Today, everybody has a webpage; from the free options at WordPress, Wix or other web providers to the more sophisticated self-hosted options that I would encourage anyone with a free account to have a look into.

But it’s not having a website that is important, because it’s like having a nice new set of expensive brushes and colours; owning them doesn’t make you produce a painting and showing them to your friends wont get you far either. 

You have to use them, and the same goes for your webpage.

Apart from the obvious static portfolio that a lot of us have (me included), a website can be much more if your goal is to propagate your art business to the masses.

While they might not cost much to host and domain names are cheap, building one can get quite expensive and the point of having a website shouldn’t just be a 600€ alternative to a hosted PDF portfolio on Google Drive or some other cloud storage provider — especially not if you’re attacking the markets.

If indeed your aim is to venture into the gallery system like me, a good looking portfolio with lots of details on past exhibitions, an up-to-date CV and preferably some online catalogues of your work is ideal.

But if you’re building up a follower base and aim at selling prints, smaller works or even the whole collection of your art directly to the people, your website should be your hub to do so and your means of how to do it.

It’s like with everything else on social media; you can sell on Facebook and Instagram and of course you should, but in the end you do not own the way your products are presented and neither do you own the permission to contact anyone of your followers or other users of any platform — Facebook, Instagram and others can decide to just stop you in your tracks, mark your DMs as spam and eventually close your account.

Obviously this doesn’t happen on a daily basis — at least not to my knowledge — but to be able to control the way your works are presented, how you incorporate any mailing automations and other hooks that create your funnel (as the marketeers like to call it), is an incredibly powerful tool for your art business.

You could for example set-up an automated process that tracks people who view your art on your page and you could target only such individuals with your Facebook or Instagram ads — creating a much better and efficient channel to really put your ad budget to work and increasing your conversion rate (that is the amount of people that buy as a consequence of seeing one of your advertisements instead of blindly targeting users who “like art”).

You could also set-up your mailing automation in such a way that consistently engages people who signed-up; you could send them to one of your webpages and provide behind-the-scenes footage of your process or create a secret podcast where you discuss your work, that they can only get access to by signing-up to your mailing list.

People who give you permission to talk to them will probably enjoy any such content as it is more or less the reason why they signed-up in the first place and if you’re fair and don’t bombard them with sales pitches and discount codes, such relationships can be nurtured and grown from artist-follower to artist-collector over time. And obviously don’t be afraid to sell them your work form time to time — many might buy something only after a well prepared and sincere reminder.

The goal is to be sincere and to build an infrastructure on your website for anyone interested in your work. The better that infrastructure the more people will actually visit and even come back. But if all you’re rocking is a static portfolio, of course most will just look at it and leave — never to return again.