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Marketing Strategies for Artists: How the Jaguar Campaign Can Apply to You

By |2025-01-07T08:28:14-05:00January 7th, 2025|Art Marketing Minute Podcast|

Marketing Strategies for Artists > In the world of art marketing, understanding how to effectively promote your work can be as crucial as the art itself. Today, we delve into the intricacies of marketing strategies, drawing inspiration from a controversial Jaguar ad campaign that sparked significant debate. This analysis aims to apply these marketing lessons to artists and their unique challenges.

Understanding the Jaguar Campaign

The Jaguar ad campaign has generated mixed reactions, with many questioning its effectiveness and appropriateness. This controversy is not just noise; it’s a strategic move that has garnered attention. The ad features unconventional themes and imagery, pushing boundaries to create buzz around the brand.

What Jaguar aims to achieve is twofold: they want to stand out in a crowded market and reposition their brand toward a higher, more luxurious segment. By using provocative visuals, they invite discussion and debate, which translates to free advertising. This strategy raises an essential question for artists: how can you create similar buzz around your work?

Creating Controversy and Engagement

Controversy can be a powerful tool in marketing. When executed correctly, it can lead to heightened visibility and increased sales. For instance, think about how Banksy generates attention with his provocative art pieces. His art often elicits strong reactions, sparking conversations that keep his work in the public eye.

As an artist, consider how you might incorporate elements of surprise or controversy into your marketing strategy. This doesn’t mean compromising your artistic integrity; rather, it involves finding ways to present your work that challenge norms and provoke thought.

Turning Questions into Opportunities

During the live Marketing Monday session with Eric (video above), a viewer asked if customers really want to know how long a painting took to create. This question often arises in art circles, and the answer can be complex. Instead of simply providing a time frame, consider turning the question back on the asker. Ask them what interests them about the time spent on the piece. This technique not only engages your audience but also provides insights into their motivations and potential buying signals.

Engaging with Your Audience

When someone expresses admiration for your work, it’s essential to capitalize on that moment. Instead of letting the compliment pass, ask them what specifically they love about it. This can lead to deeper conversations that reveal their emotional connection to your art, making it easier to transition into a sales pitch.

For example, if someone says, “I love your painting,” you might respond with, “Thank you! What do you love most about it?” This opens the door to discuss the piece’s story, technique, or inspiration, all of which can enhance the perceived value of your work.

Marketing Strategies for Artists

Now, let’s explore practical marketing strategies that artists can implement, inspired by the Jaguar campaign’s provocative approach.

1. Define Your Unique Value Proposition

Every artist needs to identify what makes their work unique. This could be a specific technique, the materials used, or the stories behind the pieces. For instance, if you use traditional methods that ensure longevity, make that a focal point in your marketing. Share the narrative of your artistic journey and the materials you choose, emphasizing how they contribute to the quality and durability of your work.

2. Create Engaging Content

In the age of social media, engaging content is key to capturing attention. Share behind-the-scenes glimpses into your creative process, videos of you painting, or even time-lapse footage. This not only humanizes you as an artist but also creates a connection with your audience. When they see the effort and passion behind the work, they may be more inclined to support you.

3. Leverage Social Media Platforms

Platforms like Instagram and Facebook are invaluable for artists. Use them to share your work, engage with followers, and build a community. Consider hosting live sessions where you can interact with your audience in real-time. This creates a sense of belonging and encourages people to invest in your art.

4. Collaborate with Other Artists and Brands

Collaborations can expand your reach and introduce your work to new audiences. Partner with other artists, galleries, or even brands that align with your aesthetic and values. These collaborations can take many forms, from joint exhibitions to social media takeovers.

5. Embrace Email Marketing

Building an email list allows you to communicate directly with your audience. Share updates about new work, exhibitions, and exclusive offers. Ensure your emails are visually appealing and provide value, whether through insights into your process, art tips, or special promotions.

Investing in Marketing

Many artists struggle with how much to invest in marketing. The answer varies based on individual goals and circumstances. If you aim to increase your visibility, consider allocating a portion of your budget to online advertising or promotional materials. However, remember that time can also be a valuable investment. Utilize social media and community engagement to build your presence organically.

Understanding Your Audience

Understanding your target audience is crucial. Identify who is most likely to buy your art and tailor your marketing efforts toward them. Conduct surveys or engage in conversations to gather insights into their preferences, interests, and buying behaviors.

Building a Community

Creating a dedicated community around your work can lead to consistent sales. This can be achieved through social media groups, newsletters, or local art events. Foster connections among your followers, encouraging them to share their experiences with your art and create a supportive network.

Wrapping Up

Marketing your art effectively requires creativity, strategy, and engagement. By learning from successful campaigns like Jaguar’s and applying these principles to your own work, you can elevate your marketing game. Remember that controversy and engagement can be powerful tools, but authenticity should always be at the forefront of your efforts.

