Branding Your Creative Business: Social Media For Your Business

1. Introduction: Hello and welcome to Branding Your Creative Business. This part is all about social media for your business. For those of you who are new to my classes, my name is Faye Brown and I'm a designer and animator based in the UK. I also run an Etsy shop called Miss Printables. In this class, we will be looking at some of the main social media networks you should be thinking about having a presence on. We will also look at some other avenues for promoting your business. Along the way, there will be a few project steps that are going to help you create your social media plan, and I regularly check in on all the projects you guys are posting. So if you are wanting some advice or feedback, please do use that feature. You might be joining this course having taken the previous parts of this series. In part one, we looked at defining your business and target market. In part two, that was all about designing your logo. Part three, we looked at everything you need in place to launch your brand from photography to packaging. If you have been with me from part one, you will now be more than ready for this class, no doubt. If you're new to my classes, then massive hello. If you think any of the previous classes will also help you with your own business, then please do check them out. I'm very excited about this class as I think it's a class I really needed when I first started my Etsy shop selling principles. Hopefully, you guys will find it useful and you can take your business to the next level. If you want to keep in touch along the way, you can join our Facebook group as well, which is www. facebook.com/group/brandingyourcreativebusiness. We're ready to go. 2. Facebook: Master Facebook for your business is an art in itself, and Facebook regularly changes how it allows people to see your posts. For instance, I have over 1000 followers on my miss printables page, but due to the way Facebook algorithms work, sometimes my posts are only seen by seven percent of my followers. I'll try to give you some quick tips on how to make the most of your Facebook following. But bear in mind there's full courses on Facebook marketing and I wouldn't say I've mastered it completely yet, but I have learned a few things along the way. So let's start with the appearance of your page. Once you've set up a business page, you have to make this page look like part of your brand. You have the chance to upload a cover photo that sits at the top of your page, and that is 851 by 315 pixels. Also, allow a 64 pixel, no text area at the bottom where the buttons and the text is overlaid. So try to design an image that fits exactly as this shows you've taken the time to really think about your page. If you upload a photo that's smaller, sometimes Facebook won't accept it, other times it might blur out and quality might look poor. What could you choose to be there? You could choose to have a product as your cover picture or a photograph or a design. You can think about changing this may be once a month to highlight a new product or just to keep your page fresh. You have a spot here also for your profile pic. So maybe a logo or a photo of yourself depending on the nature of your business. You can upload this at 180 pixels square. I'll also include a PDF in the resources so you can refer back to all these sizes. Another useful exercise is to check how your cover photo looks on mobile devices. Facebook has over 1 billion users, and one third of them only ever look at Facebook on their phones or devices. So this is an important aspect to consider. Once you've set up your page, you want to start attracting followers and page likes. Firstly, get your friends to like your page. Ask them to tell their friends and this will help you get started with some quality likes. I use the term quality likes as you can by page likes. People often do this to make themselves look popular or established. Personally, I discourage you to do this. This likes, often fake profiles. These people will never become a customer or client of yours. They are probably not interested in your business at all as if they are real. So let's think about the numbers. Say you have 100 genuine followers and you pay for 900. Let's say you post something up and 100 people see your post, is highly likely that only a few of your genuine likers actually see your post. So the people who are actually interested in your product don't get to see your updates. One sale from 100 likers is better than no sale from 1,000 likers. So try not to get too hung up on the numbers and think quality not quantity. You only want people who genuinely like your business to like your page. They will be your potential customers and clients. So now we're going to get some tips from an expert. I spoke to Jen Whitman of Jens Little T about her top tips for gaining real, genuine followers who go on to buy your products. Jen grew her Facebook following from 600 to 10,000 in just over two years. She now makes a living purely from [inaudible] , mostly thanks to her loyal customer she built up free Facebook and setting up a shop. So here are her top five tips for gaining a following that leads to sales. Continuously show new products, or variations of existing collections or products. It's hard for potential customers to engage and want to order when only one variation is given. Jen is pretty prolific at coming up with new products. She has diversified firm selling just a few products like prints and pocket mirrors to now sell personalized notebooks, mugs, stickers, etc. By continuously offering her customer something new, they are more likely to come back for more. Tip 2, share reviews, show potential customers what past customers think of your products. Whether that be on a website selling platform, or Facebook. A review section is your friend. I have to admit I haven't utilized this option while on Facebook myself. I had some nice reviews on my Etsy shop and they really do matter. I often look at reviews before I buy from someone. So don't be afraid to share this information. Think about how you sign up to online courses. Are you more attracted to the ones that have lots of good reviews? So tip number 3, you create an air of professionalism with your branding and photography. Consistency is key. A good logo, Facebook banner and image uploads can be the deciding point for whether a customer decides to order from you or the other page. So we have obviously spoke about this a lot through the whole course, from