 Well hello and welcome to this video. Now do you ever wonder how do I start to make money from my art? You're passionate about what you do and now you really want to start selling things or maybe you've been trying to sell things for a while and it's kind of not getting off the ground. Sometimes it can just seem all so overwhelming, right? So many voices out there telling you you should do this, you should do that, try this strategy, try that strategy. How do you ever work out what you should be doing in order to start selling your art? When it really comes down to a few key things I'm going to share with you in this video. Well hello and welcome or welcome back to my channel. My name's Sophie and I help artists just like you to set up market and grow a successful art business doing what you love. Now if you'd like to learn more tips and tricks on how to build that successful profitable art business then you're in the right place. That's exactly what I share on this channel, all things art business related. Okay let's dive into it. How do I start making money from my art? Step number one, make sure that you've got high quality products. That might sound really really obvious but some questions to ask yourself are are you really happy with what you've produced? Is it something that you think you're super proud of? Is it the best that you can do? Have you used the most superior materials that you can possibly afford to at this point in your career? Are you always on that learning journey so you're always taking courses or learning and looking to improve? Or have you just kind of done good enough for now and now you want to make some money? Because here's the thing if you want to create an art business you really want to make sure that whatever you're making is the best you can possibly make. So you need to look at it with very critical eyes and just say okay am I 100% happy? Do I stand behind this? If not you need to get it to that place where it's as good as you possibly can make it at this point. Now we know that we're all on a learning journey and we know that we're constantly improving but when you put something up for sale you need to make sure that the product as a whole is as best as you can possibly make it. Number two, understand your target audience and what they are looking for. This is so fundamental. If you don't know who you want to buy your artwork or your art services then it's a bit like throwing darts in the dark and hoping that something is going to stick. It's going to waste hours of your time and it's also likely going to lose you hundreds if not thousands of dollars or pounds especially if you do any form of advertising and trust me we've all been there. You need to understand your niche your audience and of course that ideal customer as well. So don't forget to check out this helpful video on how to find your target audience and below here we've also got a link to a free download to help you fill out your ideal customer avatar. Number three, make sure your work is priced to sell and sell profitably because if it's priced to sell we want to make sure that of course you're making a profit. The thing to focus on when growing a business is profit. You can't just put a price tag on your artwork and then somebody buys it if you don't understand the numbers behind it. So you can use my six steps to pricing and there's a link to the video there watch that afterwards. There's also links to all these videos below here as well to make sure that when you actually price your items you understand all the numbers that go in all the costs they're involved in selling a product or service and then make sure of course that you follow this through thoroughly and that when you put your price up and when you sell you're making a profit and you can sit back and smile happily with the work that you've done. So what can stand in the way? Well mindset can stand in the way. You finish off your pricing you put your work up there's a price tag underneath it you look at it and the little voice in the head says oh my goodness me who am I to charge that I'm not good enough you know people are going to look at that and think that's too higher price I'm not going to sell people don't buy art all these misconceptions that are floating around and beliefs that you or other people hold unfortunately doesn't make them true which is good news for everybody right? So there are plenty of people out there buying art the question is have you got your work in front of the right people who are looking already to buy and this comes down to all the things that we're talking about today and some of the next steps that I'm going to talk about next as well number four choose a sales platform where your audience already is because at the end of the day if you build a website you spend hours of your time and lots of your money putting a website up unless you're a master marketer and you're sending loads and loads and loads of people to look at that website it's going to sit over here all alone with all the beautiful listings that you put on it and over here are your audience looking for artwork all right so unless you're really really good at marketing you need to find a sales platform where your audience is already looking and shopping whether that's online offline whether that's galleries and boutiques stores and art fairs or whether that's online places like Etsy or Arts Finder or whatever places that your audience might look for work number five you need to create a consistent marketing routine so we've mentioned marketing briefly marketing is a really large piece if you want to start making money from your artwork you create good artwork you work out who you'd like to sell to you work at where they are you have a sales platform you have the things going on but unless you're doing some consistent marketing they're likely not going to know you even exist so some questions to ask yourself are you somebody who only does marketing just