How to Sell Your Art Online With Flickr

 
Flickr is an online photo sharing and managing website which has over 51 million registered users.

Do you share your art at Flickr? Flickr can be very beneficial in attracting visitors to other websites, who want to view more of your art.

Artists can sell art through Flickr simply by including a link to their art website or print on demand profile.

 

I have outlined some of the settings that will help others find you when they are searching for your particular style of art.  The option to allow others to share your artworks using a Flickr Commons license, may be particularly helpful.

I explain how I use the photo sharing website Flickr to promote and sell art below…

 

Online Photo Sharing of Artworks with Flickr - Tutorial

 

Signup for Flickr

Fill in your profile information by clicking on “YOU” at the top, and going to your profile.  On this page there are links to manage your flikr profile. Go to “edit your profile information” and fill in the boxes with info. about yourself. A short introductory statement about yourself and your art can be included here, along with a link to your artist website. The same url may even be included inside your statement.

The Buddy Icon
It is highly recommended that you upload a new profile picture here, so that others will readily recognize you. This appears on your Flickr profile, and along with each individual shared artwork. The image should be no more than 48 by 48 pixels. If you need your photo shrinked to a smaller size, you may go to Shrink Pictures.

Flickr uploader
Upload photos and videos by clicking that certain category under the YOU menu. There are two options here for uploading pictures. You may either use the Flickr Uploadr, which is a desktop photo uploading application, or send your artworks to Flikr directly.

Before sending your images, it is advisable to read up on SEO tips for naming your image files.
Writing the correct file names will make images easier to find for both search engines and Flickr users. 

Choose the image files on your computer, make sure the privacy is set to public, then start your upload.

Description and Tagging
This is very important and will also help other Flickr users find your art! Be sure to describe your artwork accurately.

What category or style of art is it?

Here is an example from one of my descriptions.

As you can see here, I used the descriptive phrase graphite abstract pencil drawing. This will help others to find my drawing Inseparable Hearts when they search using any of these words.

Links in the description.
It is recommended to include a link or two here, to help others view more of your art elsewhere. This will help to sell your art on Flikr, by providing the website where prints and originals can be purchased. To shorten your time, you can create a new notepad document, and paste you html code there, and use it for descriptions of other artworks as well. (More tips on how to use notepad for organization on your computer)

Flickr Creative Commons

With Flickr commons, you may grant permission to other Flickr members to share your art on other websites, as long as they link back to you. Find this option by going to “Your Account”, then “Privacy and Permissions”, and setting the creative commons license under the heading “Defaults for new uploads”.

When uploaded, this can also be set for individual images. I have set my image sharing to Attribution-NoDerivs Creative Commons. This means others may share my art by posting it on other websites and credit me for it, but they cannot manipulate the image in any way.

 

 

The key to success for promoting and selling art through Flickr is to link every single image to any site where you have art for sale.

Continue to do this effectively, and eventually you will start to receive visitors, and hopefully art sales by means of Flickr.