part 1 to this one which is part 3. But this really shows the power of good consistent branding. Tip 4, be friendly, especially when networking. There is an abundance of networking pages on Facebook and Twitter that openly willing to share your products and services. They will do so if they see you helping out other businesses and offering your services. So I've been a friend and following Jen for a good few years now and she's always popping up on social media, whether to reply to people asking for advice or recommending another friends work. Jen is really good at this and it's paid off for her. She's also very natural at it, never fails for. She genuinely enjoys interacting and meeting people online. Remember Facebook is perhaps the biggest social network and it's called a social network for a reason. If you aren't very social, maybe look into one of the other options that aren't as personal as Facebook. Tip number 5, be clear and concise with your prices. Create a price list if possible, make it available for all to see. Do not undesire your products, cheaper is often seen as lower in quality. Customers are more likely to come to you. If you know your products, know your prices and can show quality products for that price, where possible, add prices to your photographs. Lots of Jen's friends, but she told me that they've been put off by Facebook business is not listing prices when sharing products. So try not to make the customer ask, have to ask too many questions. So take this points and keep coming back to them. Jen has worked on this for a few years and she really doesn't know her stuff. There were also a few other ways to increase your following. Here's a few we can discuss briefly. So offer a giveaway. People might need to like and comment on your post. Enter, for instance, maybe they will even share your post in their news feed and you'll start attracting their friends. This can then grow and grow. You could say, "Once I get to 500 followers I'll be holding a competition." This encourages your existing followers to share your page. Team up with another page for a giveaway. Hopefully this way you'll attract their followers to your page and vice versa. I've actually done this with Jen Little T, and gained 200 followers in a few days once. Ask questions, posts with more likes or comments, get more views and can show up in news feeds. Try to start a conversation with your followers, be friendly and not overly professional corporate on Facebook, it's a social network. People are mostly there to chat. So for instance, this question, asking for how upon a variation of a design for teachers got 12 people commenting and my views for that post went up 300 percent compared to my average and 453 people saw that post, which is quite a high percentage of people that actually like my page. Yeah, now we can see the statistics and Facebook is also great for giving you those stats. So you can really see what's working and what's not on your page and posts. The next one is offer a freebie. Maybe a free e-book, a free printable or free tutorial video link, anything your followers might like to share and talk about with friends. Facebook ads. Some people have a lot of success paying for Facebook ads. I've often done it myself, but not had that much success with click-throughs. You can target an audience with pages they like. I'd say, maybe start experimenting with a few $ and see if you have much success. As your business grows, maybe you could invest more. If you fail, it's an avenue that will help your business in sales. I think it also depends on the price point of your products. If you're selling, like an online course for $100, for one sign up, pay in maybe $50-$60 for Facebook ad will probably be better value than for people that are selling $4 products, for instance. So to use Facebook ads, just use the boost post button once you've written a post and then that will go through all the details you can add and try and target your audience there as well. Then don't just sell,sell, sell. Try to get to know your followers. They won't want to constantly see posts of you selling to them. Maybe post links to articles you think they will find interesting. Try to become their go-to place for information on your specialized subject. Maybe you have a blog and you use Facebook to post links to interesting articles you've written on a particular subject. These type of post might encourage people to share your link and more people here of your business and page. As a side note, think about ways you can attract a different customer. Say your main business is selling knitted hats. Maybe you could also try to attract fellow knitters, but those that like to follow patents. So you could look at selling patents too. Or if you're a wedding photographer, get connected with other local photographers. Maybe you can build up a relationship where if one of you has already booked for wedding on a specific date, you could recommend each other. So that's your introduction to Facebook. Once you've set up your Facebook page or maybe you already have one, why not share it with us in the project gallery? I'm sure we'd all love to visit each others and like each other's pages. We will now in the next video, look at Twitter. 3. Twitter: Twitter is an instant news feed where you can follow people and use hashtags to joining conversations and trends. It's real-time, so as soon as you tweet your tweet will move down the timeline as soon as someone else you follow does a tweet themselves. That's why it's important to become involved in conversations or social hours on Twitter because otherwise your posts will get lost. How can you say what you want to say in 140 characters? That's your limit on Twitter, and that's the challenge. It's great for really getting to the point. You can add external links to shops, websites or blogs, and also post photos too. You can mention other people using the @ symbol before their username and this might spark a conversation with them or just start showing your support for someone. That's not to say Beyonce will start chatting back with you but it's a great way to get to know people in your industry, and it's a good way to start making friends in a similar business who may champion you or retweet your posts to their followers. I've heard it's good to use the 80-20 principle on Twitter, 80 percent of what you post should be interacting with other people, offering advice, retweeting other posts, or commenting on their conversation tweet, 20 percent can be more about the