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Art Marketing Minute Podcast: Episode 135: Scams and Pricing Your Art

By |2024-02-05T13:46:15-05:00February 9th, 2024|Art Marketing Minute Podcast|

In the Art Marketing Minute Podcast with Eric Rhoads, you’ll learn how to sell your art, how to market your paintings, and everything else you need to know in order to have a successful art career. 

How can artists manage social media junk queries versus actual buyers? And how should you price your framed oil paintings? Eric Rhoads answers in this week’s Art Marketing Minute Podcast.

Get your copy of Eric’s #1 Amazon Best Seller, “Make More Money Selling Your Art: Proven Techniques for Turning Your Passion Into Profit” here.

The Art Marketing Minute Podcast has been named one of the 2023 “Top 25 Art Business and Marketing Blogs on the web” by FeedSpot.

Listen to the Art Marketing Minute Podcast: Episode #135 >

Submit Your Art Marketing Question:

What questions do you have about selling your art? Visit artmarketing.com/questions or e-mail Eric at [email protected] (include your name and where you’re from) to hear your question answered on an upcoming Art Marketing Minute Podcast.

FULL TRANSCRIPT of the Art Marketing Minute:
DISCLAIMER: The following is the output of a transcription from an audio recording of the Art Marketing Minute. Although the transcription is mostly correct, it is sometimes slightly inaccurate due to the recording and/or software transcription.

Announcer:
This is the Art Marketing Minute with Eric Rhoads, author of the Amazon best-selling book, “Make More Money Selling Your Art.” In the marketing minute, we answer your questions to help your art career brought to you by ArtMarketing.com, the place to go to learn more about marketing. Now, here’s your host, art magazine publisher, Eric Rhoads.

Eric Rhoads:
You can send your questions to me [email protected]. And by the way, that’s a great resource artmarketing.com has lots of great articles for free. Okay, so the first question comes from Nancy Tyler in Dallas, Texas. I love going out to paint plein air and sell my work as a means to finance my trips and supplies. Many sales come through Instagram and Facebook from people that I’ve made connection with. Through my travels at outdoor events and finding the painting in their neighborhood. A question is how do I continue to engage these wonderful collectors on social media while discouraging the many many offers from those wanting to offer me ridiculous sums for my work as NFTs, cryptocurrency, bla bla bla bla bla. And it has become exhausting, explaining that I don’t deal in digital file sales and crypto and deleting their posts. Well, Nancy, it’s, it’s funny because it’s comes on the heels of my colleague Ali sent me a note that I had been somebody had hacked my account, and was pretending to be me and telling people that they had won prizes. And if they clicked on this link, they would collect their prizes. And then of course, it was some other kind of a scam. And I said, that’s the price of popularity. I mean, that’s the price of success, I suppose. And that is that you can’t avoid that stuff. If you’re on social media, and you’re getting some followers and people see that you’re eventually going to get hacked, and you’re gonna just have to deal with that stuff. As far as NFT’s go. The whole NFT thing is kind of, I don’t, from my perspective, kind of over maybe it’s not but, there’s a lot of artists are hearing from people saying, oh, I want to do NFT’s of your work, and then, they end up getting scammed, or I don’t think there’s very many people out there legitimately reaching out to artists and saying, I want to do NFT’s of your work. But quite frankly, I mean, you can do LFTs generate them with with AI now and come up with some pretty cool things and who needs who needs to do that. So, the people who’s spent millions or hundreds of million dollars on NFT’s most of them are burned pretty badly. Now most of them are you know, it’s not recovered. That could change. I don’t want to be a Luddite and say never, never say never. But right now, that kind of stuff is happening and, the whole idea of crypto. I love crypto. I think it’s really cool. But, it’s really easy to get scammed through people you there are legitimate places to go if you want to do nfts Do NFT marketplaces, if you want to do crypto do it yourself, do crypto marketplaces, but steady, steady. Be careful who you take advice from. I personally have been scammed. And I don’t want that to happen to you. But I do want to bring something up that you said I just want to you know, you said you love to go out painting and plein air and use it as a means of financing your trips and supplies. I think that’s that’s wonderful. But, you can go further than that if you want. And I think it’s nice that you look at it and say okay, this is a way to finance my trips and supplies but maybe, maybe you can do more with it. You can make more of a living with it that depends on you and what you want to do. But you also mentioned something else and that is let’s see here that that. Oh, let’s edit that out. So I want to touch on a couple other things you said your plein air painting and you’re selling via Facebook and Instagram from people you made a connection with when you were out plein air painting at events or otherwise, it’s worth pointing out because the sales that you’re getting from Facebook and Instagram may have more to do with the fact that you were out there they worked, saw your work in person, they met you in person you connected with them, they followed you, that may have more to do with it than just putting yourself out there on social media and hoping that somebody’s gonna spend money, it happens, it’s happened to me, it doesn’t happen a lot, it happens to some of my friends frequently, some of them not frequently, I think it depends on how good you are at working social media. But, there’s a lot of phony buyers out there, too, every single week, not a week goes by where I don’t get, hey, I love your artwork. And usually, it’s coming from social media, I love your artwork. And I’d like to, we’ve got a special anniversary coming up, it’s my wife’s birthday or something. And then they say they want to buy your painting, and then they cut a deal to buy your paintings and they send you a check, and you send them the painting, and then they overpay you on the cheque. And then you they say well just Venmo me the difference, I must have misunderstood, then you Venmo the money, they’ve got your painting, and then the cheque doesn’t clear. And this is a big scam. This is going on, every week, every week you get it. So it’s kind of like the Nigerian prince, it’s same kind of a thing. So be careful out there. But there are fundamentals in marketing that, no matter what the the hot thing of the moment is, these fundamentals really matter. We’re attracted to shiny objects, we assume because we have a few 1000 followers, or maybe even more than that, that everybody sees every post. And the reality is, it’s not true 2% to 3% of your followers ever see your posts ever? And only if you can increase your engagement levels? Do they start seeing a more if if Facebook or Instagram, same company, see you increasing the engagement levels? How many people comment how many things you comment back, that type of things, how many people share, then those engagement levels drive up, then you might go from 3% to 4%. And, if there are lots of things, lots of comments, lots of engagement, they might go to 5%, sometimes they go higher, but usually, we get a mistaken belief that we have a lot of followers and those people see everything we do, that’s just not true. It they’re people who have millions of followers, they have great results, because a small percentage of their people see every post or if they’re super, super popular, and it’s good for the platform than Instagram or Facebook will push them out more. But, when you have big numbers, you get small percentages, it still makes a big difference. When you have small numbers and you get small percentages, people not seeing things. So be careful about that, social media changes every three months, they’re always updating the algorithms, things always are changing. And most of us don’t have time to keep up on that. So there are experts out there that help you. But there are also experts out there that are willing to scam you. So be really careful about that. You can sell on social media, people do it. And don’t, don’t put it into things you can’t control. Put it into things you can control. There are things that are tried and true that have tribes of followers that are very specific to tribes of people who buy paintings, like the pages of, of my art magazines, the people there buy paintings, so you would kind of know that the likelihood of selling a painting is going to increase by being there. Whereas, you’re being random, just because you have a lot of followers doesn’t mean they’re people buy paintings. They might be other artists they might be who knows, there are a lot of people who, who, who follow for no reason. So they might like your artwork, but they’re never gonna buy anything. So keep that in mind.

Okay, the next question comes from Sally Dixon in Maine. I’m an impressionist plein air artists with 30 years experience. I have an art show coming up in November. How do I price my framed oil paintings? I have a website to backup my work. I’ve been in the Portland Art Gallery in Maine. I really want homes for these ocean scapes and landscapes and floral paintings. It’s a local art show at our library. So I want to price them reasonably well. I’m not sure what the question is. But let’s just talk about a couple of things. First off, let’s Congrats. Congrats on getting into an art show. That’s big deal. Thank you for pointing that out. How do I use set? How do I price my framed paintings? Does that mean that you also we’re gonna put paintings in the show that are not framed. I want to talk about frames. First off, the only things I believe, there are no rules. But the only thing I believe that you should be selling are framed paintings. Or if you have something unframed, and that might be matted prints, a lot of people sell matted prints at art shows and things like that. And you should be able to make a 600% markup, that’s the average automatic print, the cost of printing, unframed, you can make some good money on that, and to have a low price point, you might have $7 in it and sell it for $50, or something like that. So I want you to think of frames as a way to increase your profitability, and a way to increase the status of the painting, which increases your profitability a friend of mine recently sold. Recently, he told me he spent $7,000 to frame a painting, why would do not just put a $40 frame on it? Well, because he’s a high level artist he’s selling at a high level show is selling to people who have big money and big homes, and they want the best. And so you put a, you put a good frame on, it matters. I have a friend that owns a gallery, he had a painting in the gallery as a $2,000 painting, he had a frame on it didn’t sell for years. So he decided to send it back to the artist. And then he thought, now I’ll try a new frame. So he spent $4,000 on a single frame, put it back in the gallery, he said, Well, if I’m going to have a $4,000 frame, I need to raise the price. But he thought, well, it’s a beautiful frame, it looks completely different now. So stead of selling for $2,000, you put a $14,000 price tag on it 10,000 For the painting 4000 to get paid back for the frame sold first week, frames make a difference. I think that anything unframed devalues your work, if you have unframed paintings and you’re selling them cheap, you have frame paintings, you’re selling them for more money, it’s going to devalue your painting. So even if you’re saying these are my studies, these are not my best work. Don’t, don’t do that. So don’t stack them up and put them in a pile, don’t set a bunch of stuff on the ground, just treat them like they are paintings that deserve to be purchased. If they’re going to be in the show, put your best work out there and put, if you have to stack with more, or paintings, then frame them up and hang them up when you need to replace the others that are sold that have red dots on them. You also mentioned you want to price your work reasonably what does that mean? What is reasonable? Is, is reasonable. What’s reasonable to you? is reasonable. What’s reasonable to Bill Gates or Elon Musk? Is it you know, a lot of people say well, I want to price my work so that the average Joe who’s like me can afford it. But what about getting properly compensated for your time and your education and the amount of time you’ve spent learning paint learning painting? What about getting what if? What if this idea of pricing your paintings reasonably is more about your insecurity, that you can’t get a good price than it is about getting a good price? What if it’s about something completely different? You know, I hear this a lot people say I want a reasonably priced so just anybody can afford my work. But then they’re saying, Well, I would like to be able to go to the plein air convention or something, I can’t afford it. Well price your work higher, so you can afford it. And this is the big problem. Most artists I know underpriced their work. Most artists I know could double and or triple their work price and get it and probably not have any more price resistance. But most of them are like well, I don’t know, I think I could only afford this. So I want to make it affordable for everybody yet somebody could walk into your gallery and spend $40,000 on a painting, or 140,000 or 400,000. So just keep that psychology in mind that you might want to be thinking about why is it that you want to price things the way you are? Does somebody who’s going to a local library have no money? Yes, but there’s also people who go to a library local library who live in a in a $10 million house. So keep it in mind. Just try to think through what is being reasonable mean. Now, I want to meet my market. I want to give good value, but I also know that there are people who want things that are the best. There’s 10% Of all people who want the best. And so you might want to have something that those people want and price signals value. It’s documented, it’s tested. If you walk into an art gallery, and there’s $150,000 painting, next to an equally good painting, that’s $10,000. The $150,000 painting is the better painting and someone will buy that before they’ll buy the $10,000 painting could be an almost identical painting, but there’s something wrong with it, because this one’s 10. That one is 150,000. So just keep that in mind. All right. Anyway, that is the art marketing minute. Remember, pricing is emotional. So keep that in mind.

How to Submit Your Art Marketing Questions: What questions do you have about selling your art? Submit it at artmarketing.com/questions to hear your question answered on an upcoming Art Marketing Minute Podcast.

Art Marketing Minute Podcast: Episode 133

By |2023-09-12T10:27:01-04:00September 22nd, 2023|Art Marketing Minute Podcast|

In the Art Marketing Minute Podcast with Eric Rhoads, you’ll learn how to sell your art, how to market your paintings, and everything else you need to know in order to have a successful art career. 

In this week’s Art Marketing Minute:
What can you do to attract more out-of-town buyers?
Are there ways to vet potential buyers so you don’t waste your time?
Listen and learn!

The Art Marketing Minute Podcast has been named one of the 2023 “Top 25 Art Business and Marketing Blogs on the web” by FeedSpot.

Listen to the Art Marketing Minute Podcast: Episode #133 >

Submit Your Art Marketing Question:

What questions do you have about selling your art? Visit artmarketing.com/questions or e-mail Eric at [email protected] (include your name and where you’re from) to hear your question answered on an upcoming Art Marketing Minute Podcast.

FULL TRANSCRIPT of the Art Marketing Minute:
DISCLAIMER: The following is the output of a transcription from an audio recording of the Art Marketing Minute. Although the transcription is mostly correct, it is sometimes slightly inaccurate due to the recording and/or software transcription.

Announcer:
This is the Art Marketing Minute with Eric Rhoads, author of the Amazon best-selling book, “Make More Money Selling Your Art.” In the marketing minute, we answer your questions to help your art career brought to you by ArtMarketing.com, the place to go to learn more about marketing. Now, here’s your host, art magazine publisher, Eric Rhoads.

Eric Rhoads:
This question comes from Mark Reynolds in Quincy, California. Mark says I own a frame and gallery shop in Quincy. In 2024. I’ll be organizing my third plein air festival. Congratulations on that Mark, it’s pretty cool. The first year 23 artists attended and 2023 there were 38 artists in 2024. I’m expecting 60 artists. I advertised in two magazines, plus Facebook and Instagram. And I need to attract more art buyers to attend the reception and the street fair. What else can I do to attract out of area art buyers? The area’s full of artists but not very well known? Well, that’s a big question Mark first, congratulations on doing that. I think it’s really important to to start plein air events. You know, there are, are now hundreds of plein air events around the world. And there were none. When we started this magazine are very few maybe maybe under three or four. So it’s really changed a lot and people like you are important to us. And thank you I know one of the advertising places you spent money on was plein air magazine, thank you. It’s a good place to be if you’re selling a plein air event. Many galleries have tried to avoid things like what you’ve done because they think it hurts their business. Because we had a gallery say to us, you know, I don’t I don’t want to be a part of a plein air event because all these people are gonna come to town, they’re gonna buy paintings at the plein air event. And they’re not gonna buy paintings from my artists and from my gallery. And I said, Oh, contraire, they will because they’re in there. They’re here to see art, they love art, they go see paintings they want, they’re gonna wander into every gallery in town, they’re gonna buy paintings. And sure enough, that turns out to be true. So I applaud you, because a lot of galleries might have just rejected that whole idea. So that’s really nice. People get this art buying dopamine high, and they like to buy art. And so when they come around for a plein air event, you know, especially if you’re sponsoring it, you’re gonna sell art, you’re gonna have a big, a big success. And I think we all need to approach things with an abundance mindset instead of, you know, a protective mindset. Now, you say you advertised in a couple of magazines that you need to attract more art buyers to attend? Well, let’s take that. Let’s take that question. First. I think that the question is, how did you advertise in those magazines? I know you advertised in one of ours. Plein Air magazine, I don’t know if you advertise in Fine Art connoisseur, which is where all the collectors are. And I think you advertised in one of the Western publications, all good, all good decisions. But the things you’ve got to ask yourself is did I have enough frequency? Frequency is the repetition of ads? And did I have an ad that really stood out that got attention that made people slap them in the face and made them pay attention and get their attention? I think everyone in the plein air world needs a dual strategy. And the dual strategy is a local strategy and a national strategy. Now, a national strategy would be something like plein air magazine, right because you’re reaching a national audience. And it’s important for a lot of reasons. First off, it reaches art collectors who are specifically plein air collectors. And it reaches people who oftentimes traveled to shows especially if it’s a regional thing you know, if it’s a couple hour drive three hour drive a weekend away, then it’s cool say hey, I’m gonna drive up to your town to Quincy and experience this event. But the other reason it’s important is because the key to a successful plein air Event is the artists. And because the chatter from artist goes like this, Hey, I went to this plein air event and they didn’t have any good artists and they didn’t sell any work, I’m not going back. So the other artists, when they get the opportunity to go, I’m going to skip that one. And to make yourself known. So what, what we typically say is, you want at least three and one is a call for artists early on at the time, you’re getting ready to solicit artists to have them come in. And then the second one is about a month or two months before the event, and you get and then the third one is right before the event. And then we recommend also, that you get on our newsletters and things like that. So that it’s a reminder, hey, next weekend is this and make sure you come to this, make sure you schedule this, that kind of thing. I think that’s really important. But you know, you really need to reach local people, because anybody who’s within a, let’s say, an hour or two hour driving distance is the most likely to come to your event. And so where do you reach people like that? Well, the first question is, you know, are you a suburb of another area? Are you isolated in the middle of nowhere? I don’t know the answer to that. Because I don’t know where Quincy is, I should know. I’m sorry. But I think the the idea here is there are lots of ways you can advertise locally. And there are local, you know, websites, newspapers, magazines, tourism, books, things like that. We have up here in the Adirondacks, we have a very successful plein air festival, it’s it’s in its 20th year, and you know, they are everywhere, they have banners on the streets, they get the local community to put up banners. So it’s talking to the tourists, you know, they’re there in all the local magazines, their stories in the newspaper, they’re really working the PR angle, they are advertising, they have posters all over town that you know, they do all those things, all of those things matter, not one works independently. So you want to make sure that you’re getting out and having a local strategy. But you also want to have that national prestige because you need those, you know, there sometimes it’s one collector who sees that ad who comes in and buys you know, six or eight paintings, and spends $20,000. You know, that’s, that’s what you hope for. And so make sure that you’re doing both of those things. I think that’s important. The other thing I like media partners, I like collaborations, media partners, would be you know, you go to the local city magazine, in the surrounding area, or the local TV station, a local radio station, you say, Hey, I’m gonna put your logo on the posters, you’re gonna have a presence, you’re gonna have a booth, a table, whatever. If you promote it, we’re gonna get you involved in it, you could do you get the exclusive on the local story, you know, those kinds of things, that stuff works really, really well. And that’s how I would do it. And the other thing that’s really important is who you have involved in your event, most of the successful events in America, and there are lots of successful events. But the ones that are the biggest and most successful, surround themselves with really, really smart local people who they get involved as volunteers and all kinds of different levels. And you want smart people who know lots of people who can invite lots of people, smart people who know how to encourage people to buy, know how to run auctions, because you can’t just assume they’re going to buy, you need to nudge them a little bit, you need to help them along, you need to have somebody standing there by the booths and saying, Hey, let me tell you about this painting, you know, there’s a lot of different things you can do that will really help this. And remember, the artists component is really, really important. There’s a show, I won’t mention names, but there was a show it was really a big and prominent show. And they decided in their infinite wisdom that they were going to be a little bit more equal and sensitive to the needs of the local community. Make sense? Right? So they said, All right, we’re gonna make 50% of the artists, local artists and 50% national artists. And so they did not jury in the local artists, they just put in the squeaky wheels, the ones who, you know, always were asking, and as a result, they brought the overall quality of the show down because some of the artists that they let in were not very good. I happen to be at that show. I happened to be judging that show was a almost an embarrassment. And the thing that happens is the the good artists who come in say, wait, wait a minute, I’m showing with other artists, they should all be good. It shouldn’t be a bunch of good artists and a bunch of lesser developed artists. I mean, every one of us was a bad artist at one time. So I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with that, but you’ve got to have good artwork. And so the key to that is to have an independent third party juror who juries in it’s fine. have local people, it’s fine if you want to have 50% local people, but make sure they’re juried in and, and that you’re not doing favors for somebody who, who you know you like them, but they’re not a very good painter. And I know I’ll get emails about this, I’m sorry, I don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings. But the reality is if you’re trying to build a reputation for show, you need to have good painters and and so the good painters would not accept the invitations for the show when they were invited back. And the word got out that the show didn’t sell well. And because people saw, I don’t know something about bad paintings brought things down, I suppose. And as a result, things changed pretty dramatically. And so what you want to do is focus on getting really, really good painters in there, Quality Matters, local Quality Matters, National Quality Matters. But make sure that it’s good because word spreads, and artists don’t want to come to shows where they’re not going to make any money.

Second question comes from Scott Pinu in Dalton, Pennsylvania, he said, I just read your book. And I now have a clearer vision on how to handle social media and how advertising is a more effective tool. Each day, I spent at least an hour working on some aspects of marketing planning, Bravo on that, and I’m working to launch my business in the fall of 24. I’m developing ways to make buying my art enjoyable as an experience for collectors. My question to you is, since I’m planning on selling directly to collectors, when I’m approached regarding my works, is there an easy way to vet the potential buyer early on to make sure I’m dealing with a legitimate collector without insulting them? Or coming across? Like, I don’t know what I’m doing? We hear a lot about fraudulent sellers. We hear a lot about fraudulent buyers, but to what degree should I be concerned about potential fraudulent buyers? Well, that’s a loaded question, isn’t it? I mean, you know, we’re all getting these emails that say, Hey, it’s my, I saw your work online, it’s my wife’s anniversary, I want to buy or something special, I like your paintings, I want to buy one of your paintings turns out to be a big scam, you know, they send the painting the check bounces, you know, etc. Watch that. It’s very, very tough. But, you know, I think that first off, why do you need to find out if they’re legit buyers, you know, if if you’re doing something quality, you can kind of tell if somebody’s quality. But be careful about that. You know, I was at a gallery in New York one day, I was sitting there waiting for a meeting. And this guy walks out of the gallery, and the gallery owner says, Hey, that guy just spent a half a million dollars in paintings. He said, When he first came in, I looked him up and down. He was wearing flip flops, shorts and a T shirt, I thought he can’t afford anything. He can’t, he doesn’t belong here. Well, he just sold his company, his kids are out of college, he had plenty of money, and he spent a half a million dollars. So you can’t judge people based on the way they look. You know, you want to, you might want to have legitimate payment methods, you might want to have a credit card machine so that you can, you know, run it through the bank, if the if there’s fraud, that’s the bank’s problem, not yours. I wouldn’t you know, if you want to take checks, you can take checks, but there’s certainly ways that you can call and check those checks or deposit those checks with your with your camera and your phone instantly to make sure they go through. So there’s a lot of things you can do, you’re gonna have some risk, but I wouldn’t worry about that too much. I think the thing that I worry about more is that if you try to categorize people, you might lose people because some people might be offended by some attempt to find out if they’re if they have the money, I wouldn’t worry about that. I just don’t worry about that kind of stuff at all, you know, the majority of people who are going to buy something are going to be legit. And you know, once in a while you get burned, I got burned on something one time pretty badly. It stung but I didn’t stop doing everything. I was just one more cautious. The other thing is, I’m a little concerned about what you said is I’m only going to sell direct. Now, a lot of artists do that. And that’s a really, really wonderful thing. But here’s why I oftentimes say to people, be careful what you wish for. Because, you know, the art of the typical artists argument is well, I you know, I get to keep all the money. So I you know, now I have the responsibility selling all the paintings, I get to keep all the money, I have to do all the advertising, I have to attract all the customers. I have to deal with the customer service of all the customers I got to answer questions. I got to be on the phone. I got to be constantly reaching out to people I got to constantly advertising man, it’s exhausting. And yet if someone good likes your work like a gallerist for instance, they are selling while you’re sleeping. I mean literally in some cases because if you get a gallery in a you know Ever timezone and they’re open while you’re still in bed, you know, if they’re in New York and you’re in California, they’re open and they’re selling paintings while you’re sleeping. And, uh, you have a gallery in Alaska or you know, a Hawaii, there are a lot of different things, you know, they’re selling while you’re sleeping, and they’re selling for, if you have two or three galleries, I don’t like to have more than two or three, I have three, currently, I have an offer from a fourth I’m considering but you know, I don’t know, if I can, I can produce enough quality for that. But some artists sell direct up to a certain size, and then anything over eight by 10, or whatever they’ll sell through galleries, that’s an option. But you know, you have a lot of work to do. And I like to leverage, you know, if I can have three people, three different people selling for me, you know, if my sales skill isn’t very good, then you know, if I’m, if I screw up, I don’t eat, you know, if I’ve got three galleries and one of the three is good, at least I eat something, if two of the three are good, I might sell a little bit more, all three are selling stuff, I’m golden. Now, I don’t ever like to turn 100% Over of anything over to somebody else, I want to make sure you remain in control. I talked about that my book a little bit, you probably saw that. But you know, you could you could try a couple of things. First off, you know, direct marketing. And that’s what you’re doing. When you’re selling direct. It’s a whole different game, you have to build email lists, you have to do a lot of different things differently. And you got to stay in touch with people and there’s a limit to how much ask you can make. So you got to look for different ways to get your work in front of different people get it seen and get it seen by people that you don’t know exist because the ultimate buyer is somebody you don’t even know. So I like the idea of multiplying yourself and I hope you consider it talking about selling direct. I think it’s it’s okay, but you got to be really good at this. And I don’t know I’m pretty good at it. But I’m not selling any my work direct. So, just just a thought. Anyway, that’s the marketing minute. I hope it’s been helpful.