As you embark on your marketing journey, stay true to your artistic vision while exploring innovative ways to connect with your audience. With dedication and strategic thinking, you can cultivate a thriving art business that resonates with collectors and enthusiasts alike.

Art Marketing Minute Podcast: Episode 142

By |2024-12-12T08:54:37-05:00December 12th, 2024|Art Marketing Minute Podcast|

How to Sell Your Art: What are the current trends in art buying behavior, and how should artists adapt their marketing strategies to align with the preferences of modern collectors? And, how can international artists market their art in the U.S.? Eric Rhoads answers in this week’s Art Marketing Minute Podcast.

On January 10, 2025, Eric Rhoads is hosting our first-ever Art Business Mastery Day on how to sell your art — a one-day live workshop to cut through the confusion and help you:
✅ Learn what’s working right now to sell art successfully
✅ Get answers to your most pressing questions about marketing, pricing, and more
✅ Know exactly what next steps make sense for your specific goals.
Get the details to RSVP here!

Listen to the Art Marketing Minute Podcast: Episode #142 >

Submit Your Art Marketing Question:
What questions do you have about selling your art? 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.

Summary of this Art Marketing Minute:

How to Sell Your Art: Strategies for Success

In the ever-evolving world of art, understanding how to sell your art effectively is crucial for both emerging and established artists. Eric says that knowing current trends in art buying behavior and adapting your marketing strategies to align with these preferences is essential for success. This episode dives into practical tips and insights on how to sell your art and navigate the complexities of the art market.

Understanding Current Trends in Art Buying Behavior

Eric emphasizes that artists should be aware of the diverse ways to approach the market. He mentions the importance of authenticity in your work. “You can feel if an artist is genuinely passionate about their subject,” he states. This authenticity resonates with collectors and can significantly impact your success in selling art.

While some may chase trends, Eric advises artists to focus on what they love. “If you love it, there’s a market for it,” he asserts. This approach not only nurtures your creativity but also helps you connect with buyers who appreciate your passion.

How to Sell Your Art: Marketing Strategies for Modern Collectors

To effectively market your art, Eric suggests leveraging social media platforms and advertising. He notes that platforms like Instagram have revolutionized how artists reach their audience. “You just have to figure out how to find them and how to talk to them,” he says. Building a robust online presence can significantly enhance your visibility and help you connect with potential buyers.

Eric is hosting an upcoming event focused on art marketing, which he believes will be instrumental for artists looking to thrive in 2025. “We’re going to walk you through your planning for 2025,” he shares. Events like these can provide valuable insights and strategies for selling art successfully.

Marketing Art Internationally

When addressing how to market art in the U.S. from the Philippines, Eric emphasizes understanding the market dynamics. He encourages artists to explore their local market before expanding internationally. “You could sell everything that you paint in a smaller country like the Philippines,” he points out. This localized approach can yield significant results without the overwhelming competition of larger markets.

Eric suggests using targeted social media advertising to reach specific demographics. “If you were targeting the U.S., then you would target the U.S. in your Facebook advertising,” he explains. This method allows artists to connect with potential buyers effectively and engage with a broader audience.

The Importance of Consistent Marketing Efforts

Eric highlights the necessity of ongoing marketing efforts, stating that “without marketing, nothing happens.” He draws a parallel to a famous movie line: “If you build it, they will come” is a myth in the art world. Instead, artists must actively engage with their community and promote their work through various channels.

Building relationships within the art community is crucial. Eric advises artists to participate in podcasts, YouTube channels, and other platforms to share their work and connect with potential buyers. “You’ve got to get out there,” he insists. This engagement fosters a sense of community and can lead to increased sales opportunities.

Conclusion: How to Sell Your Art > Take Action

In conclusion, Eric’s insights provide a comprehensive framework on how to sell your art effectively. By focusing on authenticity, leveraging social media, participating in events, and maintaining consistent marketing efforts, artists can significantly enhance their chances of success. Remember, the art market is dynamic, and adapting to its trends while staying true to your passion is key to thriving in this competitive landscape.

This has been the Marketing Minute with Eric Rhoads. You can learn more here at artmarketing.com.

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.

How to Sell Your Art: Strategies to Attract Collectors

By |2024-12-11T11:29:26-05:00December 11th, 2024|Art Marketing Minute Podcast|

Understanding how to sell your art is essential for any artist looking to reach a wider audience and attract collectors. In this blog, we’ll explore various strategies and insights that can help you market and sell your artwork effectively. From adapting to changing tastes among younger audiences to leveraging technology, there are numerous ways to elevate your art selling game.

On January 10, 2025, Eric Rhoads is hosting our first-ever Art Business Mastery Day — a one-day live workshop to cut through the confusion and help you:
✅ Learn what’s working right now to sell art successfully
✅ Get answers to your most pressing questions about marketing, pricing, and more
✅ Know exactly what next steps make sense for your specific goals.
Get the details to RSVP here!

