Each week, Eric Rhoads answers two art marketing questions from listeners like you during the Marketing Minute Podcast. Browse the marketing minutes here to learn tips on how to sell more art.
Art Marketing Minute Podcast: Episode 129 – Expanded Edition Live from PACE
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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