How to Submit Your Art Marketing Questions: What questions do you have about selling your art? Submit it at artmarketing.com/questions to hear your question answered on an upcoming Art Marketing Minute Podcast.

Art Marketing Minute Podcast: Episode 130

By |2023-07-21T08:18:00-04:00July 21st, 2023|Art Marketing Minute Podcast|

In the Art Marketing Minute Podcast with Eric Rhoads, you’ll learn how to sell your art, how to market your paintings, and everything else you need to know in order to have a successful art career. 

In this episode, Eric Rhoads opens the floor to our friends in the Dreamliners* group for a special Plein Air Podcast that focuses on art marketing and the eternal question, “How do you sell your art?”

*The Dreamliners group was started by fans of Eric’s Art School Live program in 2020 and has grown to 3,700 members. As a listener of the Plein Air Podcast, you’re welcome to join the “Dreamlineartists” group on Facebook.

The Art Marketing Minute Podcast has been named one of the 2023 “Top 25 Art Business and Marketing Blogs on the web” by FeedSpot.

Listen to the Art Marketing Minute Podcast: Episode 130 >

Submit Your Art Marketing Question:

What questions do you have about selling your art? Visit artmarketing.com/questions or e-mail Eric at [email protected] (include your name and where you’re from) to hear your question answered on an upcoming Art Marketing Minute Podcast.

FULL TRANSCRIPT of the Art Marketing Minute:
DISCLAIMER: The following is the output of a transcription from an audio recording of the Art Marketing Minute. Although the transcription is mostly correct, in some cases it is slightly inaccurate due to the recording and/or software transcription.

Announcer:
This is the Art Marketing Minute with Eric Rhoads, author of the Amazon best-selling book, “Make More Money Selling Your Art.” In the marketing minute, we answer your questions to help your art career brought to you by artmarketing.com, the place to go to learn more about marketing. Now, here’s your host, art magazine publisher, Eric Rhoads.

Speaker 3 13:44
I’m Pat White. I’m from Louisiana. And I’m a been a professional Realtor for 40 years and been painting for about 13 years. So I have a lot of experience in marketing. So as an artist, what percent of our gross income should be spent on marketing for budgeting purposes?

Eric Rhoads 14:05
Well, I think that’s a loaded question. Everybody’s going to be a little bit different. Everybody has to spend marketing money based on the timing of their marketing. Right so let me give you an example of that Pat, the if you’re a brand new artist, you have no brand whatsoever people don’t know who you are people need to discover you. You’re going to spend a higher level of money on your marketing to build yourself up at that time. And that will probably last for potentially a few years because it takes a few years to really properly brand yourself as an artist. Now it depends on where you’re branding yourself to so branding yourself in a what Where did you say you live?

Unknown Speaker 14:55
Baton Rouge Louisiana

Eric Rhoads 14:57
Okay, so and Baton Rouge If the cost of marketing is going to be a lot different than the cost of marketing in, let’s say, San Antonio, or in New York City or something, so if you’re focusing on local marketing versus national marketing, etc, then it changes. So I believe that every artist should have at least a dual strategy, and probably a trio. And that would be a local marketing strategy. Local, meaning local and regional, and a national marketing strategy, meaning reaching the entire US if you’re in the US, or whatever your country is, and then potentially an international strategy, if that makes sense for you, it does for some artists, I was talking to TL Lawson, yesterday or the day before, and he’s doing a big show in London. And about last time, he did a show in London, about 50% of the audience bought from Europe, and the other 50% bought from the United States. And so that that would be an example of someone who has an international strategy. He has a Gallery in London, he probably has them in other places as well. But this gives you an opportunity then to grow in other markets, if you feel that need, most of us aren’t going to need that. Because we’re probably likely to sell all we need in either our local or national strategy. So if you’re brand new, then you’ve got a lot more marketing expense than you normally would. And there is there’s the there’s the issue of time versus money. So in the case of time versus money, a lot of us don’t have any money to market. But we have plenty of time. And so you can make up for a lot of the lack of money with time, by you know, even if you’re hand addressing envelopes by yourself and taking the time to do it, versus paying somebody to do that or paying a service to do that. It’s going to depend on you. When I started my business, I had no money. And I had a lot of time. And so I did everything imaginable for a number of years, probably for I went seven years without a paycheck. And when I first started my business, and so I think the idea is, you know, you’re contributing what you can give of yourself towards that marketing effort. You might not be able to afford advertising in the beginning, you might have to do you know, list building or other things, which we’ll probably talk about.

Speaker 4 17:42
Good to see you. I’m Linda Marie Crab. I’m always here in Italy. And yes, and my question is a lot of what’s in the book, and I love the book, but it doesn’t work. Over here overseas, for example, you just mentioned, I believe you said he’s an American artist who shows in London. But in Italy, the market is totally different from what it is in the States. And so I was wondering if, if you make a new addition, will you include more for an international artist or or perhaps, like a small chapter where there are other things because here it’s marketing is if you go up to an Italian and you ask if you can have their email address, if they’re watching over your shoulder while you’re painting, they’re going to be thinking that you have other motives. And so some of the things just don’t work in Europe. And so that’s my question.

Eric Rhoads 18:57
Well, I let me answer that in a couple of ways. Linda, Linda, Linda Marie, you want to be called Linda Linda Marie and Linda’s fine. Okay. So first off, Europe is different. And different areas of Europe are different. I’ve been told that the way I do marketing would never fly in England, for instance, because it’s just too abrupt to direct to in your face, so to speak. And yet, I remember a story about a friend of mine who is a world famous marketing guy, consultant. And he was told this, he said, you know, he wanted to do a series of seminars in England. And the his advisers said, No, you can’t do that. You can’t use the same kind of headlines, the same kind of copy the same approaches. And he said, Well, I don’t believe that for a minute. He said what works works And he says, I don’t think I need to change my tone, I don’t think I need to change anything. And while they battled on that, but he decided that he was going to do it the way he wanted to do it anyway. And he had a partner in England, and in that partner was the one saying, you know, it won’t work over here. Well, it, not only did it work is that he sold out everything, and he sold it out fast in his partner, living there, realize that what he’s being told about what you can and cannot do in England is only opinion. And so his partner now has built a thriving business using same same type of marketing that this fellow, Dan Kennedy used. And so I would caution, you know, we hear a lot, Linda, not just in Europe, but throughout the United States as well. We hear people say, Well, I could never do that, or I can’t do that, or people don’t want that, you know, you’ve got to be thinking about really understanding your audience. And sometimes we think we understand our audience, and we don’t understand it. So let me give you an example. I work with a guy who is a world class marketing consultant, who built a company from zero to $400 million in two years. And he did it using certain types of marketing. And he was told, you know, this, this type of marketing, you know, lots of frequent emails, that type of thing is just too much never worked, and that he would completely lose his list. And so he went ahead with us anyway. And he would send emails daily, sometimes two or three emails daily. And he lost about 2% of his list, and the rest never left him. And he gets massive amounts of response every day. So I think that there’s a rule in marketing that applies really, to everything, and that is to test everything, you know, maybe giving, asking somebody for an email, when you’re out, you know, painting and somebody talks to you maybe that that is something you’re not comfortable with. And if you’re not comfortable with Don’t, don’t do anything in marketing that you’re not comfortable with. But there may be a way and you want to test different ways, you know, maybe it’s having a little card that you hand out that’s got a QR code on it, or maybe there’s a QR code on your easel, or maybe there is some kind of an explanation that makes it in the eyes of the beholder, and an acceptable thing. So those things might might work, they might not work, you know, we all have to adapt. And I, you know, I’ve been doing marketing now in the United States and a little bit in some other countries from time to time I did marketing for I can’t mention the name, but a world famous Watch Company, out of a foreign country. And so what you have to do is you have to kind of figure it out, you have to try things you have to adapt, you have to, you know, things that are hot, one minute change. You know, two years, three years ago, Facebook, you could do almost anything on Facebook, you could do retargeting on Facebook, that would get to all the Apple phones, and then Apple changed it. And so now you can’t do retargeting on those phones unless those people have given you permission. So that killed a lot of businesses overnight, I hurt my own business. Thankfully, we knew it was coming. We had planned for it, we had some other things ready. So you’re gonna be experimental and just try things, you know. But be careful about what you tell yourself, you know, we give ourselves messages. And those messages might be true. They might be you know, if I were to ask my friends, I have an employee, a guy who works for me. And he’s, he’s always saying, you know, this won’t work. We shouldn’t do this. We do too much of that, you know, on and on, and on and on. And for him, he’s right. I would never respond to that I would never do this. And but the reality is what we’re doing is working. It’s, it’s working well. And we have tested the ways that he suggested because we obviously you know, somebody says, hey, try this. We’re going to try it. And you know, there are there are people who believe that long emails are necessary. There are other people who believe that short emails are necessary, or other people believe no emails are necessary. So we test it and we test it all the time. So if we’re sending out an email We have taken a certain number of people, and you know, maybe a small group of people, maybe it’s 1000 people. And we’ve sent half of that group one way and half of that group and other way. And then we track the response. And so and whatever wins, that’s what we end up doing. Sometimes it’s a short email, sometimes it’s a long one, sometimes it’s no email, sometimes it’s an image. So you just got to try everything related to the book. I’m working on another book. I don’t have any plans to update the current book, although I might at some point, I’ve updated at one time. And the next book, I’m not going to get too much detail about it yet, I would say it’s about a quarter of the way done. And it’s just kind of trying to reflect some new things that I’ve learned some new things that I’ve discovered. So we’ll talk about that when the time comes.

Speaker 5 26:03
It’s great to be here. Eric, I can’t thank you enough for all that you’ve done. And if not for COVID, I never would have found this wonderful book. I love this book, it is filled with so much good information that I always keep it nearby. And if I could show you the highlights, it’s practically all highlighted for important information.

Eric Rhoads 26:29
Okay, I’m going to put you on the spot, show him to show me the highlights.

Speaker 5 26:34
Okay, so I got tired of highlighting every line. So I just put a yellow line down the entire because just putting a few here and there wasn’t cutting it, it was all important. So I’m Elaine Miller, and I’m an artist I’ve been painting for about eight years. And I’ve owned a series art gallery that I created seven years ago. And I am just so thrilled to have your guidance in all that we’re doing here. My question is, with all the news about the economy coming up, and I’m trying not to listen to news, but the economy goes in a roller coaster, and we might be coming into a recession. What is your advice for artists and galleries to protect themselves during a recession? What’s the best advice to give?

Eric Rhoads 27:30
Well, I first off, I think we’ve been in a recession for several months. And I think that, you know, the news media tries to control the narrative or somebody tries to control the narrative. We’ve been in a recession for a long time, we, you know, we’ve seen indicators of business changing substantially for at least six months, maybe maybe eight months. And so I think that, you know, we’re in it. And I talked to a lot of artists every day. And many of the artists that I talked to are feeling it. They’re not, they’re not seeing the level of sales. They’re worried or concerned. And I’ll just tell you a couple of stories. In the Great Depression. Now, the Great Depression was worse than any recession that we’ve seen in the United States, since although there’s been some that have been close. The Great Depression. I’m hearing feedback. Did somebody unmute? Okay, so in the Great Depression, there was a dominant cereal company, it was called post. They did post toasties. They did post them they did, you know, all kinds of things. You’ve heard of Marjorie Merriweather Post, it was her father that created that company became General Foods. And during the Great Depression, there was a startup company called Kellogg’s ke Double L O, double good, right. And Kellogg’s started advertising when the Depression started. And board of directors at post, one of the people that post cereals, went to the board of directors and said, Hey, there’s this young startup company, and they’re advertising a lot. And we’ve cut all of our advertising because of the depression because we’ve believed that, you know, we’re number one, and we’re going to always remain number one. And the board met and they said, Yeah, yeah, we’re gonna keep that. Keep that philosophy. Nobody’s going to beat us. They’re a gnat. They’re a little company just ignore them. Well, by the end of the Great Depression, and post cereals at the beginning of the Depression had a 90% market share. At the end of the Depression, Kellogg had a 75% market share, they beat post and And to this day, post is never recovered to this day. And the reason this is an important story is because a recession or a depression is the biggest opportunity to grow. Because you can grow with almost no noise. So what happened to Kellogg, they dominated at the time newspapers and radio, they were advertising heavily, I’m sure it was really hard for them to put that money out there. But it was working, they were they were winning. And nobody else was advertising, or very few others were advertising. So not only were they advertising, they were getting great rates, because the media was desperate. And so this is the message. And that is to always remember that if you’re gonna go down, you go down in flames. And what that basically means is you’ve got to try everything, you You never give up 50% At least 50% of your success or failure during any time is about your attitude, your mindset. And it’s also about your mindset in a tough economy. So here’s what happens. I was in the radio broadcasting business for a number of years. And I was always able to say, Oh, the recession is right around the corner, because we saw trends when everybody started canceling their radio advertising, and the TV stations, but it had not been publicly announced yet that it was a recession. When we see people cutting expenses, you know, there’s a problem. And so what’s the first thing everybody cuts? They cut advertising because they look at advertising is an unnecessary expense. When in reality advertising is the opposite of that. It’s it’s it’s a total important expense and something that they do all the other times, why would they do it here? So there’s a gallery. I think it’s okay to mention a name, but I you know, I better not, there’s a gallery that started up in 2008. And all of a sudden, they just appeared on the scene. And they had all these major artists, they appeared on the scene in 2008. And I was in the advertising business at the time, I have fine art connoisseur in plein air magazine. And I noticed that we were losing a lot of advertisers. But this advertiser was, instead of buying one page, they’re buying 5678 pages of advertising. And they were just blown everybody out of the water. And so a few years later, had dinner with his advertiser. And I said, Okay, what’s the deal here? You know, I think I know what was going on. But you tell me, because he had since sold to Gallery. He said, Well, I used to be a consultant for one of the major, major consulting firms. He said, I know that the best possible time to make a business is during a recession, because everybody’s gonna stop advertising. He said, All of my competitors, all the ones that I had targeted and cared about all of them had either reduce their advertising or stopped altogether. He said out of the, he said, I got 10% 10% of the customers from each my top 10 customer, top 10 competitors. He said, several of those galleries don’t exist today, because they they stopped advertising. He said that 10% of there’s always money that will buy those 10% will always buy said My goal was to get all those 10 percenters that are going to keep buying. And so a lot of galleries went away during that period of time in Santa Fe, I’m, I think I remember there were 210 galleries, something to that effect that went away. I may be wrong about that. And yet, the ones who survived are the ones who kept their face far forward. They were out there. They were doing the same disciplines that they were doing before. And in some cases, like this guy, they were doing more. So you know, what happens when, when you’re trying to cut expenses, you start looking at the things and saying, Oh, these are unnecessary? Well, I won’t do any shows for a while. I won’t do any gallery shows because that Wine and crackers and cheese are too expensive. Or I’m not going to do any advertising or, you know, whatever the the promotional, I’m not going to do any direct mail or any postcards or any books or you know, whatever they normally do. And so what happens is that you’re out of sight. You’re out of mind, people forget about you. There’s a concept in advertising called momentum. And it’s true with all things is once you build momentum, you know You’re really crushing it, you’re just driving through, but the minute you stop putting fuel in the airplane, the airplane starts to glide down, and then that airplane eventually crashes if it can’t land. And so the same is true for momentum. You know, when you’re building up your brand as an artist, or you’re building up your brand as a gallery, you know, there’s this, this theory, you know, that post serials took on, which is, well, we’re so big. And, you know, if we stop for a couple of years, it’s not gonna matter. I had an advertiser. Again, no names, I had an advertiser who called me up and said, You know, I’ve been advertising consistently for five or six years. I’m gonna stop and, and move my money somewhere else for for a while. And I said, Well, I think that’s mistake. And I know you’re gonna believe I’m just saying that because I don’t want to lose your business, which is also true. I said, but the problem is that I have you have built up momentum with my audience, and you’re deciding, you’re gonna go to a completely new audience that doesn’t know you, they don’t know you exist, there’s going to be some overlap, you know, two or 3%, probably, but they don’t know you. So you’re starting from scratch. So you’re gonna get out there, and you’re going to spend your money and you’re going to have to spend more money than normal? Because you are trying to get known? Oh, no, no, that’s not true. Everybody knows me now, everything’s gonna be fine. So person left, about three, four months, six months, tops later, person calls and says, my phone stopped ringing. I, you know, I stopped hearing from people I will I’m not top of mind anymore, I’m coming back. So what ended up happening is, the ads in the beginning of this other publication weren’t working yet. It takes time, you got to build up momentum. And not only that, but this person was out of sight, out of mind with the audience that that had been built up. As a result, the, you know, things go down pretty fast. So you want to, you always want to maintain a presence. I’ve always believed that. To some extent, any presence is better than no presents, you know, I do have a caveat to that. And that is, if you’re a full page advertiser, or you’re a double page advertiser, or what we call a double truck. And all of a sudden, you become a quarter page advertiser, you’re sending a signal to your market, that something’s wrong. And so if you’re a quarter page advertiser, and you maintain a little smaller ad, that we don’t sell them, but if you had a smaller ad, that it’s probably not as dramatic as moving from a three times the size four times the size. So you know, there are a lot of things like that. Do you have to keep in mind? I’m not sure I answered your question.

Speaker 5 38:06
Oh, you did. You did marketing, maintain the marketing, and don’t disappear. I mean, the serial story is proof that it works, it worked in the Depression. And so if we can all hold on to that idea, if we’re in a dip, then we put all of our money that we can and just stay invisible, and not drop out with the rest of them, because the people who are the survivors are the ones who are going to be successful. So thank you so much.

Eric Rhoads 38:35
You’re welcome. I had all my top executives fly in a few weeks ago. And I made a speech. Now we had lots of agenda items for two days, but I made a speech and I said, if anybody here is thinking about cutting expenses, just know I’m totally for cutting expenses if we need to. And it’s always better to get out ahead of it. But I am not cutting any advertising expenses. As a matter of fact, I intend to increase advertising. And you know, a lot of deer in the headlights looks and then I tell the story. So this is a really great time, it’s really a good time for an artist to launch. Now you have to have the the money to launch. Now you don’t have to do advertising, but if you’re gonna do things that cost you money, you know, you’re gonna have to have some of that and anybody who’s starting a business and you as artists or business and so on if your gallery. I mean, when you’re launching a business, you have to put money aside for marketing. Now. I didn’t answer the question about the percentage, and I will answer that. Because that was an early question. Like I said, standard is I didn’t say a standard but I said there is a is higher than normal level in the beginning. And then once you get to a point of maintenance, you probably don’t have to work as hard. I think it depends on the type of business to like, if you’re in the cosmetics business, cosmetics business has a 90% margin, glop is basically just mud with with dye in it, lipstick is just goop, right? It costs nothing to make the most expensive part about it is the packaging. And they will spend loads of money on advertising because they got 90% profit, they spend a lot of their money on advertising, they grow their business, they still got 50% profit, if you’re in a business where you have no profit, then you can’t spend a lot of money. So in in your business. You know, I don’t want to diminish this. But the reality is, at least as a as an artist, you know, it’s your time and some materials. And so you have a little bit of flexibility there you have what I would consider to be a high margin business. Now, if you have a gallery, you’re given away half of that to the gallery. So now you’re in a much lower margin business. So you have to, you have to decide. The other thing you can do is you can partner collaborate with others, whether it’s your gallery, there’s a thing called Co Op advertising, where a lot of people will go to their Gallery, and they’ll say, Listen, I want you to advertise me, and I’ll pay 50% of the ads, when you feature me as the primary artist, because now you’re buying an ad for half off. They’re they’re buying an ad for half off, you both get benefit, you’re getting benefit of them promoting you. Next question, Katie, what’s your question? I’ll tell us who you are.

Speaker 6 41:47
I’m Katie Smith, and I’m from Santa Maria, California. And my question is about mastermind groups. I’m wanting to start a mastermind group with some like minded people. And I’m wondering how you go about choosing who to be in a group with? And then also, as we get started, should we place a timeframe on our group from the get go and say we’re going to be together for one year or two years or five years? Is there some kind of a timeframe that should be established? Or do people come and go from mastermind groups and it’s, it stays as a body that changes its members over time.

Eric Rhoads 42:31
I’m gonna, I’m going to answer that first. And then I’m going to answer the other piece of it later. You know, you want to try it out. Before you, before you commit to anything, you, the key to a good mastermind group is who’s in the group and how participative they are. And if if you find somebody’s a dud, you got to move them out. So you’ve got to have somebody who’s the head of that mastermind group, who is going to be willing to make the tough decisions and call people out if they’re not participating. Now, let me just back up and say that if you don’t know what a mastermind group is, it’s a group of people who get together to share information so that you can grow. The idea is you have one mind, but if there are six of you together, you have a master mind, everybody’s working on your problem, and you’re working on their problem. I have been in and paid for to attend multiple masterminds in my life. And there, I wish I learned about him when I was 30. Because I would have done it then. I’m in one mastermind. Now, I spend a substantially high amount of money, the equivalent of a full time salary for one person to be at a mastermind. And not just an average person, but a pretty high level person. And the reason I do it is because I have 15 other people working on my business, and they can see things I can’t see. And they tell me the truth, even when my baby is ugly. So tell me your first part of your question again.

Speaker 6 44:16
And the first one was yes. How to choose who to be in a group with?

Eric Rhoads 44:21
Well, I think the first thing is to set a goal and the goal is to understand what it is you want, do I? What’s my mastermind about? Is it to sit around and chat have friends? Or is it to become a better painter? Or is it to become a better marketer or a better business person? You need to articulate that? And then you need to handpick the people that you think are the smartest people that you can get your hands on because the reality you’re starting a mastermind so that you can learn from the best and you’re going to have people who want to participate, and you’re going to have to be willing to, to in the nicest possible way, say, Sorry, Charlie. And, and that you don’t have to be rude to anybody, and maybe they don’t even know about it. But I think the idea is, you try to articulate so you, you pick up the phone, and you call one person. And you you call your, you know, one of your top targets. And you say, hey, it’s Katie, remember me? Hey, I’ve been observing that you’re doing this really, really? Well. That’s your superpower? From what I can tell, would you agree yes or no? Yes, I do this really? Well, this is my superpower. Would you say that I do that better or worse than you? And if they say, well, you’re probably doing better than I am in that say, Well, why don’t we put our heads together? Let’s meet, you know, once a quarter, once a month. And let’s just compare notes. And I’ll help you and you help me? And why don’t we see if we can get you? Would you agree to that? Sure. No charge, right. And then who, what, what areas of your life are missing that you need help with? Let’s say it’s about marketing. I need somebody really understands advertising? Oh, you know, I do too. Why don’t we call I understand that, you know, this person is really good at advertising. And so, you know, and I would start it out small, I keep it to two or three people in the beginning, see how it goes, you have to have a format, you have to follow a discipline, you’ve got to, you’ve got to have a leader who’s going to be like, we’re not going there. This is this is off topic. And I have a mastermind, actually, this week for two full days in Austin, Texas. And the guy who runs my mastermind that I pay a lot of money to, he keeps us on task, we’re not talking about that that’s not relevant. And he just kind of reigns us in all the time. Because it’s really easy to get off on stories and, and things that are not focused. And so you want to keep it focused. And if you really want to do it, you can also find a professional who can kind of guide your group, but that’s gonna cost you money. Did that answer your question?

Speaker 6 47:14
Yeah. What about that timeframe, though? Is it something that there should be a timeframe on like, when you’re in these mastermind groups? Are they open ended?

Eric Rhoads 47:24
I would say let’s try it for a year, and see how it goes. And if everybody participates, and everybody wants to keep going, and if somebody drops out, then you get to invite somebody else in, I wouldn’t necessarily make it a group thing. But you can. But the thing you got to be careful of is you’re going to have friends who want to get into the group that are not necessarily people are going to put in the work, everybody’s got to put in the work.

Speaker 3 47:53
And, and your book, great book, again, we talk a lot about social media, and this book was written a few years ago. So things have changed. But it seems like what you cover in the book is still relevant. But you just talk about that you use LinkedIn a lot, which I’ve never spent a lot of time on. And now things have changed with Instagram and Facebook to more real skinny. So you can you talk a little bit about social media and how we can use it to our advantage?

