I recently had an old friend contact me about setting up a blog. He’s a smart guy and just received his MFA in Visual Studies from the art school we went to together. He wanted to know about the best ways to go about setting up a blog and potentially selling some pieces of artwork. It was a good conversation and I think there were some good points that I decided to repost some of my information as a new post about setting something up.

I’m not going to get into the benefits of blogging or it’s use as a marketing too. That’s an important topic but I want to cover some basic information on just getting started with blogging. There’s a TON of information out there and while I know I’m not covering it all I wanted to give a crash course.

There are a lot of blogging options available now a days. My friend sent me some links to various other blogs he had found that he liked. The first one was a nice WordPress site of another artist. WordPress is a very popular open source blogging content management system. It has a lot of advantages, it’s free, easy to use and has an active developer base with plenty of useful plugins. It’s also easy to customize and there are PLENTY of free and low cost themes to modify the look of it. You can basically go at it a couple of ways: You can install WordPress on your own server, which requires a bit of bit of web knowhow and very slight database setup(PowerBand Graphic’s site was built this way). There’s TONS of tutorials online thanks to its popularity. You can also host your WordPress site on WordPress’s servers. In that case your site URL would look something like www.yourname.wordpress.com. If you don’t want that you would need to tweak some DNS settings on your domain . Here’s some useful links:

www.wordpress.org (this is for downloading the software to install the blog yourself
www.wordpress.com (this is for using WordPress to host your blog for you)

WordPress isn’t the only blogging platform out there either. Blogger (or blogspot) is owned by Google and is a popular way to blog. This service is all hosted by Blogger though. It’s easy to use, free and easy to integrate advertising(if that’s something you want to do) but doesn’t have the same level of customization that WordPress has. Again, you would have a name like www.yourname.blogger.com unless you change some DNS settings.

Another popular blog is Tumblr. Tumblr is getting very popular because of it’s simplicity, style and customizability. It’s very “stream of consciousness” and not the most robust content management system though.

There’s many many more blogging options out there to say nothing of dedicated content management systems. They all have their strengths and weaknesses. Some are free, others are not. Some require a decent amount of upkeep and managing others do not. I have worked and researched systems like Joomla, Drupal, Movable Type, Expression Engine, Concrete5, CushyCMS and LightCMS. All good options but like anything worth researching to find out which one fits your specific needs.

NOW on to selling stuff. Here’s where you can get a little tricky. It depends on how you want to do this. Do you want the process to be automated-full-on-ecommerce with a shopping cart where people go through the process without contacting you? That’s where it can get complicated and the answer depends on how much you want to do the work yourself or hire someone. Most of these solutions require some form of fee or constant updating to make sure everything is running smoothly.

Magento is another free option, it’s a full on ecommerce platform that you can download and install similar to wordpress. This might be a bit overkill and time consuming for you though. Shopify is another option for selling things online. It’s a service with a monthly fee but what is nice is the company handles all of your hosting, security & support. Another possible option would be to create a blog and then also create a shop on Etsy Then my friend could just link his artwork in the store from his blog as he creates it. I’ve never used Etsy myself but I’ve heard it highly recommended by many artists and designers.

Phew! Lot’s of stuff to cover! It might also work to start small and test the waters. Maybe set up your blog and create a post for each item you’d like to sell with pictures and details. Then just have people contact you directly to purchase with a paypal or money order. There aren’t any hidden charges from Google that you should worry about when selling stuff from your blog. You may have to start charging sales tax depending on the state that you sell to (I believe if you use Etsy or Shopify they automate sales tax for you). I’d get an accountant you can trust if possible and get their opinion.

In the end I recommended a combination of WordPress + Etsy as the simplest combination for what my friend wanted to accomplish. Like I said there’s an incredible number of options out there. It depends on how much time you want to do this stuff yourself, your technical ability, budget and what you want your site to do. Do your research, there’s a perfect fit for everyone and you’ll be blogging in no time!