 Cara Bullock. Cara is an artist who lives in Southern California. Cara has 20 plus years of experience in teaching and curriculum development. She began her career as an elementary school teacher in 1998, working with children ages six through 12. In 2018, she stepped away from teaching education courses to work full time as an artist, art instructor, and mentor. Her work as an online instructor quickly transferred over to teaching art to students all over the world. Cara Bullock. I'm known as a crier, so if I cry, I just get emotional. It's just the artist to me. I'm going to really try hard to not do that. Thank you so much for being here today and for a WordPress camp for having me and encouraging me to submit to speak here. I'm really excited to be here and share with you all. And I'm basically just going to share my journey with you from elementary school teacher to owning my own online art school and in-person art studio and how WordPress has really helped me to share with the world who I am and what I have to offer to other people, maybe even to you. So WordPress, for me, provides the best for a creative business, and it's helped me to grow my business one step at a time. So let's see here. OK, so who am I? I'm going to share a little bit about who I am. My name's Cara Bullock. And above all things, I'm a mom and a wife. I get emotional about this because my husband's been super supportive of this journey of mine, and I would not be here today without him and my kids too. So I have three children. We're very busy, 14, 12, and 9, Charlotte, Claire, and Brady. And they're also pretty creative, so it's been fun. My daughters are my muses. I paint them all the time. I'll show you some of my paintings towards the end. I started my journey and my first career was an elementary school teacher. Prior to that, I wanted to be an artist. Growing up, I wanted to be an artist, but when I was going to school back in the day, it was like, oh, what are you going to do? Are you going to go to Knott's Berry Farm or Disneyland and do caricatures? And no, I didn't want to do that. And so I went to college not really knowing what to do, and ended up going to school to become a school teacher. So I studied child and adolescent studies, went on to get my teaching credential from Cal State Fullerton, and graduated there in 1999 and started teaching elementary school. I did that for 10 years and loved it. And I also got to be really creative there, so that was nice. And I really just love people. I love children. I loved adults. I loved the interaction of being around people all day. But I became a mom. And after having two children and being pregnant with a third, my mom said, my mom was taking care of our daughters while we went to school, and along was coming baby three. And my mom was like, I'm going to need you to be home helping me. And so I thought, well, what am I going to do? So I started teaching college online. I started teaching education courses for different universities that offered online programs for in child development, early childhood, elementary education, anything, education that I could teach online. I looked for those colleges. And I ended up with seven. So I ended up teaching for seven online schools. I stayed home 10 years and was able to be a mom and work full time. And my mom helped me. She would come over and help me in the morning for a few hours. I don't know what's happening with my boring slideshow, but it's gone away for a minute there. So while I was doing that, I was reading hundreds of papers every week, and it became kind of boring. But the internet was growing, and all these new things were being offered. And one day, my sister texted me, and she says, look what I did today. And there was a picture of this art project that she had done, some mixed media giraffe that was really cool looking. And this was in 2014. And I was like, oh my gosh, how'd you do that? Where'd you learn it? She's like, I'm taking an online art class. I'm like, online art class. I teach education online. There's art online. And she was like, yes. So she sent me to this website. And I started, I took an online art class. And my mentality has always been, I can do that. So I took this class, and it was really fun. And it just reignited my passion for art. And I'm going to be an artist. I'm just going to do it. It may not happen today, but I knew I was going to be an artist. And I was going to do it online, because I had all this. I had 10 years. Now, at this time, I had had 10 years of teaching college online. I had built classes on nine different platforms. I had used Moodle, E-College, Blackboard, Angel, Canvas. I don't know. But I remember those ones. And so I knew how to build a class online. And I thought, OK, I've got to learn how to be really good at art. I've got to have some place, some kind of landing place, some kind of platform. I didn't even think website yet. I'm thinking platform, just because that's what I was used to. And I'm going to have to have a following. I was starting to realize I'm going to need people to believe they wanted to learn from me. So I became an artist. And last year, I incorporated my business. And I now own Care Bullock Art