Selling your artwork online is an excellent way to get your art seen by thousands of people, and if you do it right you can make money at the same time. Just showing your art online doesn't guarantee success, learning how to market yourself and your artwork can make the difference between being one of a million artists online, or a successful online artist that works from home. Let me share my 5 easy steps for successfully selling your art online.

Step One: Choose how you want to sell your art.

There are endless possibilities for artists to show and sell their artwork online. How you choose to sell your artwork online depends on how and what you want to sell. There are many different types of online art sites that are designed to help artists sell their artwork online. Lets review some of these options.

Print on Demand
Print on demand sites are wonderful for visual artists and writers. Two of the most popular print on demand sites are cafepress and zazzle. Both of these sites print your artwork on to t-shirts, buttons, stickers and other products after a customer purchases the item. These sites are easy to use, you just join, set up an easy online store, upload your designs and start selling.

Auction Sites
Everyone has heard of e-bay, but that is just one of the wonderful sites where artists can sell their artwork online. ArtbyUs is another great way to sell your art online. The nice thing about auction sites is that they work for people who do all kinds of artwork, along with visual art, these sites give sculptors, quilters, fabric artists, bead artists, wood crafters and more a place to display and sell their art.

Online Art Galleries
This is another option that is fantastic for visual artists and photographers. These sites offer free or low cost online Galleries where you can show and sell your artwork. Two sites that offer this are DeviantArt and Imagekind.

Online Store Sites
These are sites where you can create your own little store to sell your artwork or crafts. These include sites like Etsy, where artists and crafters of all kinds can show and sell their artwork without having to actually build their own website.

Step Two: Setting Up Your New Online Store or Gallery

This is an important step, you want your online store to look really great. Spend some time on this step making sure your artwork is presented in an appealing way. Get more than 1 or 2 products listed, people like lots of choices. Learn some basic html to really make your store look special.

Step Three: Marketing 101 - Getting traffic to your online store.

Having great artwork and a fantastic store won't pay off if no one can find your store online. It can be really frustrating, after you've worked so hard setting up a wonderful online store, to only actually sell one or two items per month. As an artist you think, my art is great it will sell itself, but it just doesn't work that way in the real world.

Selling your artwork online requires marketing your art online. Spend some time learning how to get the big search engines like Google to list your online store where people can find it. Taking the time to learn how to market your artwork and your online stores will pay off in the long run.

Step Four: Market Yourself and Your Store

To really get the most out of your online stores you need to actively spend some time promoting yourself as an artist and your online stores at the same time. You can do this in a lot of different ways like blogging, paid advertising, and using social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook and Twitter.

The more you get your presence known on the internet, the more traffic you will get to your online stores and in turn, the more money you will make from selling your artwork online.

Step Five: Rinse and Repeat - Keep repeating steps 1-4

Having online stores is a job that requires a lot of real work in order to succeed. You have to keep adding more designs or products to your online stores. Once you have your first store up and running and have traffic, then you can set up more stores and link them together which will increase traffic to all of them. Keep adding products, the more items you have available, the more opportunities you have to get sales.

Online stores require upkeep, advertising and lots of work, but the rewards of a successful online shop are worth the effort. If you follow these 5 steps you will be successfully selling your artwork online in no time at all.