Eric Rhoads 48:18
Well, yes, I can. Thank you, Pat. The The first thing to understand about social media is that it’s ever changing, you know, Instagram and Facebook, and you know, they’re hot. Does anybody remember MySpace, they were hot. And then they were not. Things don’t seem to go in and out quite as quickly. But tick tock came on fast. And you know, there’s some talk about tick tock, being restricted in the future, etc. So things are always going to be changing. The other thing is there’s change constantly within those organizations. One minute, they’re focusing on reels, the next minute, they’re focusing on something else. The reason they’re all focusing on reels right now is because tick tock is eating their lunch in terms of time spent online. And so they want reels, they want things that are quick that people can flip through. And so they, they will reward you. And typically these organizations will tell you what they’re thinking, you know, or you can see clues, you know, like they say, Hey, we’re opening up a new thing called this or that, whenever they have a new thing, be the first to jump on it, because they will reward you if you’re putting content on their new thing, then they are going to make sure you’re getting pushed out there and you want them pushing you out there. The average if you’re on Facebook, the average number has gone down from 7% to 3%. And what that means is that let’s say you, you think you’re a big deal. Let’s say you have 5000 followers and you think every time I put something out on Facebook all 5000 of my followers see what I’m writing or posting? Not true. A year ago, two years ago, 7% only 7% See what you’re using, or what you’re posting. Today only 3% see it. So you’re talking to no one. And the only way that they’re, you’re gonna get to more people is if you do Boost Post advertising, which I don’t recommend, as I know that works. Secondly, is you have to figure out how to get Facebook to push you to other people. So when if Facebook sees high engagement, they are Instagram to, or LinkedIn really, if they see high engagement on your page, then they will reward you with more views because they want people engaging. So things like asking a question. You see, somebody asked a question about something and everybody chimes in with an answer. Facebook sees that Instagram sees that, and they’re like, oh, this person’s got a lot of people interacting, that means more people will interact if we push it out there. So now they’re going to show it to 7% instead, and it gets more action, maybe they’ll show it to another 5% and so on. You know, even the people who have 10 million followers aren’t getting out to more than a small percentage of their people. But if they get good interaction, so that’s why engaging content, things that are relevant to the audience. That’s why those things matter. Did that answer your question?

Speaker 3 51:45
Did my I guess the second part of that, again, with a social media? You said you don’t believe in boosting our our ad but don’t isn’t? If you’d run an ad, you can target your friends and friends of your friends. Right? And that would force everybody to see your your painting or whatever you’re putting out? Is that true?

Eric Rhoads 52:05
No. No, I didn’t say I didn’t believe in ADS. I said I don’t believe in boosting, there’s a difference. There are boosting ads, you get these little things to said, Do you want to boost this post? That doesn’t even necessarily mean it’s going to be boosted to your friend list, it might be boosted some to some group in Afghanistan or something it does doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to see it, it’s just that more people will see it, and not a lot of more people. And you got to ask yourself, can I spend an extra 20 bucks? You know, what is that worth? To me? Why am I doing it? If you cannot see a specific return on your Instagram, your Facebook, you know, this is a giant trap. You have all these people who believe, you know, they beat their chests because they have 100,000 followers, having 100,000 followers on Instagram is the equivalent of having 5000 followers on Facebook, it’s been proven time and time again, Instagram, it depends on what kind of following you have and where you’re being followed. But it is. It’s what we call vanity metric. And so if you’re focusing on vanity metric, I hired an agency to help me with with social media posting, and they, you know, they helped me a lot, they got a lot of stuff out there. And I was spending, I don’t know, some large amount of money every month. And I looked at it and I said, Why am I doing this because I’m not making any money from it. And I’m not trying to make money for you know, I don’t monetize my YouTube show. I don’t monetize any of my stuff like some people do. I don’t really want people drive in ads in my stuff i and it’s not worth the money to me. I’m doing it for completely different reasons. I’m doing it about my community, what I’m involved in, you know, plein air painting or realistic painting or otherwise. And so that’s what that’s more about for me, but I still to this day have not figured out how to make money with it. Now, I do know people who do, but those are not necessarily certainly things that are a right fit for me. So I’m not necessarily going down that road.

Speaker 7 54:18
Hi, my name is Gabriel Stockton. I live in sunny San Diego. And my question for you, Eric is from a video publishers point of view. What are the points that you’re looking for in artists for consideration of making videos?

Eric Rhoads 54:39
Well, everything in marketing boils down to one thing, Gabriel what does the audience want? The hardest question to answer in any marketing is how do I find out what my audience really wants? Because you can ask Ask them and sometimes they don’t know what they want. And and I don’t mean that to sound rude. But let me give you an example, I had a product that I developed back in 1902 or something. It was a product that had never been created before. It was a broadcast studio on wheels that looked like a giant radio, it was called a giant boombox. And I had a manufacturer lined up, and I had this great idea. And I did a survey of radio stations that I wanted to sell it to. And the survey came back that they didn’t want it. I even put a picture of it, would you buy this, if it was available for your radio station with your call letters on it? And they said they didn’t want it. And I was pretty discouraged for a minute. And I thought, Well, I’m gonna do it anyway. Because I think they once I show them, they will want it. And I build a $6 million business on that overnight, because of my gut instinct. Because my gut because I came out of that industry. My gut told me that I I believe that to be the right time. Now I can tell you 30 Other failure stories that were my gut was wrong. So to answer your question, when we do art instruction, courses, videos, master classes, whatever you want to call it, we have, we’re investing heavily in the artist, it’s not unusual for us to invest 20 3040 $50,000 in a single production, you know, we have Hollywood level, video team, we have soundstage, we have cameras that just the lenses alone are seven grand, the cameras are 20 3040 grand, that you know, this is really high quality stuff. You know, we spend a lot of days with them. There’s travel involved, and there’s a lot of other things. And you know what I say to my team, who helps me put this together? I say, Okay, would you be willing to take 30 $40,000 out of your pocket? And roll the dice on this artists that you’re recommending to me? And there’s usually a long pause. And oftentimes, the answer is no. And you know, and I want to be able to do anybody and everybody, I love artists, I like they’re my friends, I want to be able to help them out whenever I possibly can. But at the end of the day, if I do too many failures, I’m not helping anybody. I’m not I may be helping the artists, I get a lot of publicity. But at the end of the day, if they’re not making money, they’re not going to come back to me. And if, if I’m not making money, I’m not going to want to do anything else with them. I mean, maybe other things, but not that. So that’s the problem is, you know, you have you have a big investment. So we ask a lot of questions. When we’re developing, who we’re going to approach we ask questions like, what are their followings? Like, what, what is the interaction on their following? You know, how many people do they have on certain social media? How active? Are they promoting themselves? Are they good, you know, we have some artists who work with us and promote themselves. We have other artists who they never want to help. They don’t even want to tell anybody a website, because they consider it to be evil to promote themselves. So, you know, there’s a lot of different things at the end of the day. If, if we can’t make it successful for us in some way and successful for our artists, partners, it doesn’t make sense to do it. And we get surprises all the time, we have artists that we’ve done on a whim that we’ve invested in that we have done massive sales with, we have artists that we have that are massive, big names that we’ve done things with that, you know, didn’t do as well as we hoped they would. And you know, so it’s still very hard to understand what to do with it. But, you know, at the end of the day, we shoot 2025 30 of these a year. So do the math. I mean, you’re talking about a very big investment. And though we kind of look at it, like venture capital firm would look at companies, you know, they say, Well, you know, we’re going to invest in 10 companies, we hope that seven of them make some money and five of them make a lot of money and two of them are really really big hits. But that’s not always true. I mean, sometimes we have several that don’t do well and sometimes We have some that do well, the artists always win. We don’t always win. The artists always win. Max Ginsburg called me one day. And he said, Eric, you made me famous. And I said, why? What’s that all about? He says, Well, you know, you just talked about me so much. So I’m getting invited all over the world and, and I’m getting articles about me and other publications. And, you know, so when we get behind an artist, you know, we’re if if it makes sense, I mean, we’re not going to put something inappropriate and but if we have a watercolor artists, they’re gonna go into our watercolor newsletter, or if a pastel artists, our newsletter, or our general interest newsletter, or our magazines, and on our stages at the conventions, you know, those kinds of things we we try to be as proactive as possible to push these. That answer your question?

Unknown Speaker 1:00:59
that does, thank you so much.

Announcer 1:01:02
This has been the marketing minute with Eric Rhoads. You can learn more at artmarketing.com.

Eric Rhoads 1:01:11
Well, I hope you enjoyed that. If you have questions, email me, [email protected]. We’ll get them on the art Marketing podcast. And also on the plein air podcast. I have an art marketing blog. It’s artmarketing.com It’s really easy. And you can go there and learn a lot about it. I have videos and things like that at paint tube.tv. But if you’re really interested and a career and selling your work, marketing, your work is obviously an important part of it. And I studied Marketing long before I ever got into art, I did marketing, I wasted a lot of years and a lot of dollars making a lot of stupid mistakes and learning things. And I’m still up on it, I still stay very, very current. I’m in marketing groups and a lot of other things. So anyway, hope you enjoyed it today. I want to remind you guys pastel live is coming up in August, make sure to sign up for that at pastel live.com. The next artist retreat I’ve got coming up is fall color week, which is a week of painting in September into the early October. And last but not least, we still have some seats left on our fine art trip to Stockholm and Madrid. We go deep, and we get contacts that you’ll never meet on your own. We do experiences that you’ll never be able to do on your own. Because we use our Rolodex, anybody remember what a Rolodex is. And so that’s something that that we try to do want to remind you guys that we do have a regular podcast called The Art marketing minute and look for that it’s on its own. But you can also get that at the end of end of these broadcasts. I’d like to encourage you guys to subscribe to plein air magazine. That’s kind of the root of it all. And some of you are not yet subscribers. 10s of 1000s of you are thank you for that. If you’re out of the country, a lot of people just pick the digital edition. But most people pick the subscription to digital and print because the digital comes out sooner. Right? You don’t have to wait for the mail. And it has 30% more content, more images, things that we just don’t have enough paper to do because paper is expensive. Last but not least, I want to tell you about my blog called Sunday coffee. I come out with it every Sunday and you can find it for free. It’s at Coffee with eric.com. So anyway, I want to thank you guys for watching today for being here for the 250th episode for listening. And remember it’s a big world out there. Go paint it. We’ll see. Bye bye.

How to Submit Your Art Marketing Questions: What questions do you have about selling your art? Submit it at artmarketing.com/questions to hear your question answered on an upcoming Art Marketing Minute Podcast.

Art Marketing Minute Podcast: Episode 129 – Expanded Edition Live from PACE

By |2023-06-09T08:46:59-04:00June 23rd, 2023|Art Marketing Minute Podcast|

In the Art Marketing Minute Podcast with Eric Rhoads, you’ll learn how to sell your art, how to market your paintings, and everything else you need to know in order to have a successful art career. 

This week’s Art Marketing Minute was recorded live in person at the 10th Annual Plein Air Convention & Expo

Listen and watch as Eric Rhoads answers questions on:

  • writing emails get the attention of art galleries;
  • how much time an artist should spend on marketing;
  • your name when it comes to branding;
  • using software for art business;
  • finding balance as a painter and other aspects of being a full-time artist;
  • social media for artists – using photos versus videos, and if you should ever “boost” a post;
  • finding new work with galleries no matter how “old” you are;
  • how important it is to have a niche

The Art Marketing Minute Podcast has been named one of the 2023 “Top 25 Art Business and Marketing Blogs on the web” by FeedSpot.

Listen to the Art Marketing Minute Podcast: Episode 129 >

Submit Your Art Marketing Question:

What questions do you have about selling your art? Visit artmarketing.com/questions or e-mail Eric at [email protected] (include your name and where you’re from) to hear your question answered on an upcoming Art Marketing Minute Podcast.

FULL TRANSCRIPT of the Art Marketing Minute:
DISCLAIMER: The following is the output of a transcription from an audio recording of the Art Marketing Minute. Although the transcription is mostly correct, in some cases it is slightly inaccurate due to the recording and/or software transcription.

Announcer:
This is the Art Marketing Minute with Eric Rhoads, author of the Amazon best-selling book, “Make More Money Selling Your Art.” In the marketing minute, we answer your questions to help your art career brought to you by artmarketing.com, the place to go to learn more about marketing. Now, here’s your host, art magazine publisher, Eric Rhoads.

Eric Rhoads 0:13
So welcome to the Art Marketing podcast. We’re live today at the plein air convention. Welcome you guys. Thank you for being here. All right. So we’ll be taking some audience questions. And we’ll also be answering some questions that have been pre-delivered to us.

We have a question from Jennifer Smith, well in Canada, and the question is how to write a great email that will get attention to get into a gallery. So let’s, there’s a whole different answer about how to get into a gallery. I’m going to talk about that in a second. But let’s just talk about writing emails. If you’re writing, marketing, emails, marketing emails are essentially designed to get somebody to pay attention, maybe, maybe the goal of the email is to get somebody to buy something, maybe the goal is to get them to go to a particular place. And so the very first thing you do with an email is you ask yourself, what is my goal? What do I want to accomplish? So sometimes, we do emails where we want to do what we call sell the click right? So the whole goal of an email is to get somebody to click through to something. So that that that email will get them to open up a webpage or something, it might be to get them to schedule something on their calendar, or it might be to get them to respond to something. So the first thing you ask yourself is, what do I want somebody to do? The second thing you want to do is ask yourself, Who am I speaking to? And what is it that they want? So if you were, let’s say you were targeting an art gallery, and you’re writing an email to an art gallery, which by the way, I don’t recommend, and I’ll talk about that in a minute. But if you were writing to an art gallery, ask yourself this, what’s important to an art gallery. And most of us who are artists don’t necessarily understand what is important to an art gallery. There’s an art gallery owner here in the room right now that I see. And I can tell you that the conversations that she has, are a whole lot different than the conversations that you have. And what I mean by that is that she’s thinking about different problems that she has to solve, right? So what are the problems that an art gallery has to solve? First off, they have to figure out how to sell enough to keep the doors open, and to pay for the lights to pay for the employees. And so the one thing that’s always on the mind of an art gallery is how am I going to sell enough to keep the doors open? And then the second part of that is, how am I going to sell enough that I can actually make enough profit to pay myself? And then on top of that, how am I going to make enough profit that I can actually have a future, right, so I can put some money away. And so an art gallery owner typically is interested in one thing only, and that is, how am I going to sell something. And now that doesn’t mean they’re not interested in you. They’re not interested in in your art, because they are otherwise they wouldn’t be in that business. A lot of art galleries very, very deeply care about their owners, I mean about their artists, and they want to help them as well. But if you have an artist that you think is just a really, really terrific artist, and you’ve had them in your gallery, and you’ve tried to sell them and they don’t sell, there’s only so far they’re gonna go right, they’re not going to keep giving you that wall space. Think about this. If you walk into a shopping center, or let’s say a grocery store, and what do you see on the ends of the aisles, right? There’s always a product on the end aisle cap. And those companies, let’s say it’s Coca Cola, Coca Cola pays the store extra money to have their product on the end aisle cap. Why did they do that? Because they know that’s the most visible spot, do you end up somewhere in the middle of the aisle that’s less visible, but if you’re right there on the end, everybody gets to see it, right? That’s why they want to pay money for it. Well, every bit of shelf space that a retailer has, is valuable. And a retailer, a serious retailer, whether it’s a clothing store, a grocery store, they know how much money they get out of their shelf space, and if they put something on a primary spot, then they say to themselves, this shirt, this t shirt has to generate, you know $30,000 This month and and if it’s not gonna do it, then we’re going to put it in the back of the room where it’s going to generate, you know, a different amount of money. So really, that’s how a gallery person would think as well. And that is I have so much wall space, I have only so many artists, what’s the most important wall space in my gallery? And that’s typically what the spot that people see when they first come in, or there may be another premium spot. And so when they’re thinking about where am I going to put the art, they’ve got to say to themselves, alright, if this is, if this spot makes up 80% of my sales, then what do I need in that spot, I need something that’s going to sell, I need something that’s going to sell for a high price. And as a result, they’re thinking about, Okay, do I put a new artist in that spot? Do I test them elsewhere first? And is this going to be productive for me? So you need to be thinking when you’re writing an email, to a gallery, or to anyone you’re thinking about, Okay, what’s the most important thing that you can say to them, because in an email, it’s the most important thing in an email is the subject line. Everybody thinks, well, the body of the email is what counts. But if they don’t open the email, right, you you don’t get them. Right. So the most important thing you write is that subject line. And a subject line really should not be over five words. Now, sometimes there are exceptions to that. And the reason it’s five words is because if you’re looking at your email on your phone, and you’ve got a small screen, there’s an average of five words that show up in the subject line, and the rest of them get cut off. And 80% of people check their email on their small screen, not their big screen. And most Commerce today is taking place on a small screen. So you want to optimize for small screens. So that means you want to have a shorter email, and you want to have something that’s going to get their attention. So based on what I just said, what’s going to get their attention? And the answer to that is something about how they’re going to make some money off of you. Right? So what do you put in a subject line, and it’s maybe it’s, I’ve got an idea on how you can make some money. I’ve got an idea. That’s kind of it’s more than five words. But the idea is get their attention, draw them in. Now, the second thing is that the second most important thing in an email is the headline. Most people don’t put headlines in their emails. But if you’re in a marketing, mindset, you you may not put it as a big headline, but you might make it as the first sentence. So what’s the most important thing that you can say? You can say, Dear Elaine, I have a history of selling substantial amounts of art at high prices in three other galleries. I’ve decided to add one gallery this year. And I’d like to talk to you about that. All right, now You’ve piqued my curiosity, right? Because now you’ve said, All right, you already know my business, you know, that I need to sell. And so you’ve caught my attention. Now, if you don’t have something like that to say, then you can’t make it up. But you’ve got to look for something that’s going to be of value.

Eric Rhoads 8:35
Now. I will tell you, I’m going to answer this question in a different way. And I don’t want to be discouraging anybody. But when you randomly send an email to a gallery, and a gallery, a really good gallery, like a New York City Gallery, is getting 345 600 solicitations from artists pretty much every week. And if they actually open all those emails, they don’t get anything else done. I was sitting with a gallery owner in New York and he said, Do you mind if I get some work done while you’re while you’re talking? I said, No, I don’t mind. What do you do? And he says, Well, I have he had a pulled out a big box. He said these are submissions from artists. And there must have been 150 of them in there. He said this is a week’s worth. And he had opened it up peek in and throw them away, open them up, peek in and throw away. And he said, I don’t ever pay attention to the submissions that I get because I already know the artists that I want. He said I’m not peeking in to look at their art. I’m peeking in to make sure that I didn’t miss something like a customer said something or whatever, but they kind of knew which ones were probably submissions. And so he said if I were to open and pay attention to every piece of mail every email, then I would never get anything else done. And he said I was in the gallery. I was talking to a client who was about to buy a high end painting. And this guy wondered, and he was an artist, he says, Hey, I’d like to talk to you about carrying my artwork. And the guy said, Oh, can you just wait a few minutes, and he says, Well, I’m in kind of a hurry. And anyway, he interrupted, the client left, he lost a sale. So from the mindset of a gallery, you’re a pest, right? You’re unnecessary pest, they love you. But if you’re, if you’re trying to get into the gallery that way, so best way to get into a gallery is to get introduced, find somebody who knows an artist that’s in that gallery, get to know the artists that are in that gallery, contact those artists, get to know them, ask them to critique your work, don’t ask them for right away for an intro to the gallery. And after you get to know them, and you and you feel comfortable with them, and they feel comfortable with you, you might say, hey, are there any galleries that you would recommend that I should go in? And if they feel comfortable, they might say, well, you know, I actually would introduce you into this gallery or that gallery. But if they don’t say that, then they’re not comfortable that your works ready. So you want to be really careful about not being a pest now, you can get around that. I know people who do get around that, but you’ve got to be really sensitive to being a pest. Right? Because if you if you’re not, then that’ll be an issue. Okay, do we have any questions from the audience? And if so, just come right up to the microphone. Ask your question. And then we’ll see if we can help.

Speaker 2 11:45
My name is Nancy cloths, I come from Portland, Oregon. very delighted to be here. I noticed a major uptick in this plein air convention on computer information. We’ve gotten lots of information through emails, here’s how you access your links and so forth. And I’m wondering as an artist, what percentage in our marketing life? Should we be on the computer in person? Writing, creating brochures? Do you have any kind of formula? Say I consider 50% of my life as an artist in marketing, and teaching? And I just wondered, it seems like the proportions of how we spend our time in marketing materials and access to the computer and so forth, has changed.

Eric Rhoads 12:42
Okay, good question. Thanks. Stay at the mic, because I might ask you a question. Or you might comment on something. The world has changed, obviously, you know, we used to Does anybody remember letterhead? I don’t think our company even has any letterhead anymore. And if we did, I wouldn’t even know how to find it. But you know, we used to spend a ton of money on letterhead and brochures and things like that. And we don’t do much in print anymore. I don’t even carry business cards, I have an electronic business card, somebody holds up their camera to it, and it scans it and puts it in their phone. And I hate I hate the idea of printing something. But I still print magazines. Isn’t that ironic? And people still read print magazines, but some people still read digital magazines. Some people don’t read any magazines. I think that, you know, from our standpoint, we like the idea of being able to be nimble, because if we, we have to change something, we can change it and notify everybody and it’s out there. But in your world as an artist, you have to, you have to think about, you know, what’s your environment? First off, my rule is you should spend 20% of your time on marketing, no matter what if that’s one out of five days, and you can break it up however you want. But if you force yourself to spend 20% of your time, even if you don’t know what to do, you’ll find something to do. And if you find something to do, you’ll be doing productive work eventually towards selling or whatever. So I think artists typically galleries typically need brochures or books or some way to show the art. It’s an expensive investment, you know, even southern beaches and Christie’s has gotten away from from doing the catalogs, it’s all online now, which I prefer because I can just click and look at it and register and and make a bid if I want to. But it depends on the audiences you’re talking to more and more older demographics are more tuned in especially after COVID You know, nobody before COVID knew how to use Zoom. And now everybody does. And so the world is more electronic. And so you have to just get Gotta judge what it is you do. Did that scratch that itch? Or is there more you need?

Speaker 2 15:06
Yeah, my Mondays are devoted to marketing. And then every morning, I’m, I’m one to two hours in marketing, okay, I teach and I present and I sell in a gallery and I, I have to produce, I am trying to establish a balance a new balance with with production.

Eric Rhoads 15:26
Well, what I would ask yourself is, what is my, I have what I call my optimum times, right? I know my energy patterns, I know when my mind is working great. I know when I’m tired. So you know, my day I start out like really high energy, well, kind of, after I workout, I’m low energy, and then I get high energy again. And then I kind of go along, and then after lunch, I lose my energy, and then it starts dwindling down for the rest of the day. And so I try to put the important things that require my brain, my thinking time, in that period of time, and the things that don’t require that in the other periods of time. So, for instance, I oftentimes would, would tell my salespeople, there are certain things that you do when you’re at your best, right, so you make your phone calls when you’re at your best. And when you’re tired after lunch, that’s when you build your presentations, and you get that stuff out of the way. So if you were to look at my calendar, I, I’m not always perfect about this, but I actually calendar eyes, my projects, I calendar is thinking time, because everybody needs to just stop for an hour or 20 minutes or you know, two or three times a week and just think about your business. And I oftentimes will calendar eyes, not just meetings, but I’ll calendar eyes projects, I’m going to give myself one hour to get this project done, or two hours or whatever. in your particular case. And in my particular case, I have painting time as well. And I do my best painting when I’m at my highest energy. And unfortunately, because I have all of this that I have to run, I don’t paint during my high energy times, except sometimes on the weekends, right? If I can get high energy time, on a Saturday morning or after church on Sunday, that kind of thing, then I will I’ll be able to paint better in those periods of time. But you know, I go out to the studio six or seven o’clock, eight o’clock at night, and I’ll paint till two o’clock in the morning some days. And so but that’s, that’s just me, but you just have to kind of figure out what works for you. Thank you. Any other questions? Thank you. Any other questions? Come up to the mic if you have one. And and if you could just be lined up so that one person asked them the next one we’ll get to you.

Speaker 3 18:12
Hi, I’m Caitlin Lee line hatch from Wisconsin. Super excited to be here my first time. My question relates to how to figure out how to use my name as my brand. It’s a little complicated. I feel like I’m in an identity crisis. Because I I’ve used my maiden name my whole life doing art, but it was more of a hobby, after getting married, you know, dropped that. But now that I’m finally getting back into my art, after 10 years of raising kids, I still want to sign my work with my maiden name, but use my maiden name and married name to talk about myself because we also have another business that I think goes well with the story of my art. And we run a dairy farm and make cheese and it’s a beautiful story that works together. But I’m worried that if I have two different names, it’s complicated. And is it a mistake? Or will people just eventually figure it out?