Let’s dive in!

Understanding the Market: Adapting to New Tastes

One of the significant shifts in the art market has been the trend towards minimalism, particularly among younger consumers. Many artists feel that this trend makes it challenging to sell traditional artworks. However, it’s crucial to recognize that while minimalism is popular, it doesn’t mean that there isn’t a market for all types of art.

  • Research and Insights: Conduct research to understand your local market. Are there still collectors who appreciate more traditional forms of art? Engage with your community to gauge interest.
  • Highlight Versatility: Showcase how your art can fit into both minimalist and more traditional settings. Offer suggestions on how to incorporate your pieces into various home styles.
  • Stay True to Your Passion: While adapting to market trends is essential, don’t compromise your artistic vision. Create art that you love, as this authenticity will resonate with collectors.

Innovative Marketing Strategies: The Intersection of Art and Science

Embracing technology and innovative strategies can significantly enhance your marketing efforts. One of the most exciting developments is the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) in marketing.

  • AI Tools: Utilize AI-driven tools to analyze your audience and generate targeted marketing content. These tools can help create ads, manage social media campaigns, and even assist in generating marketing copy.
  • Data-Driven Decisions: Leverage data analytics to understand which artworks resonate most with your audience. This insight can guide your future creations and marketing strategies.
  • Content Creation: Use AI to help brainstorm ideas for blog posts or social media content that can engage potential collectors.

The Art of Engagement: Building Relationships with Collectors

Building relationships with art collectors is crucial for long-term success. Engaging with them goes beyond just selling; it’s about creating a meaningful connection.

  • Personalized Communication: Tailor your communications to potential collectors. Share stories about your art, the inspiration behind your pieces, and how they can enhance their living spaces.
  • Educational Content: Offer valuable insights through newsletters or blog posts. Topics could include how to care for art, the significance of different art styles, or tips for new collectors.
  • Invite Interaction: Encourage collectors to share their experiences with your art. Create a space for them to discuss how they display your pieces in their homes.

Direct Sales vs. Gallery Representation: Finding Your Balance

Many artists grapple with the decision of whether to sell directly to collectors or seek representation through galleries. Each approach has its pros and cons.

  • Direct Sales: Selling directly allows you to keep more profits and foster personal relationships with buyers. However, it requires more effort in marketing and customer service.
  • Gallery Representation: Galleries can provide exposure and credibility. They often handle marketing and sales, allowing you to focus on your art. However, they take a commission and may not always represent your best interests.
  • Hybrid Approach: Consider a combination of both. Sell smaller works or prints directly while placing larger pieces in galleries. This strategy can help you tap into multiple markets.

Creating Compelling Content: Engaging Your Audience

Content marketing is a powerful way to connect with potential collectors. Crafting engaging content that resonates with your audience is key.

  • Visual Storytelling: Use high-quality images and videos to showcase your artwork. Share behind-the-scenes footage of your creative process or the stories behind specific pieces.
  • Blogging and Newsletters: Keep collectors informed about your latest work, upcoming exhibitions, and art events. Consider topics that might interest them, such as art trends or investment tips.
  • Social Media Engagement: Use platforms like Instagram and Facebook to connect with your audience. Share not just your art, but also your journey as an artist.

Pricing Your Art: Communicating Value

Pricing can be a challenging aspect of selling art. It’s essential to communicate the value of your work effectively.

  • Understand Your Worth: Evaluate your experience, the quality of your work, and local art market trends to determine appropriate pricing.
  • Communicate the Process: When asked about how long it took to create a piece, use it as an opportunity to discuss your artistic journey. Explain that while a painting might take a few hours to complete, it reflects years of skill development.
  • Frame with Care: The right frame can enhance the perceived value of your artwork. Invest in high-quality framing to elevate your pieces and justify higher price points.

Getting Into Galleries: Building Credibility

Galleries can be a great way to gain exposure but getting accepted can be challenging, especially for emerging artists.

  • Build Relationships: Attend gallery openings and engage with gallery owners and curators. Building a rapport can increase your chances of being invited to show your work.
  • Quality Over Quantity: Focus on developing a strong portfolio. It’s better to have a few exceptional pieces than numerous mediocre ones.
  • Seek Recommendations: If you know artists already represented by a gallery, ask them for feedback on your work and if they can introduce you.

Conclusion: Your Path to Success in Selling Art

Learning how to sell your art involves understanding market trends, leveraging technology, and building meaningful relationships with collectors. By adapting to changing tastes, creating engaging content, and effectively communicating your value, you can successfully navigate the art market. Remember, the journey of selling art is as much about connecting with people as it is about the art itself. Embrace these strategies and watch your art career flourish!

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.

Art Marketing Minute Podcast: Episode 141

By |2024-12-04T07:33:03-05:00December 4th, 2024|Art Marketing Minute Podcast|

How to Sell Your Art > Is it necessary to have an artist website? What are some of the current email list do’s and don’ts? Eric Rhoads answers in this week’s Art Marketing Minute Podcast.