online and in-person. So this is kind of where we'll be going in. So 2014, I shared that. My passion was reignited. And so I knew I had this experience creating curriculum. I knew that I could build an art class online. I just didn't know how exactly I was going to do that. And I knew that I needed to get good at art. And so I was just obsessed. Once I got back into art, it was like staying up till 2 AM in the morning. I didn't care if I got sleep. I was just painting and creating art and still teaching college for seven colleges. So I had about 15 classes. Anywhere from 12 to 15 classes at a time, grading all these papers, being a mom, and then painting at night. And I was like, sleep didn't matter. It does now. But it didn't at that time. I was just so excited. So I was like, what was next? And so my goal, I'm going to go through goals. And this is in early 2015. My goal, my early on goals were, OK, I want to teach art online. So what do I need to get there? And I knew, like I said, I knew I was going to need an audience that trusted me. At this time, I knew I was going to need a website or some kind of landing platform. And I knew I was going to need a good idea to make this happen, because to be successful, you have to have a good idea. And it can be the same idea as somebody else. You just have to figure out how that idea is going to work for you and how you're going to make it different. So artists, we say, good artists steal like an artist. So you do. Everybody's inspired by somebody. And some people might say, well, somebody's already doing that. It doesn't matter. They're not you. What you're going to bring to the table is going to be different than that somebody that's already doing it. So those were some things that I knew. I knew that I was not this. I was inspired by some of these people doing different online classes. But I was a different person. And I was interested in different things. So I looked at what they were doing. And I thought, how can I do what they're doing the way I want to do it? So the first thing I started doing, I was on Facebook. I was kind of new to Facebook. I didn't really use it a whole lot. But at this time, I started looking for some art communities online. And I joined several quickly made friends. I like people. And so it's easy for me to kind of connect. And I want to know everything about everybody and what they're doing. And so I joined a few art communities. And then the online classes I was taking, I think I was in one. It had an art community with about 3,000 people in it. And so I started being active in there and posting my artwork. And people would say, start commenting, just like how Facebook works. And started building these friendships. And then the friendships would go off to inboxing and private messaging and really building more of a friendship, not just this online community. And so these private messages ended up turning into a small group on Facebook. There were about 20 of us, one of the girls that I became friends with early on. She'd been living and working as an artist for about 15 years at the time. But nothing online. She did weekend art fairs. Excuse me. She would take her art to like a farmer's market type or an art walk. And so she hadn't done anything online yet. But she had a big following online. And she and I became good friends. And she created a small, it was like the artist's professional guild or something like that. And she put about 20 of us in there. And we all started talking about, what are our goals? What do we want to be doing in the next year? And I said, I want to be the girl that's got 3,000 people in her art class. That's who I want to be. And everyone was like, well, Kara, I mean, that's kind. And I said, guys, we can do this. We can do whatever we want. Just got to work for it and figure out what do we need to do to get there. So I started building these relationships and had this group of 20 where I was feeling really supported and had my husband supporting me. And it's just kind of going crazy with all these ideas. And I felt like I had way too many ideas and I had time for it, which is still kind of, I'm just always that way anyways. But it was really, and then I'm still trying to manage these online schools that I'm teaching for and my kids. But I was like, nothing was stopping me. One day I'm at school. Brandon Dove, if you're familiar with him, he helps run WordCamp. And he and I, our kids go to school together. So we're chatting one day and he's got this shirt on with this logo. Like, well, what is that? And he says, oh, it's WordPress. Well, what's WordPress? He said, oh, it's a website platform. I need a website. And he said, I can help you. So we met for coffee. And he helped me build my website. And I'm so thankful for just that little conversation. And WordPress, for me, immediately, it was intuitive for me. It felt like it was easy to navigate. And it was another canvas for me to create on. So I mean, I have just as much fun working on my website as I do on my paintings. And so that happened in 2015. And then I knew I needed a good idea. And I was collaborating with these artists in this small group and the one that had been doing her art walk, selling