My Online Art Journey

In this blog post, I will be sharing my personal experiences as an artist navigating the online world. From finding my niche to promoting my art, I'll cover it all. Join me on this creative journey and gain insights into the world of online art.

OUR STORY

Don't be fooled.

Maybe you don't want to hear this, but most of the people you are following on YouTube are not successful!

They simply would not have time to script, record,and edit their videos AND do the things they are "teaching" you about.

I have been online, trying different things since 2016. If it is out there, chances are I have tried it. I have tried affiliate marketing, FBA, Etsy Handmade, and print on demand on both Etsy and Amazon Merch On Demand.

Don't Get me wrong, there are some great YouTubers and I have learned most of what I know from following the good and bad and trial and error. It was purely trial and error that I learned that I needed to take what I learned and apply my own instinct to find what works. I have been semi-successful. By semi, I mean I have gone from OK, to good, to great, back to OK. I am working my way back up the ladder. That is why I decided to start this blog. Partly to share my experience getting back to great and as a journaling exercise. I am also trying out Hostgator's website building platform instead of Wordpress, which I love and have used for years, but now I am going to change it up and test this!

What made me fail? A few things, one being that the market has become extremely competitive as more and more people are trying to get into print on demand. The another is assuming my great sellers would remain passive income. I was making up to 11k a month profit on Merch On Demand alone, and Etsy was my side hustle (I was doing something handmade and it is time consuming). Then I saw things start to taper off. My previous organic sales were not ranking anymore, despite reviews and consistant sales for years. I don't know why or how this happened, maybe Amazon decided to give others a chance in a niche I dominated. I started to advertise when I saw the sales start to go down, despite my efforts, I couldn't save those listings. This was a hard lesson for the need to diversify my income, I never will rely on one source of income.

I also have had to do some self study to figure out my flaws and try and correct things that I could do better or differently. Reflection is valuable, never assume you know everthing. One fault was my art for print on demand. I was overdoing it. I would spend ages on a design and truly create great works of art. T-shirt design is about making a statement, people just want something that pops and reflects their emotions on a subject. Concert and tattoo designs sell well, but they are not my area of expertise. I have loved every minute of make my artistic creations, but my biggest sellers were stock art. I was on Creative Fabrica before it was really popular! A lot of the origninal sellers were creators that came over from other platforms. I have been a customer of sites like Creative Market, Freepik, Design Cuts, and Design Bundles for years. I still use assets from them. I have a subscription to Creative Market, but it has become overcrowded and sloppy. It is hard to find what you are looking for and their standard for accepting artists is not a high bar.

The Creative Fabrica platform has become so crowded with bad Midjourney art created by non-artists that sometimes I find it annoying. As soon as I find a good artist I follow them. Some of the art I have downloaded has crappy files, or is missing something. The non-artists (and you will find me complaining about them often in future posts,) do not check their work and I have seen everything from mispellings, poorly removed backgrounds, to files that just won't open. I also can't stand that font designers on there do not name their fonts with original names, so I will download a font and find that I already have that font on my computer. So it is either a choice of checking it against what I already have or r now I make a split decision and will either overwrite or ditch on the spot, I don't want to take the time to go to Adobe Illustrator to and compare, I am too busy and want to pump out the work. In the early days of Creative Fabrica, they would contact the artist to change the font names, now they will not even answer your help request.

I spent a lot of time learning AI this year, signing up for every free trial I found. A lot of artists I know decided to hate AI before even trying it. I have always been a techy and was using computers before most people I know. I am completely self taught and am constantly striving to learn new things. I saw AI as something that was exciting and was not going to go away. So it was either jump on board, or get left behind. I have found it as a wonderful and exhileration way to add to my creative process. In futute posts I will chronicle the programs I am using now, what I have tried, and how I incorporate them into my work flow.

In the new year I have lots of plans for my creative life and am excited to explore them and share what I am doing. I will share what works and what doesn't. I am not sure about sharing income reports, I will make that decision later on. The areas that I plan on exploring are adding more Etsy shops, a TikTok shop, re-opening my Amazon Seller's Account, opening a Walmart account, KDP (I want to publish a craft book, I am not sure if that is the place to do that yet), refocusing my Amazon Merch on Demand assortment, and repurposing my art by selling it. I know I need to step up my social media efforts as well.