Eric Rhoads 19:06
If I woke you up in the middle of the night from a dead sleep? And I asked you if you had to make a liver die decision right now about what direction you would go What would you pick?

Speaker 3 19:17
the hyphenated name but still sign it just my maiden name they want to do

Eric Rhoads 19:23
all right, well, you need to do what you want to do. And I came out of the radio industry and we had radio names. And you know, like you’d have a guy or a lady who had a really difficult to name, last name, you know something, you know, heavily ethnic or something and, and so they’d say, Okay, well your sandy beach or you know, or, you know, your french fry or whatever, they come up with these names and jingles for him and the reason they do that is because they’re memorable If you have a name that is not memorable, then it makes your life much more difficult. And it makes their life much more difficult. You know, we have a company that we acquired little little art instruction video. And we kept that name for 10 years, before we stopped using it and combined it into one name of paint tube TV. And it and we kept it alive, because a lot of the people who knew them, you know, we wanted that consistency. But as those people kind of aged out, and then we started getting them more familiar with their other brands, we put them together. But we one of our slogans was, you know, difficult name, great training. And but if, if I were starting from scratch, I would consider, you know, coming up with something that’s easy. Now, there are a number of artists who will just use their first name, or their last name, or maybe they’ll come up with something. I, my brother calls me brick, because my, my first name is Bruce. So there’s the B, about my family. And my middle name is Eric. And my family always calls me, Rick. So he calls me brick. And I was thought, well, that’d be a great name for if I became a abstract painter, I just become brick, right? So because I wouldn’t want anybody to know who I was anyway, because I don’t do that. So you, I think, if you’re going to do something, pick something and stick with it, whatever you’re going to do. I have a friend that’s here, I don’t know if she’s in the audience. But she, she decided that she she was using a her maiden name and her married name, hyphenated for many years. And she got known as that for many years. And then she decided she was going to change her name. And I said, You’re stupid. Don’t change your name, you know, you’ve got 30 years of branding. And now all of a sudden you want to become whatever it was, I said, Don’t do that. You’re just throwing away 30 years of equity, and brand equity. So in your particular case, if you’ve been known as your maiden name, then I would incorporate that. And I would, I would add your last name if you want to do that. But if your last name is tough, maybe stick with your maiden name, you have your dairy farm business, you can easily be who you are for that and be who you are for your artists. And I’ll tell you something, I I’m on a board of directors, with 15 other companies. And one of the people on my board is an artist who makes $5 million a year as an artist, by the way. And he has different brands. So he has his name as a brand. But he has also he’s created names. He’s made up names of other brands with different styles of art. And, and he never puts his picture on it. So I mean, it’s no different than then a cosmetics company saying okay, well, let’s come up with the essence of Jasper, right? You know, so you could do something like that if you like. So we have a lot of artists who have these like, the questions are like, Well, I’m known as a portrait artist, but I really also want to be a sculptor. And so it’s like, do you confuse your audience or not? And so those are ways to overcome that. Tell me your name again.

Unknown Speaker 23:44
Caitlin Lee line hatch.

Eric Rhoads 23:46
Caitlin Lee line hash hatch hatch. Well, that’s easy. That’s fine. It’s very elegant sounding. And it might be hard to write all of that on a signature. But I think that’s fine. Okay. All right. Did I answer your question? Yes. Okay, great. Terrific. Next question.

Speaker 4 24:07
Hello, my name is Gabrielle istok. And this is my first physical time so it’s nice to finally meet everybody and you in person. I would like to know, back to our first question, that gal asked about marketing. What is some software that you use? I could definitely use some good calendar software. What is something that you recommend to help artists in now this more digital age?

Eric Rhoads 24:40
Oh, well, what kind of help?

Unknown Speaker 24:44
Like what what? So I still use

Eric Rhoads 24:47
I understand AI can make the art for you. Is that what you’re looking for?

Speaker 4 24:51
No. I don’t think so. I’m, I’m referring to you know, I still use the good old paper have, you know, calendar? Are you using software to schedule things? Well?

Eric Rhoads 25:09
That’s a loaded question. The answer to that is yes, and no. So I’m a bit of a tech nerd. But I’m also a bit of a Luddite. So I have, I have tried different programs and spent money on different programs and apps, and so on to manage my to do list. And I do my to do list every day on paper. And the reason I do it is because I have a system, I have a book, I buy these hard bound books at the office supply. And the left side, I write the date, the left side is for notes, the right side is for my to do list. And I take my to do list and I prioritize it by A, B, or C. A is the most important, B is kind of important. C isn’t really very important right now. And I list everything by A, B, and C. And sometimes there’s 50, or 75, things on that list. It’s not uncommon. And then I also go through and I put an asterix next to something if it’s urgent. So it could be a C, but it has to get done because it’s urgent. And then, so I put that Asterix there, that means I gotta get it done today, then the next thing I do is I go through my list and I go, is there anything on here that I can delegate, and unit probably don’t have anybody to delegate it to. But if you did, I go through and go, You know what, this is really something I shouldn’t be doing, I shouldn’t waste my time doing it. So I’ll cross it out. And I’ll send a quick email to Carrie or somebody or ally. And I’ll say, do this. And then I go through and N A is 80%. Those are the big things, right? I, I try to knock out my A’s first. And so how do you know which one so if I’ve got five A’s, I go through it. And I said based on today where I am, and what’s the most important thing to me, that’s going to be the most important to what I’m trying to move the needle on at this time. So it might be a new product, or it might be a different project, or it might be a money. So like, if I know like I have to sell out the plein air convention by, you know, within three days, and I’ve only got three days to do it, that becomes a one and then the next thing becomes a two. And so that’s how I do it. So I do that manually. Now, there’s software that will do that for you to do a better job. But I’ve never been able to I just you know, because I’ve been doing it for 30 years, it’s just works for me. And we’re using a piece of software we were using. Let’s see where it is called up up. Upwork. Right? Is it Upwork. Anyway, we now build all of our projects in the software, click up, click up, thank you. And, and we put every detail every step of everything and every person who’s involved with it into that. And then it sends us reminders of what to do and how to do it. So my whole company operates on on clickup. Now, we were using another piece of software until about six weeks ago. And so I get email notices, and it tells me when I need to have something done. And that is a really great tool for you. It forces you to plan. But once you plan once, if you have like a typical week and you want to repeat that, you can it’ll just automatically you just regenerate it for the next week. So it says okay, spend spend two hours on marketing starting at two o’clock on Thursday something but you know, I just use Google Calendar and and what’s in my iPhone that’s convenient for me. I use AI a lot not to create paintings. But I have aI up all the time. I recommend spending the money for chat GBT for it costs you like a couple $100 a year but it’s better. And so now you can have it write emails for you. You can have it write promotional pieces for you. It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty good. And just to give you an example, I told Christina, who’s our social media manager that I wanted to do quotes from Sunday coffee, and she said, Okay, well get me some quotes from Sunday coffee. So I went into AI, I said, go to my Sunday coffee blog, find 50 Motivational quotes and put my name at the end of them. Two minutes later, I had 50 of them. And so I and I sent her that and then we also learned how to use a software called Canva. That is for graphics. And there’s a way you can automate that. So she was able to take that automation that I had In two minutes, she automated it in Canva it spit out in another 10 minutes spit up 5050 different graphics for it. So that’s, that’s where you can save a lot of time and and AI is going to be very valuable for marketing for all artists. I anytime I have a hard problem I’m trying to solve, I’ll go into AI and I’ll say, here’s the problem, what would you do? And it’ll give me a list. And some of the things are correct. And some of them aren’t. Some are things I haven’t thought of. So it can be very valuable.

Speaker 4 30:32
And nice. I also enjoy it. It’s called vid IQ and they have a chat GBT thing that links to your YouTube. So everything you’re saying in your YouTube connects, and you can do that same thing, like, what did I say over here? And they’ll bring it over and write what you said. So it feels more genuine? Because it took what you were talking about in your own YouTube channel. And then one other question I had, is it is it a is a new fad that’s going on right now. But I noticed when people are on camera, and they’re addressing people that might be watching them on camera, they’re saying friend, like, hey, Fran, I want to tell you about this thing. Is that a good marketing strategy?

Eric Rhoads 31:20
I don’t know. I have no idea. I don’t know why it’s a trend. There’s no, there’s nothing I’ve seen that indicates one way or the other. I think that general rule of thumb is whenever you can be personalized, it’s better. You know, if you’re sending an email, and you have a system that allows you to do this, whether it’s MailChimp or some other thing, we use Agora Pulse, you know, you’ll get an email that says, hey, Gabriel, that’s more powerful than saying, Hey, friend, but sometimes there’s a moment when you want to say, Hey, dear fellow artists, or whatever, but anytime you say anything like that, you immediately go, your radar goes at, and Oh, me, and you hit delete, right. And this I do this all day, every day, we all do. And so, I mean, the best rule for all marketing is tested. You know, test test one doing Hey, friend and test one without it. The most important thing is what you say it when you’re talking about YouTube, I paid a huge amount of money for YouTube training. I hired a consultant on YouTube. As you know, I’ve got 100,000 followers on my YouTube channel now. And the most important thing is the first three seconds, and also the titling. I went through and changed all the titles of the my top 50 viewed art school live shows. And I put the word secrets and every one of them and viewing went up. And it’s stupid, but it works. And so you know, Secrets of watercolour painting with Gabriel Stockton, you know, kind of a thing. And but the first three seconds of your show, determine what it’s like you’re driving down the highway at 65 miles an hour, in your case, 85 miles an hour, you’re driving down and you see a billboard. And you’ll see two billboards, and one says McDonald’s next exit, and the other one has like 500 words on it crammed in, and you can’t even make it out, right. And you might make it out if you drive by it every day going to work. And so you’ve got to put a billboard out front of your YouTube, or anything you do your emails, if everybody in the room would just start saying, okay, what can I say that people want to hear? That’s going to get attention. And I’m going to put that at the front of emails. I have a friend is a best selling author. And he said to me, he was coaching me on writing my Sunday coffee. And he said, Now when you write it, write everything and then take the first two paragraphs and throw them away. Because nobody gets to the point until the third paragraph. And so I’ve now learned to get to the point right away. But the idea is you want to get their attention because they’re deciding am I going to watch this? Am I going to read this? Am I going to open this? What’s going to get their attention? Alright, good question. Thank you.

Speaker 5 34:36
My name is Frank Gonzales. I live in Mexico. I keep Jalisco Mexico and this is my first time as you know. Yes. Okay, so I have two questions. One is kind of an awkward one. I have been teaching in San Miguel de Allende, watercolor and oil. I love that. Yes, I know you were there at some point.

Eric Rhoads 34:57
I’ll tell you a quick story. Okay. Very quick. All right, COVID hits, Art School live starts, we get millions of viewers. And I’m walking down the street in San Miguel. And my wife says, Don’t look now, but that guy’s staring at us. And you know, you hear these stories about people getting kidnapped and all this stuff. So she’s like, be careful, be careful. And I said, just don’t look at him. So we walked by the guy and he starts walking towards us. And she’s like, holding on to her purse. And he says, Are you Eric Rhoads? Yes, I took us on a tour. So anyway, I’m sorry.

Speaker 5 35:37
Okay. Well, my question has to do with the so I started teaching there. I’ve been teaching for quite a few years now. 20, to be exact. But the thing here is that when I started teaching in San Miguel de Allende, and I used my name and friend, Gonzales, then they say, you’re no different Gonzales. They say, Well, you are not every Gonzales. And I said, Of course I am. It happens to be that there’s another artist there who has the same name. And I’m trying to kidnap him, but I haven’t really. So somebody said to me, you should change your name. And I said, No, he needs to change his name. I don’t know, what do you think about that?

Eric Rhoads 36:15
Well, what I would do, first off, I would go meet this guy, and get your picture taken with him. And then I would tell the story on social media about how that you’ve got this confusion thing going on. And that just be kind of a fun thing to do. But the only thing you can do is figure out another way you can differentiate yourself. Now, when you’re attracting audience to come to you and San Miguel, they’re probably coming from other places. I know from also from San Miguel, they’re all coming from San Miguel, not all of them. Okay, but so you have to figure out, first off, what I would do with your marketing is I would put your name and then put where, where you’re from? Okay. Okay, so like DaVinci? Yeah. Okay. And then I would put your photo that way. The people who know the other guy are gonna go, that’s a different guy. Right? So there are obviously lots of people with different names. It’s a very difficult marketing dilemma. And you only run into that in San Miguel.

Speaker 5 37:45
Okay, so the second thing, the second thing has to do with the so I paint a lot I paint fires. I’ve been doing it since I was a kid. But so I have this idea, this strategy, which actually, I want to explain a little bit so that you can tell me what you think. So what I’ve been doing other than painting, and you know, selling my work in different galleries, I, I became a promoter of art. I also became an art auctioneer. And I paint a lot of public art in my town, because many people cannot buy my art, but I still want them to enjoy it and to have it. And also, I use it obviously, as a strategy for marketing. And last year, we founded an art museum in our town. Yeah, we have over 500 600 pieces of art that, you know, a lot of people from different parts of the world come to, to our little town, I actually learned to speak English there. So I mean, doing all of these things besides painting, thinking, you know, this is a nice, a nice way to put myself you know, in front of people. But the idea is to do that publicly and socially. Until 55. I will become 51 next year. So it’s like, Okay, so once I get to that point, then I do nothing but painting. So it’s like a, like a ladder. I want to think to get to a point where I’m known in my area, but then I can just do what I love, which is painting. like to know what you think about that.

Eric Rhoads 39:20
I think it’s a really good idea, but it’s also very stupid. Okay, and I’m not calling you stupid. So here’s the problem. We have this misconception, that when we become famous that all of our problems are gonna go away. All right, so I’ve known some pretty great artists, some of which are no longer around. I won’t use any names. But I had a conversation with one of these famous artists over dinner one night, and I said, you know, it must be really nice to be you because you don’t have to mark it anymore. He said, What are you talking about? He says if I’m if I’m not seen all the time, everywhere they forget me at you have to be seen all the time. If you look at the great artists alive today, let’s look at like David LaFell. Do you think David LaFell doesn’t do any marketing? David LaFell does marketing every day of his life. Richard Schmidt and I talked to him about this, Richard Schmidt did marketing every day of his life. Now, it may not be marketing in the traditional sense that you think of I mean, maybe you weren’t seeing ads, with Richard Schmid, talking about his paintings or something, but you would see books come out, you would see shows you would see stories or articles, everyone needs to adopt an attitude that if I’m selling my artwork, if I’m in a business, which you are your small business, then if I’m in business, you have to devote a certain amount of time to your marketing. And that never ends. Marketing is a lifetime commitment. If you think you’re going to get to a high point of awareness, you will, and you’re doing all the right things to do that. But here’s the problem. Once you get up here, the minute you stop promoting, you start sliding down the scale. And so remember that there’s a concept called attrition, right? So if, if I owned a gallery, in a typical year, 10% of my customers would die, move, retire, not have any more wall space, lose their jobs run out of money, I’d lose 10% of my customers in a typical year, in 2008, the attrition rate for art galleries was 60%. That means in 2008, most art galleries lost 60% of their customers, and most of them didn’t survive hundreds of art galleries went away, not the smart ones, in 2008, actually increased their advertising, even though everybody said, you know, we’re in a recession, nobody has any money. And those people survived, and they’re still around today. Because they realized that if you stay top of mind, you’re gonna get the customers that are spending, there may not be as many people spending. But if you can get some money in the door, then that will help you survive. So here’s what’s going to happen, you’re going to make yourself famous in your area, but 10% of them are going to die, move, whatever. And then there’s going to be 10% new people who come in and they don’t know you. And, you know, five years from now, 50% of those people are gone. And five years from now, 50% of the new people don’t know you exist. So you are constantly having to replace that 10% that’s going away with a new 10%. Okay,

Speaker 5 43:04
no, but I guess what I meant is, you know, the public card, the social work and all of that I don’t I know that I can’t stop doing my publicity. I mean, that’s, that’s a certainty for me that I know that I have to invest in my own publicity. But I just, I guess what I’m trying to say is, you know, I’ve been doing all these things, and everybody gets when they think art, the first name that comes to their mind is my name. Well, except with that other guy who doesn’t same name as me. But when I’m saying 55, I’m saying 55, to do all the work that I do all the teaching, all the auctioning, and all of those things, and stop all of that paint and still continue with my publishing Academy. That would never stop, I can’t do it all.

Eric Rhoads 43:47
So what you have to do is look for leverage. And what I mean by that is, so I’m kind of in the same boat, I can’t do it all anymore. I used to do it all. I used to be a one man show and do everything. Now I have 5050 people and I still can’t keep up. Right? And, and so the first thing is if you can get some help some volunteers, somebody to do some work with you. Maybe it’s some paid people from time to time, that to help you do some of those things. But the other thing is to leverage other people and that is to look for somebody else who’s aggressive in your marketplace that wants to be involved in those things. And then see if you can do collaborations with them, you know, they have marketing that’s going on, maybe they can include you in their marketing in exchange for something you do for them. Look for ways to collaborate look for ways to be interacting with other people. You know, I have a this is gonna sound really, really arrogant, and I don’t mean it to sound arrogant. It’s just you get to a point where you have so much demand on your time. You have to be picky Right. So if I did every art competition that I was asked to judge, if I did every show opening that I was asked to attend, I physically couldn’t do them all. I mean, there would be something every weekend. And so I have to turn down most of it. If I did, all the speaking engagements I’m asked to do, I would have to turn them down. So I, I set a let what I call my leverage rule, and that is, okay, I will only accept a speaking engagement, unless if there’s a minimum number of people in the, in the crowd, usually 1000 people or more, because, you know, I’m gonna get on an airplane, I’m gonna fly across the country, it’s gonna take me a day to get there, I’m gonna have to stay in a hotel, and I hate hotels. I’m going to have to get up at four o’clock in the morning to go to the airport. And then I’m going to go and I’m going to speak to 50 people. And no, I would love to speak to those 50 people, it’s just not productive. So if I’m going, I have something that I want in return, right? I want them to sign up for my email list. I want them to buy a product I want them to know about a blog or a podcast or something that I do. And so I, I look at that. And I say, Okay, what’s my goal? If I accept, I turned down, there was a big art convention for art materials people in in Cincinnati a couple of weeks ago, Columbus a few weeks ago, and they asked me to be on a panel with three other people who were my equivalents in other industries, I mean, for for other publications, and and I said, No, I’ll come if I’m a keynote speaker, but I won’t come if I’m on a panel. Now, why would I do that? Because I didn’t want to be one of three. I thought, if I’m gonna fly across the country, I want to stand out, I want to have control of the conversation, I want to be able to talk to the audience. Now that sounds arrogant. And it might be and that’s not my intent. But if I’m going to take my time, I want to get value out of it. So you have to look at that and say, How can I get value? How can I leverage my time? What else can I do? Thank you. All right, next question.

Unknown Speaker 47:23
Hello, my name is Laura Lee, I’m from Texas.

Eric Rhoads 47:26
Can you get a little closer to the mic? Yeah, you could pull it up if you want to tall or handheld.

Speaker 6 47:32
Okay, no, that’s okay. I’m fine. I wrote out my question, because I wanted to make sure I did it. Right. So in doing emails and social media posts, how important is it to be on the camera myself? And what would you say about photos versus videos?

Eric Rhoads 47:48
All right, well, and we’ll get into a dialogue about social media here from this. First off, in, you know, the, the world has changed so dramatically. It you know, the, we have people on our team who do nothing but social media and video and, and I have a producer for my show, and we take my show, my daily show, and then we make shorts out of that. And then we put captioning on it. And we take my podcasts and we do shorts out of that we put captioning on it, we actually now have just discovered an AI tool that does all that for us. We have, we have one company that we pay a couple $1,000 a month just to do that for us. And we found this AI tool that does it for like $10 a month or something. And so this guy is gonna probably lose his job. You don’t work for us. It’s a company. And we do it because Facebook and YouTube and Instagram are fighting for their lives because Tik Tok is crushing them. And so they’re if you do reals, if you do shorts, they will reward you. And the way that social media works first off, most people think, Okay, I have 10,000 followers. If I write something, all 10,000 people are gonna see it. Anybody in the room believe that? No. So three years ago, the number was 7%. Facebook will push your posts to 7% of your followers only 7%. Today, the number is 3% only 3% of your followers are going to see it. So you have all these people who think Well, I’m gonna do my marketing on Facebook and on Instagram and I don’t need anything else. I’ll just push it out to my 100,000 followers, you know, and, and so what Facebook does is they look at at your engagement rates And the first thing they reward is if you’re doing video, they reward that. And so rewarding means if we have good engagement, people watching it, then we’re going to show it to more people. If they watch it more than the first three seconds, then that’s good. We’ll show it to even more people. If they watch it. Halfway through, we’re going to show it to even more people, they watch it all the way through, we’re going to show it to even more people. Right? So that means that you have to be thinking about what I talked about earlier, how do I get them to watch what’s what’s the first thing I can say that’s gonna stand out, be controversial, get their attention, whatever. And then what can I say that’s gonna make people watch all the way through you, if you pay attention to Instagram, you’ll see people doing this very effectively. You know, at the end, I’m going to show you how I, you know, did this magic trick, whatever. And the whole goal is to try to pull you through, you know, these people do these things where they turn the paintings around, and they’re trying to hold people longer. And that’s why they do this stuff. And so video is very highly important. And if you’re branding yourself as an artist, in today’s world, brand yourself, and that means they need to know you, they need to know your face, and you need to have your look. And your look needs to be your look forever. I told Eric Koppel when we did our first video with him, I said, What’s your look going to be since I don’t know he had this cap on. I said, Don’t ever take the cap off. This is now your look. And so you’ve seen everything you see him in on his social media for the last 10 years, he’s got that cap on same cap probably stinks by now. And the idea here is that you need every artist needs a brand. They need something that you know might be your haircut, it might be your glasses, it might be your jacket, it might be everybody’s got to look, you pay close attention to Jane Seymour, you know, she’s always got the scarf on. And she’s you know, we’re about to take a picture with something. She said, Oh, wait, let me put my scarf on. Right. So everybody’s got their look, you need to kind of figure out what is my look, you know, when I’m on art school life, I wear a black shirt every day, this my look that I that I wear there. And so you have to kind of figure out what, what do I want to be how do I want people to perceive me, and you need to build your brand. And you need to show your picture. So I think it’s important. Thank you. Okay. Other questions?

Speaker 7 52:40
I can. How about that. I’m Doris MIDI. And I’m from Tarrytown, New York. I’m 80 years old. And when I walk into certain places of certain galleries, to find out if I can set up an appointment to show my work or whatever. I believe sometimes I’m totally eliminated because I’m not a young artist who might be selling their paintings cheaply, or have a certain amount of years to be in the industry. And I’m wondering, how do you combat that?

Eric Rhoads 53:14
Well, I think the very first thing that came to mind, tell me your name again.

Unknown Speaker 53:19
Doris VAD, Doris, yes,

Eric Rhoads 53:22
the and forgive me for saying this. But the first thing that comes to mind is you have to ask yourself, am I telling myself a story? Or is this really true? Because we all get stories in our heads about the way things are. And sometimes those things happen, because we have those stories in our heads. And that may not be the truth. I mean, if Andrew Wyeth walked into a gallery, and he was 80 years old, what would happen?

Speaker 7 53:53
Well, he had a reputation that preceded him. Okay, he would be welcomed.

Eric Rhoads 53:57
Sure. All right. So it’s not about age is no, what is it?

Speaker 7 54:04
It’s my ad, my actions possibly

Eric Rhoads 54:08
is about reputation. Okay, right. So what does every gallery want, they want you to make their job easy, right? That a gallery owner wants to know that your work is going to sell that you’re going to be easy to sell. I mean, some artists are easy to sell. I mean, if I had Jeremy lifting, I could sell that all day long. Right? So I think that what you need to ask yourself is it might not be an age thing. It might be in some cases. You know, as I get older, I notice how some people respond. You know, people start calling me sir, you know, things like that. So there’s gonna be some of that ageism stuff that takes place but you know, screw you’re gonna just go forward anyway and do what you want to do. and you will find a way to overcome any obstacle because that’s who you are. And, you know, I have had people in my life that have, I have made, I’ve judged them. And they’ve, I’ve had impressions in my mind, and I would have discounted them. I hate saying it, because it’s, it’s just something I don’t like about myself, but it’s true. But there are some people who live up to that. And then there are some people who are like, not letting you get away with that, you know, I’m gonna plow through and I’m gonna change your mind. And you have met people who are 80 years old, and who are fireballs and energetic and can get things done, and you’ve met people who are 50 that act like they’re 90, right? So, you know, just manage your mindset mindset is so critical. How you think about yourself, listen, I look at myself in the mirror every day. And I wonder, you know, how did that happen? And so, I have to constantly say to myself, that, you know, we let this stuff creep into our heads, you know, oh, you know, nobody wants to hear from me, because I’m, you know, over 40 I mean, or over 50 or over sick, you know, I mean, think about when you turned 30 What a big tragedy it was. And then when you turn 40, it was a tragedy, then when you turned 50, it was a major tragedy, then you returned 60 It’s like you’re almost dead. And then you turn 70. And you look back at 60 and 50, and said, Gee, I wish I were 50. Right? It’s all head trash. So you have to manage your head trash.

