If you’re someone who doesn’t want to be active on social media, or just doesn’t want to rely on social media for all of your traffic, there are other ways you can grow an audience online or in-person.

We’ll talk about the different ways you can show up when a potential customer is searching for what you offer, and the different ways you can put yourself in front of your target customer as they go about their day.

There’s a lot to consider with marketing, so let’s look at how you could put all of this into practise with three marketing strategies you could use in your art business: one with social media, one without social media, and one with a focus on professional illustration work. 

In this lesson we talk about how you can own your own traffic with an email list.

We’ll cover the benefits of having an email list, how you can incentivise people to join and what you can do with it.

If you’re selling your services as an artist to other businesses like publishers, agencies or corporate companies, then you need to build a beautiful portfolio that shows what you can do, and then find a way to show it to them.

We’ll cover what makes a good portfolio, how you can format them and who to send them to, plus go over a few common types of portfolio with some specific tips for each.

With all of this marketing you want to at some point direct your community of potential customers toward the actual paid products you have to offer them, so let’s talk about where you’re going to sell your products.

As you start taking the first steps toward earning money with your art business, you need to learn what the legal requirements are for starting a business in your country for your particular circumstances to make sure that you’re complying with the rules from the beginning.

There’s no global, one-size-fits-all approach to setting up a business because laws vary, so I can’t give you specific advice, but we can talk about some common considerations for you to research.

As a small business, you’re going to encounter some legal contracts, so let’s look at a few general things to to consider with art related contracts.

I can’t give any legal advice of course, but we’ll cover a few typical types of art contract and what I personally look for in the contract terms, just to give you a starting point for navigating your own contracts.

You’ve got big plans for your art business, so it’s good to break down those plans into goals, and then into smaller tasks that you can action. 

We’ll talk about the difference between goals and outcomes (and why it’s so important) and how you can set clear, achievable goals in your business.

If you’re like me then you might be over-ambitious with your goals because there are so many things that you want to do and you probably want to do them all as soon as possible.

In this lesson we talk about how you can prioritise your goals so that they don’t overwhelm you, and how you can think of your business in different phases to help you with those priorities.

Scheduling can be hard as a creative, so we’ll cover a few options for keeping on top of your tasks and talk about what to do if you’re short on time.

Once you get everything up and running and the initial excitement of starting your business starts to wear off, you might start to feel your motivation dropping, so let’s talk about why we feel motivated to do things and how you can use that information to keep showing up for your business.

It can be really quite lonely working for yourself, so sometimes it’s really powerful to connect with other creators to lift each other up.

In this lesson we briefly talk about how connecting with other creators allows you to share knowledge, keep each other accountable, collaborate on projects, and introduce each other to your audiences.

The way you build your business needs to be something that you can continue doing for months and years, and only you can really know what that is.

We’ll cover a few things that can help you maintain balance and sustainability in your business so that you’re excited to keep growing it.