 Well, hello and welcome to this video. Today I'm talking about three easy online ways to grow your artist's email list. Recently I've done another video, kind of refreshed video on how to set up and grow your mailing list. So if you haven't watched that, make sure to grab the link below this one and check out that video. But here we're diving a little bit deeper into just three online strategies and look out for another video coming where I'm gonna do my favorite offline strategy. So at the moment we're talking all things mailing lists and remember, again, if you're new to this channel, you won't know yet that I talk an awful lot about building your mailing list. Why? Because you own it, right? Doesn't matter how many followers you have on social media. If you don't own social media, you could have 100,000 followers on Facebook or 100,000 followers on Instagram, but if those platforms shut down tomorrow, you're going to be a little stuck, right? But a mailing list you own, you've got the possibility to send emails on a regular basis, check out this video here about email marketing, what to be putting in your email. And from there, of course, you build up rapport and a relationship with people who are interested and want to hear more from you. And as we know, over time, the likelihood of somebody making a purchase from your email is really high. You've got somebody that said, yes, please, I want to hear more from you. You communicate regularly. And when you make an offer specifically to people who are on your mailing list, then you've got the opportunity to make sales right there. Super simple, right? But there's a few things you need to know. And the most important one right now, I figure, is how to grow that list full of the right subscribers. So in this video, we're going to really get into action and focus on growing. And like I said, I'm going to share three online strategies that you can use that I think are probably the best ones to be using right now in 2023. So I look forward to sharing those. In just a moment. So in case we haven't met, I'm Sophie, Artist Entrepreneur and Art Business Coach, helping you create a profitable business from your creative passion. And don't forget, if you find my videos helpful, consider subscribing to my channel. I may have even given this video a little thumbs up as well because that helps it get seen by more artists just like you. So before we start, I should say that these work really, really well if you are already creating content. So as we know, in the world of marketing, there's a couple of ways that you can generally go. You can become what we call a content creator. That's somebody who's going to do blogging, make a podcast, make a YouTube video. They're going to create something for the audience to read or watch or listen to predominantly. Or maybe you're somebody who's going to use more kind of on the spot stuff. So maybe you're going to use PR or you're going to go networking or you're going to use something like TikTok, videos and social media. There's a little bit different. So these three strategies work particularly well if you are more of a content creator. Okay, so strategy number one to build that mailing list. And this is a kind of medium to long burn, but oh goodness me, it can be a really, really great way to build the list and that is blogging. So you think about what it is that your audience either wants to find out more about or perhaps has a pain point. So this is going to depend if you offer products or services. If you are creating those online courses or offline courses and workshops, then chances are your audience has a challenge or a problem that they need solving. If you create products and you have artwork then they probably have desires, things that are looking for. So you need to make sure that you've listed out a few of those and that you plan out your blog topics accordingly. Now I do have a blogging playlist. So if you're even vaguely intrigued or you already do blogging and you want to learn a bit more, then below this video, I'm leaving a link to my blogging playlist where I sort of break down the blogging process in various different videos. So one of the easiest ways is to think about one of the blogs that you've got. Perhaps it's you know that it's a really core topic for your audience and you create a PDF worksheet or cheat sheet or materials list or something that's going to be super simple for you to do, like a one pager and you can create into a PDF and then again you offer it for people to join your mailing list. So they're reading the blog. They're like, this is interesting. I'm going down the blog. I'm reading the information. I really want to know for example where you get all the materials that you're mentioning from. Oh, there's a free materials list where I can find out more. I'll grab that materials list. They click through and they're joining the mailing list. All right, so there's so many different free things that you can create. It could be that you're writing about your process and you're writing, maybe you do digital art and you're creating, you're talking about your process and you're saying, this is my process to create these prints. Why not get a free download of this specific print right now? And somebody who's reading that might be really inspired. I love one of the prints. I've got a free download. This is amazing. So they get the free download joining the mailing list. I think you've got the idea, right? And then I wouldn't say that you need to do this in every blog. I would actually look through the blogs that you're writing and think, yeah, that one's a standalone. That's good. Obviously, you're linking the blogs together. So when somebody reads one blog, they click through on something that you've said. They click through to another blog. And perhaps that's the blog that's got a freebie in it. So this strategy works really well if you're prepared to make a few of these free offers and entry points to the mailing list. If you've only got one, it might be quite hard work to make all the blogs linked to that one thing. So I think it's quite good to have, work your way up. The more you have, the more entry points, of course, you have to the mailing list. Number two, you know it, you're watching it, it's YouTube. So it's pretty much the same strategy for blogging. So when I create the YouTube videos, I actually have a plan normally for the whole year in a spreadsheet. I've got various topics that I know that I want to cover based on questions that you have, comments that you make, things that I see come up in my free business for artists Facebook group, that sort of thing. So again, I'm very familiar where the pain points are and so in this spreadsheet, I have worked out all the videos that I'm going to be