 Well hello and welcome. Now if you want to make a ton of sales with your art this year then you want to make sure that you avoid the biggest mistakes that you possibly can make in your art business. Now in this video, I'm going to show you how I uncovered this mistake by mistake actually and of course if you stay right to the end what exactly you should be doing instead. Now in case we haven't met, I'm Sophie, artist's coach and entrepreneur Helping artists just like you to make more sales by building a profitable art business. And on this channel you're going to find playlists in all areas of building your art business as well as some of my daily sketching challenge that I'm currently doing as I'm shooting this video. Okay now let's talk about this biggest mistake So if you're on my mailing list already then chances are you saw the email last week where I asked you for a take of a little artist's survey and a big shout out and thank you to those of you that did by the way. I do this every year and it gives me valuable information Hint, could this be something that you're doing with your customers by the way? And the answer that of course is yes absolutely surveys are invaluable. And yesterday I analysed the results. To be honest they're mostly pretty much what I expected right? Most people aren't making a living from their art. In fact it was something like 70 something percent I can't even remember off the top of my head. But most of you aren't actually making a full-time living from your art. Most people out of all the products they could be selling are focused on original art and whilst there's nothing wrong with that of course sometimes that itself can be a challenge and there are other ways to get going in the business perhaps a little bit faster. And almost half of you who took the survey only have between 10 and 20 hours a week to build the business and of course make the art or do the creativity. And that's not a lot of time especially if you are closer to the 10 hours. And to me that sounds like you're still in the job and you're doing it kind of outside those hours which is a huge challenge right? With only 13% of you actually doing this full-time. And these stats make me really sad alright? I want more of you artists and creative to be able to learn how to build a business so that you can do this full-time so that you can put down that day job so that you really can step into doing something that you're passionate about every single day. Now when I asked about challenges of course there were the typical challenges and they ranged from time which we completely understand to making sales, to marketing, to mindset, to motivation. Somebody said just to get up and get on with it. I really like that. But actually out of all the people that took it only five of you had a really clear, tangible goal of what you wanted to achieve this year which in itself again is a little bit concerning because if you don't know where you were heading like how on earth are you going to get there? So a big shout out for those of you who haven't got a clear goal now is the time to make it. You want to be specifically clear. And some people were brilliant. They were really specific. I want to make this amount of money by the end of the year. I want to make this amount of money selling this number of products. It was very specific. And everybody else, well it was kind of more of a dream or a wish or a vague sentence or in fact some of you who just said well I don't really know. And let's face it, knowing where we're going is the start right? We need to know what the vision is. We need to know where we're going in order to work out how we're going to get there. So I think there's a bit of sort of exercises you can do off the back of this video straight away. Now when I asked what areas you wanted help with a staggering 81% of you said you wanted help with growing your social media presence. Alright and this is exactly why I'm making this video. Now hang on to the very end where I explain where I feel social media should fit in. I'm not telling you right now to ditch social media. However the fact that 81% of you thought the biggest challenge in building your business, making sales, clearing your time, building a business that you love with social media was really concerning for me. Alright so why? Well here's why. Why would you put all your effort into building a following on a platform that you don't own and you don't have control over? Which could change dramatically right? Or in fact close up altogether at any time. And we know that certain platforms have a habit of changing all the time. Just as you've got one strategy you think is working, bang it's changed and now suddenly nothing's happening alright. So what should you be doing instead? Well you want to use that very limited time and perhaps limited financial resources as well. You'd want to focus on attracting your ideal audience and making direct sales right? You'd want to grow your very own mailing list of your audience that you own, you have control over and then you want to create a more personal connection with, build trust with etc over time. And then when you have something to sell you simply reach out to the people who have asked to stay in touch and you offer them a chance to buy. Now to me it's really simple. I have a whole playlist on this channel which I will link to directly below this video and I'll put a card up there as well for you to click through to. But don't do that just now watch that at the end because right now here are three things that you can do to make sure that you don't make this whopping great mistake this year. Number one you can sign up for my free 10 day mailing list challenge. Now I set this up a while ago and it's sitting on my website and people join it all the time and there are emails that come every day and give you little micro tasks and at the end of the 10 days you have built and set up your mailing list so that you can start collecting those customers so that you can start communicating with them on a regular basis. Number two watch my videos on how to grow your mailing list. I said there's a playlist there's a playlist on growing the mailing list there's also additional videos on email marketing how to communicate and all of that or if you're really ready to build that art business get a clear vision of where you're going and actually put all of this into consistent practice then you might want to consider joining my art business academy membership. It's an online membership where you'll get ongoing support you'll get ongoing knowledge and of course accountability all the things that you'll ever need in one place. Now you can find out everything that you need to about what's in the art business academy again in a link below this video. Now let's just say something about social media before you feel like oh my god I need to ditch social media altogether and now I'm not quite sure what I'm going to be doing. I'm here to say to you you don't need to ditch social media altogether but let's put this into perspective. There's absolutely nothing wrong with building your presence on Instagram on Facebook on TikTok etc. and if you have the extra time it's an incredibly valuable thing to do. There are sometimes people looking for artists for specific jobs and one of the places they might look at for example as your Instagram account it's not the only place for sure but there are cases where again if you have extra time that you can be doing social media but the primary focus you want to be doing is actually using marketing tactics good old-fashioned marketing tactics that are not going away to build that list to get in front of your ideal customer to start making sales and then really I kind of see the social media as kind of the fluffy icing on the cake it's the extra bit it's not the primary bit but if you're still watching this by now you've completely and utterly understand it's not the primary piece it's an additional piece it definitely has its place and you're going to say to me Sophie what about the people that are making sales on social media and I'm going to say to you great let's go and have a look at their business and see what percentage of sales come directly and only from social media and I can tell you now it's going to be a very small percentage somebody who has a really large presence will also have an online portal where they'll be making more regular sales directly from their website for example so I hope you've enjoyed this video I'm going to try and keep some of them a bit shorter this year because I know I love to talk and I'm passionate about this topic and what can end up starting out as a 5 minute or under 10 minute video ends up nearly 20 minutes and I really know that time is of the essence for you I've completely got that so I'm going to really promise that these are shorter more succinct videos look out we're back every week again next up I'm going to be talking about great things to focus on in your art business in 2024 so make sure that you subscribe to the channel like this video if you enjoyed the content and look out for that next video and then in the meantime check out the playlist for building your mailing list and thank you so much for watching and I'll see you on the next one