On January 10, 2025, Eric Rhoads is hosting our first-ever Art Business Mastery Day — a one-day live workshop to cut through the confusion and help you:
✅ Learn what’s working right now to sell art successfully
✅ Get answers to your most pressing questions about marketing, pricing, and more
✅ Know exactly what next steps make sense for your specific goals.
Get the details to RSVP here!

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.

Listen to the Art Marketing Minute Podcast: Episode #141 >

Submit Your Art Marketing Question:
What questions do you have about selling your art? 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.

How to Sell Your Art

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:
Send your questions to me at [email protected], wherever you wanna send them. And if you wanna come on live when we’re recording this, you can do that too.

Here’s a question from Bobby Donahue. And the question is, how much value do you place in having a website to share your artwork? Is it a necessity? I am considering a website, but having a hard time justifying the cost in my head? Well, I think there’s a couple of things here. First off, I have, I have a whole lot of feelings about websites. I think things are changing. I think websites are still very important, but I do think there’s going to be a new breed of ways that artists are going to be found on the web, and I’m excited about that, but I can’t talk much about what’s going to be happening yet, but I think there’s going to be some changes. But the bottom line is, if you have a website, it doesn’t do you any good unless you have a strategy, an art marketing strategy, to get people to visit your website. Because it’s like, remember, in the old days they had a thing, it was a phone book. And in Los Angeles it was five inches thick. It’s like saying to somebody, Hey, I’m in the phone book. Well, nobody’s going to just, I mean, you’ve got to have somebody who’s going to specifically seek you out, but if you’re just hoping that somebody will randomly find you in the phone book, well they might randomly find you in the yellow pages of the phone book. Remember those. But the idea is, you want to drive people to your website, and so you have to be committed to marketing. You cannot expect the website to just deliver traffic. You know, a lot of that has to do do with what’s called SEO strategy. And SEO is basically search engine optimization. So you want to be able to show up in Google search or in Bing, or whoever you’re using, duck, duck, go. And so you’ve got to be putting things out there so that people can find you. Part of that means you’ve got to do fresh content on your website pretty much all the time, because if it’s not been updated, they’ll never push it to you. They’re looking for updates every week. And so I go to artists. You know, sometimes we’re considering an artist for something we’re going to do, a project we’re going to do, I’ll go to their website, you’ll find that old 1995 style website, or maybe 2000 style website, says, Enter here, and you’ll go in. And everything has not been updated for five years. You know, if you’re going to have a website updated, otherwise you’re wasting your time and your money. So you’ve got to treat it like it’s a precious commodity, and you have to update it, you have to market it, you have to promote it. Unless you’re selling artwork and you think a website is going to sell artwork for you, I think it’s pretty unlikely. Now, there are some people who specialize in websites for artists, or there’s lots of other options out there. This stuff has become a commodity these days. You know, it’s a good idea to preserve your what’s called your URL, like www.EricRhoads.com, that kind of a thing. And you should have one if you’re a professional. But or you need to have something that’s going to supplement that. Now, one of the things that supplements it is having your name and Instagram and Facebook that really is important, and it it might be important, depending on the demographic you’re going after, to be on other other sites, like like x or threads or Snapchat or other things, but you want to be able to be found, right? So the goal here is these days, instead of, you know, if I’m searching an artist, I usually go on Instagram. I don’t go on the web. Once in a while I’ll go on the web, but Instagram is where people are posting their pictures, and it’s a good place to get a feel for that. So I think, Bobby, it’s up to you, but there’s a lot more to it. By the way, the idea of – I’m having trouble justifying the cost. In my head, the cost is going to be 10, 20, 30, 40, bucks a month. If you, if you’re not willing to spend that money to sell paintings, to get customers, you’re never going to get customers. You have to be willing to spend money. The person who spends the most money gets the most customers ends up selling more than anybody else. It’s like entering art competitions. You got to spend money to enter them, but when you win, even if you win in a single category, like Nocturne painting for the month of January or something, then you have something to talk about. It’s something to help promote you. It gets other people to see your name. And Camille Przewodek said. It. She enters the plein air salon, for instance, every time she entered it, every month for 13 years before she finally won the main prize. But she won other prizes. She won some cash, but she had all this stuff to talk about. She said it was really important to her, so you got to be willing to invest money if your goal is to sell, if it’s an ego plane, you just want something to show you to your friends. Just use Instagram. Show your friends on Instagram.