making. Therefore, I can work out also which videos I'm going to be talking about a freebie, an entry point to the mailing list. So it's similar to blogging, it's just a different platform and I think it's a little bit more powerful because you can talk about the freebie. So imagine if you're making that video, I don't know, three ways to start your watercolour painting. I'm always doing watercolours. I don't do watercolours myself, but I saw as my example, three steps to beginning a watercolour painting. You know that that's a topic that somebody wants because you've done some research, you've done your keywords. You know that it's a topic people want. You create this video and then in there, you create a freebie that goes with it that would be the natural next step. And then people are like, oh, this is exciting and you could talk about it. If you want to learn a little bit more, then grab my five ways to, 10 ways to, whatever it is that's relevant for you. People are watching the video and they're like, I've got to really want that resource. They look below the video where you send them, you say that's it's below the video. You can also link it up above in a card but you put it below the video, it works quite well and then people go and grab that freebie. So the blogging, they're reading it all. The video's quite nice because you can really, you're talking about the pain point in the video and then you can talk about the freebie. So obviously it depends what it is that you do if you're more of a writer behind the scenes, that's gonna suit you. If you do the YouTube videos already, well, perhaps you can go back through and you can even put some freebies at the bottom of your descriptions of all your current videos. And then as you plan forwards, you can make sure to think about a freebie, talk about it in a key video. Like I say, you've probably noticed, I don't talk about these things in every video, I talk about them where they fit in naturally. So where it's like, okay, how is that useful? That is gonna be just a video on the setting up and kind of growing the mailing list. Well, obviously I have a free challenge. So why would I not tell my audience about that? I have something that solves the problem. Why would I not do that? So I did, I said, you can get a free challenge. This is where it, this is where you can get it. So this is a really great strategy and there's a lot of you who are, got your own YouTube channels. So again, it's targeted to your audience. Remember, this is not a random thing. You must understand your audience and understand what they're looking to gain. And the third one is, of course, Pinterest. Now for those people who are already using Pinterest, you're probably very aware that it's a high traffic source. What does that mean? So if you're using it, a lot of people use Pinterest to send people to their website. Lots and lots of pins with different topics on. You click on them, they go to the website. Now I've got a recent video on Pinterest for this year. So check that out up here. I'll make sure and I'll also link it below this video as well. Dives a bit more into Pinterest and what you can be doing with it right now. But the basics are, you've got a board on a specific topic, are we gonna do the watercolors again? I think we are a watercolour course. You might even call the board and then you can create pins that are the videos. You can send people to YouTube. You can send people to the blog and you can send them direct to the landing page where they can gain the freebie as well, right? Pretty simple. So in the pin there's a description. This is what you're gonna get, here it is. And you can create several pins around that one freebie and put them on different boards as well. So you can create some static pins around your freebie. You can create idea pins that link to your freebie. So you can use the link in your Pinterest bio to send people maybe to the core freebie or to a page on the website where you have multiple freebies. That's a good idea. You could create a free resources board. So one of those multiple boards that you pin to could actually just be free resources. So somebody could go there and go, oh, I want that one, that one, that one. Now they're only ever gonna get on the list once, but if you've got the list set up in such a way that it tags them, then they're gonna have a little tag in your system saying which freebies they've got. That's interesting to look at that data later and see what your audience is really interested in. So as I said, make sure to check out my Pinterest videos. I've got one that I've just made this year, as I said, and I'll link below this video. Well, so I think really it's likely that one of these three is gonna work for you, specifically if you create content and or if you're a Pinterest user. Now if you don't do any of these things, then you're gonna love the next video that I'm making because that's something you can do even offline as a physical strategy as well. You can do it online, but the story I'm gonna tell in that video and the one I think the best way to grow the list offline, I'm gonna be telling that in the next video. If you're at all interested, make sure you're subscribed so you can get a notification when that video comes out next week. And a bonus strategy, ads, of course, to really kind of grow things and ramp things up. So here's my little rule about ads. Don't be running ads until you've got something that you know works well. So if you have a freebie that you know is very popular and people are organically clicking through from wherever and gaining your freebie, then imagine what would happen if you put some ads in front of that, you get 10, 10, 100 times more people actually signing up. Super powerful. But I say don't start out with ads until you know that that thing is working, all right? So in conclusion, building your artist mailing list with these three online strategies is gonna work really well if, like we said, you have a routine and you're doing this consistently. So consistency is always the key to success, folks. Putting up one blog and then six months later, putting another one and getting a freebie in there but not redoing anything else. That's kind of not what we're talking about. We're talking about somebody who blogs weekly or puts a YouTube video out weekly or pins daily. So it's a consistent routine is what's going to work. So if you've loved this content, don't forget again to give the video a thumbs up. Let me know in the comments below what point you're actually gonna work on, what you've enjoyed, what you'd like to hear more about. And if you haven't already, check out the set up and grow in 2023 video that's here on the screen right now. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you on the next one.