Lessons
Embracing Yourself as an Artist
08:13 2Actionable Goals to Achieve Your Dream
06:09 3Setting Intermediate Goals
04:15 4Creating Actionable Tasks
05:29 5Develop Your Business's Personality
02:51 6Your Messaging & Communication - Part 1
01:11 7Your Messaging & Communication - Part 2
03:41 8Successfully Promote Your Work
09:21Lesson Info
Picking Social Media Platforms
major social media platforms. I know this is gonna be old news to a lot of you because a lot of you know what these places are but I'm gonna talk about not as much about how they work as I am, why I feel like they're important to use. So twitter is that social media platform where you tweet 100 no more than 140 characters. So and that includes the U. R. L. So I use twitter 2-3 times a day to share my blog content. And mostly I only write one blog post today occasionally to like not only happens once or two times a month when I have a lot of stuff going on that I need to share and so in the morning I might say um let's say I'm writing about and uh an opening that I'm having the next night and I've written a blog post about the opening inviting people to come. I'm also linking to where people can buy the work online because a lot of let's say my show is in SAn Francisco and a lot of my followers live but the work is going to be available online so I write about that and I post pictures a...
nd links. So my first tweet might be I'm having an opening in SAn Francisco tomorrow night. I hope you can come you know than a link. And then the second link maybe I'm going to target more of the people who don't live in the city. You know work for my new show available online starting at nine a.m. Tomorrow with a link and then at night I might post the same content, you know, linked to the same content but target somebody else or word it differently. Twitter won't let you tweet the same exact words and link more than once. Um interest, I have a Pinterest account, although I'm totally inactive user. Um I got really mad for a period of time at Pinterest and I have a lot of friends who work at Pinterest. So, and they know that I feel this way I got mad at Pinterest because it's very easy for people to reap in things and um, and oftentimes the links back to me or that it was my work, we're getting lost. The onus is on the person who pins to make sure that they link back to the original source. Um, and you know, oftentimes people are pinning images and over the course of time, the, the source of that image can get lost. And so people were posting my work with giving me no credit whatsoever and that was feeling really frustrating to me and I wasn't technically Pinterest fault, but I was getting frustrated Panera. So for awhile I closed my account and now I recently opened it up and I and I want to try to use Pinterest again because I do feel like it's a great way to potentially share your own work. Um A lot of artists and makers use it to pin their own stuff so that people end up re pinning what they pin. Um It's also a great way to share the things that are inspiring to you and other artists that you like. So, um I personally am not an active Pinterest user, but you heard Carrie Lederer's say yesterday that she's a curator and she's Pinterest boards around certain types of art. She finds artists on Pinterest. That's another great reason to be on Pinterest or instagram, which we'll talk about next. These are places where people can find you and hire you or curate you into a show or email you about buying a painting or drawing from you, or, you know, finding your Etsy shop or whatever. Um instagram. Okay, I love instagram. It's visual, there's a feed, right? Um people can sort of follow you, people can recommend you and tag you. Um there's no links. So you can tell people, like, go to my blog to check out this story I wrote on what such and such. Um And by the way, that question about writing is, is, you know, the great thing about blogging and instagram is that you don't have to be a writer, you can just post images in a few sentences. Um and on instagram you don't even have to post a few sentences if you don't want to, although I think a short description is great, so, um it's a great way to show your process what you do. I'm gonna share with you. Um there on my phone here some names of some of my favorite instagram feeds and these are great ones to look at as examples of artists, designers who use instagram have pretty big followings, some medium followings. Um who do I think a great job of sharing their work in their process and they're not all, you know, clean and pretty and polished. Um Like I love Jason Poland. P. O. L. A. N. I'll write these down for you later. Um at Jason Poland, he's great. He's a, he draws, he hosts these Taco Bell drawing nights um mostly in new york city where he lives. But if he's traveling it's just just like this great idea and like people come to the Taco bell and meet him there and then they all draw together and he posts hilarious drawings um and kind of stream of consciousness, thoughts about whatever he's drawing has a great following, has a great sense of humor. Um His, you know, I love him, I was gonna model this for you always start small find one of these things I just talked about and do it for a month and then add another one unless you're already doing them already and then just take it to the next level. Be responsive, respond to people show people you're human. People ask you questions, respond, stay positive. Don't, don't talk about your mom share some of yourself. Okay. Market. Market market this is a great way to market what you're doing celebrate your successes. Don't be shy about that, strike a balance. Make sure that you're not over posting. If something feels like too much to you, it probably is. Trust your own judgment. Um email news blasts. How many of you have them? Um I have been using mail chimp. I love mail chimp, but I used to use a campaign monitor, which was great too. These are ways that you can, people can sign up for your email newsletter. There's templates. I think male chimp has some really great templates and easy ways to email people on a regular schedule. Never add people without their permission to your list. That's a pet peeve of mine. Stick to a schedule. I think once every two weeks or once a month. The spine doesn't have to be every day. Always create a call to action in your newsletter. Get people to go to your website, get people to go to your shop, let people know, get people to go outside of their email. Advertising um is still a great way to promote what you're doing. But the thing about advertising is that you can't just do it in one place. You have to do it in lots of different places. It's really, as I said yesterday about brand recognition and it's kind of like social media. People aren't necessarily going to find you on one instagram post. I'm sorry, one twitter post that you make, they're not gonna necessarily find you through one advertising post, you have to advertise in a lot of different places and advertising can be expensive but it can be effective. Business cards are great, great way to connect with people. People love the tangible card and I hope this has sort of become clear to you as we've been talking the and I hope that all of you will also do this exercise where you do an assessment of how much you're using social media and then the next page is like what you can do differently or what you can add or what, you know, add this to your plan or your goal setting chart to if you feel like you're weak in self promotion. What are some of the things that that you can do and and use, you know, start a new email newsletter, you know, start using a social media platform that you don't already use. Um maybe just one if social media feel scary and new to you. Um so the the effectiveness of your promotions is in relation to your reach. So notice I wasn't like choose one social media platform and only use that I'm saying eventually get to the point where using two or three and use them really well and use them consistently. It's kind of like advertising, you advertise once um in one place you won't reach as many people as if you advertise several times and in several different platforms, use different channels simultaneously and consistently to reach a whiter and whiter audience. And again, this isn't going to happen overnight.
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