Question number two is from Crystal H in Tennessee. Okay, so can I address some email list do’s and don’ts? Well, yeah, I can. I do a lot of emails. You probably know, email list do’s and don’ts are different than email do’s and don’ts. First off, do not send an email to a mass group of people unless they have done what’s called opting in. If they have not opted in, that means they subscribe to something where you had a chance to give them a chance to subscribe. Then it’s technically illegal. Now you can send anybody an email, one on one, one at a time, but if you’re doing a mass email list, then you have to have ops, opt ins. And sometimes people forget they opt ins. And the second thing is you have to have a way they can easily opt out. They can get off your list immediately. That’s really critical. You do not want to get investigated by the authorities right on something like that. And in terms of other things with your email list, you have to check deliverability if, if an email is not being delivered, let’s say that you send an email to me and I change my email address and I no longer have that old email address. If it shows up as undelivered, it actually hurts you, and so when you go to send it, first off, a lot of the email providers will not send it if you have a history of a bunch of stuff going out. That’s bad. They want you to have, a, what’s called a clean list they want to have. They want to have people that are opening emails. And so if you’re if people are not opening your emails, then it becomes less deliverable than Google isn’t going to deliver it, or whomever, or the suppliers aren’t going to deliver it. So there’s a lot of stuff with that. So you got to keep your fresh up, your list fresh and up to date now related to sending emails in terms of do’s and don’ts. Make sure you’re sending something that’s of value that people want. Make sure that you’ve established trust. They know who you are and they know why you send them things. Make sure that they always have a chance to opt out. The key to email marketing is a strong subject line, that little, tiny subject line, those 3, 4, 5, 6, words. If I pick up my phone and I look at the subject line on my phone, it’s only showing about four words, and then it cuts it off. If it’s on my browser, it shows more words. Most people check their email on their phones, about 80% so you need a subject line that’s about four words long that is going to grab people’s attention. You could have, you could be given away a million dollars inside your website. Nobody would ever visit it because they wouldn’t know. So your subject line gets people to open it. Now, the next thing that’s most important … There’s a lot of statistics on this, the set. The first most important thing is the subject line. Do you know what the second most important thing is the photograph, the photograph. Now, the third most important thing, and equally important if you don’t have a photograph, is your headline. You want to have a strong, easy to read, bold, stand out headline that’s going to really get a lot of attention and make you want to read further. So there’s a technique that was come up. The guy that came up with it was a guy named Gary Benson, gay was one of the great copywriters of all time. I don’t know if he’s alive anymore, but he’s not. I don’t think he’s writing anymore, but he’s written a couple of great books that you can find, and he talks about the slide. What you want to do is pretend you’re at a child’s playground, and you’ve got to get people to climb to the top of the slide, and when they get to the top, they slide all the way down to the point where they’re ready to purchase your product, right? So the slide is a strong subject line, that’s one rung in the ladder, a strong headline. That’s another rung in the ladder. The next is a strong photo, the next is a strong first paragraph and then a strong second paragraph. You know one thing rate relates to the hierarchy. So once you get a strong first paragraph and a strong second paragraph, typically, all of a sudden they get to the top of the slide and they read through. Not everybody reads everything. People will skim. That’s why it’s important to have some things bolded, or some headlines, or some sub headlines, and then, you bring them down. And then the next most important thing is, is a call to action. If you’re trying to sell something, right, or you’re trying to get them to come to an event, that might be different, but, it might be make your reservation now, that’s a call to action, or click the Buy button. That’s a call to action. So there’s a lot of different things you can do in that regard, but you want to have that there. And of course, if you’re selling something, the other thing that’s really critically important are testimonials. It’s better people trust other people more than they trust you or me. And so if you have Mary from Sheboygan or something, and you have a testimonial and she likes your product, that’s really good, very important to study the Federal Trade Commission rules, because there are certain things you cannot do in testimonials. One of the things you cannot have if, let’s say you had one customer who bought your product and they were like, they made a million dollars, you cannot highlight them unless that’s the average customer. So, you’re thinking, Oh, I’m going to highlight this person, because they made a million dollars when everybody else made $1 Well, you have to highlight the average customer. So you have to be really careful about that stuff. It’s very complicated. Okay, well, I hope this helps.

This has been the Marketing Minute with Eric Rhoads. You can learn more at artmarketing.com.

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

Art Marketing Minute Podcast: Episode 140

By |2024-09-16T08:31:34-04:00September 16th, 2024|Art Marketing Minute Podcast|

What are some ways for artists to effectively use social media? How do you get more eyeballs on your Instagram posts that will lead to serious potential buyers? 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.

