The key to making this possible is to take advantage of art affiliate programs offered by several websites. It doesn't matter which program you decide to use the concept and steps to success are the same. In this guide I'll walk you through every step of the process and demonstrate each step using our sample website, Tropical Art.
For those of you already familiar with how affiliate websites work, you can skip ahead to step one. For the rest of you I'll briefly explain. By becoming an affiliate of an art website you agree to send customers to them, in exchange for earning a commission off the sale. There are several ways to do this, but the most common is by setting up your own website for your virtual art store. You allow visitors to browse the art selection you offer and when they wish to make a purchase you send them to the website you have affiliated with to check out. When you send the visitor to the affiliate manager's website, the url includes a tracking id so that you get credit for the sale. You can visit the tropical art website above for an example of how this works. The percentage of commission you collect for this varies based on the program and how many sales you make, but it typically ranges from 10%-25% of the amount purchased. With art purchases it's not unusual for a single visitor to purchase $100 or more in art so you can see how the sales can add up quickly.
Step 1 - Select an Affiliate Program
The first thing you need to do is select an affiliate program. The reason it is important to do this first is because it can take days or even weeks to receive approval of your acceptance back from these programs. By doing this step first it will not hold you up later on. Some of the affiliate programs require you to list your website before signing up, while with others it's optional. If it's required you can skip this step and come back to it.
There are several factors to look when choosing an affiliate program. Some questions you need to ask are: What percentage of commission will you be paid? How wide is the product selection? Will consumers feel safe providing their credit card information to this site?
I highly recommend sticking with the big three art affiliate programs, Art.com, Art International and All Posters. While there are plenty of others to choose from and many are legit, there are always a few scams out there and I simply can not personally vouch for the others. By working with the big players in the industry you also are typically able to offer your visitors a wider selection. For my sample site I will be using the art.com affiliate program
Step 2 - Selecting a Topic
It's important for you to know that setting up an art website and making money off of it is going to take some work and you're not going to profit over night. Most websites get the majority of traffic from search engines, but as with any industry you have competition. This guide will show you how to put up a good fight to get your site ranked in the search engines and get traffic to your site. It's important to begin with the end in mind so the first step is finding what topic you wish to target.
Usually beginners want to set up a massive art store that sells every product available. While this sounds good at first, it's not practical for a novice or anyone without serious financial backing to compete in this field. You have to find a niche to target and focus all of your energies on that niche. The most important step in doing this is to find the primary keyword you want to target. I recommend the keyword suggestion tool from Digital Point for doing this.
This tool is simple to use. Just enter a keyword that describes the type of site you want to set up such as "art" and click the suggest button. You'll get a list of related keywords and the number of daily searches each receives. I recommend using the Overture numbers which show the number of searches performed on Yahoo because I feel these are a more accurate example. At the time of writing this the term "art" receives over 29,000 searches a day! As I said before this is way too competetive of a term for most people to target. My suggestion is to scroll down towards the bottom of the list and look at terms for easier targets. The words in each phrase are listed in alphabetical order, not necessirly in the order searched. For example the term I targeted in this example "tropical art" is listed as "art tropical" on this site. It receives about 400 searches a day on Yahoo alone which will be more than enough to earn a decent amount on this site. Once you found one you think you'd be interested in, go to the search engine you use and perform a search for it. Look at the top few sites and ask yourself the question of if you feel you can build a site that is of this quality or higher or hire someone else to. If the answer is no I'd recommend you try other terms until you find the right one.
Step 3 - Make Sure You Have Products to Sell
So far you haven't spent any money and have invested a minimal amount of time. Before you do either you need to make sure you have a fair number of products to sell related to the topic you have chosen. Doing this is simple. Just browse the site you have chosen to become an affiliate for and make sure they sell products related to your topic.
For the Tropical Art website I'm using as an example I can see Art.com offers a beach and ocean gallery that will be perfect. If you can't find any products for your topic or a very limited selection I would suggest finding another topic or a different affiliate program.
