Higher prices are not the reason your work isn’t selling.

The other week, I wrote about contradictions.

Well here’s another one that plagues artists – you price your work at an appropriate level so that you are not exploiting your own labor, but then your work isn’t selling, so you end up not making money (or not enough money) and inadvertently end up exploiting your own labor anyway.

When this happens, the knee-jerk reaction is to lower your prices. (Or start running lots of sales and giving massive discounts.) But nine times out of ten, the reason your work isn’t selling has nothing to do with price.

So why isn’t your work selling?

It’s lack of marketing.

It’s trying to sell within the wrong markets.

It’s photography, branding, and other visuals that don’t support your higher prices.

It’s lack of connections to an audience that can afford your work.

It’s a million little reasons that add up to make it feel like the problem is your pricing.

And sometimes, it’s simply time. It takes time to grow a business, especially online. It takes consistency and showing up over and over again. And it often also takes other people sharing your work to help spread the word and give it legitimacy.

So how do you know if it’s your prices or something else that are causing your lack of sales, especially when you’re selling online and getting very little feedback for your efforts? I want to break down some of those examples I shared above, so that you can do a thorough and honest investment of your business and really know if it’s your pricing or some other factors.

1. Lack of marketing.

Most artists and makers think they are doing way more marketing than they actually are. But the reality is, if you want to succeed online, you need to market all the time. (Ok, not ALL the time. But a lot.) And when I say market more, I don’t just mean posting on Instagram. Instagram by itself is not marketing.

Marketing is emailing your list every week while also working to grow your list. (Because you need to be realistic about how much money you can expect to make from your list. A good metric to start is to aim for making $10 in online sales per person on your list per year. So if you have 500 people on your list, you should be making about $5000 a year in online sales. And if you want to make $50000 a year in online sales, you need 5000 people on your list. If your list is performing well, you can probably get away with less people on your list. But if you’ve only got 50 people on your list, you can’t expect to make $50k a year.)

Marketing is also a robust content strategy that involves some combination of social media, content marketing, and SEO. That could mean posting to Instagram and Facebook (or running ads), it could mean blogging and Pinterest, it could mean creating regular video content, or it could mean optimizing your website for SEO. Or some combination of all of those. But with any of those, the key is consistency. You can’t just blog a handful of times, or share a couple of videos, and expect your business to grow.

Marketing is also tapping into other people’s audiences. That could mean selling to stores or doing shows. It could mean working with influencers (and by influencers, I mean anyone with an audience, not just fashionistas) to have them share and celebrate your work. It could mean pitching your work to the press or giving interviews on podcasts. And it could even mean reminding your friends and family about what you do and asking them to help spread the word.

Ultimately, marketing is some combination of all three of those (email, content marketing, and tapping into other people’s audiences) and if you’re not doing all of those things with consistency, well then you aren’t marketing enough.

2. Trying to sell to the wrong markets.

Not every market will be the right fit for your work, especially after you’ve figured out how much you need to charge to make a living. Some markets, like Etsy, are simply more price conscious than others.

And this doesn’t just apply online. I live in a fairly rural area, and the local market simply cannot support the prices I need and want to charge for my jewelry. So I don’t do local shows or really sell to local stores. Instead, I focus on bigger cities where my prices make more sense.

The best way to know if you’re trying to sell to the wrong market is to take a look around. If your prices are significantly higher than everyone else’s, then it’s not the best market for you. But that doesn’t mean you should lower your prices. It just means you need to keep looking for markets where your prices fit in.

That could mean approaching different stores, applying to higher end shows, or marketing your work online to different platforms. It may take some digging to find the places that will best support the prices you need to charge, but finding the right markets for your work is a more sustainable long term strategy than trying to price for markets that don’t make sense for you.

3. Photography, branding, and other visuals that don’t support higher prices.

If you want to charge more, you need to look the part. The same necklace can look expensive or cheap simply by the way it is photographed.

