The Weekly Glow Up: April 26, 2023

Apr 26

Welcome back to the Weekly Glow Up, where I share tips and resources that you should know about as a creative who wants to make money from their art.

Here’s what I’ve got this week:

1. ☝️Reco: One Tool I Can’t Live Without as a Business Owner

So much of getting good at running your business comes from first developing a complete understanding of where your time goes.

When you know exactly where your time is going, you can:

charge more appropriately (and usually, charge more)
figure out which products are more profitable so you can sell more of them
figure out how much you need to sell of a “passive” product to make the upfront time investment worth it
set reasonable expectations for yourself in terms of tasks you can accomplish, how much you can post on social media, and what projects you can take on (and avoid burnout, or guilt, or feeling “behind”)

Enter Toggl.

Toggl is a time tracking app I use to see exactly where my time is going when I work on my business.

I use it to get a clear, accurate picture of what categories my time is going towards. For example, I track categories like Instagram post, client coaching calls, product development, webinars/workshops.

Then I can see what percentage of my available side hustling hours are going towards each of those categories, and if the results are aligned with my goals.

Knowing how long on average it takes me to plan and schedule IG posts for the week means I can scale that up or down depending on other priorities.

Knowing how long it takes to write my email newsletter (a ‘non-negotiable’ task) means I can more accurately plan what else I can realistically accomplish with the remaining hours in my week.

The more clarity and insight you can have into what’s actually happening in your business (vs what you wish/want to happen), the better and more impactful decisions you can make. 💪

2. 🍵 Client Tea: 3 Separate Types of Work You Should Be Doing

I talk to a lot of people who have trouble getting stuff done in their business.

They sit down to work, but they don’t know where to start.

They get sucked into something, then hours go by and they haven’t touched what they had actually planned to work on in that session.

The way I avoid this is by separating my work into 3 types: big picture thinking, planning, and executing.

🧠 Big picture thinking is where you probably feel most at home as a creative entrepreneur.

This is where you dream about what new projects you can take on, visualize the long-term direction and goals of your business, and craft your strategy.

📅 Planning is potentially the hardest for a lot of creatives. 😅

This is where you take that big picture plan and break it down into the milestones and tasks that will keep you on track—think through every step, be realistic about the time required, and assign all the due dates.

⚙️ Executing is when you actually do the work.

This is when you create the art you put in your plan, or develop the digital product, or create and schedule the social media posts.

Each of these types of work is necessary for your business, and each depends on the type that comes before it.

But the mistake I see a lot of people make is that they try to do ALL of these in one sitting.

Your brain has to be in a different mode for big picture thinking and planning than it does for executing.

It’s hard to do ALL of these in one sitting, unless you’ve got a full uninterrupted day ahead of you.

If you schedule out time to JUST think about the big picture, then JUST plan things out, then JUST execute, you’ll be a lot more productive.

That big picture/planning sesh means you’ll have an executable to-do list when you sit down for your execution work sesh.

That means no more spinning your wheels. No more getting sucked down rabbit holes.

You have an exact path ahead of you, because you invested the time upfront to get your plan organized.

Try separating your work out this way and see if it helps!

3. 🎧 Good Listenin’: 5 Steps to Landing Paid Assignments

In Martina Flor’s latest Open Studio podcast episode, she shares what I’ve been preaching to my clients:

Social media isn’t the best way to find paid gigs as an artist.

I know at one point I was told I needed to have 10k followers and tons of likes to get my art out there, get my name out there, and then clients will just find me.

That’s not really the way things work anymore (if they really ever even did work that way).

What’s much more likely to get you a job is being the one to reach out and talk to people.

Doing the work to define what you do as an artist, who you best serve with your artwork/services, finding them, and starting a conversation is a much better bet.

Here’s her podcast page if the above Spotify link isn’t where you listen to your podcasts.

4. 🤑 Money Talk: Where My Income Actually Came From as a Lettering Artist

For some real-life proof that social media isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, here’s a slide I used in my lettering biz “tell-all” webinar:

Sales outreach got me over a third of my total revenue.

Social media isn’t even included on this chart.

That doesn’t mean social media is entirely useless. It builds credibility.

For example, when people hear about you by word of mouth, they’ll probably check out your Instagram page first to get a preview of what you do, or get a feel for your personality.

An up to date social media profile assures people that you’re a legit, active business.

I also got a lot of my email list from people who signed up because of a freebie promotion they saw on my social media, so that “email marketing” category could also be loosely connected with social media too, I suppose.

But my main point here is in general, we’re all putting way too much importance on social media as creative business owners.

Social media has become a very highly monetized space, and it just doesn’t pull in the traffic and exposure it used to if you’re not paying for ads.

There are other, more powerful channels you can use to find your ideal clients and customers and grow your business without having to stress over algorithms and likes and follows and shares.

Try doing an analysis of your own business: how have you gotten most of your clients, and how can you invest more time/energy into that method if you’re not already? If you haven’t had any clients yet, what other channels can you try besides social media?