea of all the prompts you can give it and the results they give. I like to start my prompts simple to allow it to use some creativity and then expand if I decide I want something more specific. No matter how you use it, this can be an amazing tool to get some art done very quickly and if you are at a level where you are not charging a lot per artwork, it will help you get a lot done almost instantly.