At the bare minimum, your images need to be well lit, in focus, and with a clean background. (I know this sounds obvious, but I’ve seen a lot of people trying to sell high-end work with too dark, slightly blurry images.) And once you’ve masted the basics, you can bring in props and styling that help communicate a higher price point for your work.

Photography will make or break your business, particularly when selling online, so if you invest in nothing else for your business, you should always invest in your photography. Now, invest could look different for everyone. It might mean spending time learning or improving. Maybe it’s upgrading equipment. Or maybe it’s spending money on professional photoshoots. Perhaps it’s all of the above. The key is that you’re putting the best images out you possibly can.

While photographs are the most important thing when selling art or craft, branding plays a roll as well. Your website should look like it’s modern and up to date and your brand should convey that you aren’t selling stuff for cheap. And if you aren’t sure, the best thing to do is ask someone. (I give regular website feedback inside Artists and Profit Makers, so you can always ask me!) We are often too close to our businesses to look objectively at things like our website and branding, but our websites and branding play a huge roll in how people perceive our work.

4. A lack of connection to people who can afford your work.

At the end of the day, if you’re priced sustainably, chances are not everyone will be able to afford to buy your work. And depending on your own socio-economic background or current situation, it may feel like there’s no one in your circle that could actually afford to buy your work.

If that’s the case, you need to work on expanding your circle. The first place to start is by going through your network. And this shouldn’t be limited to friends on Facebook. One member of Artists and Profit Makers shared recently that she’s been posting more on LinkedIn, where she’s connected to colleagues from her former life in IT – people who still work in IT, have money to spare, and want to support her art.

When you’re just starting out, the easiest way to sell is through your own network, but if that network can’t support your prices, then it’s time to expand. I’m not telling you that you need to start hobnobbing with rich people. Because chances are, people don’t really need to be rich to afford your art. They just need some level of disposable income and a desire to support creative business. But if that’s not your network, then it’s time to expand.

5. You aren’t giving yourself enough time.

It takes time to grow an audience for your art or craft, especially online. Yet in our world of instant gratification, we feel like if our businesses aren’t successful out of the gate, we’re a failure. But it took me six months from when I first listed a product on Etsy until I had my first sale. And it took me almost ten years to grow my online jewelry sales to a level I was happy with. And along the way, I was doing A LOT of offline marketing for my business. (Some shows and a lot of wholesale.)

My point is this; it takes years of consistent effort. Sometimes more. And I don’t mean years of just slapping a few pieces online and hoping people buy them. I’m talking years of all the strategies I shared above.

And like I said, there are also a million little reasons that things aren’t coming together right. Maybe your emails aren’t sales focused enough. Perhaps your aren’t writing compelling and keyword rich headlines for all those blog posts you’ve been pushing out. (Or maybe you think you’re blogging enough, when you really aren’t.) Or you just haven’t found the right people yet.

All of these factors (and many more) add up to reasons you aren’t selling that have nothing to do with your prices. And even if your prices are part of the issue, there are ways to fix them without universally lowering them. Maybe you just need a bigger range of prices in your line.

The next time you feel doubt about your prices, before you lower them or resort to trying to run a sale on social media, I want you to take an honest look at your business. Ask yourself if you’ve really been putting in ALL the work that needs to happen to grow. If the answer is yes (and I can honestly say I’ve never met a single artist or maker who is doing ALL the things) then the problem might be your pricing.

But chances are, it’s something else that’s holding your business back.

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It can be so difficult to take an objective look at our business, our branding, and our marketing strategy to know if we are doing the right things for our businesses. That’s where having an outside perspective can be huge, and that’s exactly why I started Artists and Profit Makers, my online mentorship program. In Artists and Profit Makers, I give individual feedback that’s specific to your business. (Because I believe there isn’t one right way to run a creative business.) And I back that feedback up with a library of over 30 trainings to give you the resources you need to make changes and take action. So if you’d like some feedback on what is and isn’t working in your business, I invite you to check out Artists and Profit Makers today!