Listen to the Art Marketing Minute Podcast: Episode 140 >

Submit Your Art Marketing Question:
What questions do you have about selling your art? 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:
So if you have questions, you can email them [email protected] By the way, artmarketing.com is a really great resource. There’s a lot of articles on there about marketing your art, and a good place to kind of poke around. And so check it out. If you guys ever want to come live on the podcast to record your questions. I do a lot of live on the weekday, Monday Marketing Show for art school live on YouTube. Here’s a question from Linda Jack from Virginia. I’m seeing these for the first time. By the way, the question is pricing and how to use social media effectively are always a struggle. Any suggestions? Well, those are two big questions, two questions that deserve a lot of time on their own. Pricing is the most difficult thing, other than learning to paint, that I think artists have to deal with and pricing has a lot to do with the environment that the painting is sold in. Keep that in mind that now if you were selling paintings at a high end show filled with multi millionaires, and they were selling $20 paintings there people aren’t going to buy them, because they’re not going to think they’re any good. And but if you’re selling paintings at the farmers market or the flea market or something, that’s going to be a different story too. So environment, the type of gallery you’re in, if you’re in a gallery, the environment makes a big difference. And so always think in terms of environment. Now you should, typically not, I don’t like to have rules, but I like to have guidelines. You typically should have your prices be your prices so that somebody, especially if you’re a gallery artist, if your paintings are in a gallery in Wisconsin and they’re in a gallery in California, and you can look them all up online. You want to have, you know, similar pricing, so that a nine by 12 is the same as a nine by 12. Now there are exceptions to that, because sometimes I’ll work on a painting for 100 hours, and I want to get more money for it. And so that would be an exception, because not not all paintings are equal, even if they’re equal in size. And then there’s all kinds of great books on pricing, but pricing is about kind of testing the market, putting it out there, starting a little higher if it sells well, move it up a little higher. More. If it sells well, move it up a little higher, more. If it doesn’t sell well, move it down a little bit. And also build in a little room for negotiation, because sometimes people need to negotiate. Some people can afford it, but they don’t. They won’t buy unless they can get a better deal. So just build in a little of that into your pricing, in terms of social media, in terms of effectively doing social media. You know, there’s, there’s courses on this. It’s not an easy task to just give you an answer to this, but I will tell you this, there’s a couple of things about social media. First off, what I’m learning is that post it depends on on what you’re posting on, so if you’re posting on X, formerly Twitter, then you can post 3, 4, 5, 6, times a day, because it moves very fast. If you’re focusing on Instagram, experts say once, maybe twice a day. If you’re focusing on Facebook, three, four times a day is fine, but it depends, because there are what we call time zones, or the times when people tend to check, you know, the masses. There are times when the masses are there. And the masses are typically there before work, during lunch time and after work. And so the busiest time for social media typically is after work. Now, different time zones are going to see things different ways. And so, you know, it’s, it’s nine o’clock in New York, it’s six o’clock in in Laguna. So you know you want to kind of time things to the time when the audience that you’re trying to reach is most important. And then keep your content focused on what you want your content to be known for. So if you, for instance, are a painter, and you want to be known as a painter for collectors or finished paintings, then you know, only put finished paintings on there, or maybe, maybe you painting in a location with that painting in the finished painting. I don’t like progress shots, typically, because most people don’t read that it’s in progress, and they look at it and they go, Ah, it’s not done. Or they’ll look at it and go, Oh, it’s it’s not good. So be careful about sharing progress shots. If you have a social media account that your primary purpose is to sell paintings, then don’t show pictures of food. Your cat. Keep it all about paintings, and then, you know, you can talk about the stories of the paintings. You can ask people for for comments. You can even say, you know, this one’s available. Sometimes I wouldn’t put that in the main post, but I put it in the first comment. So by the way, this is available, right? That way you’re not being too salesy, but that’s just a matter of opinion. So there’s a ton of other things social media is ever changing. It’s got to study it all the time. The you know, hashtags were all the rage now they’re not. They don’t matter anymore, because AI is kind of picking up and running with things, and so that that changes a lot.

Second question comes from Pat watam in Louisiana. Pat says, How do you get more eyeballs on your Instagram posts that will lead to serious potential buyers? Well, you know, it’s really the same question. The way to get eyeballs is to get people to to you gotta post. Post frequently. You gotta just because you post something doesn’t mean you can’t repost it. You know, I post things sometimes the same thing, 3456, times a year, at different times, because I want to be talking about things that are going on, or things that I’m doing, or things that are paintings that I’ve done, and you know you, you don’t always know who’s going to see them. So the algorithm at Facebook, and this is constantly changing, but Facebook, typically, if you have, let’s say you have 5000 followers of Facebook, is only going to show that to 200 maybe 100 followers. One, two, 3% maybe not even that. And if there’s a lot of interaction, if people make comments, if people if you’re responding to comments, if people are engaged, or if people share it a lot, then they will show it to a couple, a couple 100 more people, and then if that continues, they’ll show it to more and more. So the idea is you want to look for ways to get engagement, which is why asking questions. Do not be so bold as to say, Hey, give me a like or something like that, because that’s considered click bait. But you can just, you know, you can ask a question, you know, what does this painting remind you of? And that way you get engagement? Or does anybody know where this painting was done, or something like that? So you just get people talking and then make sure you respond. That’s one of the best ways to get eyeballs. Because I even learned recently that even if you have a Facebook group like I have Facebook groups. I have dozens of them for some of the various things that we do, like our we have a private Facebook group for fall color week, which is coming up, and as a result, only those people can see it. But Facebook doesn’t even push it out to all of them. I thought they did. They only push it out to five or 6% of those. And again, if there’s engagement, they’ll push it out to more. So you’re not even guaranteed that, if you’re in a group, that everybody’s going to see everything. So keep that in mind. Okay, well, anyway, that’s the art marketing minute. I do art marketing Mondays on my show art school live. You can find that on YouTube, and we do a whole lot more there. So anyway, there we go. 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.

