The Weekly Glow Up: May 24, 2023

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. 🤑 Money Talk: How Do I Figure Out the Right Price for My Products?

There are 2 forces dictating your pricing:

External, meaning "the market" and what it dictates products or services like yours are worth.

Internal, meaning the numbers that your business needs in order to keep running and make a profit.

When I was running my lettering business, I only ever saw people talk about the external forces.

They said to look at what your competitors are selling their offerings for, look at the going rates for comparable products, and price within those ranges.

Which yes, is important—you can't sell things at prices that people aren't willing to pay.

But looking ONLY at the market totally ignores the part where you need to make sure your prices make sense related to the income you need to bring in to hit your goals.

I recommend starting from the internal side.

See how much you need to make to cover your business and living costs. Then add on the amount of profit you want to make and get your income goal.

Guesstimate how many of each offering you can sell per month, then work backwards to figure out what the price needs to be to hit your goals.

THEN take a look at the market and see if your price makes sense.

If it's way too low, that's great news! You can raise it and bring in more profit for your biz easily.

If it's way too high, is there something you can add to that product to differentiate it from your competition and provide additional value to your customer, so that the higher price makes sense?

Or are there other, higher profit offerings you can add into your business plan to offset the one that you need to price lower?

When you start with your business needs, you're more likely to come up with a price that works for your goals and makes it easier to get there.

2. 📢 Big Announcement: Roadmap to Profit is LIVE!

The questions and insights around pricing I touched on above are the kinds of things I found creatives needing help with over and over.

So I made a toolkit to walk you through it all.

And by "all," I mean:

Making sure you're selling your products for more than it costs to create them
Figuring out your profit margins and ways to increase them
Determining your monthly and annual income goals to make sure you can keep your biz running AND make a profit
Determining your "effective hourly rate" that you need to be making in order to actually hit those income goals
Figuring out which products are most worth your time, which should be maximized, which should be dropped, which should be outsourced, and which need to be reevaluated in terms of the cost of making them
Projecting monthly and annual sales and recording actual sales to see where you should spend more marketing and promotional efforts

Roadmap to Profit Pricing Strategy Toolkit for Creative Business Owners

The toolkit includes a Google Sheet template where you'll do all of your calculations and a Notion workbook with video walkthroughs, additional explanation, and templates to use for monthly strategy reviews.

Learn more and grab your copy here.

3. 🍵 Client Tea: Put Yourself in a Newbie's Mindset

In a session with one of my coaching clients, we were talking about content to create for his Instagram audience.

He was a little stumped about what to share related to his process of creating art (he designed movie posters), and what parts of that would matter to his ideal client.

So I had him walk me through an example.

He explained the process of one poster design for a martial arts movie, and started talking about how it didn't have all the photography assets he needed, so he created his own.

He wrapped his own fist up in bandages, held it over your run-of-the-mill table lamp, had someone take a picture of it, then photoshopped it into the poster to look like it belonged to the star of the film.

I was FLOORED when he told the story—to me, someone who's not a movie poster designer, that seemed amazing that his own fist is in a movie poster.

And to potential clients, that shows resourcefulness and self-sufficiency.

As a movie producer, I would feel confident hiring this guy, knowing that if I don't have all the exact shots he needs, he can improvise and still create an amazing product. Weight off my shoulders.

When you're an expert at your job, things that would be amazing to other people seem routine and commonplace to you.

And that often holds you back from sharing them.

The key is to try to put yourself in a beginner's mindset.

Think back to when you were just starting out, before all this stuff became so "normal."

What did you love seeing from other artists? What blew your mind about their process or artwork? What did you have to learn and pick up yourself over time?

And as much as you can, try to document your journey and growth as an artist, so that 5 years from now you can remember what "past you" was working on, struggling with, curious about, etc.

This will give you better insight into what you can share with your audience and what they'll find interesting, even if it's overly "normal" to you now.

4. 📢 Marketing Tips: Should You Start a Blog?

I know the thought of a blog can make a lot of visual artists groan, but there's something to be said for maintaining one for your business.

It helps people who are actively looking for your services find you through their Google searches.

Instead of just shoving your content in the faces of people who aren't actively looking for you, as can often be the case with social media.

One thing to know: it's a long term play.

But that also means that if you want to reap the benefits, it's a good idea to do a little each month and start building it up over time.

Here's a look at how powerful it can be:

I basically haven't touched my lettering business website since I pivoted my business to coaching a year or so ago.

But, I'm still getting a good amount of organic search traffic to that website thanks to the blog posts I wrote on it.

Here's my web traffic data from the past year. The top visited pages are all from blog posts, the people came from just searching on google, and it added up to over 20k visitors: