About My Journey
About My Journey
I have been a working artist for nearly 30 years and have made my living doing what I love to do. As a creative person, my artwork has taken on many forms and has become more of a problem-solving mindset than just marketing physical goods.
Over 30 years, I have experienced successes and many failures, economic global downturns and multiple stock market crashes causing almost all of my clients and customers to stop buying, and extreme increases in materials costs, which have forced me to change how I market and what type of product I would produce.
I have encountered flooded markets where it felt like everyone was making something similar. Through it all, I had to adjust and was able to make it through to the other side of the troubles and still reach my goals.
The failures have brought me far more insight into how to market as an artist. In 2008, after the housing crash, people began to tighten their spending just like they had done in past economic downturns, and I realized that I had to adjust my strategies to gain new sales.
Here were my options: I could get into galleries, do art fairs, and stand in the heat of the sun or the cold of the rain and hope they would buy what was unlikely in the current market. I could open a store or some combination of these choices. I was not optimistic and had grown tired of limited options and being at the whim of gallery sales staff or the unpredictable weather of art fairs.
I focused on digital and emotional marketing, website development, and product photography. I studied everything I could, learning what makes people buy, how they decide about buying, and what platforms work best for selling online and in person.
I started building websites and implementing what I had learned to get attention for my work, and in later years began selling it online. It took me nearly three years of trial and error before I started to see some results. After that, I returned to school for digital marketing, content creation, and Google ad marketing.
In the third year, something clicked for a website I had built. The sales tripled after changing keywords, photo tagging, and focused content creation. That was my Aha moment, bringing us to the information I will share with you now.
I am going to go over what a great number of people would say is an incredibly boring topic. Yup, boring. So, I would encourage you to stay with me during this course, especially the marketing terms and explanations. The money is in the boring details and will mean the difference between success and failure.
Here we go!