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

Art Marketing Minute Podcast: Episode 138

By |2024-08-02T12:47:59-04:00August 9th, 2024|Art Marketing Minute Podcast|

What are the safest and most effective ways to sell your art online? Is it too early to start planning holiday marketing? 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.

Listen to the Art Marketing Minute Podcast: Episode # >

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:

Send your questions to me [email protected] you ever want to come on live, you can do that too. We can probably arrange that or pre record you. The other thing I just want to mention is I’m now doing a thing called Marketing Mondays. And that’s on my YouTube show. If you go to YouTube, and look for art school alive, or you can find it usually on my Facebook accounts and some others. Anyway, we go live and I answer art marketing questions, you can ask to answer questions there or you can pre submit questions. We do them in both places, but marketing is so important. So anyway, we have a question from Lorraine Potocki what is the safest and most effective online ways to sell your artwork? Well, I you know, I’m gonna go backwards. Just a second Lorraine because a lot of people and I just constantly hammer on this and if I do it too much, I apologize. But a lot of people are like, you know, I want to focus on tactics and tactics are selling work online or selling work through advertising or selling work through direct mail or selling work through gallery you know, there’s a lot of tactics. And the reality is that you want to make sure you set your goals first because everybody’s easily seduced by all these supposedly sexy things, but they may not be really right for you or right for you for what you’re trying to do. Depending on how much work you need to sell what kind of work you’re trying to sell how well it looks online because some work I know an artist. This artist I met with had this absolutely incredible artwork I met in person went to his studio in Colorado. And his work was just so stunning in person, but when he sent pictures of but it just was flat, you know, the pictures didn’t represent it well. And so some artwork doesn’t represent well, in a social media environment, just keep that in mind. But some, especially if it’s really big artwork and a lot of big brush thick brushwork and paint, stuff like that. But so figure out what’s, what’s the right thing to do before you say online. Now, Online is a very wide variety of things. Of course, you know, there’s all the different social media, there’s online would be considered website would be considered online galleries would be even considered email marketing, and having an online store, you know, there’s a lot of different things. And they’re all effective, and they’re all ineffective. And what I mean by that is that they might be effective for you, they might not be, everything depends on if you use core marketing principles, if you don’t use core marketing principles, if you don’t know and understand them, go read my book, because it really talks about those things. It’s called make more money selling your art. And the reason is, that if you if you do an email campaign, and you don’t do the right kind of copywriting, or you don’t ask for the order, or you don’t do the right things, it’s not going to work. Same thing with a social media campaign, and so on, so on, you know, I am a big spender. On social media, I spent a lot of money, I can’t even begin to tell you how much money it is. But it’s a lot of money on social media, because it works really well for us. But you know, you see these artists who, you know, Facebook, or somebody will say, you know, just boost this post, you boost this post, and it cost you 15 bucks, and it doesn’t do you anything. And so you’ve got to really understand that. And it has a lot to do with the copy that you write and the images that you use, we test everything, we test them. And then we test them again. And we test them again, we test them again. Because a lot of things that we put out there on social media we’re spending money on they don’t work. And so and so you could do organic social media, you know, that’s putting a painting out on on your social media feed and saying that it’s available, sometimes that works really well that I think would you say the safest and most effective. There’s two different things. The safe part is there’s a lot of scams going around, I got scammed. I’m embarrassed by it. But I got scammed two different times. One time a company contacted me and they said, you know, we love your artwork, we love your posts, we love your paintings. And we would like to help you grow your social media. And so they, they I went through a full presentation with them, they got up got me on a zoom call. And they’re like three or four people, they were in suits and ties were credible. Looking at agency, they showed us a picture of their building. And they did this in depth presentation about how they were going to generate money for me with my social media. And that was a really cool thing. And so they said, Great, all you got to do is go in there and change the setting right now and put our name in there. And I did it, they took control of my Facebook account and locked me out. They went to that much trouble to do that. Okay, so there’s obviously good reason for them to do it. Because I spent so much money with Facebook, we were able to pick up the phone call them and they were able to reverse it and in about 15 minutes. But usually that’s not possible. And I don’t know if it’d be possible today. So be careful about promises that people are making, you know, we’re gonna run ads for you or ask you to run ads on your social media, etc. You know, we have we hear from a lot of people who are, you know, you get this email, it says My wife has or husband or cousin or whatever, you know, we have an anniversary, birthday, whatever. And I love your work and I want to surprise him or her and, or it and, and so they they say you know, they want to buy a painting and then they buy a painting from you and they overpay you for it. And then they say and then then you contact them you say oh, you overpaid me and they say well just Venmo me the money or whatever. And you Venmo them the money and then the other money never clears and then you’re stuck because you’ve sent them money and the other money never cleared. And that’s something you want to be careful. Make sure it clears your bank or your payment system or something. Make sure it’s not fraudulent and make sure you don’t ship it if they’re in an urgent you know, that’s the that’s the scam right? It’s a birthday, I gotta have it tomorrow you got to FedEx it to me, you know, they don’t even care if they get your painting even if they do maybe they’re they’re selling it. But the reality is, there’s a lot of that going on you got to be really careful talk to people bet them and then you know use a credible source for payment. That you know that if you know if the if you get a Venmo payment or PayPal payment or whatever it is you’re using Apple Pay, it’s probably going to go through but there’s always possibility they file a claim against you be careful about credit cards too. So there’s not a most effective there’s so much. I mean, it’s just really a tough question. I think that we all fall for this, this belief that our social media is a big deal. And sometimes it is, please don’t misunderstand me, I have on one of my accounts, I have a couple 100,000 followers on my Instagram. And that’s on realism dot today. And you know, so I reached a lot of people, but it turns out that some of them are not legit. Some of them are bots, you know, you hear from people like that all the time. You just got to be really careful. You think that you’re, you know, if I, if I do a feed, let’s say I do a post, and I think oh, all 200,000 people are going to see it. The reality is, that’s not true. Only 3% See it. Instagram met on Facebook, they only feed it to 3%. That’s a new number I just learned it used to be 7%. So and the reason they do that is because it takes a lot of energy to feed everything that everybody does. So they test it, they want to make sure it’s good. If it’s if they get a lot of engagement, a lot of response, then they’ll push it out to some more people, if they get a lot more engagement, they’ll push it out to more and more. But if you think that your 3% is a marketing strategy, think again, because it’s not. And so you got to be really careful about that. There’s also you know, a lot of great online galleries and a lot of scam ones. So you got to bet that stuff, talk to other artists find out what works for them. There’s also print services, you know, where you can advertise your stuff online. There’s a lot of things out there. You know, there’s people who provide websites and have some marketing services, some of them are good, some of them not so good. There’s, there’s people who are, you know, they’ll ask you to spend six or 10 or $15,000 upfront, and they’re gonna give you a lifetime of stuff and do all this stuff for you. And I’ve heard mixed reviews on that. I’ve heard some people say, you know, I spent all this money and I got zero results. I’ve had other people say I spent all this money and I got lots of results. So you have to be just checked with people. Always check everything, test everything. There’s not a an easy answer. I wish there was I’m sorry about that.

