Instead of immediately removing sold pieces from your website, or your outbound marketing efforts, you can leverage them to expand your audience and add more names to your contact list and your mailing list, which should be the main focus of most of your marketing efforts.
When you sell a piece, especially if it's one of those special pieces that you "could have sold" a dozen times over, take that as a sign to utilize that image as a "Pillar Painting". Yes I'm coining that word.
Bloggers have long understood the power of "Pillar Content", but artists have tended to squander the opportunity to leverage sold "Pillar Paintings."
Don't just sell a great piece once and then hide that image away from the world! Leverage that image to generate more interest in your future art works, just as my gallery did with those sold works that were in print advertisements.
Sold paintings have several things going for them.
1. Sold paintings have already proven that they are masterful enough and interesting enough to sell.
2. Sold paintings become even more interesting to people because, once they find out it is sold, they now have social proof. And it's the best kind of social proof: it's not a like, it's not a share, it's that someone actually put up hard earned money to acquire the piece. This provides credibility for you, the artist, and for the painting.
3. The fact that it's sold makes it even more desirable to people. This creates an air of exclusivity around the painting and the artist.
When you have a "Pillar Painting", because of all these benefits, you should utilize it in your marketing, because it is likely to generate more interest and responses.
When utilized well, Pillar Paintings can also create spillover effects to the rest of your portfolio, increasing interest in your other works.
So here's what I'm proposing:
Use the sold Pillar Painting to get people interested in your work, then redirect them to other works they may like as well or better (just as we did with our sold advertised works in the story above).
For this to work, when you sell a pillar painting, don't immediately mark it sold on your website. Just change your site settings so the call to action button is "Inquire about this painting." (To do this in FASO you can simply remove the price and we will automatically change the main call to action button from "Add to Cart" to "Contact the Artist").