Speaker 7 56:46
Well, most people don’t take me to be as old as I am. Well, you don’t look old. And you know, I I have like four businesses I’m running and all that. But it’s just when I walk into the galleries, it’s what happens and I don’t, maybe that’s what I’m trying to rationalize, because I know you can’t

Eric Rhoads 57:04
do cold. Maybe they just maybe your work just isn’t something they like, and they haven’t

Speaker 7 57:08
even seen it. Yeah, I’m just cruising to see what the gallery has to offer. Yeah. And, you know, find out who the principles are just see the thing, okay. And if I’m not buying, I’m kind of like, well, what do you want to do here? And I said, I’d like to show a portfolio. Oh, we only buy from Europe or something.

Eric Rhoads 57:25
Yeah, but it’s a it has nothing to do with your age. Okay. It has to do with with the idea that if they took 10 minutes for everybody who walked in for it with a portfolio, they would never get anything else done. And, and you are the fifth artist has walked in that day. And the 50th That’s walked in that month, and the 900 That’s walked in that year. And so they have set their standards, and they’ve said, you know, we’re not talking to these people, right? So you have to ask yourself, alright, if I want to be in this gallery, how do I get in there? And so maybe the question isn’t, I’m an art, maybe you’re not saying I’m an artist? I’m, you know, I want to be in your gallery. Maybe the question is, tell me about this artist. And then they tell you about him say, how do you find people like this, these people are this is amazing. And they’ll Oh, you know, while we were really watching this, or whatever, I had an art dealer tell me that he said he has a secret, Instagram and Facebook account. And he follows artists with a secret name because they don’t they everybody knows his name. And he said, I watch their behavior. I watched how they not only what they post, I watch if they post good things or bad things I watch if they post things that are uncooked, I watch if they’re showing party photos with their head in the toilet, you know, things that are gonna get in the way he says, and I watched their progress over a number of years. And sometimes when they get to a certain point, I’m like, Okay, I want to bring them in. I had a gallery owner tell me that one of her customers came in the other day, and and brought the painting that she had just bought. And she said, I can’t own this painting anymore. Because I saw the artist on Facebook and him doing something so disgusting. I just don’t want to own his work anymore. So she traded it for something else. That’s how important this stuff is. And so you got to do your research. You got to do your homework. And you know, the concept of marketing is really when everybody else is doing this. Do this Zig when everybody else zags. And rather than being one of 9000 people that year that go into that gallery. Why don’t you figure out a strategy that you’re going to be the one they’re going to pick this year. And so you know, use your brain Get to know the other artists that are in the gallery try to figure out what you can do that is going to get you invited in. Because if you’re invited in you have more strength, more power. And by the way, they see your work. They’re not going to care about your age. The only thing they’re going to care about your age, I had a gallery owner tell me one year, he said, he saw younger artists who was really hot, he said, Oh, this is great. I can get 40 years of sales out of this guy. Versus I can get 20 years out of sales of this person. Right? So that’s how people think sometimes it’s it’s cold and cruel, but it’s true. Okay. Thank you. Good job.

Speaker 8 1:00:44
Hello, Eric, how are you? So my, my name is Luis Sackett, I’m from New Mexico. And I’ve been painting a long time. Now I sell occasionally on Facebook, or Instagram. But I noticed that they were throttling back the amount of people that were watching, I check the statistics, the statistics on Facebook to see how many interactions I’ve had how many views I’ve had. So trying to figure a way around, not boost having to pay to boost something.

Eric Rhoads 1:01:17
So complete waste of money, don’t ever hit the boost.

Speaker 8 1:01:20
That’s just what I was gonna say I did that one time, I saw less interaction than when I didn’t do it. So that really teed me off, I thought, me I’m not doing that one again. So I sat there, and I tried to figure out a way to get more exposure without any monetary outlay on my part, I had a painting in my studio, that was a failed painting. And I have occasional killer or curate days in my studio, where I’ll pick something up that has displeased me, because you know, your site advances faster than your abilities. And so I looked at him, and I thought, I’ll give it an hour. Let me see if I can turn it into something. And it turned into a pretty credible little eight by 10 painting. And I thought, you know, I didn’t have this painting. When I walked into the building, what would I lose if I gave it away? So I created on my Facebook page, a share contest, that if you shared my painting publicly, and then let me know that you did it, I put your name and a hat. And on Mother’s Day, picked out a name. And somebody when the painting, it wasn’t framed, I could stick it in an envelope send it so the postage was no big deal. And I had a bunch of names people I didn’t even know. And I checked the interactions the end of that week. And where I had had something like 58 interactions the week before I was up 2000 interactions. I had a whole bunch more people that followed me. And it didn’t cost me anything but an hour of my time. So I thought that was pretty good. And somebody who knows me pretty well said, why don’t you do it around Christmas time, too. And I thought, What is your thought about repeating something like that? I think it was fairly successful the first time out. But I don’t know if it’s a good idea to create a pattern of that or to do it for a short time or to not do it.

Eric Rhoads 1:03:18
Well, that’s very creative. Congratulations. I think that I have two answers to that question. If if something works, keep doing it till it doesn’t work. And if it doesn’t work, keep changing it until it does work. And if that doesn’t work, then try something completely new. So we will sometimes we send out emails, and sometimes we’ll send out two emails, we’ll send out 1000 emails, we’ll send 500 with one subject line, and 500 with another subject line, and one subject line, we’ll get 60% response and one will get you know, and you never know what it’s going to be. And so we’ll pick that subject line, then we’ll send the email out to everybody else. So you know, test everything, try things. I think that’s remarkable. I think the thing that we all get hung up on is, it doesn’t matter how many followers you have, those are called vanity metrics. And it’s really easy to get sucked into that, you know, because you see this. This artist has 100,000 followers on Instagram, and I don’t and you go, Oh, well. So I hired a guy. I have a guy that works for me on Instagram. And I said, you know, this guy’s got 100,000 followers and I don’t and I want 100,000 followers and so he got his special software. He looked into it and he said he bought them all. You can buy you can buy you know you go to these farms and you can buy names. and you can get 100,000 followers in Iran. But who cares?

Speaker 8 1:05:04
I wanted to be able to sell so well.

Eric Rhoads 1:05:07
That’s the point. Yeah. Right. So the game is not to get followers. followers don’t matter. If you have 100,000 followers, who don’t make $5,000 a year and can’t don’t have any expendable income for buying paintings. What do you have? You have vanity metrics, it’s all ego. Right? If you have five followers, who spend $5,000 with you a month that you don’t need any more followers, right? So what the key is attracting followers, the key is attracting valuable follower.

Speaker 8 1:05:47
I had two people inquire about paintings and and that’s good. Yeah. So we’re, I’m in the process of communicating with them whether or not that saucer works, I don’t know. But that was two people more interested in my paintings than were the week before.

Eric Rhoads 1:06:02
That’s right. And so that’s, I mean, that’s really the game. And maybe it’s a numbers game, and you get as many as you can, and hope that you get some people who are actually going to do it. The thing that we tend to get hung up on as artists is we we are talking about things that collectors don’t care about. Now. I think there’s two categories. I think there are collectors and I think there are people who buy art. I met a woman yesterday, she’s got 700 paintings in her house, and sculpture. She’s a collector. There are a lot of people in here who buy paintings that are not collectors, they just happen to buy paintings. They love paintings. So you know, the big artists, by the way, buy a lot of paintings. Yeah, they do. Okay, so if you’re talking to artists, that’s okay. And you might sell paintings to artists, because they buy paintings. But if you’re not talking to people who buy paintings, then you’re it’s, it’s all ego, if it’s if you’re trying to sell paintings, so you have to figure out how do I find people? What’s the messaging that is going to appeal to somebody who might buy a painting, and maybe it’s talks about art history, or maybe it’s talks about things that how to protect your art collection. And if you wrote, one of the best things that everybody’s ignoring, is LinkedIn. There are groups, I’m in groups on LinkedIn, that are art collector groups, and Art Gallery groups. And if you are in those groups, and you’re posting you post a story on five ways to make your art collection more valuable, and then they start following you. Who are you getting? You’re getting people who are in those groups who want to know that kind of stuff. If your store posting stories about five ways to make Cadmium Yellow tastes better. It’s right. So anyway, thank you for that question. All right. We have time for one more. Okay, one more question. And then we’re out. So you’re on tell us your name. And where are you from?

Speaker 9 1:08:18
Mansi from Arizona. And first, I want to tell you, I love your Sunday coffee. It’s your fabulous writer. I kind of a two part question. But one is, how important is it to have a particular niche in your painting? Because I like to paint, you know, from the East to ask from people, the landscapes and you know, oceans. I mean, should I zero in on one particular thing?

Eric Rhoads 1:08:46
Well, it’s a tough question, I think. I’ll tell you a story. So I have this buddy, is a brilliant painter. And he got known for painting. Trying to figure out how to say this, so it doesn’t reveal who he is. He got known for painting a particular subject. And he was really, really great at it. And he sold lots and lots of paintings. And then he decided that he wanted to shake it up and try something new. And he take took this trip, and he did all these paintings that were a completely different subject matter. And his gallery supported him on it, and they did the show, and the show bombed. And because they asked all these people who were used to his paintings to come in, and it wasn’t so much the artists that they valued, I mean, they did, it was the subject matter, plus the artists that they valued, and when he changed his subject matter. It was a tough, tough thing for him. Now, that’s not always true. I mean, you know, we’re gonna be announcing a trip this week. Maybe I announced that already, but you know, so we Do shows like if we go to Cuba, we’ll do people do shows their Cuba stuff and things like that. I think that when you’re getting established, you want to stay in terms of what you’re promoting, you want to stay relatively narrow. And narrow can be pretty wide. I mean, landscape painting is pretty wide subject. But if you’re doing like, landscape painting, and still life painting and portrait painting and other things, you can confuse people. And so what I oftentimes will tell people is get yourself established. And then once you’ve developed a good collector base, then you can start experimenting and expanding. And a woman call me one time she advertised, and she said, I didn’t get one call from my advertisement, nobody’s reading your magazine, this is fine art connoisseur. And I said, Hmm, because this other galleries called me and they sold, they sold a $500,000 painting. She I said, so it’s not a matter of somebody’s not reading. And I said, what, tell me exactly what you’re promoting. She says, while I was promoting my commission portraiture, I said, Great. Let me see the ad. And I looked up the ad, and I said, Okay, I’m gonna go to the website, went to the website, and it had her name, and it said, landscape painter. And I said, Okay, how do I, how do I find that portrait? She said, Well, if you click on this button, and then you look at subjects, and you click on that subject, and then you look at this, you’re going to find my portrait sirs. And I said, you’re throwing your money away, you know, if the website that you’re putting on your ad, needs to take them right to that painting. And she said, Well, what if it’s sold, I said, take it right to that painting anyway, and say, sold, here are five others that you might like, because they’re going there to scratch that itch. This happens to me all the time, it really irritates me, because you have, you know, you’re spending money to get people to something you like, and then it’s not there. And this happens more times than not, we caution our advertisers not to do that. But when you if you put too much out there, you’re risking confusing your market, figure out what you want to do, and what you want to promote first and foremost, and try to get known for something, and then you can start expanding and, uh, you can do whatever you want to do, it doesn’t matter. But you kind of I think people kind of need to be known for something, you know, Thomas Kincade, was the painter of light. And, and now everybody, for a few years after that everybody became the painter of something, you know. So I think the idea is just kind of get known for something. And if you want to be broad about it, then you know, maybe you become the bold brush, stroke painter, you know, and now everything you do is in bold brushstrokes, and then you can kind of encompass everything. You just have to experiment and try to protect.

Speaker 9 1:13:07
So then the part two of that would be I only have time for so much. To get a marketer it would that be a good idea? Because I mean, there’s all kinds of things online that says learn from me how to market. I don’t even have time to learn other stuff I’ve tried. But so is it important to find a marketer? And how would you do that?

Eric Rhoads 1:13:28
Yeah, I’m seeing a lot of stuff I’m seeing. I’m seeing things, courses from people who I’ve never heard of that doesn’t mean anything, but I’m seeing people out there who are pushing things that I’m not sure what they have to offer. I never marketed any art. I’m not you know, I teach art marketing and I never marketed any art. I just I did marketing, I learned marketing principles. You know, there’s some of them are going to be good, some are not going to be good. You can spend a lot of money on something. And ultimately, you just have to decide what is it you want to be? The best possible solution is just to take well the best possible solution is to have a an agent or a someone you know a lot of people have a spouse who becomes their marketer Kathy Odom’s husband, Buddy is her marketer. I think he’s helping other artists market their work now he’s very good. But the idea is that if you can have somebody who’s helping you so you can pay if you know you don’t have the marketing skills and don’t want to learn them. That’s okay. You know, not everybody’s gonna be that way. Be able to market some of us, you know, Camille pres wattics She’s a brilliant artist. She’s a brilliant marketer, she’s a brilliant businesswoman. She’s got that mixture Some of us need help, you know, I I have big muscles in some areas, and I have giant weaknesses and other areas and I have big muscles in In, in marketing, I have no muscles in bookkeeping and accounting. So I have to surround myself with people. And I’m in a position I can do that because my business is has been built up. But you know, you can find somebody to help you with something. There are there good people out there, there are bad people out there, get references. I spent last year I spent, I’m embarrassed to say how much money it was a big amount of money. It was a full time salary for an employee on an ad agency that gave me all these promises, and thankfully, I was marketing one of our online conferences, and I wanted them to help us boost it. Thankfully, I kept my own marketing going anyway, they sold 20 seats. I sold 1500 seats. They charged me, you know, $200,000 to sell 20 seats. I, you know, I fired him. And I’m embarrassed by it. But you know, thankfully I didn’t because they said oh, don’t do your own marketing. Let us do it all if I had done that. And the problem is, I got it. The problem is you can never if you’re in control of your business, you always have to stay in control of your business. You can never let go entirely of your marketing. You can delegate you cannot advocate. Yes. All right. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Thank you guys.

 

How to Submit Your Art Marketing Questions: What questions do you have about selling your art? Submit it at artmarketing.com/questions to hear your question answered on an upcoming Art Marketing Minute Podcast.

Art Marketing Minute Podcast: Episode 125

By |2023-04-26T15:39:11-04:00May 5th, 2023|Art Marketing Minute Podcast|

In the Art Marketing Minute Podcast, you’ll learn how to sell your art, how to market your paintings, and everything else you need to know in order to have a successful art career. 

In this week’s Art Marketing Minute, Eric Rhoads, author of Make More Money Selling Your Art, addresses pricing your work and getting into galleries, and mistakes that could quickly make you irrelevant.

The Art Marketing Minute Podcast has been named one of the 2023 “Top 25 Art Business and Marketing Blogs on the web” by FeedSpot.

Listen to the Art Marketing Minute Podcast: Episode 125 >

Submit Your Art Marketing Question:

What questions do you have about selling your art? Visit artmarketing.com/questions or e-mail Eric at [email protected] (include your name and where you’re from) to hear your question answered on an upcoming Art Marketing Minute Podcast.

FULL TRANSCRIPT of the Art Marketing Minute:
DISCLAIMER: The following is the output of a transcription from an audio recording of the Art Marketing Minute. Although the transcription is mostly correct, in some cases it is slightly inaccurate due to the recording and/or software transcription.

Announcer:
This is the Art Marketing Minute with Eric Rhoads, author of the Amazon best-selling book, “Make More Money Selling Your Art.” In the marketing minute, we answer your questions to help your art career brought to you by artmarketing.com, the place to go to learn more about marketing. Now, here’s your host, art magazine publisher, Eric Rhoads.

Eric Rhoads
So my goal is to help you I’ve been marketing my entire life, which is a long, long time. And I learned a lot about marketing and I did not learn about art marketing. And so the principles that I teach really are not art marketing principles. They’re just standard marketing principles, right? I mean, I have picked it up over the years helping a lot of artists helping some of them become just super successful hopefully. Anyway, if you want to make a great living art marketing minute is a good place to help you do that you can email your questions, Eric at art marketing.com Or if you you want to send in a video we have a video first timer All right, we have a video. Let’s let’s run with it.

Speaker 1:
Hello, Eric and Amandine. So from Canada, I started painting in February 2017 to work on my phobia of painting. But four months after I started painting, I was commissioned for an art piece just by showing random little projects I was working on after selling that first piece the idea that I could eventually maybe make a business with my art. And so I decided to do this I sold two small eight by eight paintings for $1370 I have a website where I sell prints and and merch And those two, but it’s not really, it didn’t really get started. The problem is I’m getting self-conscious. It seems I was more now even doing things more spontaneously. But as I go, I realized that I’m selling at higher prices than than most would do, and hearing our professionals saying that you can’t sell for higher than that when you start. And so I’m wondering, is it can it be detrimental for me to sell at those prices?

Eric Rhoads
Don’t let them get you down. The one of the first and important principles that I learned in business, is that everybody always tells you all the things you can’t do. You can’t do this, because it’s not done that way. You can’t do that. Because nobody does that. Just ignore it, you know, just follow your heart and do what you believe in. There’s not a right or wrong. There’s not a manual. I’ve tried to write one. But you know, there’s really not a manual, most. Most importantly, is you put yourself out there, you started out at a higher price. You’re getting a decent price for first time paintings out there. You mentioned, I think you said 900 or more, and you’ve sold some. So what’s wrong with that? There is nothing wrong with that. Now I can understand why some people might say, Well, you got to start out slow, it is start, you know, edge up. Why? Why edge up? Why should you have to do that. Now, a gallery might want to say, look, we have to edge you up and build a collector base, and then increase your prices over time. That’s where that thinking probably comes from. You’re not selling through a gallery, you’re selling direct. And if you don’t want to sell in the gallery, I’m gonna talk about that later. But that’s, that’s just fine. So you said that, that in your original comment, I don’t think you said in the video. But I read your question, too. And that is you said that $900 is a lot of money? Well, it is a lot of money to some people. But it’s not a lot of money to other people. Right? So we tend to get hung up on perceptions of money. A lot of artists do this. The big problem that I have constantly, I’m constantly coaching artists to say, Look, your prices are too low. I had a world famous artist staying in the world famous artists cabin recently. And I said how much are these paintings? And she told me and I said, wrong, that you they should be selling for four or five, six times this amount of money? And they’ll sell? Well, I don’t know, I don’t think so. And I said no, no, no, you you have to have that confidence. They’re fabulous, you don’t realize the the importance of your, your ability and your career. So we get hung up on these perceptions of money. If especially if we never had money, right, so the one thing that we as many of us as artists never grew up with anything. And so, you know, so to us, you know, spending $900 on a painting may not be possible or may not something we want to do. And yet there are people who will drop 900 bucks like you and I would drop a 10 And so you have to understand that now the key to this is environment environment plays a huge role in selling if you’re selling at a flea market you know, you’re gonna have to attend dollars is a lot at the flea market, right? You’re not going to sell a Rolls Royce. at the flea market, Rolls Royce is going to be where they’re going to be at the Palm Beach art show or the LA art show or they’re gonna be where the money hangs out at the country club or whatever, you know, they’re looking for environment environment makes a difference. Well, why aren’t you looking for environment? Sounds like you already found it. You found people willing to spend money. So there’s lots of different levels in money, right? So you know, my cardiologist is probably a really wealthy guy. But he’s not wealthy, compared to Elon Musk, right? I can’t imagine. But he’s still a wealthy guy. I mean, this is different levels of wealth. I have a buddy that I grew up with who has become, I’d say probably a billionaire or pretty close to a billionaire. You know, he’ll he’ll drop 40 $50,000 Over dinner with movie stars and people like that. And you know, buying $10,000 bottles of champagne. I mean, it’s just money to him. And so it doesn’t affect him. You know, I’m not doing that. But that’s why hitting money targets is so important if you’re selling works that you want to price well, I’ve had dealers tell me that my magazine Fine Art connoisseur has sold million dollar paintings. And because we have, like three 400 billionaires who read it. And I sold, I had a real estate company sell a $20 million house from two ads in that magazine. And the person who bought responded to the one of those two ads, and ended up it was $20 million house that was 10 years ago is probably equivalent of $100 million house today. And it was, by the way, a billionaire. So you just never know you got to be in the environment. So where you advertise matters, where you hang out matters where you, you know, they always talk about the people you hang with influence how you are, you know, if you want to sell to rich people, you need to learn about him, you need to hang out with them figure out you know, go go do a lessons at the country club or something. So you know, rich people don’t need bargains, everybody wants bargains, but they don’t need bargains. Some people need bargains. So your question, is it detrimental in the long term? No, probably not. I think, right now, you’ve only sold 234 paintings at these prices. But you’ve got a consistent track record. So now what you got to do is figure out how to sell more paintings, if that’s important to you. And it might not be but to increase volume, you might lower price. But there’s something people don’t understand. There’s a great book, I wish I could remember the name of it, it’s on pricing. And it says that if you reduce your price by 10%, let’s say you have something that’s $100, you reduce it by to $90, you have to sell 18% more volume to make up the amount of money. So be careful with that because otherwise you’ll price yourself out. I think higher prices are generally good. You need to build a brand, a brand helps you get a higher price. Now brands have different meaning McDonald’s is a brand that’s a low price brand. Louis Vuitton is a high price brand. So you need to figure out what brand do I want to be where do I build my brand? How do I build it? Where do I stand out where where do I want people to see my my ads, my stories, things like that, because you want to be where the rich people are, if you’re selling to rich people, if you want to, you want to sell to school teachers and you know who who are not going to spend $900 Sorry, I don’t mean to be a little school teachers, not my point. But the idea is, you know, then advertise someplace that they’re reading. But the idea is that you want to you want to go where the standard, the money where the river is flowing is always say, Look, you need to feel that you deserve it. And you did that you set a price because you feel you deserve it, Bravo for you. You tried it, it worked. Congratulations. Now raise your prices more keep going up and see how see where you get price resistance, you know, if you, you go from 900 to 10,000, you might get price resistance. I was once in a gallery, I said I want to be the most expensive person in the gallery. And they said, but nobody knows who you are. So I know that but somebody’s gonna walk in there and they’re gonna see two paintings and they’re gonna see one that’s $10,000 in one that’s $2,000 in aid like them both, but the one that’s $10,000 must be better. I couldn’t get the gallery owner to agree to it. So I don’t know what what would have happened. Anyway. Good job. Congratulations. I’m proud of you keep it up. All right, next question, Amandine.

Amandine
The next question is from Laura, from Berlin, Maryland. How does one get into a gallery when you’re not an already established artist? I’m told not to approach a gallery but how else can one do it?