us on the art walk. I said, let's do an online class together. You don't know how to do the online class, but I do. I can build this class. She had the following. She had a lot of people following that I knew would want to learn from her. And so we kind of needed each other. And then we said, OK, let's invite these other four people. And then she's going, no, I don't know. And she's kind of backpedaling, backpedaling. And I said, I'm doing this. So you either get on board with me or I'm going to move on. So she said, OK, so we decided to go for it. It was called Angels Among Us. It was all about creating angels. We put it out before Christmas. We thought people can create Christmas gifts by making these paintings. And we put it for sale. I think it was August, because I was away on vacation when we put it on sale. And within the first day, we had 80 people sign up. And it was like, oh my gosh, people really want to do this. And 80 people is 80 people. I would have been happy of 10. And then by the time it went for sale, we had 200 people. I mean, by the time it opened, we had 200 people signed up. And that was pretty incredible. We were all really excited. And it was a success. And it sold for about two years until I closed registration on that for other reasons. But that helped me to move forward with another idea. I knew it now. I thought, OK, I can reach out to other people and make them believe that I can help them. And they can help me. I knew this networking was going to be really important. And so one of the classes I had taken was a year-long art journaling class. And each week, you would get one lesson from a different artist. And there were about 25 artists in the group. So 50 lessons. Each artist was doing, say, two lessons. And for the whole year, you would get one lesson a week. It would be uploaded on Monday. And you could go do your lesson. And then you have your private Facebook group. And you have your private Facebook group. And then that's where you show your work so people can comment and you build these relationships. So I wasn't into the art journaling. I'm into drawing and painting people because I love people. And so I was really into portraiture and figurative art. And so I thought, I'm going to do a year-long class on portraits. There's nothing. There's no year-long class on portraits. And so most of my friends that I had made relations with online, they were also portrait artists. So I reached out. I drafted an email and a contract and my idea and what they would have to do. And I started sending it out to people. Said, hey, do you want to be a part of this? And everybody replied with yes. I don't think I had any no's, which was a pretty incredible feeling. And that was in 2015. It's called Let's Face It. Like, let's face it, face. But also, let's face it like face your fears of portraits. So it kind of has a little back end meaning to that. And I just now we're in 2019. I've been selling it since. And at the end of the first year, I had 1,000 students. And it was a pretty incredible thing. So that was my good idea. That really helped me. And the 20 people that joined me the first year helped me in a network and start getting more students to my website. But I also helped them to start living their life as a creative. And many people have been able to quit their jobs or be stay-at-home moms because they are also now teaching art online. So it's really been this whenever people say thank you to me, I'm like no thank you. Because I couldn't be here without everybody else that's been a part of the journey. So how did WordPress help me with my first goal? It gave me a professional landing place for people to come to. So when people were on Facebook and said, well, how do I find you? CareBullicArt.com. I would just say go to CareBullicArt.com. And you'll see everything that I have to offer there. I was able to create my virtual classroom. I was able to create detailed registration pages so people could go and see what are they going to get with my class. I could upload pictures. I also always have a bio for any of the teachers in my classes. So WordPress helped me to link whoever is coming to my website to other people as well. So it's helping the people who are helping me. It's just this constant helping. I started my newsletter, thankfully, back in 2015. Because we all thought we were going to be able to run our businesses off of Facebook but with their algorithms. You got to have your newsletter. So thankfully, I started that early on. It was a place where I could show a gallery of my artworks. And at this time, I have an important note, one password per class. At this time, I did not have accounts for students. I just had a dropdown menu on, let me see if I can put this down for a sec. So here's my website here. And over here on login, there would be this dropdown menu, just a long list of different classes. And there was a different password for every single class. So once I got up to about 15 classes, because along with Let's Face, at Angels Among Us, I started selling my own personal classes and hosting other people, which I'll get to in a minute. But I started getting emails daily. I forgot my password at Angels Among Us. I forgot my password to Let's Face. And I'm going, oh my gosh, I'm spending all day like your password is blah, blah, blah. And I said to Brandon, Brandon, I need help. This is not going to work for me long term, because I want to have like 50 classes, 100 classes, like this is long term. And he's like, OK, then you're going to need a different system. So that goes into my second goal. So my next goal is in 2016. I knew I wanted to expand my art school. So what was that going to entail? I started researching other businesses. I'm always looking at what are other people doing like me that have an art business like me? How is the navigation? What does it look like? What are the registration pages look like? I'm constantly buying art classes to see what other art classes look like. Because I know, from my own experience as an educator and teaching college online, it's really important for me that people could navigate my website and navigate through their classes easily. There is nothing more frustrating than going to a website that is not planned out well and that you just don't even know where the heck you are and how to get to where are OK, now I'm in my class, but how do I get back to this? Or you know what I'm saying? I didn't want that, and I can't stand that. So I'm always looking to see, is somebody doing something better than the way I'm doing it? And if so, what do I need to do just to make? I'm always looking for a way to make things better. So I researched other businesses. I continued creating Let's Face It. Each year I have a few people come back. I've had about five people who have been with me the whole time just because they've been supporting me. And they have a big following. So it's been a great way to keep bringing more people. And then it's an affiliate system. I was using eJunkie when I first started. I don't know if you're familiar with affiliate systems, but eJunkie was not very expensive. And so I basically had a button to PayPal and eJunkie and linking those together. I didn't have eCommerce. I now use WooCommerce. I wasn't using that yet, but that was also a goal. So each year with Let's Face It, I have new artists. So I'm bringing in seasoned artists with a following. And then I also bring in artists who have never ever taught online, may not have a following at all, and just reaching out saying, hey, you're an amazing artist. Do you know what you can do online? Do you know that, oh, I've got a full-time job. Well, do you know that I used to have a different full-time job, and now this is my job? I mean, there's ways to do what you love full-time. And I just love when people are like, really? Wow. And then they say yes. And then they learn how to do it. And then they have their own business or some people are not all about running a business. But I can help them create a class and host it for them, and they can still make money and stay home, raise their kids or put their kids through my one girl. She wants to put her kids through this private school. So her teaching online has helped her to do that. So I wanted to offer my own personal classes, more of those. I wanted to host other artists. I wanted to build, I started building a resource library for my students where I linked them to YouTube tutorials, free copyright-free pictures to use for your portraits, because that's another thing. You can't just go to Pinterest and paint whenever you want, especially if you're painting something that looks like somebody. There's copyright issues. So building an online photograph library. And then I left eJunkie and switched to WooCommerce. And then in April of 2016, I also opened an in-person art studio. So how did WordPress help me with all of this? Okay, so going back to the 50 passwords, I decided to move to Sensei, which is a plugin. It is more for college-type classes. If you're going to do something that's going to have quizzes and just more academic-type classes on your site, Sensei is a great plugin for that. And it worked for me for two years. I say worked because I hit a wall with it, but that's because I am really creative and I wanted to do something that was a little bit more customized. And then I switched to WooCommerce, which is awesome. I like hate eJunkie now, but eJunkie was great for me at the time. But having integrated eCommerce is like the best because I can look at reports. It's so easy to say, okay, what did my business bring in last month or how many classes did I sell? How many, you know, just, and it's just all there on my website. So everything's in one place. I don't have to go to PayPal and make my, you know, link and then make a button on my website. It's just so nice and easy. So that's been fantastic. And WooCommerce also has a lot of really great plugins. I use follow-up emails. So if somebody buys a class, and that was the thing with Sensei too, that was fabulous. You buy a class, it's immediately dropped into your account. You have one username, one password, and I didn't have to manually do anything anymore. Everything was automated, which freed up so much time for me and I was able to paint more, which is what every artist wants. We want more time to draw or paint or whatever it is you do. And I no longer got hundreds of emails a day saying, I forgot my password, because guess what, if you forget your password, you just click forgot password and you reset it. So those two things were just amazing for me. So Woo made transactions easier. Oh, it says transactions, but that's really transactions. And then Sensei allowed me to create those accounts with passwords. My courses were more professional looking. I no longer had to, I was just kind of making them with the editor on WordPress. So now Sensei has actual lessons and course home pages, so I was really able to make it look more like the classes that I used to teach when I taught college. Had a sidebar that you could go to, which is great. So if you're in one lesson, but you want to go to lesson two, just click on the link in the sidebar. It takes you there. And it was really easy to navigate. Something my students love in Sensei, I'm still in Sensei, but I'm transitioning into something new as we speak. But there's a little progress bar, so as you complete a lesson, you can click it and you see this little, you're 25% through your class. And I can't believe how many people love that. I mean, that's not something that's really necessary for me, but I can't tell you how many times we were like, I love seeing my progress. Okay, so I had happy students. It helped with my registration for my workshops, because again, everything was linked. My product was linked to my course, which was linked to WooCommerce. So everything, it's like you build your course, you build your product, your registration page. It's all linked. Just saved me so much time and it just looked so much better. So then now my current goals and my goals from 2018 to present, I started focusing on branding. I felt like I was kind of a little all over the place. On my website, I had art journaling, I had mixed media, collage, I have florals, I have portraits, but I started looking at what are people coming to buy? And WordPress, I was able to track that because now I've got WooCommerce, so it was really easy for me to start tracking my reports. And I thought, I wanna be smart about my business. I wanna create things that are gonna sell. And I was finding that some classes were selling really well and others weren't. So when I looked at what was selling really well, it was always the portrait and figure classes. And it's because my demographic is coming to buy those classes. And so I started getting rid, I actually retired the art journaling classes and some of these other classes that weren't selling so well. And I just started offering only portrait and figurative art classes and my business started doing even better. And back to the hosting. That was one thing when I was researching other businesses, I found a couple of businesses that were hosting other artists. And basically that's, I'm gonna reach out to you, hey, I really like your portraits. It's different than anything I've seen. Nobody's doing anything like that. I can mentor you, I can teach you how to create a course. I will sell it on my website and we'll split the sales 50-50. Yeah, I wanna do that. Most people say yes. I do have some saying no and they say they wanna try and do it on their own and then sometimes later on they come back to me. Did my mic go off? Maybe not. They'll come back and say, are you still interested in working with me? And usually I am. Depends though, depends. Sometimes I'm not for different reasons. Maybe my website's now, my school's in a new place and now you don't fit with my school. So no, no I'm not. But you know what? This person over here, they're doing the same thing and you would fit with them. So I always, I have a lot of people reaching out that now they want to teach on my art, my online art school. They're coming to me. I get submissions and what I try to do, if it's not, maybe they're not ready to teach portraits but they're doing these awesome mix media type classes. You know, I'm not, you're, you may, and I just say in a nice way, something like that doesn't fit with my agenda for next year for let's face it but I think it'd be a great fit in Lifebook which is an art journaling online class. They go and they're in that class. You know, so I'm helping people to find where their fit is if that's a passion of theirs. Oh my gosh, I'm out of time. Okay, so what I'm doing is I'm moving, am I out of time? I have two minutes. Oh, 12? Okay, I was like, okay. So I'm moving now to member press from Sensei because, and Pixel Jar is helping me to do that as we speak. I really had a vision for what I wanted for my classes and so I said to Brandon, because we see each other often being with our kids at the same school. I said, you know, I really love Sensei but I feel like these are the things I'd like to do and he's like, you're not gonna be able to do that with Sensei but thank God you're with WordPress because you can do anything with WordPress. You just need a different plug-in, right? So that's the best. I have a friend who is on Squarespace, uses the same, also has a very successful online art business, guess what? They recently hit a wall, guess where they are now? They're with WordPress and I kept saying, they're like, what are you using? I'm