 What's happening guys? It's Shane here and in today's video I'm going to be talking to Ashley. Ashley is somebody who became a digital marketer and she is also an artist. So Ashley's story is really awesome and one of the reasons why I wanted to get her on the channel is because of the fact that I have so many people asking me, Shane I'm an artist but you know you don't really recommend college degrees for artists. What should I do instead? Now there are several careers that I typically recommend for artists depending on their situation and what they want to do and digital marketing is one of them and I think Ashley has some great insights and some great advice for anybody who is an artist and they want to get paid to do art. So I'm super excited about this one. I think it's going to be super super helpful for you guys. Definitely check it out. Also gently tap that like button, hit the subscribe button and ring the notification bell and let's jump into it right now. Today we have a very special guest on the channel Ashley. She is a digital marketer. She's also an artist and I am super excited to interview her because I already saw part of her story and I think it's going to help a ton of people out on the channel and you'll see what I mean here in a minute but thank you so much for coming on Ashley. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. Awesome. So let's go ahead and start at the beginning before you even discovered digital marketing. What was your what is your first exposure to the career of digital marketing that you can remember? So digital marketing was something that I actually got into by accident. It wasn't until literally years later that I realized I could be doing what I was already doing and for fun and get paid to do it and what I mean by that was if you're an artist you do need to have a good internet social media presence. So I already had a WordPress site where I was posting my art and thoughts about the state of the art world and you know things like that and I was already doing like keyword research and all that kind of thing trying to do experiments trying to figure out how to get more people on. I was very fortunate to be raised by a I had a web developer mother so she actually taught me some some cool stuff like when I was eight years old basically. I'm not I'm not a web developer myself. I'm not a coder but that was I guess you could say technically my start into that world and then I got into I was posting my art on Instagram and I really loved like the analytical side of it. I loved like watching videos and learning like what I can do to put my art in the best light, how to get more followers and it was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed it. So by the time I discovered Seth's course he was already like listing all of these things keyword research, WordPress, blogging, guest posting, social media management, things that I was already doing for fun that it doesn't matter what field you're in somebody needs a marketer somebody needs to find your product. So that really appealed to me. Actually if you don't mind me asking I didn't plan on asking this but what are some other recommendations that you have for aspiring artists besides going to college so somebody wants to make a living from art if they want to work as an artist either in a job or doing their own thing as a freelancer or starting a business what are some alternatives or recommendations that you have. Okay, I'm I'm gonna be honest it's really hard to make money as an artist it this like the success that I have now as an artist it did not happen overnight it took a lot of hard work it took a lot of like like stubbornness and persistence. I would say there's there is nothing wrong with having a job like doing like you guys are in a very fortunate situation now where you don't have to go into debt to get up to get good job skills. You can you know you can just like spend like $400 on a course versus like thousands of dollars on a degree so there's nothing wrong with doing like digital marketing full time and making a lot of money and then like working on your art on the side and you know you're you're taking all these skills that you're learning from digital marketing and you're reaching an audience and yeah while you're in digital marketing that's also like a really good way to get into like graphic design for example but yeah I would say definitely work on getting that first job and then you can use that job because that's what I'm doing out using that job to fund whatever you need for your art and then in my case I just kept up with like my Instagram and then I actually have there's a there's a company named Lovanna and they saw like my fantasy art and my my dragons for example and now it's like I'm working full time as a Google ad specialist and part time as an artist with them so it was one of those things where I just kind of struck gold but it's like if I didn't keep going that and just keep like trying to get my art out there that wouldn't have happened. I would say one thing I typically the advice that I give and this is kind of I think it's kind of what you were getting at a little bit is have you ever read the book Steel Like an Artist by Austin Cleon? Yes. Yeah okay so I think that that book for one it has a name like a clickbait name so guys don't be scared by the name it has a very clickbait name it's actually a phenomenal book about just being successful as an artist in general and one piece of advice that he gave in there which was just so refreshing to me with all the bad advice that I hear is just learn a skill right off the bat learn some sort of valuable skill and then do your art on the side