Eric Rhoads
Well, you know, again, just because I say something doesn’t make it true. And I have some strong feelings about this. And I have strong feelings because I was sitting in a gallery one day. gallery owner said Do you mind while we talk I go through the mail and he’s going through mail. It was actually kind of rude actually. Now that I think about it, but he’s going through mail so what are you looking at is he look at peeking something and throw it away peeking something, throw it away, and he had a stack a big status, what are you going through? He says, Oh, we get 50 100 submissions a week. And I feel obligated open them in case there’s something in there that I should see. But he says, I don’t even look at the artwork. You know, I can’t do it. He says, I get hundreds of emails soliciting the gallery I people, he says I was the other day I was in front of a customer, the customer is ready to buy. in walks this guy, he interrupts us. And he says, hey, you know, I’m kind of interested in being in your gallery, I’d like to talk to you about that. And meanwhile, the customer walks off, he loses the sale. Alright, he says, I don’t want somebody walking into my gallery to talk to me about this stuff. You know, the reality is that galleries are they’re a business. Right? They’re busy. And what questions to galleries ask themselves? Here are a couple of them. Is this artist good? Is this artist consistent? Do they have a body of work? And they do one good painting? Or can they do hundreds of good paintings? Because I have to sell a lot of work. I can’t make a living from one artist and one painting typically. Will it sell? What price? Will it sell for? Is it a price that fits my price point in the gallery? Is it too low? Is it too high? You know, and how much is my wall space worth, you know, shelf space and wall Smith space is worse something I got. If I have a small gallery, and I got to meet a you know, let’s say $100,000 a month, I and I can put 10 paintings up, I know I have to be able to get $10,000 a month out of each of those paintings that are hanging there. That’s wall space. Right? So can I make it with this artists? Can they do it? Do people know your brand? Do they know who you are? Is this artists selling well elsewhere? What’s the evidence of that? Can I make a lot of money on her? Can I make a lot of money on her over the next 510 20 years. And I had a gallery owner say, you know, I told him about an artist. He says yeah, I’m aware of that artists. But quite frankly, you know, he’s good, he’s very good. But I don’t think I can get 20 years of business out of him. So I would rather invest in somebody that’s going to be around for 20 years. Sad, but true. So you know, everybody thinks differently. So now, if you do want to go through and being a gallery, by the way, there’s no rule that says you have to be I like the idea of having a gallery, I have three of them. And I like it, because they’re talking to me, they’re talking about me, they’re selling me when I’m sleeping, right. And I don’t have to do all that work. Now, I don’t sell anything direct on time, I barely have time to paint for the galleries, I have scarcity, I have that because I don’t have much in the galleries, and they probably don’t push me very much because they know they’re not gonna, I’m not gonna give him enough stuff. But if you want to be, then keep in mind a couple of things. First off, you are handing your future over to a gallery, which I think is stupid. Now, I’m not an anti gallery live galleries. But what I mean is, don’t rely 100% on any gallery. First off, you want to spread your risk, you want to have two or three, ideally, minimum, some people don’t. But if if you’re going to have exclusivity with a single gallery, you know, then you want to be in someplace like forum in New York, or a kta Gallery in New York, because they are gonna make you a lot of money if they get behind you. And so you want to make sure that you still have control, you want to make sure you control the circumstances, the deal, the stakes, you got to motivate them, you got to help them, you got to cooperate with them, you got to brand yourself, still control your branding, you got to have other outlets to sell if they let you some artists will have like a certain category or a certain amount of money. So you’ve got to control everything, because the minute you lose control, if they all of a sudden they stop working for you, you’ve got a bigger problem, right? So you don’t want to have that. So I would say if you want to be in a gallery, I like the idea of getting invited in and the way to get invited in. I go into excruciating detail in my book, but the the essence of it is find somebody who knows them. Ask them to evaluate your work, ask them if you feel that you would be a good fit for their gallery. And if they do ask them if they would be willing to mention you to somebody don’t push it. You know and you have to your call it a favor. So you got to be kind of careful about that. But that’s overall one of the best ways now. Here’s the other trick that nobody realizes which is probably the biggest way that galleries find artists. Well It used to be just ads. Now it’s Instagram, Facebook. That’s why I always say don’t post unfinished paintings. And don’t post your bad paintings. You know, we all do bad paintings don’t post your bad paintings. Why? Because not, you know, people are flipping through and they see a bad painting and they see your name, what do they do? They say, Oh, Eric does bad paintings. So put your best work out there. And then, of course, we have I had a dealer, I interviewed one time and he said, I watch who’s advertising in your magazines. And I said, why? He said, because I want people who are committed to their career, they’re so committed that they’re willing to spend money to brand themselves to try and sell on their own. And also, they’re going to eventually keep spending money. And they’re going to mention my gallery and their ads. And I’ll mention them in my ads. And so it’s it’s a win win. And he says, I’ve got this one guy, I’ve had my eye on him for five years. Since I’m about to go with him. His work was a little inconsistent. But it’s getting better and better. And now I’m about to go with him. So be patient, you know, there are people watching, you don’t know or watching. So I’ve also seen galleries and this is the thing I alluded to earlier. And that is that I’ve seen galleries who have decided not to work with established artists, what why would that be? Well, there are people out there who established themselves, you know, 1020 years ago, 30 years ago, they became big deals, they were known they were household words, were household names in the art industry. And they’re no longer keeping up. They’re no longer promoting themselves no longer doing shows no longer doing ads. Because they were, they thought they could rest on their laurels. But the reality is that unless you stay at the forefront, you’re no longer going to sell. I heard from an artist who called me one day since you know, five years ago, 710 years ago, he says I was making so much money I was selling just I couldn’t believe it. And I said, Well, what are you doing now? Are you doing ads? No. Why? Why should I do ads? Everybody knows who I am. I said, are you doing shows Nice. Too much work. Everybody knows who I am. You know what, through the whole thing. And, and I said they forgotten you, you know there’s a thing called attrition. Right? So every year, a gallery loses 10% of their audience. Every year, artists loses 10% of their buyers, right? attrition. People die, people move people retire, people don’t buy paintings anymore. People get sick people change their tastes, you know, there’s a lot of things that happen. And so that’s 10% a year in 2008. When a bad economy happened, it was like 60% in one year, right? So you have to constantly be bringing new people in and galleries have to do that. And that’s why people keep advertising because you’re always bringing people in. You know, if you lay low for 10 years, you’re gonna feel it. You’re gonna feel it after a year, quite frankly, you feel it after six months I I have a very well known artist who, who advertised with us. And the discussion was, Well, I think I’ve been advertising a long enough time. I’m just going to stop and I said, Okay, that’s fine. Here’s what’s going to happen. Oh, no, that’ll never happen. Everybody knows who I am. I said, Okay. Six months later, phone rings. You’re right. phone stopped ringing gallery stopped calling sales stopped happening. I said right out of sight, out of mind. Anyway, those are some thoughts on galleries. Bottom line is you got to build your brand. You got to control your brand. You got to get invited. That’s best. Don’t just barge in. If you do decide you’re going to go that route, at least email call, try to get an appointment and explain to them the answers to those questions, why you’re a good investment, why they’re going to sell give them evidence. Let them watch you. And also make sure you’re producing the best possible work. You can you know, some of you are not gallery ready. And some of you think you are you know, it’s just something you’ve got to get advice from other people to find out. Anyway. It is today’s art marketing minute.

How to Submit Your Art Marketing Questions: What questions do you have about selling your art? Submit it at artmarketing.com/questions to hear your question answered on an upcoming Art Marketing Minute Podcast.

Art Marketing Minute Podcast: Episode 122

By |2023-03-15T12:09:43-04:00March 24th, 2023|Art Marketing Minute Podcast|

In the Art Marketing Minute Podcast, you’ll learn how to sell your art, how to market your paintings, and everything else you need to know in order to have a successful art career. 

In this week’s Art Marketing Minute, Eric Rhoads, author of Make More Money Selling Your Art, shares thoughts on submitting art to virtual galleries; and how to price your art.

Listen to the Art Marketing Minute Podcast: Episode 122 >

Submit Your Art Marketing Question:

What questions do you have about selling your art? Visit artmarketing.com/questions or e-mail Eric at [email protected] (include your name and where you’re from) to hear your question answered on an upcoming Art Marketing Minute Podcast.

FULL TRANSCRIPT of the Art Marketing Minute:
DISCLAIMER: The following is the output of a transcription from an audio recording of the Art Marketing Minute. Although the transcription is mostly correct, in some cases it is slightly inaccurate due to the recording and/or software transcription.

Announcer:
This is the Art Marketing Minute with Eric Rhoads, author of the Amazon best-selling book, “Make More Money Selling Your Art.” In the marketing minute, we answer your questions to help your art career brought to you by artmarketing.com, the place to go to learn more about marketing. Now, here’s your host, art magazine publisher, Eric Rhoads.

Eric Rhoads
You can send your questions by email to [email protected]. Or you can send a video question artmarketing.com/questions. All right. My producer Amandine is going to give us the first question.

Amandine
The first question is from John Tez from Georgia. I explore many galleries online and see they accept submissions virtually. Has your usage Do you believe those are taken? And as an emerging artist, Is it professional to apply to multiple? I know the best way to get in is being invited. So is applying virtually a good option worth devoting time to? Two different known galleries from overseas averaged out to feature my artwork, but required that I ship it. Is that the industry standard? And do you think the exposure is worth the exponential logistics? How would I verify that this is a legitimate gallery and not a scam?

Eric Rhoads
All right. Well, that was a great question. John Tez. I’ve got some opinions on this. They’re probably wrong. But first off, when galleries are saying they have they accept submissions online, I question that. Now, I think that there is a reason they might do it. And one of the reasons they might do it is because they’re trying to keep you from calling them emailing them or showing up at the door. Because most of the gallery owners I know, absolutely hate that. Because, you know, if they had 100 artists show up a year, and it took 10 minutes each or 20 minutes each, you know, they’d never get anything else done. I have a gallery owner who told me that he gets 150 to 200 emails a month. And he doesn’t even open them and look at him, if he can tell what it is he gets that many or more packages, unsolicited, they, you know, they have to open them because they don’t know what’s in the packages. And then they’re just throwing them away. If they’re a good gallery, they have plenty of artists. And every good gallery is always looking for another and maybe the idea of having submissions is good. But most of it’s probably just to kind of make you not call or email, I will tell you that there are a lot of galleries out there that operate differently, they have a different model. A lot of galleries operate, most of the galleries operate on a consignment model, where they pick artists invite them in, and they keep a certain percentage of the work in exchange for selling it. I you know, for instance, you know, a standard for a lot of galleries is is they keep 50% of the markup price, which is legitimate because they’re doing all the heavy lifting the work in the marketing, the lighting, the salespeople, the phone calls, you know, everything that goes with it, they’re earning their keep, usually, not always but you know, there are galleries out there that will look for artists that they can prey upon. And prey upon they do we have one particular gallery no names, who, every time an artist appears in our magazine, in a story in an ad anything, they pick up the phone, and they say we want you in a special gallery show in our in our gallery, and the artist gets all excited. And then next thing you know, they’re saying, Well, you know, it’s only this much money to be able to do that. And some of them do it. And some of them have given us feedback that it hasn’t been terribly productive. You know, usually, if somebody’s going to do a show of your work, they’re going to do a show of your work, because you’re already fairly established, you have a brand branding has a lot to do with everything. And you know, it’s like nobody really wants a brand new startup artist. You know, you don’t want to hear that because it’s easier to sell somebody who’s established. Now once in a while, they’ll take a chance and they you know, legitimate galleries do that too. But there’s got to be some good indicators of success, I believe, for that to happen. So I think you know, there’s a lot of different things now you asked a question about shipping going overseas. First off, how do you know it’s a legitimate gallery? I got a call or an email from somebody one time. This was not about my artwork, but they said, Yeah, no, we, we want you to be an influencer on Instagram, you got all these followers and, and we’re going to pay you for doing some ads. And I kept saying no to everybody, I get 10 of those a month. And for some reason, this guy got my attention, he got me on the phone, he did a pitch, he showed me a website, it was very, very in depth, it was very credible. And I ended up signing with him so to speak, turning over control of my account, right then and there. So they could do the first thing. And they took it over and took it away from me. Luckily, because I spent a quarter million dollars a year or more in Facebook at that time, I was able to get to Facebook and get their attention to get my account back real quickly. But you know, there are galleries out there, there are people out there contact you all the time that are going to say, hey, you know, it’s my wife’s anniversary, and I want to buy something nice. I saw your art and you know, they, they legitimately pretend to be buying it, you ship it out. But you know, the check doesn’t clear etc, that there are galleries out there who would do the same thing I want to put you in my gallery that might have a fake website, and then you ship them a painting? Well, my question is, do you need it hanging in the gallery? You’re going to sell it online and you’re going to feature it, I would legitimately look into a gallery? How do you look into a gallery? First off, you know, Google search it ask around, look for reviews, look for the artists that are in the gallery and find out if any of those artists happened to be willing to talk to you and tell you if it’s legit, did they get paid? Are they selling work, etc. So there’s a lot of things like that you need to be watching out for, you know, you can submit artwork to anybody and I, I you know, I don’t want to discourage everything, I just think it’s best to get invited because then you’re not begging. And then you’re in a strong position. But also because the gallery really truly wants you. They’re gonna work hard to sell, you know, if you’re pushing yourself on somebody, they may or may not push you on somebody else to try and get you to sell. So there’s a lot of little nuances to it all that I’m sure there’s exceptions to every real, every, every situation. So, anyway. That’s kind of the gallery thing. Next question.

Amandine
The next question is from Linda, Lydia, from Burg Virginia. The questions the most frequently comes up, especially with new artists is how do you decide how to price your art?

Eric Rhoads
Lydia, Lydia, Lydia, it’s the biggest question everybody asked us the hardest thing to answer. I don’t know. I mean, I have some feel for it. I’ve done it. I have coached people. Some of it has succeeded. Some of it is not. Pricing is all over the map. First off, pricing is a mental issue. What you have in your head as your value is your been a beginning point. And some of you have an inflated value in your head. That’s unrealistic. And some of you have a value in your head that’s too low. So you got to be thinking about that. Everybody has to start somewhere. Usually, you start modestly. If it sells, you start where you sell some more in this start building a collector base and you grow it that’s what galleries are really good at a good gallery will answer the question for you because they’re going to say, here’s what I think I can get for this. Now. I had a gallery who I believed How can I say this without getting into trouble? I believe they were underpricing my work. And I wanted to be more expensive and they would not agree to it. I was able to prove to them that I could get that amount of money and sell a painting at a higher price. And that convinced them but ultimately, they gotta believe it if they’re going to sell it. So that has a lot to do with a bit pricing. You know, if you got a good gallery trust the gallery if you’re selling direct, then you know there’s a lot of different things first off research, comparable artworks. Now the problem with that, of course is what’s comparable, you know, is an eight by 10 painting by Richard Schmid comparable. No. Why? Because it’s by Richard Schmid. Right. So before pricing, your work, research similar works and your genre your style, see what people are getting for it, check the prices, you know, some subject matters sell better than others. I know that seems crazy, but it’s true. Similar things you know, look for things that have sold find artists who are equivalent to You Be realistic, and see what they’re selling for and then Study? Do they have a big brand or not? You know, are they promoting themselves heavily? And because brand makes all the difference in pricing? You know, why is a Bentley a whole lot more money than a BMW, right? Well, it’s a perception issue, mostly, you know, you’re gonna say its quality, and there is some difference. But the reality is, back when I studied this, it’s been a few years. But back when I studied it, the difference to build BMW versus a Bentley on the same chassis was 18 $20,000 difference, but the price differentiation was 100, or $200,000. More. So you know, it’s about perception, a perception of, of a lot of things, elegance, and so on. So consider your experience, your reputation, your brand, that has to be factored into your pricing, if you’re well known. That’s one thing, if you’re emerging, that’s another it’s more appropriate to start with a lower price. More experienced artists are more likely to get bigger prices. But I got to tell you, I know experienced artists, who are brilliant painters who have not kept their brand alive and can’t get the prices they used to get. And they don’t understand that one guy called me said, Eric, why is my painting not selling anymore? I said, Well, are you doing the things that made you successful? He said, Yeah, I’m doing them all. I said, are Have you done any shows in the last five years? No, I haven’t done those. They’re a hassle. I said, Have you advertised in the last five years, he’s now now now everybody knows who I am. I said really? Well, you know, 10% of the people as attrition every year 10% of the people who know you don’t know you, in a year, five years from now, 10 years from now, nobody knows you. Five years from now half of the people that knew you don’t know you anymore. And you wonder why your works not selling because you’re not advertising you’re not, you’re not promoting yourself, you’re resting on your past your laurels. You’ve also got to factor in things like the production cost, the cost of the canvas, the materials, the frame, the time calculate how much money that went into each piece. And you know, I know an artist who gets a very large price for his money. When I asked how he gets it, he said, Well, I factored in, I could do this many paintings a year. And this is how much money I need. I divided it equally, you know, I could do this many paintings. And so that’s how he said his price. It works for some people. But he also had a big brand. And so he’s getting, you know, 100 $200,000 for pieces. Also, you know, you got to factor in the price per inch, you know, there’s ways you can figure that out. But you’ve got to have realistic prices, and prices are all very emotional. Every decision and purchases are emotional. And sometimes a low price equates to low quality. And I’ve told this story on here many times about a woman who came to an art show, she said, How much is the painting they artists at 4000. She said I’ll take it, she writes a check for 40,000. He says no, ma’am, that’s 4000, not 40. And she ripped up the checks, it must, must not be any good. So price does have an impact on perception. You increase your prices over time. You know, if you study pricing, there’s some great books on pricing. If you study how companies launch products, some people launch products at a high price. And if it doesn’t sell they back off until it does sell and that becomes their price. Others start at low and if it sells too easily, they move it up faster and up and up and up. So there’s a lot of different things. It’s experimentation is practice. You’ve got to communicate value and pricing your work, you’ve got to communicate the value of the uniqueness of the piece, the time that went into it, the value of your brand, etc. And I know painters who will charge more for one nine by 12 painting than another nine by 12 painting because this one took them two hours or four hours and this one took him took him 60 hours. So you know, it’s just kind of depends. And of course you have the opportunity in some cases to negotiate with buyers. And negotiation is a really great fluid tool. Because if if they want to buy something from you, but truly the price is too high. I start by saying hey, you know, that’s the price I’m sorry. And if sometimes they’ll say okay, and sometimes they’ll walk away and you know, you might be able if you’re willing you say okay, well you know what would you be willing to pay and then you try to find a middle ground, something that works for everybody. Don’t forget that pricing is emotional. Now the other thing I want to just tell you this is not about pricing, but it’s about average sale price and that is McDonald’s, you drive through the drive thru what are they always say? Do you want fries with that? Right? And why do they say that? Because they know If they can get everybody a drive thru to buy fries or to up up upsell to a different package, they’re going to make more money on it. So when you sell a painting, it’s the best time to get another painting sold because somebody is into you, they’re into your painting. And you can easily say, if it’s true to you, you can say, hey, you bought this painting, I have a rule that because anybody buys a painting for me, they’ll buy the second and third painting at a 20% discount. Here are two would you be interested in these? Or pick one of these five, and oftentimes, you’ll have an upsell and that’s an opportunity. Anyway, that is the art marketing minute.

How to Submit Your Art Marketing Questions: What questions do you have about selling your art? Submit it at artmarketing.com/questions to hear your question answered on an upcoming Art Marketing Minute Podcast.

Art Marketing Minute Podcast: Episode 121

By |2023-03-09T20:33:32-05:00March 17th, 2023|Art Marketing Minute Podcast|

In the Art Marketing Minute Podcast, you’ll learn how to sell your art, how to market your paintings, and everything else you need to know in order to have a successful art career. 

In this week’s Art Marketing Minute, Eric Rhoads, author of Make More Money Selling Your Art, discusses how to balance art making and business, and how to introduce a new style or genre of art.

Listen to the Art Marketing Minute Podcast: Episode 121 >

Submit Your Art Marketing Question:

What questions do you have about selling your art? Visit artmarketing.com/questions or e-mail Eric at [email protected] (include your name and where you’re from) to hear your question answered on an upcoming Art Marketing Minute Podcast.

FULL TRANSCRIPT of the Art Marketing Minute:
DISCLAIMER: The following is the output of a transcription from an audio recording of the Art Marketing Minute. Although the transcription is mostly correct, in some cases it is slightly inaccurate due to the recording and/or software transcription.

Announcer:
This is the Art Marketing Minute with Eric Rhoads, author of the Amazon best-selling book, “Make More Money Selling Your Art.” In the marketing minute, we answer your questions to help your art career brought to you by artmarketing.com, the place to go to learn more about marketing. Now, here’s your host, art magazine publisher, Eric Rhoads.

Eric Rhoads:
Admit it I answer your art marketing questions or at least attempt to and you can upload a video question to artmarketing.com/questions or you can email them to me [email protected] And give Amandine a break because she has to read them. Amandine, what’s the first question?

Amandine:
The first question is from Thomas Michael Newman from Pennsylvania Yeah, how do successful artists balance the need to continuously create and improve their craft? And do all the necessary tasks required to sell their art?

Eric Rhoads:
Well, Thomas, that’s a big loaded question. And listen, I, first off, there’s no pressure to sell anything. And I think a lot of people think, well, that’s the next step, that’s what I’m supposed to do, you don’t have to do that. Unless you have to do that. I mean, if you want to do it, you want to do it to make a living, there are a lot of ways to make a living, you don’t have to do that. But if you decide you want to do it, the moment you decide that you’re going to be selling your art, you are really deciding to make a commitment and your commitment level needs to change. Instead of dabbling. You can dabble and sell art, right? You can sell a put a, put a little show together and sell something a couple of times a year and a little bit here and there. That’s fine. That’s dabbling. But if you really want to become a full time successful artists supporting yourself, then there’s a whole whole thing about that I’ve got a series of videos just on that particular topic. And you, you have to accept the fact that if you’re selling paintings to make a living, then you are a full time artist. And when you’re a full time artist, you’re running a small business. And like a lot of small businesses, myself included, when I first started is you are the product, or the product maker and the the product, business owner, right. So it’s not unusual, think about somebody who does something else thought let’s just pick like a category like easels, right? So you know, you have an idea for an easel, you design it, and you sell it and you make your own easels, you’re out there, and you’re woodshop making it. And then eventually, you get enough demand that you can quit your other jobs. So you can just do your your products all day, and make easels all day every day. But you know, if you just made easels, but you didn’t focus on how to sell those easels and how to make people aware of them, then you’re not going to be able to succeed. So you have to find the balance. In a business. As an artist, you’re wearing a lot of different hats, right? My dad always used to say this to me, you know, some days, you got to wear your accounting hat, some days, you got to wear your shipping hat, some days, you got to wear your negotiation hat or your sales hat, you know, you’ve got a lot of different things and gallery hat. But you’re you’re never going to change, you’re still an artist, you just have to develop muscles in other areas. And so you know, as an artist is, of course, if you’ve done this, you know, you’re in the shipping business, you’re in the framing business, you’re in the marketing and sales business, because you’ve got to sell people on coming in, and you got to pay the bills. And there’s a whole lot of stuff you have to learn. But I like to create what I call time budgets. And it’s a concept I use, I highly recommend it. And essentially you make start by making a list of everything that you have to do in a typical month. And you say to yourself, Okay, I have to do shipping. And I have to do shipping once a week. And that’s going to take me two hours, you budget two hours, and then you put up a two hour block in your calendar. And you say this is my shipping time. And you might have teaching you, you have to set aside time for teaching. This is my teaching time. This is my marketing time. And this is my accounting time, you know, you have to figure out what those things are? And what is it going to take. Now. You know, you’ve got a problem, though. And that is that you have to sell a certain number of paintings. Let’s say that in order to meet your financial needs, that you have to put 30 paintings out the door every single month. Well, that means you got to do a painting a day. How realistic is that? I mean, some people can do it, some people can’t do it. But do you really want to have to do a painting every day or two paintings some days and take the weekends off. And and if let’s say you need 10 hours to do a painting, and you got to do 30 of them a month, you don’t have time, you got maybe two hours left to do something else. And that’s already beyond an eight hour day. So what you’ve got to do is you got to figure out how to become more efficient and becoming more efficient is how can I paint this painting faster? Well, maybe you can’t, some people can some people can’t. But if you can knock two hours off the process somehow, then that’s a that’s two hours you’re gonna get back for relaxed time or for other types of work. But one of the things that a way to overcome that is to figure out how do I get my prices up? Because if I need a certain amount of income, and I need to sell 30 paintings, what if I could only do 20 paintings recapture all that extra time and How much money do I need? If I’m going to hit my numbers to do 20 paintings. And of course, you have to anticipate that if you do 20 paintings, not all 20 paintings are going to sell how many are going to sell every single month? And how are you going to make that happen, that means you’re blocking out time to devote to your sales and marketing, your advertising, discussions, all of the things like that. So anyway, it’s all about figuring out how much time everything takes, and allocating that time. And if you don’t have enough time, then you got to figure out either I gotta get some help. And of course, if you get help, you’ve either got to get volunteer help, or you got to have to pay for him. That means now your expenses are higher, you got to sell more artwork, or you got to get your prices up. And I think getting your prices up most artists underprice their work. And that’s a good place. The key to successful balance is to leverage, there’s a word leverage your business. For instance, if you get a gallery or two galleries or three galleries selling for you, now you don’t have to do the selling. Now you still have to do branding and marketing, because you want to keep that under your control. You want them to do it for you, too. But that’s going to help you look for ways to get people to do things for you, leverages, you know how getting somebody to help you out, help you with your shipping, or maybe you say to yourself, look, if I spend 10 hours painting, that’s productive time, if I’m spending five hours on shipping, I’d be better off to pay somebody, you know, $10 an hour or whatever to do that it’s probably not possible anymore. Anyway. Big and business is not for the faint of heart. But guess what, it’s a wonderful thing because it buys you freedom. You don’t have to work for anyone. You got to work for yourself, though. But it’s still better because you don’t have anybody screaming at ya, you know, at work, but you got to scream at yourself, you got to say, look, I gotta get this done. I have to have this discipline, because if I don’t do it, I’m not going to be able to keep going anyway. All right, what’s our next question? Um, indeed.

