How To Earn Money Online
How To Earn Money Through Art Online
Earn Money Through Internet
How To Earn Money Through Art Online Games

Flickr helps thousands of people to start making money from their photos. If you have a Flickr account, you can now license your photos through Getty Images. So, when people see them, they can pay to use them, and earn you money. Flickr members can turn on a “Request to License” link on their photo pages. Sell Your Art and Designs on Social Media. Selling digital products is one of the best ways for artists to earn extra money online. Plenty of marketplaces for art like DeviantArt and ArtStation are ready to display your work and facilitate all print sales made on your page. Today, we’re exploring the best places to sell art online so you can earn money from your passion! Many people want to become artists but aren’t sure how to earn a living selling art. Maybe you already consider yourself an artist, but you are having trouble making money with your art.

(This post was originally written in 2013, became the most popular post in my blog out of 100+, and so I update it with what's current when I can. It's long, so grab a cup of your favorite warm beverage, and enjoy!)

Selling art online is exciting and rewarding, and selling art reproductions online is a great way to supplement your income while waiting for your paintings to sell or keep earning money from art that has already been sold. I could have saved so much money if I knew that scanning pencil drawings are the only way to produce high-quality images that will sell pencil art online. After you have scanned your drawings, you will want to resize and edit them online.

There are numerous ways in the web 3.0 world to make money online with your art and illustrations. Many of the methods outlined will also double for crafts and photography, but this primer is focused on traditional paper/canvas art and illustration. Both fine art (the fancy stuff) and simple illustration can make you money online largely two ways: selling it outright, or licensing it. There are many great websites that can help you accomplish either:

Your own website: Although you could certainly make money with your art without it, I highly recommend having your own website to showcase your portfolio whether or not you are just an amateur dabbling in selling & licensing art such as myself, or certainly if you are a professional who is looking to support themselves entirely with income from artworks. As artists promoting ourselves, a website will act as a home base linking all of our social networks to sell art, and as well to display works, information about ourselves, and a way for fans to contact us. A good art portfolio site might very well even have an e-commerce platform from which to sell works. There are many e-commerce platforms available, I recommend Shopify and Storenvy, and purchasing a dot com domain name and web hosting through Bluehost. This is not a paid endorsement so much as an affiliate link, but I do believe Bluehost is pretty hassle free, and in my opinion the best blend of: cheap, easy to use, and good customer service when there is a problem.

You can also self-host a site using Wordpress or tumblr which also require no web coding knowledge. Sites like wordpress one use 'themes', search for 'art portfolio themes'. A great Wordpress shopping cart is a plugin called 'WooCommerce' which makes it easy to add products, keywords to them, prices, etc. from a database.

Selling:

There are literally hundreds of websites to sell your art through, but I will go over some of the better ones.

Amazon, they have a special link a lot of people don't know about for Fine artists to submit their work here.

ArtPal.com is a free membership website that takes a very small commission for works sold.

Artfire.com is a comprehensive marketplace similar to Etsy.

Ebay, the site that started out for people to sell collectibles and knickknacks, is still a great place for selling art. Although they don't specialize in art, you may already be familiar with the site, and it has a huge market of people looking for art on it. Works can either be listed as a fixed price 'Buy Now', or be put up for auction.

Etsy is specializes in all 'artsy' and handmade things, and this certainly includes your fine art and illustration; whether it be on paper, canvas, or a porcelain bowl. Etsy can connect you with a staggeringly big art market, and is great to use for carving out a niche. I recommend the book on the right.

TopHatter.com is another auction site for selling goods that can be useful for artists.

Artiscle is an open platform for artists to sell their work, that is based on the communities that the artists each come from. It is a clean and easy to use website.

20x200 is another major seller house, exclusively for art. They are re-vamping their website at the time of this writing.

Art Licensing & Merchandising aka 'Print on Demand':

Licensing-or sometimes you'll hear 'merchandising- is when you simply sell someone the right to reproduce images of your art, but you retain the original. Here is an example from my Zazzle store, I made a one panel cartoon awhile back about being from Boston, and I have licensed it to Zazzle.com to be printed on postcards people can buy, when people buy a postcard, I get a royalty from the sale.

CafePress.com is probably the biggest merchandising and licensing site. You can use them to put your art images on hundreds of different products that you can then sell for royalties. I use them myself for both my Dimwitz Comics, and also my fine art. Take a look at my store to see an example of what one looks like: cafepress.com/dimwitzcomics. You can use them to sell everything from coffee mugs to actual prints, and many things in between like clothing. A lot of people say that CafePress' image quality can be low sometimes, and I agree but I'm sure they are working to improve it. Being able to see your image on a finished product is great though.

Zazzle.com is the same kind of platform as CafePress, and I definitely prefer Zazzle, but that could mostly just be because it's the one I got used to (the designing of products seems easier to me on Zazzle). Which site is better is actually a hotly contested issue. A Google search for 'Cafepress vs. Zazzle' reveals endless arguing back and forth in forums over which is better. I have used both sites, there are things I like about each, and things I don't. It really comes down to personal preference. They have a wide range of products from cell phone cases to pillows to posters and back. Here is a poster I licensed them one of my pastel paintings:

I will say the first time I ordered some postcards off of Zazzle, they didn't come as had been pictured–but they reimbursed me and I haven't seen that problem since. I do like the sites ease of use over Cafepress, and that they allow more freedom in customizing the products. Check out my store at Zazzle as an example of an entire store.

Below are some similar sites to Zazzle and CafePress I know less about for now, but assure they are major, competitive POD sites:

Art.com is also a very major art site, and they too give users the ability to put personal photos on everything from paper to canvas.

IcanvasArt.com is yet another photo to art print site.

FineArtAmerica.com Is an extremely easy to use major marketplace. They bifurcate their selling platform for specializing to either individual artists (or photographers) and or to galleries. The link above takes you directly to their selling page.

Snapwi.re is one of the few sites I will reccommend for photographers (Disclosure: I am an investor in SnapWire), it is one of the only Microstock photography websites where starting day one, you can take assignments for major companies for the chance to have your photo selected as the one they license. Currently only open for photography, but check out 99 designs for the equivalent for graphic design.

How To Earn Money Online

Art Marketing, some umbrella advice for all channels:

You can have the best website ever, and be on all of the above art platforms, but it will still behoove you to learn all you can about art marketing in and of itself. It will be hard to be successful with your creations without some savvy in that domain. For starters, I recommend reading my a

How To Earn Money Through Art Online