The Custom Artwork Strategy (Get an Art Sale TODAY)

Your end goal is simple: artwork that sells like hotcakes to a large audience that loves it.

The trouble is that the time it takes to achieve this can vary wildly based on the quality of your strategy.

In this playbook you will learn:

• How to use your talent to bring in money TODAY with only around 10 minutes of work.
• How to stop guessing what your audience might want and finally find out
• How to guide your work towards more marketable niches
• An overall framework for achieving the revenue expectations you have for your art

The Artist Growth Process: How to Achieve Your Revenue Expectations

Let’s look at a simplified breakdown of how thriving art businesses are made.

1. Earn $ from YOUR TALENT. It all starts here – can you successfully make sales by offering up your talent, regardless of subject matter or niche. This phase is often skipped, but it’s critical in order to generate the insights you’ll need to guide your decision-making in the subsequent stages.
2. Earn $ from a NICHE. After gaining experience with selling art in general, you begin the process of building a more specific collection of various niches. There is a lot of guesswork at this stage, which is why you shouldn’t hesitate to return to stage #1 if you are not making any sales, or failing to meet your revenue expectations.
3. Earn $ from a MORE MARKETABLE NICHE. After selling from your collection, the next step is to continuously identify highly marketable niches you can work in. This is the end-game for $100,000+/year art businesses, and the path to meeting your own revenue expectations. We describe it in detail in the Niche Master Course.
4. Rinse and REPEAT. The process never stops. The most successful artists STILL continue to create new work in new niches all throughout the year. This is what continues their success and takes them to the next level.

Finding the right “sells like hotcakes” niches for you is an organic process, but it won’t just happen by itself.

You need to take an active role in understanding what it is an audience of buyers actually wants, and then provide it to them.

As you create artwork over the years, what you are doing is essentially making guesses about what people might want.

Maybe this one? How about this? Any takers for this one?

What you’ll tend to end up with is a following of plenty of followers, but few buyers. They like what you do, you just haven’t necessarily created something they need to actually buy.

So, what WOULD they buy?

Let’s find out.

The Custom Artwork Strategy

Here’s the strategy: offer custom artwork to your audience at an irresistible price.

Why? But because you need intel fast.

What is your audience worth? Are they truly ever going to buy? The fastest way to find out is to offer them something incredible.

And what do they want? Is there a niche hiding in plain sight you just haven’t thought of yet? The fastest way to find out is to ask.

So, let’s build a custom artwork offer.

THE OFFERING

Your pitch: I will create whatever you would like.

But, it helps to provide a few examples to get the gears turning for your audience. Think about what it is you could create and make a list. Here are a few HIGHLY marketable suggestions:

Figurative Painters 👉 Pet, family, and home portraits, regional landscapes, honeymoon destinations, hobbies and interests of all kinds…

Abstract Painters 👉 New work created with the buyer’s inspiration in mind (personal, spiritual, emotional, rememberances…)

Photographers 👉 Pet, family, and home portraits, local sights, alma maters, hobbies and interests, quotes superimposed on existing images…

Digital Artists 👉 Pet, family, and home portraits, pieces inspired by movies, TV shows, videogames…

Because this offer will be very aggressively priced, scale it down to an offering that won’t take you a month to create. (ie: a smaller painting, not a giant one with countless details).

PRICING + PAYMENT

The pricing philosophy is simple: don’t let price be the reason you don’t get any takers. This isn’t about making the big bucks yet. You can easily raise your prices later. Right now, what we want is to maximize participation.

So find a number that feels right as an impulse buy. If you already know what people are willing to pay for custom artwork from you, go with that.

Otherwise, try starting in the $99-299 range and see how you do. This is not a permanent decision. You can raise or lower your pricing at any time as you see fit.

When it comes to accepting payment, make this as simple as possible for your buyers. PayPal, Venmo, and Zelle are all good options.

URGENCY - LIMITED AVAILABILITY

As with any campaign, it helps to provide some structure and a good reason to act fast.

The best way to do that is with limited slots. This is doubly useful because it means you won’t be agreeing to an unlimited number of projects.

If you have a small audience, you should offer one slot. If you have a decent-sized, engaged audience, offer three slots. And if you have a large, highly engaged audience, offer five slots.

PROMOTION

Create social media posts and an email to announce this campaign. Your language should incorporate:

1. What types of things you can create. Note what details you would like to receive (ie: reference photos).
2. The price
   
3. A limited number of slots

Here’s an example of how it should all come together: 

Ideally, you would include an image of past custom work you have done – or, if it is your first time, any popular image will do.

After receiving DMs, you can choose how many to accept.

You may have agreed to do one in the post, but privately decide to do three – it’s up to you. 

THE POST-SALE UPSELL

Want to bring in even more revenue? This portion of the strategy has been known to DOUBLE the size of orders!

NEXT STEPS

1. Repeat this strategy monthly! Experiment with raising your prices over time, and don't mistake this for a beginner-only strategy. Custom artwork is always going to be a great way to earn money from your talent and bring in more consistent monthly income. And even at high levels of success, you will still want to take the pulse of your audience to limit your guesswork and guide you toward that next niche or subject matter.
2. Complete the Niche Mastercourse (exclusive course for Art Storefronts members) to learn how to distribute your artwork to passionate audiences of buyers. These two strategies go hand in hand and one will enhance the other.

Get the Complete Custom Artwork Strategy and join 10,000+ artists and photographers who are using Art Storefronts to build their art businesses faster.