Amandine:
The next question is from Beth Cole sent from Maine, and well known for one style and genre, but want to know how to market to a new preferred style. Do I start a new website? Lower prices? Because this is a new style and genre? What should I do?

Eric Rhoads:
… So Beth, I would start by asking yourself, why do you want to launch a new style or a new genre, right. And there are really two reasons that I can think of one is you’re not making enough money with what you’re doing now. And you think maybe changing things will make it better? Or maybe you’re just bored. All right. And either one is okay, there’s no right or wrong. But let’s address these before I get to your question. If you’re not making enough money at what you’re doing now, what makes you think something new and different, is going to sell better, once you’re established, because you still have to weave you do something new and different, you’re gonna have to build name recognition for that, you’re gonna have to build awareness, you’re probably going to have to start at lower pricing, you’re going to have to build up interest in that. And the amount of time that takes could take, oh, 234 years, right. Whereas you’re already known in one particular area, maybe if you just get a little more excited about that, and pour gas on that make that work, you’re gonna make more money with it. So that’s one thing to consider if you’re bored. That’s a whole nother another thing. And if you’re bored, you just want to try something different, or you don’t want to do what you’re doing now. There’s nothing wrong. But if you are going to change your style, then you’re Are you going to drop the other? Or are you going to keep that going? And I look at that if you’re making money with one thing and you decide to drop it for another, you’ve lost an opportunity. How about you build that business, you figure out a way to keep it going keep it generating income, and then launch something new and build that business, but don’t give up one for the other. And the reality is you can have a different pseudonym for yourself and have it be two different artists. I know a lot of artists who do this and so they have one under their real name. They have a couple of different styles under different other names. And they have different galleries selling their work because you know people like me get bored i Some days I want to do abstract some days I want to do tight realism. Some days I want to do Impressionism and I could in theory, if I if I wanted to be aggressive enough, I could have different types. Have artworks go to different galleries, and that’s okay. But where you get into trouble is if you’re known, let’s say you’re known for landscape painting, and you decide all of a sudden I’m going to start doing abstract painting of portraits, your, your audiences likely to want to buy it. Now they might, if you’re really established, then you can start adding some new things and see how it goes. But if if people go to your website for one thing, and they see another thing, they get confused, they don’t buy anything, that’s a problem. You want to have that not happen. So anyway, if you decide you want to do this, if it’s about being bored, and just trying something different, yeah, you’re gonna have to, you’re gonna have to figure out what your business strategy is going to be, how are you going to sell it? Yeah, it might be a new name, it might be the same name. It might be a new website, it’s probably different ads, it’s a whole lot of different things. And you just got to build it and grow it. But I would, I would hang on to what’s working. If it’s not working, fix it first. If that doesn’t work, try fixing it again. If that doesn’t work, try fixing it again. That doesn’t work, then maybe try something new. But something new is sometimes got to be more problematic than just fixing something. So avoid confusion with your value your galleries and your followers. And make sure that you’re not confusing the world. And that I think solves your problem. Anyway, that’s the marketing minute.

Announcer:
This has been the marketing minute with Eric Rhoads. You can learn more at artmarketing.com.

Eric Rhoads:
Kathryn Stats for being on here today. Thank you. And I hope that she will come and join us and hang out and paint at the plein air convention. We would love to have her. Even though she wouldn’t be on stage teaching. She just loves being there. We love having her around. So if you want to come to the plein air convention and hang out with people like her, everybody’s very welcoming. You don’t have to be at a certain level to come. You can be a beginner, you don’t even have to paint to come you don’t have to paint on location. If you don’t want that pressure. You know, we’re just there having fun and everybody is accepting. So just come to plein air convention. It’s coming up in May and it’s going to be in Denver, it’s going to be incredible. PleinAirconvention.com is where you find out about it. And by the way, if you’re not following us, by having a subscription to plein air magazine, I think you’ll find it to be a really wonderful place to be a place to spend your time because you’re going to learn more about the plein air lifestyle is stories about art artists, techniques, collecting all kinds of things. So that’s at plein air magazine.com. Also, you know, I’m on the air daily on Facebook. It’s also on YouTube. It’s a show called Art School, live 12 noon Eastern time daily. Just go to YouTube, look up art school alive and hit subscribe. That’s the easiest way to find it. Got a little over 100,000 subscribers there now. Thank you for that and just follow and we’d be loved love to teach you about art and a lot of different ways. And also, if you don’t mind giving me a follow at Eric Rhoads. Spell it rho A DS on Instagram and Facebook. Okay. And if you’ve not seen Sunday coffee, that’s my blog. It’s out every Sunday morning and I kind of write it for my kids to kind of impart some lessons but everybody has been passing it along so I started letting everybody see it. Anyway, it says Sunday coffee and you can just go to Coffeewitheric.com and subscribe. It’s free. Also. That’s all I got for today. Thank you again to Kathryn Stats. I’m Eric Rhoads publisher, and founder of plein air magazine. And I’m getting excited because as you’re listening to this, we’re getting started with plein air live. You can still join us late just go to pleinairlive.com And you can watch replays if you missed any of it. It’s gonna be great Kathryn Stats is going to be on there doing critiques by the way. So thank you for watching today. And remember every day painting is a good day so it’s a big world. Go paint it. Bye bye.

How to Submit Your Art Marketing Questions: What questions do you have about selling your art? Submit it at artmarketing.com/questions to hear your question answered on an upcoming Art Marketing Minute Podcast.

Art Marketing Minute Podcast: Episode 120

By |2023-03-03T10:22:55-05:00March 10th, 2023|Art Marketing Minute Podcast|

In the Art Marketing Minute Podcast, you’ll learn how to sell your art, how to market your paintings, and everything else you need to know in order to have a successful art career. 

In this week’s Art Marketing Minute, Eric Rhoads, author of Make More Money Selling Your Art, shares advice on how to build a body of work; and thoughts on paying to advertise on Facebook.

Listen to the Art Marketing Minute Podcast: Episode 120 >

Submit Your Art Marketing Question:

What questions do you have about selling your art? Visit artmarketing.com/questions or e-mail Eric at [email protected] (include your name and where you’re from) to hear your question answered on an upcoming Art Marketing Minute Podcast.

FULL TRANSCRIPT of the Art Marketing Minute:
DISCLAIMER: The following is the output of a transcription from an audio recording of the Art Marketing Minute. Although the transcription is mostly correct, in some cases it is slightly inaccurate due to the recording and/or software transcription.

Announcer:
This is the Art Marketing Minute with Eric Rhoads, author of the Amazon best-selling book, “Make More Money Selling Your Art.” In the marketing minute, we answer your questions to help your art career brought to you by artmarketing.com, the place to go to learn more about marketing. Now, here’s your host, art magazine publisher, Eric Rhoads.

Eric Rhoads
In the art marketing minute I answer your art marketing questions. You can email your questions to me [email protected]. Or there’s other ways you can do it too. Now, I gotta tell you, we have the art Marketing Podcast separated so it tags the end of the plein air podcast, but it has its own podcast as well. If you’re somebody who’s not into plein air, that’s a way you can get it. Alright, Amandine, my producer. What is the first question?

Amandine
The first question is from Gary from Minnesota. I’m head down and neck deep working on my 2023 goals. One of the first goals is to build a body of work by the end of q1. I’m obsessed with plein air painting and working with a well known local artist under a mentorship program he’s helping with is helping me with my journey in finding my voice. So right now, my body of work is pretty much studies in a bit all over the place. That being said, I do feel some are worthy for show. And so my questions to you are, what is your take, take on building a body of work? Do you start with a formal plan a theme or style or let the style just evolve and come through as I go? Lastly, how many pieces is considered a body of work?

Eric Rhoads
Well, there’s a lot of questions in all of that and I’ll try to answering the best I possibly can. Gary. I’m glad that you’re obsessed with plein air painting. It’s a beautiful thing. It’s a lot of fun. More people are doing it every day, Gary You know, you have to make some decisions about what you want to do with your life. If you have the intention of selling artwork, then you’ve got to start thinking like a business person. And let’s say that I was, let’s say, I decided I was going to start selling Scissors, scissors at the farmers market. And so what do I have to do before I go to the farmers market and sell scissors? I gotta make scissors. And I got to anticipate how many scissors I need to sell to cover my cost of the farmers market. I also need to say, Okay, how much profit do I need to make. So let’s say the Farmers Market, I’m using a silly analogy, of course, but let’s say the Farmers Market table cost you 100 bucks, and your scissors are 10 bucks each, you’ve got to cover 10 pair of scissors just to cover your cost, right? But covering your cost is of no value. Because your if you go to the farmers market and you sell 10 pair of scissors, and you cover your cost, you haven’t really got any value of that time. Now you’ve got to ask yourself, what is my time worth in making the scissors? What is my time worth and putting them in packages? And what is my time worth for standing at the booth for 10 hours on a weekend or 20 hours on a weekend? And then okay, now what’s my time worth? Now you add that to your costs, because that’s really a cost? And then on top of that, you’ve got to say, Okay, well, how much money should I make? Now, when you’re selling something, there’s a thing called a cost of sale. A cost of sale could be involved in your marketing costs. So in your particular case, if you’re at the farmers market, right, the cost of sale is the cost of paying for the farmers market paying for everything else, that you know your time there, it’s not going to include your cost of the scissors, but but you need to keep that in consideration. So if you want to make money as an artist, you got to start thinking about those kinds of things. No matter what you’re going to do. Now, you’re not likely to be selling at the farmers market, but you might be selling at an art show a tent show as I call them. Or you might decide you’re going to sell in a gallery or or otherwise. Now, you might say, Okay, I’m going to do only originals. And you might say I’m going to do originals plushy clay prints, or other kinds of prints. You know, people who do art short shows, like to have something that people could buy for 50 or $100. And so they have print bins, and they’ll have prints of a big hanging painting. And maybe they never sell the original. Maybe their intent isn’t to sell the original, but they you know, they have those prints handy. You got to kind of decide what’s right for you. I’m going to talk galleries today, because it kind of relates to your question. If you want to get into a gallery, then a body of work is critical. Most anybody can do one good painting, you know, I see a lot of people who show a painting that they did. And it turns out that they didn’t really do most of it because the workshop instructor did most of it. But there’s their signatures on it, right? But and galleries know this, but can you provide them with dozens of consistently good painting, see, galleries want to know that you’re consistent that you’ve got a body of work, and they also want to bring you on knowing that you can provide consistent work and provide enough inventory to sell because they’re in business to sell product, right, and you are the product. So yeah, you need a body of work, but not just for galleries, you also need a body of work for yourself, if you plan to sell in any way, whether you’re selling direct online, whether you’re selling art shows, whatever your method of selling is, you have to have some inventory. Because if you go to an art show, and you you know, you don’t take enough paintings, you don’t cover your expenses, you got to go to the art show with more paintings than you think you’re going to sell. And what have you sell out all of those. So it’s always better to have some more in your truck, right? Same thing with your, your warehouse, if you’re selling online, you know, you’ve got to have some paintings tucked away so that you you know, so I start by doing projections, I start by saying how much money do I need to cover my expenses? How much money do I need to make now, you know, you could say $100 million dollars, and that’s fine, except it’s not likely to happen, at least not right off the top right, you got to kind of take it in steps. So if you’ve never sold a painting before, you’ve got to get used to selling a painting, you’ve got to probably start out at a lower price point, establish a collector base, etc and get to where you want to be. And so you’re really I don’t want to be crass about this but you’re really selling inventory. You’re creating inventory to sell your scissors right your inventory Uh, your earlier living is dependent on your inventory. And so if you want to make, let’s just I’m gonna use round numbers or not real numbers, but let’s say you wanted to make $50,000. And let’s say you sell your paintings for $1,000. Well, you just need to sell 50 paintings. And by the way, if that’s $50,000 net that you need after taxes, then you got to sell, you know more than that, because taxes are pretty high, depending on your bracket. So, and you also need to know that not every one of the 50 paintings is going to sell. So you need to do more than the 50 paintings. So I’d start there, in terms of a formal plan or theme or style. I’m kind of a shoot from the hip kind of a guy, I’m not big on spreadsheets, I use them all the time, I have to use them in business. But I don’t know that you have to have a completely formal plan. But it is a good idea to have some goals and try to hit those goals. Because if you don’t have any goals, you don’t know what you’re aiming for. But let’s say you want to get into a gallery in three months. Well, that’s a whole nother topic getting into a gallery, I’m not going to address that now. But let’s say that you have a plan and you have somebody who’s going to look at your work in three months, they want to see your body of work, then you’re gonna have to do 20 to 30 Good paintings. Now, a gallery might say, Oh, I only want five paintings, but they might also say, hey, I want to do a show, I got a contact from a gallery, they want to do a show. And I’m like, No. And they said, why I said, because I don’t want to do 50 paintings. I don’t have that much time. So I turned down the show. But I think that you know if you have that opportunity, and you can do it, do it. But let’s say they want to see 2030 Good paintings, and you have to do 10 a month for three months. That’s not likely, because that puts you under a lot of pressure. Most of us can’t paint 10 Good paintings in a month. Some people can, especially if you’re a plein air guy, and you’re really really fast. And your plein air work is sufficient. But determine how many you can do and then set a goal Oh, and let’s say your goal is in the year 2023. I want to have a body of work that I don’t touch that I’m going to offer to a gallery or to and I want to have 30 paintings, 30 good paintings by the end of the year, then set that goal and then you say to yourself, Okay, how many do I have to do once a month. Now, my friend artists, tiny Hertwig once told me, you can’t make money at painting unless you learn to paint fast. So you might keep that in mind. But don’t don’t sacrifice quality for speed, you know, you’re learning you’re growing, you know, maybe some point you’ll get there. But take it take it appropriately at the pace you need to. But produce what you need by setting up a body of work. Now. You also asked about theme, you know, some artists will do a theme for a show. You know, maybe they’ll do a theme on Volkswagens or something I don’t know, I had Rusty Humphries. I gave him an idea. He did a theme on 3030 on 30 of us 3030 bards on 30, or something like that. It was a gimmick, but it was it worked. It was effective, it got attention. So you might want to think about that. But the one thing that I think is important is and this is a question that comes up a lot. And that is that you want to be known for one thing and doing one thing really, really well. This is very important to a gallery. I had a friend who did this gallery show, and he had not shown The Gallerist what he was doing beforehand. And he decided to change everything he painted, he changed his subject completely. And he put it up at the show and it bombed because he was known as a landscape artist and he was doing figures or portraits or something. So you got to get buy in from your gallery. But you got to become known for one thing and doing it well. Let’s say it’s because you’re a plein air guy or you want to do landscape painting, then be really known for your landscape painting. Don’t throw portraits in don’t throw other things in. After you get established. You can do that a little bit, maybe a lot more. But right now you got to be known for one thing, because if you’re not, it’s gonna hurt you. Just pick one thing and do it really well master it. Okay, I’m gonna do and what’s our next question?

Amandine
The next question is from Anthony from Metro Detroit, Michigan. I’ve been paying for Facebook ads for months now with no sales, and I believe I’ve tried just about every method you could think of. I have spent well over $2,000 with no sales. A year and a half ago, an online art gallery reached out to me and I signed with them to sell my art. They take 50% of all sales. They’ve sold four of my paintings, including my most expensive piece at a time for $5,000. My question is she Should I just stop paying for ads myself, and just rely on the online gallery to sell my work? Or keep paying for ads until I figure it out?

Eric Rhoads
Anthony Anthony Anthony Anthony, I’ve got lots of things to tell you on this. There’s a lot of questions in your question. Where do I begin? Well, first off, you might think your advertising is not working. But how are you measuring? What’s working? Are you measuring the number of people that are visiting your Facebook page? Are you measuring the number of people visiting your website? Are you do you have a method of capturing people, once they visit your website, do you do know that they’re, you know, you, you’re, you’re measuring it purely on sales. So you know, they’re not buying. And so it’s not working from that standpoint, but it might be working in another way. And you may just need to tweak things a little bit. The other thing is that social media and all advertising, quite frankly, ads don’t work until they work. And what I mean by that is, you know, we have, we do lots of ads, 1000s, probably 10s of 1000s of ads in a year, in terms of placement, but we do lots of different creative, and we will test everything we’ll put, we’ll put an ad up on Facebook, we’ll see how many responses we get, or how many click throughs, we get, because the first thing you’re selling, your whole goal is to sell a click, the only reason to do an ad is to sell a click. Now, if you’re trying to get them to buy a painting, from a click, it’s not likely to happen, it’s just not likely to happen. So you’ve got to take people through a process in the process is sell a click, get them to you know, so you’ve got to entice them with something on that click, and then you’ve got to once a click, then they’ve got to see something that’s going to sell them the next piece of the process. You know, Facebook is kind of known as a five to $25 medium, meaning you’re not likely to sell anything over $25 In a Facebook environment. But if you’re, if you’re buying a lead, and then you can develop that lead. So think about this, I look at all of this, like fishing, I’m not a big sportsman. But fishing so right you, you throw your line in the water and you pull the thing back and you you hope to catch a fish. Well, what you everybody wants a big fish, right. And a big fish takes bigger bait. In that case, bigger bait is more money, better creative, etc. But really, what you really want to do is you want to catch a lot of minnows, right, because if you can take a net and scoop up 1000 memo men mid minnows, then you can put them in your own fish tank, and then that fish tank, you feed them and you grow them. So what I’m saying is if you can pull leads in and and then get them on your newsletter, and then you develop them by sending your newsletter or telling them what’s going on in your life and showing them I’ve got a whole thing on newsletters in my book, showing them your latest artworks, and so on getting them more familiar with you, then that’s a very good thing to do. Now, you don’t want just anybody you want to write your ads so that they repel people as much as they attract people. Because you don’t want to pay to get people first off, you’re paying per click usually. But you don’t want to pay to get people who are never going to buy a thing from you, you know, you don’t want 12 year olds coming in. And even though it might be a nice ego thing to have somebody looking at your art, you know, you only want people who are gonna buy your art in your particular case if you’re trying to sell art. So there’s a whole lot of different things here. But you know, one One strategy is to offer something for free like an ebook. And then that you know, ebook and my 50 Best paintings, and then that they get that ebook, you get their email address, you say, you know, I’m sending you the book and I’m adding you to my newsletter list. And then you send them your, your newsletter, and then maybe you send them some promotions from time to time. If they leave you you have to stop sending him stuff legally. So that’s one thing. The other thing is, I try as I mentioned, lots of different copy testing is everything, test everything, you know, test two different versions of your ad two different images or two different headlines and see which one pulls them in better and then that’s what you call your control. Once you get a good control that’s working then you always try to beat that right so test everything. I have probably spent more than a million dollars on Facebook alone and I’m not an ad spurt, I employ experts. And I talk to them all the time. And I know a lot about selling on Facebook and Instagram and other things. But you know, the big issue here is that you are you might be fishing in a pond that doesn’t have any warm fish. What I mean by that? Well, there are two types of audiences there are warm audiences and they’re cold audiences warm means that they are they know you real warm, they know you and they like you. And they trust you, you know, the warmer they are, the better they are for you, and the better or more likely, they will become a customer for you. So it’s kind of hard to get warm audiences in Facebook, now you can get them, you can retarget people who follow your Facebook page. But you don’t know if they’re buyers or not. You can retarget people who visit your website, if there’s a certain you have to have a certain number to be able to do that. And then then you’re being able to warm them up. And so you put things in front of them. And sometimes a strategy for advertising, by the way is you don’t want clicks. And so for instance, if you, you just want to put artwork in front of them, so they’re seeing your latest artwork. And you’re warming them, you put artwork on there, but you don’t put a call to action on there, because then you’re not paying for the click, but you’re getting the exposure, right. But Facebook is onto this. And they know that if they’re if you’re not getting clicks, they don’t want to put you in front of people, if you’re getting a lot of clicks, they’re gonna put you in front of a lot of other people. So there’s a different strategy there. You know, there, the key to warm audiences are you want warm audiences who like and trust you. But secondly, you want people who already want to own your work or they love your work, they’re going to be likely to buy your work. And the way to do that is to look for places that are more likely to advertise where you’re more likely to advertise where there are warm audiences. And so like, you know, I have this magazine called Fine Art connoisseur, I have all these art collectors really, really, really, really rich art collectors in many cases. And so what you do is you go in there, and you expose yourself to them, maybe the wrong term, but you you give yourself exposure. And then what you do is you you just stay visible all the time. Because here’s what happens is, if you’re advertising to sell a painting, that should not be your primary goal, your advertising should be to brand yourself, and to brand yourself so that you can get a higher price you see, branding, gets them aware of you. And people go through this process of awareness. I’m not aware. And then I’m aware now I’m interested. Now I’m interested enough to consider buying now I’m interested enough to buy, right, so you got to take him through that process. And some people that take seven impressions, some people it takes 10 impressions, some people it takes 30 impressions, everybody’s different. But you gotta that’s why you got to stay there constantly and be in front of them constantly. We have a lot of artists who do branding, who have built their names and reputations. And when you do branding, you’re also appealing to the emotions of the of the people you see because emotions are what sell products. And so status is an emotion, right? How do I compare, you know, to my neighbor, if I own a you know, George Carlson painting, that’s a big deal, right? So everybody’s like, wow, you want to George Carlson painting you feel good, you can beat your chest. And so that’s status and status comes from branding, you know, George Carlson’s brand was built up over lots of successful wins that art shows and successful sales and things like that, you know, that’s, that all builds brand. And so you want to take that as a process. Now, it takes time to build a brand, it doesn’t happen overnight, you can still sell paintings through that process. But if you you get a good brand, you get more money for your paintings, you get more demand, you get invited to more things. There’s a lot of other things going on. So this is very complicated. I recommend you read my book as a starting point. Don’t think of advertising as making a sale. Think of it as getting leads. You’ve got to track your numbers develop a cost per lead strategy, you know, what percentage of your painting sold? Are you willing to give up for advertising? Well, it should be somewhere about 10 to 20% In the beginning, maybe even more in the beginning. Because you have to establish yourself, you know, like some people will pay half of the ad that a gallery runs and that way you know you’re you’re branding yourself with that made You’re a gallery you go to that gallery and say, Listen, you’re you know, you’re I’m on your, I’m in your gallery anyway. And I’ll pay for half of the ad. And the gallery gets the attention, but they’re promoting you that makes you look better. They had helps them sell, that helps them brand and you know, it’s a win win deal. So there’s a lot of things you can do, you know, choose cold or warm audiences, but I always try to go for warm Facebook targeting is probably not enough. Facebook isn’t selling a lot of art for a lot of people, but it is selling probably the place that’s selling the most is people who follow your actual page. You know, here’s the latest painting I’ve done. You know, a lot of artists buy paintings and a lot of collectors buy paintings. The key is how do you get collectors, real collectors to know you and follow you on Facebook. And the way to do that is to go on LinkedIn, to collectors groups, and start commenting on posts. Don’t ever promote yourself just comment do smart things. Then they start looking for you. They look you up on LinkedIn or they look you up on Facebook or Instagram. They follow you and the next thing you know they’re buying paintings. There’s a lot to all of this. You paid a high cost of marketing for that online gallery 50% But that’s what we all pay for galleries, you know, most of us pay 50% for our galleries on consignment. And that’s that’s worth doing. So I recommend you keep your online gallery try to get a couple more galleries look for other ways. You don’t ever want to have all your eggs in one basket because sometimes people drop eggs right? So galleries go out of business. Things change for online galleries, you know, there’s a lot of things but try to spread your risk. Anyway, that is today’s art marketing minute.

How to Submit Your Art Marketing Questions: What questions do you have about selling your art? Submit it at artmarketing.com/questions to hear your question answered on an upcoming Art Marketing Minute Podcast.

Art Marketing Minute Podcast: Episode 119

By |2023-02-03T07:45:53-05:00February 17th, 2023|Art Marketing Minute Podcast|

In the Art Marketing Minute Podcast, you’ll learn how to sell your art, how to market your paintings, and everything else you need to know in order to have a successful art career. 

In this Art Marketing Minute, Eric Rhoads shares thoughts on how to balance the practice of making and selling art; and what it means to have a “title” as an artist.

