How to Get People to Buy Your Stuff

We had up to 300 customers per day, just a fraction of our eBay exposure.

“How do I get people to buy my stuff???” I hear you ask. Actually, that’s almost the whole of the conversation these days, because marketing isn’t like it used to be, and to begin with, that’s the wrong question.

It isn’t “How do I get people to buy my stuff?”, it’s “How do I get people to just L@@K at my stuff???”, and that’s the hardest question to answer, especially when you’re talking about online sales and marketing.

Let’s say that you’ve just invented the greatest tag line ever invented. Let’s say the tag line is “Cut Your Food Budget by 90%!!!”, which is the ultimate Breakfast-Table Subject. Continue reading

Can You Sell This???

You’re about to enter into the greatest online marketing game on the internet!

It’s the new internet game show, “Can You Sell This???” The game tonight is to meet the marketing challenge on this page — that means to try to sell everything on the page at full retail. Ready to begin?

The way it works is you grab a screenshot of the items you want to sell, and use those screenshots to sell the item, maybe on your web page or social media outlet — don’t forget to mark it up double, to get your full retail.

This is a way that you can use a multi-million dollar inventory without putting a single penny out of pocket, and you can start your own online gift shop this way, without having to spend anything to get started, and you’ll have hundreds of items on the virtual shelves!

Here’s a two-inch square “Empty Classified Document Folder” button you ought to be able to sell at $5.99 retail, and for a while, everybody will know what your button means. After that, it’ll be a collectible. If you get into a jam and you need some extra cash, you might sell the button to the highest bidder.

see the Classified Documents Folder collection

Continue reading

I’m Wondering…

Marvette is modeling the drippy dress, holding wall tapestry, and there’s more.

What I’m wondering about most this morning is, can I discover anything that a lot of people would like to buy at a comfortably low price? I don’t care to make money from it, just a lot of participation, that’s my goal, and I’m not looking for followers or subscribers, just a single simple participation, that’s all.

So what would it be that I could produce cheaply, and how would I — with no money and no influence and no social register whatever — get it in front of the faces of millions of eager buyers? Continue reading

It’s Not About the Art

This medium-sized tapestry wholesales for under $80.

It used to be that you’d paint something, put a frame around it and sell it either at a street fair or — if you were lucky and had a following — in a gallery.

The thing is, unless it was a co-op gallery, where the artists take turns running the store and each artist has a small area for display, you only got one show about every three years, so the gallery didn’t burn up its territory, meaning that the sales got fewer and fewer over the months, and then finally dried up altogether.

You have to move to a different town until you wear out your welcome there, too, and that’s why artists don’t stay in one place forever unless they do local landscapes. Continue reading

Empty Nuclear Secret Folders for Sale Cheap!

Empty Top Secret Classified Folders for Sale cheap!

Here’s what you do: find a slogan, meme, phrase, buzzword that is instantly recognizable and is currently trending, hash-tagging and flying about the internet on the social media.

The business team has a “spotter” who watches the news channels and finds a topic o’ the day, and in addition, monitors the hashtags to spot the trending phrases.

Your building team now comes into play, using the formula of the Magic Phrase that you decided to focus on today. Here’s what they should come up with: Continue reading

What if this were your Homepage?

Wow! If this were your homepage, you’d be home-free, because an exhibition right on your front page is going to draw people to it, and plenty of views will be the result!

You could explain your whole concept, exactly what it is you do, on your website homepage just by sticking a gallery into it, somewhat like this one, which explains the Bardo in easy-to-understand visual graphics.

You can add sound to it if you like, but I prefer not to do that unless there’s a compelling reason to have the sound.

In this case, there isn’t. Besides, what if you’re already listening to one of our albums, like “Hot Night in Hell” or “In Your Face” or “In Your Mother’s Face”. Continue reading

I Have 25 Factories

Actually, it’s closer to 30 factories, all of them making product for me and selling it for me and handling all the transaction and customer-service issues and shipping and billing and invoicing and all that jazz.