Okay, second question comes from Caroline Gavin in Maine. Nice to hear from you, Caroline. Thinking ahead. When should artists start or holiday marketing? Are there other holidays? It makes sense to market art? Well, I think these are really great questions, Caroline. I think you know, this is this is the beginning of August or July, late July. And this is the halfway point for the year right. So December is is coming up in well, holiday season really starts kind of late October, although the stores will start putting Christmas things in before Halloween probably. So I think you want to be thinking about it. The reason is, is because if you have a mailing list or if you have a newsletter, you can be posting things like hey, by the way, Christmas is coming up and and if you have us a special photo from your vacation that your your wife or your husband or your partner or your kids or somebody really loved and you want me to do a custom painting for that, now’s the time to engage me to do that. So it’s ready and dry and varnished and framed by Christmas. And here’s the deadline to get that stuff in and you’ll you’ll remarkably sell a lot of people that’s also true for commissioned portraits. So now is the time to be reaching out. The other thing is now’s the time to be planning start planning your new year. I like to get it planned at least by the fourth quarter but now’s the time to be thinking about what you want to accomplish things like that. But you know holiday planning is great but there’s also keep in mind that people have birthdays, any excuse you have to get out their Mother’s Day. You know people are thinking about what can I get my mom and a beautiful painting or a beautiful drawing or a beautiful photograph or piece of art ceramics whatever you know get them thinking about that way in advance on Mother’s Day not too far in advance but if you’re doing Commission’s yes you’re doing family Commission’s family portrait commissions you gotta have some advanced time but every holiday is an excuse but don’t do it the day before holiday do it you know in time to order in time to come by the studio you know and do do holiday shows you know pick pick the holidays that are most likely for gifts like you know you could do a studio tour Valentine’s Day studio tour get involved in studio tours for Christmas. Those are around Thanksgiving and you know there’s a lot of things like that you can and should be doing so I think plan in advance for gift Commission’s especially and I think that will serve you well. I think that will help. I hope that helps. Anyway, that’s been 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.

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

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.

 

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