If you are an artist, you probably have your pet projects you are passionate about creating. And that is wonderful, it's what makes you special as an artist. But if you want to make money selling your art, you also have to learn to market yourself, unless you are lucky and have an agent or publicist to do it for you.
How do you make sure to sell products? Create things people want to buy. It sounds simple, but multi-million dollar companies lose tons of money every year trying, and failing to do just that.
One thing to remember when you are creating products for POD sites: You are one in a million. But that doesn't mean selling cards is hopeless. It just means you have to do your research, and create cards for niche categories. Because many times, people don't come into a POD site to browse like they do a brick-and-mortar store, they come in because they have been sent there by a search engine. That's one reason why tags and descriptive words are so important, but that's a whole other blog post. I will give you an example.
On one POD site I design cards for, Greeting Card Universe, one of my most successful categories is will you be my bridesmaid cards. There are currently 5,245 cards in this category. So it could take you years to get your cards noticed in this category (unless you do a brilliant job marketing, more on that in a future post.)
If you examine the category closer, though, you will find it branches out into specific relationships. Will you be my bridesmaid Sister, Mother, Friend, and so on. There are only 326 cards for friend. so if you design a card with a heartfelt request for a friend to be your bridesmaid, you will have a much better chance of filling a niche need and getting noticed.
How do you make sure to sell products? Create things people want to buy. It sounds simple, but multi-million dollar companies lose tons of money every year trying, and failing to do just that.
One thing to remember when you are creating products for POD sites: You are one in a million. But that doesn't mean selling cards is hopeless. It just means you have to do your research, and create cards for niche categories. Because many times, people don't come into a POD site to browse like they do a brick-and-mortar store, they come in because they have been sent there by a search engine. That's one reason why tags and descriptive words are so important, but that's a whole other blog post. I will give you an example.
On one POD site I design cards for, Greeting Card Universe, one of my most successful categories is will you be my bridesmaid cards. There are currently 5,245 cards in this category. So it could take you years to get your cards noticed in this category (unless you do a brilliant job marketing, more on that in a future post.)
If you examine the category closer, though, you will find it branches out into specific relationships. Will you be my bridesmaid Sister, Mother, Friend, and so on. There are only 326 cards for friend. so if you design a card with a heartfelt request for a friend to be your bridesmaid, you will have a much better chance of filling a niche need and getting noticed.
You can go a step further and create for a relation-specific theme. One theme that never grows old is the fairytale wedding. How many cards are for Bridesmaid invitation, friend, Cinderella? One.
So you can see, with a little time and effort, you can create cards that will be noticed even before people log on to the site.
Here's another example. On GCU, there are currently 197,332 cards for birthday. So if you design just a birthday card, you will be lost in the flurry. O.k., but what about a funny birthday card? Funny birthday cards are one of the most-searched for categories on the site. Well, that narrows it down... to 2,884. But what if you have a peacock fan in your life? Suddenly, it gets narrowed down... to two.
(All images on this page by Cherie Haines. All cards available at our shop here.)
I would love to hear your thoughts about creating cards for a niche! Feel free to add questions or comments below!
No comments:
Post a Comment