I don’t invest a penny in any of it. I just upload my art onto their stuff and they sell it for me. I can add to that effect by marketing my things on my own outlets, of course, but not on eBay — you can’t sell what you don’t have in hand. Continue reading

Basics of Online Art Sales

Here’s the very basic basics about art sales — ready?

  • Title — the title is everything, and must contain three root words. Every word counts — put nothing in the title that doesn’t work for you, by which I mean attracts the views.
  • Drive — You can’t depend on casual random browsing to sell your product. You are trying to reach people with means, who can afford what you’re going to have to do to their home, so you need to get out there in social media and drive the customers to your doorstep — actually, right to the object itself. How to reach them is what you’re trying to learn right now.
  • Simplicity — It has to be easy for your customer, which means YOU do all the work, without complaint. Again, you need to train yourself to do ALL the steps to a sale, including follow-up and remarketing.
  • Story — Any and every experienced salesperson will tell you that it’s not the price, not the look — it’s the story. When you first start selling, you won’t get this idea for a while, even though you’ve heard it a million times, but for example, the Jazz Art has a story … I was the ONLY official IAJE artist for 15 years. Over the decades, my jazz backdrops have been used by every jazz great from Oscar Petersen to Wynton Marsalis, and there are equal stories, contained in full-color photo scrapbooks available to the public, about the Museum of Modern Art, Otis Art Institute, the Cedar Bar, and other important historical segments of the art world.
  • Authenticity — Every one of my works comes with complete documentation directly from me in my studio. All of my paintings have been photographed at least once, and many have photo evidence to prove that they are what they say they are.
  • Condition — All my works are stored correctly, and they are as fresh as the day they were painted, some of them as much as 60 years ago.
  • Market — My paintings have been on the secondary market for over 20 years, and the prices are well-supported, with many bonafide sales between $5,000 and $50,000.00.
  • Size — Very few artists paint in architectural sizes like 11 feet tall by 50 feet wide, but I do, and if there are a bunch of wealthy people living in homes with 22 feet of headroom, I have the art.
  • Celebrity — All of my Jazz Art pieces were used in performances behind almost all of the jazz greats of our time.
  • History — Your support makes it possible to give our support to jazz musicians all over the world.
  • Charity — Part of the sale price goes to the community.

The most important point is that you can’t stand on a street corner waiting for those wealthy clients to come along and buy your enormous canvas out there on the sidewalk. It just won’t happen that way. Continue reading

Wow! Dime-Sized Ammies are HERE!!!

This is my electronics workbench AFTER I’ve straightened it up.

Many people have asked throughout the past 25 years whether I could make the CQR Amulet any smaller, and I said “No”, because up to now — this very week — I couldn’t.

Then along came a miracle crystal that could contain the fatness of the already tiny miniaturized electronic parts inside the ammy, thanks to a friend of Barbara’s, who hand-crafts watch crystals for famous watchmakers like Piaget, whose watches go for hundreds of thousands of dollars, and she sometimes makes crystals for our ammies.

I needed a high-domed crystal that would fit into my gold bezel, so I sent her a raw radio so she could personally test the fit. Continue reading

Yet Another Talk???

I’m painting again, now that there’s a market.

You don’t want to end up with a couple dozen storage units full of unsold art, so I taper off my production when sales are down. These days, I can’t work fast enough to satisfy the marketplace, which is maybe a good thing.

But, yeah, this is going to be yet another talk about eBay and that sort of thing — you know, marketing, entrepreneurship and general media mayhem, and we have to do it soon, before the Second American Civil War breaks out. Even before we start back on subject, I want to mention that THIS is the time to acquire Pre-War coins, and I have plenty for sale.

That having been said, let’s get on with the thing.

First of all, I want to make sure you have an eBay account. I’m not discounting other selling sites, but I’m restricting my selling characteristics to the eBay mode for the moment. We will discuss other means of presenting merchandise to the public.

Forgive me, I meant, of course, “merch”, not “merchandise”. The reason for the shortened word is always the same — spelling is a major obstacle to most people, even college graduates. Continue reading