Selling my art on-line

I have not been active in this line for a couple of years, too many distractions and other things happening. In fact my last sale of a piece of art on Ebay was 2 or three years ago. I came to the conclusion that I was not getting a reasonable price for the work. You know how it goes, Ebay is an auction site (??) so you put someting on at a low start price and get ONE bid - aaarrrggg!!! What a catastrophe, and then there is the packaging and post; many people complain if you try to recover these costs fully. Always the possibility of items getting lost in the post - or that is what a minority of buyers claim. Do you believe them? Paypal certainly does! Well I had had enough, I packed it in and concentrated on trading my ATC's. No more items lost in the post, amazing!

However, recently I have been looking again at making a little cash from my hobby. I have been writing about my art on Squidoo, A site which shares advertising revenue with the top (few) web pages based on an on-site ranking procedure. These pages are called "lenses" the idea being that they are single pages which focus down on to a very tight niche. Squidoo provides lots of help in creating a lens and there is a very active community associated with the site. I will not become rich without learning a great deal more about SEO ( I do hate that subject) but I have been making a regular few dollars a month for the past 12 months or so. Many authors seem to make enough to live on doing it full time, with lots of SEO, LOL. But I am reasonably happy with a small income from a couple of hours per week, enough to buy the odd book and art materials to keep me busy. An example of one of these lenses is, Making Artist Trading Cards - 1001 Techniques

Just to keep things ticking over, I have started selling (or rather I have posted for sale) a few items on Bonanza. It has not been a very successful venture so far but again, it is all about getting buyers to your site. This is where Ebay scores of course since it has so many "users", and is often the first (possibly the only) site that prospective buyers go to. But Ebay no longer seems to cater for the small independent trader, fawning over the large (money earning) enterprises that can afford the high selling fees. see my next post for another way of earning cash on line with your art.