Author: One way you can sell your art online is by having your own online art gallery. Running your own online gallery does three things. It puts the control of your art sales in your own hands and eliminates paying commission fees to gallery owners. You also have a permanent place to exhibit your artwork eliminating the need to move your artwork from gallery to gallery.
There are two ways you can choose to host your online gallery, paid hosting and free hosting. With paid hosting you pay monthly fees for your domain name and for hosting your website. You have two choices with free hosting, with banner ads or without banner ads. The banner ad hosts will place banner ads on every page of your website either at the top of the pages or the bottom. Some hosts will even place pop-up ads on your site. With the “no banner” free hosts there are no ads placed on your site at all.
When choosing a free online host I am sure most people would much rather have a “no banner” host, I know I do. However, when I started my first online gallery there weren’t any “no banner” free hosts. Today there are lots of “no banner” free hosts where you can put up a gallery and sell your art online. But you must be careful, some will put banners on your site after a certain amount of time has past and some will want you to join and be active in their forum. Still there are plenty of “no banner” free hosting sites that have no strings attached.
Now, with all of that said, your best choice for hosting your online gallery is paid hosting. The reason I say that is with paid hosting you are in total control of your website. You have a top-level domain and not a sub-domain as you would have with free hosting and you can choose to add things like scripts or other programming data that you can’t add with free hosts.
Having a top-level domain name gives your site more authority than having a sub-domain. For instance “mikes-art-gallery.com” will garner more respect than “mikes-art-gallery.freehost.com”. Don’t let the phrase “Paid Hosting” scare you. There are places where you can get web hosting for as little as $5 a month with a host of features.
Whether you choose free hosting or paid hosting to sell your art online with your online gallery being in control of your own art career sure beats leaving it the hands of someone else.
Having your own online art gallery is just one of the ways of selling your art online, there are plenty of others also. Head on over to How To Sell Your Art Online - An Artist Resource and discover more ways of selling your art online as well as some marketing resources. Article Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/visual-art-articles/sell-your-art-online-with-your-own-online-gallery-905111.html