before an event it's like you don't do anything all year but you've got open studios that's like a quick bit of do some marketing so that's kind of not how it goes all right or perhaps you post somewhere occasionally or maybe you're not sure what to do so you avoid it all together listen i totally understand that when i first started out i didn't understand marketing either but it's something that can easily be learned and easily adopted and when you do it consistently it can have phenomenal results and should have phenomenal results so when you run a business your best friend is consistency right in everything you do across the board all the little pieces of your business you really want to make sure that you're doing all of it consistently and the most important of those is marketing you need to create yourself a simple weekly routine that you just do week in week out check out this video that i just made on marketing strategies it's going to help you with what you should be doing and i'll list other links below this video where you can find it about running a marketing plan and a marketing routine as well okay number six focus on building your mailing list if you've been on this channel a while you'll know that i talk about mailing list a lot why it's the one thing in our business that we own right you don't own social media you don't own all these other platforms that you might use for marketing the one thing you do own is your mailing list it's the most important part of your business so therefore in the marketing you do you want to make sure that you focus on growing that mailing list and getting encouraging people off say social media onto your list number seven you want to guide your followers to where they can buy so your job is to tell them whether that's through your emails whether that's through ads on social media for example or maybe pr however which way whether it's through your marketing or through your mailing list your job is to let your audience your growing audience know where and how they can buy and this is the piece that so many artists forget to do all together it's like well okay i'm doing some sort of marketing over here there's an audience that i've identified over here but honestly the audience likely to be super busy people like we all are unless you say to them okay you can find out more about what i'm doing join the list to get special discounts and then you send them out regular emails and you say okay today i've got a special offer for you it's for 48 hours only that's where you get a little discount off my work or come to my studio to get the special studio discounts or go to this link over here to get an early bird ticket on my workshop unless you can actually let them know where and how it's very easy to buy this is what you need to do hear the steps if you see a painting on the website that you like click here do this do that do the other all right you need to make sure that people understand where and how they can buy your work number eight make regular offers special discounts and those things that we're just talking about but do them on a regular basis make sure that the people on your mailing list are rewarded for being on the mailing list and they get first dibs on any special offers or those early bird tickets right you want to actually foster and look after the people on the list and you want to do this regularly people don't read every email so don't be afraid to be sending out quite regular sort of by monthly or monthly offers because some people will have missed the first one and then they see the second one timing is everything remember and also here's a lovely old adage that they used to tell us back in the day about marketing so i still think is true people need to see something seven times before they see it so don't be afraid to send emails to put ads to put posts your audience will only see maybe one of those things rather than all of it okay so don't be don't be afraid about bombarding your audience with information if they're the right audience they would like that information okay they've joined your list because they love your work and at some point they're going to buy something that neatly leads us on to number nine which is look after your existing customers did you know that 80% of your future incomes going to come from 20% of your customers therefore instead of looking for new customers new customers new customers what can you offer to your existing customers that they haven't already got so looking after your customers and building that relationship with them making sure they're happy with their purchase the chance of them coming back and purchasing again is really high so we want to remember that number when building the business because i think it's too easy to say i've made a sale over here now i'm going to ignore that person i'm going to look over here for new customers new customers new customers the only challenge with that of course is if you sell through a third party platform that doesn't allow you access to your customer information then it can be a bit challenging but there's usually a work around or a way round that anyway so in the end it comes down of course to your motivation to follow all of these steps and to just take action it's perfectly possible to make a living from your art and for you to start making money from your artwork you need to be following these simple steps all right get focused carve out some time in your diary go back through the video again make sure you follow each of the steps and i'm excited to hear the sales that you start making so don't forget to post below this video if you've enjoyed the content you've used one of the steps or all of the steps that i've talked about today and just started to make sales if you've loved the video too don't forget to give me a thumbs up because that really helps other artists to see these videos and more so thank you so much for watching and i'll see you on another one