The Weekly Glow Up: August 23, 2023

Aug 23

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. 🧠 Think B2B: How to Grow Your Creative Business Faster

Usually when I talk to letterers or other creatives who aren't seeing the progress they want in their biz, it’s because of the way they think they have to sell:

Individual low price products, one at a time, to one person at a time.

And so without a huge audience or loyal following built yet, they're getting lost in a sea of crafters doing the same thing.

When you're turning your hobby into a business that will one day pay your bills, you have to think bigger.

Selling to another BUSINESS instead of one individual CONSUMER can be a lot easier for two big reasons:

Consumer sales generally involves a lot more emotion — it’s their personal money, which is a big source of stress for many or can bring up a lot of attached feelings
Selling to businesses is more objective — they have an assigned budget to solve a problem, and it’s not their personal money they’re spending (that budget is probably a lot bigger than an individual consumer’s, too)

So in addition to your Etsy shop, consider selling your cards and crafts wholesale to a brick and mortar store.

License your artwork to a company so they can sell your design on cards they create, or print your design on other products like gift wrap, gift bags, pillows, home decor, etc.

If it interests you and fits with your skillset, start exploring how you can do more client work, like artwork for marketing campaigns, or lettering or key art for book covers or movie posters.

These B2B (business to business) income streams are ways to get bigger, more predictable influxes of cash into your business so you can grow and scale without the never ending hustle.

Are you incorporating B2B sales into your creative business today, or just B2C (business to consumer)?

2. 🧠 What to AVOID to Make More Progress in Your Creative Business

When I ran my lettering business, I wasted a lot of time chasing things that I thought were necessary or had to be perfect to run a successful creative biz.

I wanted my website and my online presence to look like that of the artists I was following.

I thought I NEEDED all these things in place — a fancy website, email funnels, freebies, daily Instagram posts, etc. — in order to get customers and make money from my business.

And so, I spent SO many hours trying to cobble together the perfect, customized Wordpress site (and I am not a web developer).

I kept tinkering with my brand colors and logo.

I got an email automation system and set up freebies & funnels.

I labored over artwork and designs that I only used for a single social media post 🙈

Heed my well-learned advice: keep your biz scrappy until you’re getting consistent sales!

Your primary focus when you’re starting out or trying to grow your business to a place of consistent income should be on sales.

Yes, there is a certain amount of legitimacy you need in order to make sales happen — i.e., your web presence shouldn’t look like a total scam.

But that’s about it.

You don’t actually need a perfect logo, or a custom website, or complicated marketing systems.

You need enough content out there to make these things clear:

What you do and the problems you can solve for your ideal client
Proof that you can be trusted to do it
A way for potential customers/clients to get in contact with you, or buy products from you

You can land a new client with an Instagram account and link in your bio that goes to a Calendly.

Even less techy: you can network and meet prospects IRL and exchange email addresses and build to a sale that way.

Trying to do too much too soon can steal your focus away from things that will make a bigger impact in your business.

As you establish a more solid foundation of consistent selling, you’ll be able to turn to other priorities and/or outsource them 💪

3. 🍵 Client Tea: Making Quicker Content

I had a session with a creative the other day that was mainly focused around growing his Instagram account.

He had spent 2+ hours creating one or two posts, and rightfully so, didn’t know how he could feasibly sustain this if he wanted to get posts out every other day.

This is where foundational marketing strategy + systems can help.

First, foundational strategy:

For your business, you should have…

A core positioning statement (what you do, who you do it for, and why you do it better than anyone else)
A definition of your ideal client - what they care about, what problems they have, and how you can help solve them
Content pillars - consistent themes you talk about, related to ideal client pains or your differentiators
Your manifestos - IF you are the kind of person who needs to word vomit everything at once, this can be a good exercise for you. For each content pillar, write out all your ideas around the topic: your opinions, the different angles of the topic, things you can teach about the topic, advice you’ve given about the topic, etc. When you’re done, you’ll have a TON of different smaller subtopics you can pluck out and use as individual posts!

When you have these in place, it makes it a lot easier to figure out what the heck to talk about in your content.

Now, the systems:

A content calendar - a place where you can dump all your concepts/ideas for posts and content pieces, map them to your pillars and offers to promote, and then schedule them out (I use Notion for all of this)
A content scheduler - a tool that automatically posts your content on Instagram or other platforms, so you can batch post creation and then set it & forget it (I use Buffer for this - free)
A project management tool - a tool where you can organize tasks to remind you when it’s time to add new content ideas to your calendar, create the posts, write the captions, etc. I recommend “batching” these creation tasks so you’re doing one type of action (i.e. ideating, creating, writing) for multiple posts at once (I also use Notion for this)

This can be a LOT to think about when you’re trying to set up content foundations & systems for your biz.

If you want some guidance on how to do it for YOUR creative business, book a free coaching call with me! I now have spots open for September — book your call here 😊

4. 🎥 Good Watchin’: How I Built a 5-Figure Business from a Lettering Hobby

I just added a webinar I did a little while back to my website so you can watch on-demand!

It’s all about my experience with Unfettered Letters, a 5-figure hand lettering side hustle that I grew from a hobby with no formal art or business training.

I walk through what worked and what didn’t, all my income streams, the best platforms for online & in-person sales, and what I’d do differently today.

Watch it here.