The Weekly Glow Up: June 7, 2023

Jun 7

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. ⚙️ Systems for Success: Do Your Actions Match Your Priorities?

Humans, especially ambitious business owners, are notoriously bad at estimating how much they can actually get done in a day or a week.

In the early stages of my lettering business, what I wrote in my planner was more of a dream than something I could actually execute.

If you want to see progress in your business, you have to spend time on things that will have bigger long-term effects on growth, instead of hopping between reactive and urgent tasks that seem important but won’t actually help you scale your biz.

Try this exercise:

Write down your top priority or goal for your business right now
Track the time you work on your business for the next week, writing down the tasks you work on and their category (try to stick with your normal patterns and behaviors 😉)
At the end of the week, review how much time you actually spent working on tasks that will directly bring you closer to that goal

If you’ve never tracked your time before, it can be really eye-opening to see the difference between what you think you’re spending time on vs. what’s actually happening.

Getting this kind of clarity is the essential first step to being able to build plans and systems that enable you to reach those business goals you set for yourself!

P.S. A time-tracking app will make this a lot easier, I like to use Toggl ⏱

2. 🧠 Biz Strategy: Applying the Pareto Principle to Your Business

The Pareto principle states that “roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes.”

It’s also known as the 80/20 rule, and has been found to be true in a surprising amount of very different circumstances (read its Wikipedia article if you’re interested!)

So, what does this mean for your business?

Here are a couple examples of where the 80/20 rule might be true in your biz:

20% of your projects/income streams account for 80% of your income
20% of your clients cause 80% of your stress
20% of your social media posts account for 80% of your engagement/leads

Even if the numbers don’t exactly match up, there’s a big lesson to be taken away from this principle.

Do more of what’s working, and eliminate what’s not.

So often we feel like we have to do it ALL—we need multiple income streams, we need to be posting every day, we need to have a ton of different clients.

But by analyzing the 20% projects or clients that have the biggest profit margin, you can spend your time getting more projects and clients like those, and drop the others to make more money in the same amount of time/effort.

By analyzing the 20% of posts that drove the most engagement, you can focus all your efforts on creating similar ones, rather than wasting time on the ones that don’t drive results.

It’s basically just a structured way to review what’s going on in your business and make smart decisions to optimize.

Try it out—where do you see the 80/20 rule applying in your business?

3. 🍵 Client Tea: How Much Do You Need to Post on Instagram?

I was working with a client the other day when he asked about a structure for his Instagram posting schedule.

He’s just getting into Instagram for his business, and was already overwhelmed thinking about how often he needed to post, how to make time for creating posts, what to take pictures of, all the things.

Before diving too deep into an IG strategy (or any social media platform), it’s important to figure out what your goals are.

You don’t actually have to get all your leads or clients or customers from social media.

There are other strategies you can implement, like SEO, networking, or direct sales outreach.

While some form of social media presence is generally important in this day and age to establish trust as a business, remember that YOU are designing your business, and you can shape it to fit what you actually enjoy doing and what works for you.

If you’re generating leads from other sources, your Instagram account can just be something you update occasionally with photos of new work.

It can just be something to point to when you’re talking to prospects to give them a feel for what you do.

On the other hand, if you’re not generating leads anywhere else, you’ll want to up your Instagram game a bit and post more regularly.

You’ll want to include engaging and shareable content that attracts NEW audience members instead of only nurturing the ones you already have.

The biggest thing to remember is to not feel like you have to follow arbitrary rules or advice around growing your Instagram/social media followings.

Every decision you make should be rooted in your unique, custom business strategy to reach the goals you have at that moment.

Something to reflect on: (feel free to reply to this email for my two cents!)

How much time are you spending on social media for your business right now? Do you feel good about that answer, or do you feel you should be doing more or less?

4. 📙 Good Readin’: Lettering Artist Income Survey

Martina Flor just compiled and released a survey of how lettering & illustration artists are making money.

The results are based on 500+ respondents, sharing how many hours they work a week, their income streams, which sources bring in the most revenue, the rates they charge, and more.

One big takeaway: a lot of artists don’t think they’re charging as much as they should/can.

About a third of those artists weren’t sure how to calculate their rates.

This is exactly why I put together the Roadmap to Profit toolkit I released a couple weeks ago—this thing includes a calculator, workbook, and video walkthroughs to help you produce a pricing strategy that will actually hit your income goals.

If you’re in that third and need some help with pricing, check out the Roadmap to Profit toolkit.

And check out the rest of Martina’s survey results for more insights into how your creative biz owner peers are doing!