like, I'm using WordPress. Oh gosh, oh my, her husband hasn't hates WordPress. I'm like, okay. I'm like, I don't know why because it's, I mean, for me, it's easy to use and he's like a website guy and I'm not. So if it's easy for me, it should be super easy for him and within a few months they had made the move to WordPress and you know, it's just the most, you can customize everything. It's just awesome, I love it. So we're moving to member press, we're customizing on my classes. I said, this is what I want my class to look like and they're like, yes, we can do that for you and I'm so excited because it's gonna be ready in a couple, I don't know, two months? I don't even know. I don't know where they are on the timeline, but I'm so happy and I want to offer a membership. So people now, not just selling classes, you know, $59 for a class or whatever, now you can pay X amount of dollars per month and have full access to all of the classes and you can have full access to the resource library with all the images and full access to whatever those extra resources are to really make the membership possible or membership desirable and valuable to whoever is wanting to buy it but that is the way that a lot of people are headed is the membership and it's also a great way financially to kind of gauge more what's gonna be coming in every month because the currently, I don't ever know what my monthly income is gonna be so thankfully my husband has a set income so we always know what his is gonna be and mine is just kind of like, you know, you never know. And then I'm starting to submit to galleries. I have, being presented with an award tonight for a piece of the gallery so I'll be heading to that later tonight so that's exciting but the gallery that I'm in right now found me on my website so if I hadn't had that website, she wouldn't have found me so my WordPress has just really helped me to do so many things for my business that I just never would have been able to do without it and it's just helping me to continue to grow one step at a time and take baby steps and just to do all the things that I wanna do and I'm continuing to mentor and so I'll show you quickly my site. Oh, how will WordPress help? And I already really went over this. I'm switching from Sensei to MemberPress. I accept submissions for online if you want me to host a class for you if you want to apply to be and let's face it or I also accept submissions from photographers for our online library of photos so if you're a photographer if that's a little side gig that you're doing you can submit a place for galleries to view art in my resume and then it's just gonna be more customized and Brandon he knows PixelJar they know I'm an artist and I'm constantly change my vision is constantly changing my art's changed a lot I'm just like I'm always moving forward and I get bored so I know that that will continue and so they've really put me in a place now where I can continue to be super creative and continue to customize my things. This is my artwork, the two on the right are my daughter the one on the left is a friend but I do kind of like an impressionistic expressionist figurative portrait artist. The one in the middle I believe well these two are in the gallery and one of those is being given an award tonight I don't know which one yet that's a surprise and then this is my site I'll take you there really quickly the branding become the artist you were meant to be I want people to know right away when they land on my website what they're there for and if you click on start creating now takes you to the online library of classes my tagline is connect collaborate create I offer mentoring live classes online courses and basically my main business is really my online classes so here's my library of classes that we offer and then I also have business classes so that basically is it and I think I have like two minutes if anybody has questions those are my paintings yes they do yeah yeah it's on my gallery so if you go to my gallery that'll pop up but yeah I sell everything everyone's like how can you sell your children no pun intended I'm like well I live with them so I see them every day you know but yeah I always say all my artists for sale any of it I there are a couple pieces that I keep but yes you talked about teaching previously did you use that accreditation in terms of what you were offering online or do you recommend the people that work for you have accreditation or how does that I don't think you need I mean to do I think for a creative business I don't think you need accreditation did it help me absolutely and does it help me I think when I'm offering to host somebody I think that they see the experience that I've had with developing curriculum and teaching I think that that makes me more desirable to work with but I absolutely do not think I don't think you even need a college degree to do what I'm doing in terms of what you talk about no I think there's a well I mean it's really helped me but I think that there's a lot of people that do it that don't have any experience in that at all so I don't think you need it but if you have questions talk to me yeah okay thank you everybody thank you so much