Listen to the Art Marketing Minute Podcast: Episode 119 >

Submit Your Art Marketing Question:

What questions do you have about selling your art? Visit artmarketing.com/questions or e-mail Eric at [email protected] (include your name and where you’re from) to hear your question answered on an upcoming Art Marketing Minute Podcast.

FULL TRANSCRIPT of the Art Marketing Minute:
DISCLAIMER: The following is the output of a transcription from an audio recording of the Art Marketing Minute. Although the transcription is mostly correct, in some cases it is slightly inaccurate due to the recording and/or software transcription.

Announcer:
This is the Art Marketing Minute with Eric Rhoads, author of the Amazon best-selling book, “Make More Money Selling Your Art.” In the marketing minute, we answer your questions to help your art career brought to you by artmarketing.com, the place to go to learn more about marketing. Now, here’s your host, art magazine publisher, Eric Rhoads.

Eric Rhoads
In the art marketing minute, my goal is to answer your art marketing questions you can send them in or upload a video question art marketing.com/questions. Or you can email it to me Eric at art marketing.com. Most people email them. And my producer Amandine, who is French, has the questions for us. Amandine?

Amandine
The first question is from TJ Pruitt from Virginia. If your primary purpose with your art is not monetizing, how best do you showcase art that you want to reach people, but are not primarily concerned in selling? For me, I enjoy when my art brings joy to others. So I want you to give it the best possible exposure for that cause.

Eric Rhoads
All right, TJ, I’m gonna tell you a story. Great question. I hold these week long retreats. I do one in the Adirondacks every June although I think I’m going to stop doing it pretty soon because I you know, this is like the summer will be like the 12th one and I’m kind of sick of doing it. I want to go somewhere different. I don’t know if I’ll stop or not. But I might. Anyway, I hold these retreats to do another one a fall color week and one time we did fall color week and in Canada ask us Park Banff Lake Louise in Canada, and we had an unseasonably early snow and a massive snowstorm. And a lot of people didn’t want to go out. So we were painting out looking out the windows and painting indoors. Some of us went out and painted part of the time. But I offered some personal coaching to people because I teach marketing. And a bunch of people took me up on it. And this one guy wanted some time and we started talking about him wanting to sell his art. And he was asking how to do it. And I could sense that his heart wasn’t really into it. So I just said, you know, why do you want to sell your art? And he said, Well, I guess because I thought I was supposed to and I said well, there’s no supposed to Why do you really want to sell art? He says, I don’t know. I said do you need the money? No, I don’t need the money. I retired at a great job. I don’t need the money. I said then why do you want to sell your art? He says Well, I guess I don’t really want to sell it. He says I what we finally figured out is I asked him a bunch of questions. And we figured out that his need was that he wanted to contribute somehow. He wanted some recognition. For his art. It’s always nice to be validated that somebody else likes your art, which is not always the case. You know, sometimes I’ll give a painting to a family member and they’ll go Oh, thanks, you know, with gritted teeth. Because you know our it’s a personal thing, sometimes, you know, they’re not going to like it so we crafted a plan for him to market his art but not to sell it. At the end we determined that he wanted to leverage his art to help organizations and charities that he loved. So we worked on a plan to get him involved in those charities in auctions and we find ways to help his art help others and we left he was on fire with a mission now. I go into a lot of that stuff in my book. There’s a lot of different things you can do to get involved but essentially, if your charities local, then you need to become famous locally. And you have to follow a marketing plan to become famous locally because they want your art and in your art will raise more money. If you’re putting A piece of garbage art into an auction, it’s not going to sell, that’s going to be embarrassing. So you got to be good, you got to make sure that you’re you’re living up to it, you know, and, and I did that one time, when I wasn’t very good, I put a piece of art in, in a auction for the kids, elementary school, and nobody bought it. And so that just reflected badly on me. So you know, now I’m really, really careful, I had a moment, one time, it was really a great moment, when I had this great big painting, I did it just because I loved it, it was one of my better ones at the time. And I just gave it to this charity auction, and it ended up you know, it was the number one fundraiser for that auction, they had me stand up, you know, they’re holding it up, and I got a lot of recognition, it was kind of cool. And, and at the same time, the charity made a lot of money. So that was really the goal. So find a cause, find a cause or two. And there’s no rule about a painting has to make you money. You know, painting is about bringing you joy. Most people don’t start painting because they want to make a living becoming a painter painter, most people want to paint because they love painting, they want to get good at it. And then a lot of them say, you know, I kind of like to make a living at it. And a lot of that goes back to the recognition. But a lot of it is about, hey, I don’t want to work in this crummy job anymore. I want to I’d rather paint all day. And if I can paint and make my living, that’s even better. So you might consider depending on the quality of your work to explore, leaving a few select pieces to sub select museums, you might not get into the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the LA or Chicago museums. But unless you’re really already famous, and even then probably not. But you know, there’s hundreds of small local community museums that need art and art donations. And I’m actually working on a lifetime plan to build a museum of plein air and of realism. Because those are two areas that I’m really, really, really excited about all I need. All I need is somebody with a lot of money to fund it. I need a building in a major city. And I have all the art and some of the art I need to get yet but anyway, that’s the kind of thing you can do is, is donate art. And you have to put some stipulations whenever you donate anything, you got to put stipulations. Now there’s a guy by the name of Alphonse mukha, great painter, was really known for his art nouveau work. But he was a brilliant painter, he did this thing, this series of paintings called the Czech epic, or the Slav Epic, or something like that. And I’ve seen them, but they have been in hiding, because he gave them to the city of Budapest, and said that they must show them but he never said when or how long. So they sat in a warehouse for 100 years before they were shown. Now they’re starting to get shown a little bit, but you want to make sure you stipulate, you know, here’s what to do. You can’t sell my paintings, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Next question Amandine.

Amandine
The next question is from Eugene Fama. Why does striving for titles from one’s peer group create unnecessary stress? Does it distract from the essence and joy of painting for pleasure? Are there any benefits to a title? What are the negatives, I see people spending a lot of money chasing the dream of a title.

Eric Rhoads
Now Eugene, because you didn’t specify what kind of title I’m gonna have to guess I’m not sure what you mean by titles, I can think of a couple of things. One is to have a title in a local art club, you know, like President or treasurer, but I don’t think that’s what you mean. I think what you probably mean is a title from an organization. For instance, there’s one called the oil painters of America, there’s the one called the American impressionist society, there’s lots of them. If you mean a title from one of those, let’s explore the pros and cons. Now, these titles are typically not political. They can be but usually not, you get them from winning a certain number of awards annually. And if you win a certain number of awards annually and so many years in a row, and you get to accumulate a certain number of awards, that adds up to getting voted in and getting a title. Oftentimes, it’s a master title or a signature member title. And that way you can sign your paintings with that, that master title so for instance, for the oil painters of America Opa, you sign your painting, you know, Eric Rhoads comma op, an OP AMR OPM, and the idea is that you are an OPA master, right? And so, that means you’ve earned that title. Now there is prestige to that huge prestige among painters who know how hard you work to get there. And they know that the standard is high that you don’t get those awards. And when those awards by putting together crummy paintings, you get a good standard. And but you have to enter a lot of paintings until you get to the point where you’ve elevated yourself. Now among some collectors and some galleries that is also very prestigious. So that’s a pretty big deal. So keep that in mind. Now, the reality is there are big names out there brilliant masters, who we all know and love, who don’t have any titles. And there are some who have them, but they don’t use them. It just depends on on what you want to do. The process of getting a title takes a lot of commitment and time. And hopefully it elevates your standard of work. And when you don’t, when you learn, you grow, you try harder next time. And you keep trying more and more to win. Now, competitions of any kind make you stronger. In our own plein air salon competition, which is monthly by the way. It’s not by though it’s also not all plein air, it’s all kinds of painting portraits, figures, everything. But because it’s sponsored by plein air magazine, that’s, that’s why it’s called that. But anyway, I’ve seen the quality increase over the years because the people who enter get better and better and better and better and better. And so and by the way, there are top artists who enter their new artists who enter their new artists who win their top artists who win, you know, there’s no rhyme or reason. But when you compete, you get better. And the same is true when you enter these organizations. If you’re a member first you got to belong. I, California art club does this too. They have I don’t think they have titles. So I’m not sure anyway. I’ve never tried to get a title, I’m not so sure that I have the time to try to get a title because it’s not really all that important to me. But I don’t have to make my living selling my work. And I think I could make a living selling my work without a title. But it might be come important. At some point in my life. If I ever decide to paint full time or something which I don’t think I’ll do. But you never know. We all have to make our own art journey about our own goals, our own interests, our own time, not somebody else’s desires for us. I paint because I love to paint, you probably paint because you love to paint, I don’t send the galleries a lot of work. Because I don’t do a lot of work. I don’t want the pressure I don’t I turn down shows. Because I don’t want to pressure creating shows, I just want to paint I want to have fun. And if I get some good ones, I’ll send them off to the galleries. I don’t even care if they sell but they do sometimes. And sometimes they don’t. If I were making my living full time, I would care a lot more, right. But I make my living publishing art magazines and conferences and things like that. So it’s not about that. I love that I can just paint without pressure. And that might be you. You might want to just paint without pressure. Nothing else matters to me. I don’t need awards. I don’t need titles. I don’t care what happens. I just want to paint because I enjoy it. And you know, and I like to paint so I can hang out with my friends and I want to be good enough so that I don’t completely embarrass myself. But do what you want to do. Follow what you want to do. Don’t follow up Pied Piper. All right, that is today’s art marketing minute.

Announcer 1:13:23
This has been the marketing minute with Eric Rhoads. You can learn more at artmarketing.com.

Eric Rhoads 1:13:31
And I also want to remind you to join me at plein air live coming up in March. PleinAirlive.com Join me at the plein air convention. You know the it’s pleinairconvention.com which is coming up in May. And if you’re not already a subscriber to plein air magazine, man, you will love it. You really will love it. I know I am not being humble about that. But I hear so many so many people just say they can’t wait. You know, some people have had it for 10 years. They just can’t wait for it to come in. I hope that would be the case for you. And if you don’t love it, you can cancel but nobody ever does. Well. There was that one guy one time. If you’ve not seen my blog where I talk about art and life and stuff and things, it’s called Sunday coffee, you can get it for free weekly at Coffeewitheric.com We got a big, big, big audience on that. I don’t know how many but I know it’s big. People keep forwarding it. That’s nice. Also, I’m on the air daily on Facebook shows called Art School live where hundreds of artists do demonstrations and talks one every day five days a week I’m on noon Eastern every weekday mostly live sometimes replay. You can subscribe on YouTube by searching streamline art and hit the subscribe button. Also, please follow me Eric Rhoads on Instagram and Facebook and by the way, I don’t have it here to show you. But I got my Instagram. I’m not my Instagram. I got my YouTube plaques. designating they’ve got 100,000 followers. That’s a pretty big deal for me. It’s a plaque, you know, it hangs up somewhere and gets dust but it’s kind of nice to get recognition. Anyway, it’s a, it’s a great thing to, to see a lot of people get something out of it. Anyway, I’m Eric Rhodes. I’m the publisher and founder of plein air magazine, among others. Thank you for tuning in today. And remember, it’s a big world out there. Go paint it. Bye bye.

How to Submit Your Art Marketing Questions: What questions do you have about selling your art? Submit it at artmarketing.com/questions to hear your question answered on an upcoming Art Marketing Minute Podcast.


> Visit EricRhoads.com (Publisher of ArtMarketing.com) to learn about opportunities for artists and art collectors, including:

  • Art retreats
  • International art trips
  • Art conventions
  • Art workshops (in person and online)
  • And more!

Art Marketing Minute Podcast: Episode 118

By |2023-01-25T16:01:08-05:00February 10th, 2023|Art Marketing Minute Podcast|

In the Art Marketing Minute Podcast, you’ll learn how to sell your art, how to market your paintings, and everything else you need to know in order to have a successful art career. 

In this Art Marketing Minute, Eric Rhoads shares thoughts on understanding your strategy for advertising through social media, and how to market your art online without distressing your gallery.

Listen to the Art Marketing Minute Podcast: Episode 118 >

Submit Your Art Marketing Question:

What questions do you have about selling your art? Visit artmarketing.com/questions or e-mail Eric at [email protected] (include your name and where you’re from) to hear your question answered on an upcoming Art Marketing Minute Podcast.

FULL TRANSCRIPT of the Art Marketing Minute:
DISCLAIMER: The following is the output of a transcription from an audio recording of the Art Marketing Minute. Although the transcription is mostly correct, in some cases it is slightly inaccurate due to the recording and/or software transcription.

Announcer:
This is the Art Marketing Minute with Eric Rhoads, author of the Amazon best-selling book, “Make More Money Selling Your Art.” In the marketing minute, we answer your questions to help your art career brought to you by artmarketing.com, the place to go to learn more about marketing. Now, here’s your host, art magazine publisher, Eric Rhoads.

Eric Rhoads:
In the art marketing minute, my goal is to answer your questions so that you can get answers. Right. Okay, so upload your questions at artmarketing.com/questions. Or you can email me [email protected]. Or just send me a note at Eric at plein air magazine, whatever cranks your clock. Amandine, my producer from France, who probably enjoyed the segment because she probably felt like she was at home. Amandine is going to ask our first question.

Amandine:
The first question is from Anthony Mankey, Jr. from Michigan. I’ve been advertising through Facebook ads at $10 a day for a little over two months now with no sales. I am advertising in multiple countries. My question is, should I advertise in America only to get better results?

Eric Rhoads:
Well, this is a loaded question. And one of the things that happens, Malcolm excuse me, Anthony from Malka, Michigan Sir, one of the things that happens Anthony is we oftentimes will pick a tactic before we pick a strategy. And a tactic is advertising on Facebook or Instagram or advertising in a magazine or advertising on a website or sending a direct marketing piece. Those are tactics. But the strategy is where you need to start, you need to ask yourself, What am I what is my primary goal for the year? What am I going to accomplish? And then once you understand that, it changes what your tactics will be. Because let’s say you said, my goal for the year is to get a list of 5000 people who are interested in taking workshops from artists, that would be one strategy another might be I want to get a list of 5000 people who are interested in my paintings. So if you had, if that were your strategy, then your Facebook ads would be all about that it wouldn’t be about trying to sell them a painting, it would be trying to get them to you would be trying to sell them a click, click through for my free my free ebook on the 10 best painting tips I’ve ever done or ever had or the 10 best paintings I’ve ever done. So then if you have the ability to build your list, then you have the ability to talk to your list more frequently because you have their emails. And then from that you have a chance of repetition. And we all know that. If you’ve listened to this a lot, you know that repetition sells products. So but why did it not work? Well, first off, let me answer your question, Should you concentrate on America only to get better results? Yeah, probably, as a matter of fact, I would concentrate. If you take your $10 a month, I would can’t concentrate on one small area. And because that way, you get an opportunity for more repetition. But let’s let’s go back. And let’s talk a little bit about Facebook advertising. I do a lot of Facebook advertising. I spend so much money on Facebook, that when I had a problem with Facebook, they fixed it real quickly because we’re a big advertiser. So that’s I can’t tell you the amount but it’s hundreds of 1000s of dollars that I spend on Facebook and Instagram, I spend money on tick tock, I spend money on everything. Because it’s important to me, but I only spend money if I’m getting a return and a return means I’m getting at least breakeven and hopefully at least one times more, you know, in other words, a two to one on my spend. So if I spend $10 I want to get $20 back, that’s not easy to accomplish, especially with a first order. And there’s a lot of sophisticated technology and a lot of sophisticated algorithm and a lot of other things that get behind this. That will really be important to understand if you’re going to be a Facebook advertiser, in my particular case, I, I study this stuff all day, every day, I focus on it, I learn about it. And yet I still employ experts, either in my own company or experts outside of my company who have skill sets that I don’t have, because somebody who lives in that world all day, every day, might have a chance of doing better for you. Now, I have had agencies that have completely ripped me off, I’ve had agencies that have made me a lot of money. I’ve had agencies that have gotten me no progress, but their intent wasn’t to rip me off. So you got to be careful about that kind of a thing. And you’re in a little different world than I am. Because, you know, my numbers are a lot different. But start with your tactic, I mean, start with your strategy, and then move to your tactic. Now, there’s also a lot of other things, Facebook is not working for you for probably a couple of reasons. First off, I believe that you have to have multiple impressions on something, before someone will buy it. Statistically, someone needs to actually physically see something seven times before they’re willing to buy it. There are exceptions to that rule, I have seen an ad on Instagram and bought it instantly. But I’ve also seen things hit over and over and over and over again. And I wasn’t interested. But the more times I saw them, the more I got interested and then maybe eventually I bought something. And so that’s the idea of multiple impressions. And that’s true for any form of advertising is you’ve got to get multiple impressions. And so if you’re, if you’re spending in a wide area, $10 a week, or a day or whatever you’re spending, you’re not likely to get that concentration. So if you have a concentrated audience, and you spend more in that concentrated audience, you might get more Impressionism, more impressions. But it’s hard to accomplish that. And Facebook, it’s hard to control it. Facebook works essentially, on a bidding system, whoever spends the most money to get in front of a category, or a keyword is the one who is gonna get seen the most. And so, right I did a campaign the other day, and the price to get in front of someone was $100, to get in front of one person. And if I spent $10, that $10 would never get in front of them now. Not since not everybody’s got to buy, I got to spend, you know, 10 times that or 20 times that to be able to make it effective. So you know, if your cost to acquire a customer is $100. That’s okay. The goal really is to outspend everybody else because if you can outspend them as long as you’re getting a return on your money, then you’re going to get more business. But most of us look at our most of us should look at this as a marketing budget, how much are you willing to spend? Now, if you had let’s say you’re selling a painting for $2,000? And you say to yourself, how much am I willing to sell that? How much am I willing to spend to get a $2,000 sale? Well, a typical in marketing, depending on what industry you’re in, is to spend 10%, some people spend 5%, if you’re in the cosmetics industry, you might be spending 30% Because you have more to spend because the cost of the product is lower, and you want to develop customers. So you might be willing to get some customers early, by spending more, and then turn them into secondary customers write it meaning, sell them a second piece, the third piece, and that’s the way advertising really should work anyways, as is get them out on a kind of a loss leader, so to speak something that is affordable, and get them in love with you and then offer something else to them. So you can get your money back that way from the second purchase or the third purchase. You know, you spent 60 days at $10 a day $600. It’s a lot of money. If it’s not working in Facebook environment and Instagram environment and probably in Tiktok environment, you can actually spend 10 or 20 bucks in 124 hour period of time and find out if people are clicking on your response and on your ad and responding to it. You don’t have to take two months till you change things. And so you probably maybe throw away a little bit too much money there where that the thing that makes people click through is Do I have a compelling offer. And that means that the ad that you write has to be something that people are interested in has to get their attention. What’s the headline that’s going to get their attention if the headline is is about, oh, you should see the work of Eric Rhoads artists they’re going to be like Yan boring. If it says look at the compelling images this artist is doing Then you’re gonna want to click through, you know, and then you’ve got to try to figure out how to convert them to a sale. Typically, in a Facebook environment or an Instagram environment, a low cost under $25 is the best way to get somebody to buy something free is even better. But then you’ve got to get them free. And if you spent if you have free, sometimes free people who buy under, or take something free, don’t spend money to get something for $5, at least they’re willing to spend money, then you get them out on a $5 sale for a brief view of something, and then maybe you sell them something more. So there’s a lot to all of this, chances are, it’s about copy. It’s about concentration, there’s always problems. But focus on reinventing yourself and seeing experiment, you know, we sometimes will run 30 or 40 or 50 ad campaigns, and they don’t work and we try to fix them fast. And, keep testing things till they work. Testing is always the key. I love concentrated off audiences because ultimately, if I can get more repetition in front of somebody, they’re more likely to want what I have to offer. And that’s what it really boils down to, is, you know, you can’t force anybody to want something, you can put something in front of someone and hope that they have the desire to buy it. You can’t force them to buy. And so you’ve got to make sure that it’s a group of people who are gonna want to have that desire. And that’s tricky. Okay, comedy. And what’s our next question?

Amandine:
The second question is from Christina from Chicago, Illinois. How do you market your fine art online without distressing your gallery?

Eric Rhoads:
Well, Christina, that is a terrific question. And distressing, is a really good word. So imagine this, put yourself in their shoes for a minute, you rent a space, a beautiful storefront, in a nice part of the community. You haven’t remodeled you put lights in, you haven’t lit you make arrangements with 20 3040 Top Artists. You get their work and your gallery you spend money advertising to track people you hold shows you hold cocktail parties, you hold openings, and then suddenly find out your artist is selling online direct, often at a lower price, how’s that gonna make you feel? You want to think about the big picture here, you know, if you’re wanting to sell through galleries, you need to be thinking about long-term relationships versus short-term game. Really top top top-tier galleries will not allow their artists to sell direct. And if they do, they kick them out of the gallery. Now, if this gallerist, I can think of a gallery in New York, for instance, that, you know, they’re selling 50 and 100,000 $200,000 paintings, they’re going to make your year for you if they’re successful. But you could blow it all by selling direct because you decided to get greedy. And so that’s something you got to be careful about. Now, some galleries will tolerate a little bit of direct sales in certain conditions. For instance, I have an artist friend who has a deal with his galleries, that he will only offer things online in a daily painting environment that are unframed, and that are under a certain size, maybe under eight by 10. And within a certain price range. But the bigger things always go to the gallery, and he never sells direct in those cases. Most artists I know, still don’t sell too much online, some do, but not a lot. You know, in the grand scheme of things, it’s not as many as you would think we all hear about these big success stories and, and we all think, well that’s gonna happen to us. There are there are certainly ways to do it. And I teach that in some of my courses in my book, but you know, selling from a gallery gives you an advantage because they are talking about you. They’re building your customer base, they’re building a collector base. They know the market, they they’re advertising and promoting bringing people in, are spending money, they’re talking to customers, they’re shipping paintings, they’re collecting the money, they’re dealing with refunds, they’re selling, they’re following up. And those things matter because you’re gonna have to do all of that yourself if you’re selling directly and then you’re not doing what you should be doing, which is painting. That’s how I feel about it. And when I’m in some galleries and they do a lot of work for me, and there’s still work I have to do like shipping and so on but the one thing I would say is never ever ever ever sell direct to a galleries client. I was in a gallery show I was only in the show for two three weeks. I sold a painting several paintings, but I sold a painting to this guy, and he contacted me He on Instagram and he said, Hey, I bought some paintings from you at the show. Do you have anything else I can see. And so I sent him a note. And I sent pictures. And I sold him, three, four or five other paintings. And when the money came in, I contacted the gallery. And I told him Listen, even though the show was over, and even though technically, I’m not in your gallery, and even though I don’t technically owe you any money, I would not have that customer if it weren’t for you. So I’m going to send you a commission. In my particular case, I gave an option. I said, I’ll send you a cash Commission, or I’ll pay you in some other way, offered something to them. And they ended up picking one of the two. And they were happy that I did that. And they said, Gee, nobody does that. You have integrity, we get screwed over by artists all the time. Now, I’ll tell you another story. I was at a gallery in Tucson, and I was sitting there meeting with the owner. And I said, Do you mind if I take these paintings down? While I’m talking to you? I said, Sure. Why are you taking them down? He said, well, a guy walked into the gallery. He said, I love that painting. But here’s how much I’m willing to pay for it. I said, No, the guy walked out, he contacted the artists direct, the artist called me and made up a story about why they needed that painting back. And then the guy ended up calling the gallery and said, hey, just FYI, I just want you to know, I bought it direct from the artists for 50% off. So the gallery fired that artist, and the gallery told all his friends at other galleries in town that the artists had wronged him. And that gallery was sending back all the paintings and no longer representing that artist. And that artist is probably blackballed among that those friends don’t play those games, they’re short-term thinking they will hurt you. You know, the reality is that art galleries do a lot of work, maybe they’re not doing the work you think they should be doing. But they’re doing all the work that I described, they’re spending money, they’re promoting you, or they should be promoting you. And ultimately, they will help you sell now, if they’re not selling after a while, then have a discussion with them move out of the gallery or something else, but don’t violate them. That’s, that’s tricky. So lots of things you can do to sell direct paintings or direct prints or other things, but you got to be really careful because some galleries look at that as poison and they don’t want to deal with it. Just a thought, if you’re gonna do it, then maybe I have friends who are not in galleries at all, and they do direct selling, and they’re very effective at it. So there’s a lot of ways you can do it. So just consider the options because you don’t want to hurt your reputation. I have stories of people who have done things like this 10 years ago, 15 years ago, that people still talk about, they still won’t touch because they were burned. You don’t want to be that person. Okay, that’s today’s art marketing minute.

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This has been the marketing minute with Eric Rhoads. You can learn more at artmarketing.com.

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