The Weekly Glow Up: May 3, 2023

May 3

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. ☝️ How to Get Customers Without Doing Any Marketing

Something I don’t see enough creative business owners taking advantage of is leveraging other people’s (bigger) audiences.

When you have a relatively small audience, it takes a lot more time and effort and grinding and money to get your offers in front of people.

One way to make sales even without a big audience is to put your products on platforms that already have a built-in audience. For example…

🛍 Marketplace sites like Etsy, Creative Market, or Design Cuts already have thousands of visitors coming to their sites every day.

By building a shop on their platform, some of those thousands are going to cross your path if you’re selling something that people want to buy.

When I ran my lettering business, Etsy's platform itself drove the vast majority of the traffic to my shop, even when I did promote my products on my social media accounts:

🙋 Guest blogging or podcasting can be another solid way to reach more, and new, people interested in your products.

Find blogs or podcasts by others in your industry, or that your customers follow/listen to. If they take applications or requests for guesting, submit something!

It’s a good strategy to find someone who’s a little closer to your current audience size for these. When you have a super small audience, it may be harder to get on a podcast or blog that has millions of followers already.

These are solid strategies for working smarter, not harder - let other people’s platforms do some work for you!

2. 🍎 Food for Thought: Does DIYing Everything in Your Biz Actually Save You Money?

As someone running a small business or side hustle, it feels like you HAVE to do everything yourself.

You look for free tools and scrappy ways to DIY everything.

I can understand it—I never outsourced anything in my lettering business.

Buuuuuut I also burnt out and didn’t make nearly as much progress as I could have in the same timeframe if I had reached out for help. 😅

When you get to the point where you really want to grow your business, you have to start asking the right questions to make strategic decisions about where to spend your time.

Let’s do an example!

I sold prints, cards, and mugs wholesale in my lettering business, fulfilling big orders at once.

Here’s what it looked like for me: picking up the cards and prints from the printer, printing out the branded inserts that go in each package at the library, cutting them all by hand, then packaging them all in plastic sleeves or boxes, sealing everything up, creating the invoice, and delivering the products to the client.

For a big client, that took several hours of my time (I remember sitting down on the living room floor and Netflix binging when my orders came in 📺)

At the end of the day, I didn’t make a huge profit margin on wholesale products since they sell for half the price of retail.

So let’s say that order took 5 hours total to get all the materials, package them up, deliver them, etc., and it made me ~$500 profit.

That’s an effective hourly rate of $100/hour.

If there’s something that you can do and get paid MORE than $100/hour (like custom design commissions, or illustrating a storefront window, or a mural for a shop, etc.), then it would be worth it to outsource the packaging and delivery to someone else, as long as you can pay them less than $100/hour to do it.

Essentially this does 2 things:

Frees up those hours for yourself to work on projects that make you MORE money per hour
Still makes a profit on the wholesale order because you’re paying someone less than the profit you’re making off of the sale

I know - it’s scary to hand your business tasks over to someone else, and it can feel like there’s no way you can afford it.

BUT, these are the kinds of calculations you need to be making if you want to maximize profit in your business 💸

If that was kinda confusing and you want more help figuring out pricing strategy for your art business - come to this month’s artist happy hour!! We’re going to walk through an exercise to outline your roadmap to higher profitability in your business 🤓

3. 🍵 Client Tea: When Is It Okay to Not Make a Profit on a Product?

I was recently working with a client who was actually taking a loss on one of her products.

When we looked at the numbers, it cost her more to produce and deliver the product than she was charging for it.

Now yes, typically you want to make a profit on everything you sell.

That is generally the goal of a business 😅

But she asked a good question: “Is there any scenario where I shouldn’t raise my prices on this product?”

Here’s my two cents:

Technically, all the time you put into marketing your business is kind of like a product that you take a loss on.

You’re spending hours on promotions, social media posts, emails, and your website, and no one’s actively paying you for those hours.

But you DO get a return on that investment of time.

People buy your products because you marketed them, because you spent the time to tell the world about those products.

So if you have a product that could be considered a promotional or marketing tool, it may be worth it to keep offering it at a loss.

For instance, maybe you create a zine that showcases your work and you find that there’s a high rate of clients signing with you who are subscribed to your zine.

You could logically assume that the zine is helping influence them to hire you.

In this case, you’re probably making a good healthy profit from that design client, which would significantly offset the cost of creating that zine (and the several others you had to create and send out before this 1 client signed with you)!

While it’s good to look at individual products and profit margins, you also always have to consider the big picture, and the ecosystem of how ALL the bits and pieces of your biz fit together and support each other 😌

4. 🎧 Good Listenin’: The Typecast

If you’re in the lettering world, you’ve probably heard of Goodtype.

It’s a big community aimed at supporting type artists, run by the former duo behind the Loomier brand.

A couple weeks ago, they announced that they’re starting a podcast called The Typecast.

Yesterday they launched their first episode, all about starting a creative business.

This duo is super supportive of artists who want to make money doing what they love - I’ve bought courses from them over the years, and they always have good insights to share.

I’m excited to see what else comes out of their podcast - if you’re a letterer, check it out!