The Weekly Glow Up: September 20, 2023

Sep 20

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. 🍵 Client Tea: Instagram Alone Isn’t a Sales Strategy

I was talking to a letterer in one of my free mentor sessions (still a few spots left for September! Grab yours here), and they wanted to know more about how to develop a content strategy for Instagram to attract clients.

In this particular situation, the letterer was just starting out with their business, and had a relatively small audience.

So my advice for anyone in this stage is:

You need to balance both passive and active sales channels.

Instagram is what I’d call a passive sales channel — you don’t have control over who sees your posts.

You’re at the mercy of a company whose goals are very different from your own. Keeping up with really effective strategy for the current version of the algorithm can involve lots of posting, testing, and analyzing, which you probably don’t have time for.

On the other hand, active sales involves finding people who look like your ideal client and initiating a conversation with them.

For me in my lettering business, that meant finding buyers and store owners where my cards and home goods would be a good fit, then emailing them with my wholesale catalog and a pitch.

For you, that might mean looking up art directors at publishing companies on LinkedIn and messaging them to start a conversation if you’re trying to design book covers.

Or, creating a list of local restaurants that could use some logo or branding help, and visiting them to pitch your services.

Or, reaching out to people who commonly work with your ideal client, and offering to buy them a coffee to connect and see if you can help each other out in the future.

When you do this type of outreach, you’re in control of who you start convos with, and who hears your message.

The first crucial step is figuring out who your solution is best suited for, AKA your ideal client.

With that defined, you can craft a clear plan of how and where to reach them, then start your targeted outreach for a much more effective sales strategy than just posting and hoping it reaches the right person 😅

2. ⚙️ Systems for Success: Balancing Ideas with Action

Most of the creatives I work with don’t have any trouble coming up with new ideas for their business.

Where they struggle is stepping away from their cozy, comfortable, energizing world of creative ideation and figuring out what action to take first.

How are you supposed to pick just ONE thing to work on??

I understand the overwhelm 😅

Something that can help is having a system to get it all out of your head, so you can better keep track of and prioritize your ideas.

I use Notion for almost everything idea- and content-related in my business, so that’s where I set up my system.

I have a table where I can dump all of my ideas, then rank them against my goals for my business (and my own personal fulfillment) to see which ones are highest priority.

Then I have regular checkpoints (like a monthly business review) where I look back through my ideas and see if there are any that I want to reprioritize based on shifting goals or new circumstances.

Something like this can help:

a) put your mind at ease that all of your creative ideas are documented and you won’t lose them

b) help you see the big picture in one place so you can more effectively decide what to pursue next

Do you have a system like this for your business? How do you handle all the creative ideas bouncing around in your head?

3. 🧠 3 Steps to Avoid Burnout in Your Business

Doing something you’re passionate about is a double-edged sword: you’re excited about your work, but you’re also more likely to ignore warning signs that you’re doing too much, too fast.

Here are 3 steps I’ve found to be helpful in avoiding burnout in my biz:

Track your time. Humans are notorious for being really really bad at estimating how much time something takes 😂. When you use an actual time tracker to see how long different tasks in your business take you, you get a way more accurate understanding of how long things take across all areas of your business, which can help you plan and prioritize better. (I use the free version of Toggl for my time tracking)
Set realistic goals. Once you have a better understanding of what you can accomplish in a certain period of time, you can set more realistic goals for yourself. You’re no longer setting yourself up for failure by expecting to be able to accomplish too much at once. Your goals should also be tied to things YOU can control. So, instead of a goal being “get 50 more followers on Instagram” (outside of your control), a better one might be “post consistently every other day on IG for 4 weeks” (within your control).
Stop comparing yourself to your peers. It can be helpful to have a general understanding of what others are doing in your industry so you can keep abreast of trends and the market. But, watching your peers and competitors too closely can lead to a lot of negative feelings around not being far enough along, not doing enough, etc etc 😓 — which leads to pushing yourself too hard for the wrong reasons, and fast-tracking burnout.

If you’re feeling exhausted with your business, take a step back and reevaluate which of these areas you could work on to make things feel less stressful 😌