How To Sell Your Art Online

You might not expect a journey from a painter to a programmer, but that's exactly what happened to me. I started as an artist, struggling to get my work seen in the vast digital world. My artwork was my passion, but my website was a ghost town. I realised I needed to learn about SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) to get found online, and that's how my entire career path shifted.

From Artist to Accidental SEO Expert

When I first created my website, I thought all I needed was a gallery of my paintings and a nice-looking bio. But nobody was visiting. I started researching how to get my site to rank on Google. What I discovered was that SEO wasn't some complex mystery; it was just about making my website's content clear and helpful for both people and search engines.

I learned the importance of keywords. I realised that instead of just "paintings," I needed to use specific phrases like "abstract expressionist art for sale" or "large canvas landscape paintings." I saw how crucial it was to be specific, so I started putting those phrases in my page titles, image descriptions (known as alt text), and in the written descriptions for each piece. I also started a blog where I talked about my creative process, which gave me more opportunities to use those keywords naturally. Slowly but surely, my website started showing up in search results. The more I worked at it, the more I saw my traffic grow.

My Pivot into Web Design

As my own site started to get traffic and sales, other artists began asking me how I did it. They loved my website and wanted to know who designed it. When I told them I did it myself using a platform like Shopify, they were amazed. This is when the lightbulb went off for me. I realised that my SEO knowledge, combined with my artist's eye for design, was a powerful combination. I could help other artists build beautiful, functional websites that actually got seen.

I started taking on small freelance projects, designing websites for other artists. My focus was always on creating sites that were not only visually stunning but also optimised from the ground up for SEO, based on the principles I had taught myself. This meant building clean code, ensuring fast loading speeds, and teaching my clients how to write their own keyword-rich content. The more I worked, the more I fell in love with the technical side of things. I was still creating, just in a different medium—web design.

Becoming a Shopify App Developer

My journey didn't stop there. As I built more and more sites for artists on Shopify, I started to notice recurring needs that couldn't be solved with the platform's standard features. Things like a better way to display a portfolio or a more intuitive inventory management system for unique pieces. I found myself repeatedly needing a way to easily manage and optimise product tags for SEO. I wanted to create a tool that artists could use to get their site found, without having to become SEO experts themselves.

This is where my curiosity led me to explore Shopify's app development ecosystem. I taught myself to code in the languages needed for Shopify development, like Liquid, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It was a steep learning curve, but my background as an artist helped me. Just like a painting, an app starts with an idea and is built layer by layer. The first app I created was Live Tag SEO Pro, which was specifically designed to solve the tagging problem I kept running into. It allows artists to quickly and effectively manage their product tags to improve their SEO performance. I saw it as another form of creation, a way to solve problems for my fellow artists on a much larger scale. Now, my apps are helping artists worldwide get their work organised and their websites found, and I couldn't be prouder.

My path from artist to app developer was unexpected, but it's proof that passion and a willingness to learn can open up new doors you never even knew were there.

You can check out the Live Tag SEO Pro app here.

And if you would like an informal chat about your own site, just get in touch.

You might also like to visit my Clyde Built Tech website for all new updates on SEO and Shopify Apps.

Thanks, Kevin :)