because typically it's going to take a long time to get any type of art related business off the ground. Yeah I remember that too he actually mentioned that whatever like it actually can help fuel you creatively as well so if like you work in a copyright office you do a clerk yeah he was just talking about that so you'll actually get to learn a lot of cool things and integrate it into your art. Yeah yeah and you'll have that stability to you know get your career started as a freelancer or you know have that time to build up your portfolio so you can apply to a bunch of jobs if you want to do the artist route or if you want to start your own business you know that always takes a long time to start up even if you have like the best business idea in the world it's typically going to take years to get off the ground for the most part so I thought that was just phenomenal advice by him just for that for the average artist of course there's always going to be exceptions but for for like you know like most people reading that book I thought it was really really good advice and so that's kind of typically what I tell people is to to learn a skill something like digital marketing it's a little bit artistic I mean there's definitely some more artistic parts of digital marketing and then there's more like analytical parts but that can help you a little bit you could like get started like making like an art blog and then you can like get guest blog with other artists and you can build skills that way I mean there's there is a whole artosphere when it comes to digital marketing even like trying to create like the best graphics and what would you have yeah but it's like it's also like a really good way to get into graphic design if that's something that you want to do some other art kind of art related careers that I wanted to mention digital marketing just from my experience digital marketing seems to be relatively good another one that I've noticed a lot of artistic type people excelling at is actually tech sales is actually pretty decent for many artistic type people and then yeah believe it or not yeah I've seen a lot of artistic type people do really well in tech sales and then the the third one is basically UX UI design that stands for a user experience user interface and then you'd want to kind of specialize more in the UI side of the UX UI design because the UX is a little more analytical or a lot more analytical but uh yeah those are some careers that I've seen artists have a lot of success with yeah so for like you know the gamers out there you know there's people who need to who even need like the little like spell icons designed and everybody wants to go into like character design and not a lot of people go into those so that's a that's a really good way to get in I think there's going to be a ton of opportunity in gaming especially considering like with all the metaverse stuff that's going on right now they're kind of making it to where people are actually going to be it's like going to be a platform economy similar to YouTube Fiverr Shopify etc where people are actually going to be essentially like making their own games and I think that is going to first of all make games way better because it's going to decentralize things and then second of all it's going offer a tremendous amount of opportunity to artists who want to design these games because they're going to have to incentivize it correctly if they want to have the best platform where these games can have a really good chance of you know being the next Minecraft or something like that all right well let's go ahead and get to the part where you took the course so you discovered Seth online you know you saw that there was another way for you to get into a pretty really good career without any experience without a relevant college degree at the entry level and you could kind of work your way up so you decided to take Seth's course how was the course okay so one of the things that I really liked about so first of all it was great it's already paid for itself literally more times than I can count one of the things that I really liked about it was he really attacks like he really attacks like the imposter syndrome like the oh crap I can't do this kind of kind of thing so it's just like he doesn't go into like all this detail about all this theory he just like teaches you enough to you know build up a portfolio and it's really like how much how much work you put into it as well so he it's like this very comprehensive like you know baby step sort of thing like you're learning really simple easy stuff first and then it gets more and more complicated so it's like really it's really easy to follow but it's it's just so easy because you see all of these like job postings they want people with like three years of Google ads experience and one of the things he tells you it's like no that's just a filtering tactic another thing too is I actually learned about like internships that I could take that was how I got introduced to a Acadium so you're also getting practical experience while you're taking the class so you're building up a network and connections references yeah so after I finished taking the course which took me I'm going to be generous and I'm going to say three months I want to say eight months but I don't think that's right after I took the course I got my internships and then like I ended up getting a 19 hour 19 dollars an hour job in SEO like really soon after that it's really great and I think it's also really great for people who've never had a job before like he also teaches you like how to like how to do interviews well how to set your resume up well and then even