For Etsy I have already opened about 5 shops, one for each niche (I don't believe in general stores, and I will cover that in a later post). I will add new categories to my handmade shop and be adding POD to my handmade assorment. Digital download patterns are another thing I will add to my assortment as they are great sellers on Etsy and I enjoy making the first product, but replicating can be tiresome, especially during Q4. My shop already has 100's of 5 star reviews and has been open for a few years, so Etsy's algorithm knows what the store's niche is. I definitely want to add digital downloads to my income and that will be a good start. I started creating my own mock ups with AI and have come up with some amazing ones for apparel as well as other products. I really believe I can make my merchandise stand out with these. I am on the fence about selling them at first as I want to be really original. I am going to be diligent about creating fully optimized listings from the start and will have videos for everything. I ditched Placeit this year as it is too slow and I found I have made better mock ups myself or can get them sometimes from Creative Fabrica. I joined MyDesigns during the Black Friday sale. I had a subscription before, but was intimidated by how complex it seemed. I found it is really not that hard once I got into it. I bought the highest tier as I wanted to be able to publish a lot of listings with videos, I get a discount if I use their products, and I can make videos for anything I publish through them, including if I want to use something from other suppliers like Printify, Printful, and TeeLaunch.

As for Amazon, I am doing 3 things. Focusing more on simplifying my art for all of my POD, starting with Merch On Demand. I will also be connecting Printify to Amazon Seller Central and experiment with selling merch on there, MyDesigns will be coming out with an Amazon integration this year. From my past experience selling on Amazon, there is a back end for SEO so you can get found easier, and I am exciting to try to sell other types of Merch or at least differt colors or styles of apparel. I failed at FBA and lost a lot of money, I will get to that in a later post.

As I stated beore, Walmart is on my to do list. I have tried Ebay before and got exasperated with the customer quality compared to Etsy so I removed all of my listings. During the pandemic it was great, then with all the shipping problems I became exasperated. Sometimes you need to pick and choose where you want to extend your efforts. I also found that there are many hidden fees on Ebay and my profits did not seem worth it to me.

I have opened a TikTok shop, stocked it with about 20 items and got shut down. Their help is almost non-existant and the FB group is only good if you want to co-miserate with others. There are a few admins but they are not active so if you post it is highly likely they will reject it when they do get around to checking the group, or never get around to approving it in a timely manner. I had a post waiting for 5 days, I finally deleted it and tried 2 more times and the posts just never got approved. I hadn't even sold anything and I recieved a notice that I violated something and can not figure out what it is. The platform is completely controlled by bots and all help questions are answered by ai with canned responses. It is also overrun with Chinese cheap sellers, so it is left to be seen if this will be worth it. I have both Printify and Printful integrated.

I opened a few Fourthwall shops. This will be an exciting as the shops look really professional and the merchandise assortment is spot on. I was excited when Printify opened up their Pop Up shop capability to sell on social media, but I found that the post views were really limited. Meaning the Pop Up shops only have the ability to use Printify's mock ups which are basically terrible and when you post, you do not get a decent picture post. It is small and distant, I would have to make a jpeg post myself and then include the shop link under my self made post. It was hardly worth the effort. I had hoped that they would be a good alternative to Merch On Demand for selling products based on trending hashtags. Merch On Demand has become so slow that I have design waiting for up to 4 days now to get processed. I wanted somewhere to post designs that looked trustworthy and could post immediately. Teespring and other platforms like it have terrible quality from the reviews I have read and the profit is not that great.

2024 Creative Goals

Here is a list of the goals:

• Refocus Merch On Demand

• Expand Etsy presence

• KDP

• Walmart

• Amazon Seller Central

• Fourth Wall

• TikTok Shop

Wow, when I list them I wonder if my goals are reachable! My main focus will be Etsy, then Merch On Demand. TikTok is last because they need to get it together. I know it is important to get in on the ground floor of opportunities so I am not going to sleep on it. I just am not going to spend a lot of time until I see it working. This is an election year so I want to be on there to sell political merch. So I am praying it works. I have been selling political merch on Etsy. Basically the store is sleepy except for when something happens that is big and then I see a flurry of activity. So as I go on my journey this year, I will be posting regualrly. As of the date I am posting this, I am not even creating images, just using waht was on the template!