How To Use A Text Widget To Sell Your Work Online

I have an online store. It’s on Fine Art America, a hosting and fulfillment service for artists who want to sell their work.

I wanted to publicize the fact that people can buy Christmas cards which feature my art.

FAA is very tech-savvy. They create embed codes (HTML) for every piece of art. Artists can embed this code in their site or blog. It will generate a small display ad. Viewers can click on the ad and be taken directly to that piece of art on the FAA site.

Here’s what the display ad looks like for a Christmas illustration of mine:

It’s very slick, very attractive. There’s just one problem: I can’t access the detail code and change what displays. I can’t change it to “Buy single cards or packs of 10 or 25.”

FWIW: Single cards cost $4.95 (I get a dollar, FAA gets $3.95). I didn’t want to confuse
the issue by displaying “Buy a print starting at $22.35.”

(People can also buy a shower curtain with the same art on it– now there’s a gift idea!!)

I decided to create my own ad. I pulled an FAA logo off the internet, and built the ad in Pixelmator, my image-editing program.

One nice thing about buying greeting cards thru FAA: you can write your own inside greeting, or just leave the inside blank.

But I’ve always suspected that many people like to buy cards that come with an inside greeting– so I include a suggested greeting in the description of each card.

For Nativity Selfie, my suggested greeting is: “Smile– we have a Savior!!”

I resized the ad to fit my WordPress sidebar (300 px wide), inserted it into a Text widget, linked it to the corresponding FAA page, and moved it to the sidebar.

I repeated all the steps and created two more ads. Now I had display ads for cards (not prints, not shower curtains). The ads also let people know they can opt for my caption or write their own, and that they can buy single cards or packs of 10 or 25.

Here’s one of the other ads:

One of my stranger card designs is called King Kong Kristmas. The famous ape has stolen the Baby Jesus from a church creche and climbed a tall outdoor Christmas tree. The Magi are flying around trying to shoot him down, as in the final scene of the 1933 movie.

I have an inside greeting for it, but why should  I  have all the fun? Here’s the image. I put it to you, dear reader: what would you write inside the card? Please share it in a comment. 😊