like says like common sense things like you know most people they send a resume and it's in crayon and where things like that or they don't send a resume so it's one of those things where you feel better about a lot of stuff so that was one of those things I really needed because it it was a new thing it was scary and it was just really nice to have that assurance that it's like okay I can do this I can build I can build a portfolio I do have what it takes and um so it's great so it's like equal parts like confidence building and skill building got it so uh just to kind of get into the specifics a little bit from the time that you sort of started Seth's course to the time where you got your first job offer how long was that approximately I don't remember for me it was about I want to say it was about four months and I say that because I took three months to do the internships and then I took a and then it took me about like a month of applying every day so at maximum I would say like five months yeah to take a couple months to apply for jobs get interviews and then finally get and then finally get a job offer loud this is a question that uh everyone's gonna want me to ask so if you're comfortable answering it you can answer it if not just kind of give me maybe a ballpark of like what people generally would expect but everyone wants me to ask uh how much would did that first job pay and then how much did the second job pay approximately okay so my first job was 19 dollars an hour um actually that was my this was my first job where I negotiated for a raise too I made roughly I think I made roughly about 24 an hour by the time I was out I was there for about a year and in my current job I I currently make a 50 50,000 a year but that being said I'm also basically working part-time as I'm also basically working part-time as as an artist so I didn't calculate like everything including everything else but it's like I'm also making money doing commissions on on the side which is my day job allows me the flexibility to do that got it and that's kind of one thing I wanted to ask you about a little bit it's another thing that um I sort of talk about with some people who are kind of on the artistic side is you sort of like a lot of people say they kind of have like a certain amount of artistic juice in the day sort of like maybe it's three hours four hours five hours but if you're at a really hectic job that's like really stressful by the time you get off the job typically like you just want to go home and sleep right you don't really have any artistic juice at the end of the day would you say that's an issue with your digital marketing job or do you feel like you know you enjoyed enough to where you're actually energized after you get off work and you can you know really put your heart and soul into your art so I would say that I would say that was probably a bit true with my first job there was just there was there was a lot to do and it was it was like constant it was just constant fast-paced and then yeah it was very exhausted by the end of the day but I don't know I think it was kind of like I kind of use art as a means of kind of relaxing so to kind of unwind so I don't know if that really applies here I will say this though that was definitely true with a job that I had prior to when I was in digital marketing where I actually forced myself to wake up early hence like why was able to get up at four this morning to have this interview I actually forced myself to get up super early so that I could have an hour to do art feel like I accomplished something and then you know go to work and get get paid to have the boss yell at you for for eight hours a day so yeah so dragon riders dances that's the the photo behind her in the video by the way so everyone go and check that out do you have like a instagram handle or something that we yeah yeah my instagram is dragonriders.dance I also have a patreon that I need to clean up it's patreon.com slash dragonriders dance and everything that I make in the patreon actually goes back into it so like I use it for I have a I have I have an assistant colorist who helps me do all the flats and you know I I have a theme song that I hired somebody to make so I get to do so that's that's what I do all right last question for you what would you say about somebody who is thinking about you know digital marketing thinking about possibly investing in Seth's course they're on the fence about it what would you say to that person I would say look at the I would say look at the cost of the course and look at that compared to a degree and I think I'll just leave it at that that says a lot right there and it definitely works it's a lot cheaper than college it's much faster than college so you know it gets my stamp of approval which I'm very critical of all different types of businesses in this alternative education space so I will say one thing is Seth does have a free master class I did I did watch the free master class and it is very useful it's going to go over different statistics and kind of help you to sort of see exactly what digital marketing is because I don't really get into the nitty gritty of that in these videos because there's kind of different different forms of digital marketing and I will go ahead and put that link you can check it out if you want to down in the description as well as the pinned comment below well thanks for coming on maybe we'll have you back here next year or something like that to do an update video at some point but I really appreciate it everyone go check out dragonriders dance and Ashley's Instagram and thank you so much again have a good one thanks you too take care take care