What's an artrepreneur? An artrepreneur is a person who is actively involved (or interested in becoming actively involved) in the business side of art, as a means of making money by helping artists such as myself to market their work. It isn't necessary for you to open your own physical art gallery in order for you to benefit from part-time, non-exclusive partnerships with artists such as myself. Ideally, such a plan will be implemented in such a way as to make it possible for you to make money without the need for much of a financial investment on your part.
Let's say that you work in an office, for example. Lunch breaks can present opportunities for you to present catalogs to coworkers who might be persuaded to order the products shown in those catalogs (such as fine art prints, greeting cards, etc.) in a manner which would enable you to receive sales commissions as compensation for your marketing assistance. In such a scenario, I might present you with a PDF file which would enable you to create your own catalog for that purpose, along with order forms which could be given to potential customers of yours. Such order forms would include your own vendor ID information so that you would get sales commissions in connection with any sales attributable to your marketing efforts on my behalf.
Such arrangements present "win-win-win" scenarios for all involved. You have the opportunity to earn some extra cash. I, the artist and gallery proprietor, have the opportunity to gain additional sales of my products and/or services. And your customers have the opportunity to buy products and/or services of mine which they otherwise might not have known about.
Of course, you need to be sensitive to specific situations when trying to market products and/or services in the workplace. Some employers have rules pertaining to such things, so you want to be sure that you don't violate those rules. But even then, there are often ways around those rules, without alienating your friends and coworkers. For instance, you might not be allowed to make direct sales presentations during business hours, but you could still hand "calling cards" or business cards to coworkers and invite them to visit your own personal blog site (the web address of which would be printed on such cards), whereupon they would then be presented with information pertaining to your "side business" and its applicability to your desire to earn extra cash while simultaneously helping a worthy artist to market his or her own work.
Part of my plan for marketing products via the Pettigrew's Gallery blog site, therefore, involves the recruitment of various people who, in exchange for reasonable remuneration, would help me to market the products which I plan to offer via this site in the future.
One nice thing about web-based entrepreneurial programs is that the rules which prohibit young people from working at various traditional jobs don't apply. If you have a child just starting high school, and if he or she is willing and able to do so, there's no reason that your child can't sell products and/or services in his or her spare time (possibly with your supervision and occasional help), in order to help pay for school expenses or in order to buy personal items, or just for the purpose of getting a jump on the process of becoming economically self-sufficient to some degree. And unlike jobs working at fast food joints and the like, there are no artificial limits to the amount of money such a person can make, because the hours are totally up to the individual artrepreneur. Child labor laws wouldn't apply. Your child would be an independent contractor or sales rep, not an employee. There might be a simple contractual agreement giving me the right to terminate the relationship if the "artrepreneur" violates certain minimal rules or fails to meet certain requirements, but I'd have no right to "fire" anyone.
Obviously, in order to benefit from your help when marketing the products being offered via the Pettigrew's Gallery blog, I'll need to create some means of identifying the responsible parties whenever I receive completed order forms, so that sales commissions are paid to the correct people. The ideal way is to create affiliate marketing links so that people get such credit automatically whenever orders are placed, but that takes a certain level of programming expertise, and I'm not entirely sure that that's possible within the context of Blogger.com blogs. But what I can do, and what I plan to do, is to create customized order forms, in which the Vendor ID numbers for specific vendors can be customized so that specific vendors receive proper credit. That will also require that I have all of the information needed in order to make proper and timely payments (based on a policy which I'll fully explain later) to vendors of my products and/or services.
TO BE CONTINUED...
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