sales, getting people to buy your product or service. As with most social media, Twitter needs some good quality care time and attention to really build relationships. I often find myself going through phases of using Twitter. I haven't really used it that much from the Miss Printables shop, I've had more success as Faber Designs on there. I used to take part in a local hour called hashtag HampshireHour. I would advise you to use the hashtag, it's how people search for tweets. You might have tweeted one hour ago, there's no way a person will find your tweet again unless they either follow you and specifically go to your page which is unlikely, or you've used a hashtag they regularly search for. I live in the county of Hampshire in England, and every Tuesday night for one hour local businesses would chat, promote themselves using the HampshireHour, hashtag. I actually had some success with this and landed a branding job through a contact I made on there. I've also done an animation job through a contact I made in that hour, so it can work but it needs time to build up relationships. My advice would be to find out if there is similar hours for your industries. Hashtag weddinghour is a big one for example, great place to promote anything you do relating to weddings. Posts with photos get more interaction too. Think about what you can post, not just your products. Remember, people love to see behind the scenes or work in progress photos. Now in terms of your page design, you can get a cover image and your profile pic here. The cover image can be uploaded at 1,500 by 500 pixels. The logo can be uploaded at 400 pixels square, although it displays at 240 pixels square. Remember the little avatar at its smallest it's only 73 pixels square, so whatever you put in there needs to be recognizable at that size, whether it's your logo, an element of your logo, an image of you or products, make it clear and easy to see. Or you could try a different trick of making avatar look intriguing, and people simply must click on your name to see that image bigger. Try to make your landing page look like part of your brand. Avoid using a generic Twitter background, for instance. Potential new followers will click on your name if they're interested in following you, so you want this page to look on brand, on message and attract your ideal customer. Write something in the description box, include a link to your website, use all these areas that you possibly can for communicating your brand message. Also consider again how your page looks on a mobile device. For instance, you can see the logo and text covers most of the cover image on this phone. If you had a lot of text on your cover image, this will start to look messy on a phone. I'd love it if you are already on Twitter to share your handles. That's the @ symbol followed by your twitter name for newbies. Also share your experience of Twitter, or give me a shout out @fayebrowndesign and I'll say hi. I wouldn't say I absolutely love Twitter, but I know people that do. It's great if you have other content to attract people to like blog posts. There are people who have built a really good following that absolutely you can convert to sales. Also for all you crafty people I will share some useful hashtags and people to follow in the discussion section of this class. I've had the most success on Twitter when I've really devoted the time to get involved with the social hours and conversations. Maybe try starting out with devoting yourself to one hour a week to get started with it and see where it takes you. See if you enjoy it, and then try to hit in a few times a day using specific hashtags related to your business. You can easily go onto Google and type in Twitter hashtags to use for my jewelry business, for instance, and you'll get posts recommending some popular tags. I hope that helps your little introduction to Twitter. Please do share your experiences in the project class. In the next video we will be looking at a relatively new site in to the social media scene, which is Pinterest. 4. Pinterest: Pinterest is a fabulous social network and it's all about the image and the visual experience. You can pin imagery and links directly from the Internet, upload your own images to pin or repin from people you follow, and add those pins to your own curated boards. Those who have taken the previous two classes with me will probably already be familiar with Pinterest when we created our new boards. I'm guessing most of your businesses are selling something visual, and for that, it's a network you really don't want to ignore. Statistics have shown that people come to Pinterest for inspiration on what to buy. Note, that's very different to Facebook. Most people don't open up Facebook with the prime reason to buy something. How can you use Pinterest to? One, get your business brand recognized and two, get sales for your product or service. I'm actually going to tell you a story about something I pinned and what I did totally wrong. In my Etsy shop misprint post, I listed some make your own Christmas gift boxes. Social, how can we promote these little babies? I know. I'll offer some free blank box templates because offering something for free is good and that's not where I went wrong. I pinned a link from my misprint post block to Pinterest. This image has now had 273 pins in six months. The post on my blog has been visited over 22,000 times. The link to actually download the blank templates has been clicked on over 7,500 times. This is all sounding like a big success. Well, I might have got few sales from this by certainly haven't sold that many boxes. What else could I have done? I never thought this would be such a big hit. If I'd really thought about this, I should have set up an option to subscribe to a newsletter before you can download the templates. I probably would have lost a few people at this point, but even if 25 percent of this slot had signed up, I would now have almost 2,000 people's e-mail addresses, and we will talk more about newsletters later. This was a wasted opportunity on my part. My main goal was to attract people to the actual product, but I forgot about what else I could gain from offering a freebie. It's now lost, I included my logo on this graphic and that will also help with the build a brand recognition. What's my point? My point is, think about how you can use Pinterest to not only sell your products directly or offer freebies, but how you can actually start building an e-mail list, or maybe divert and traffic to your blog is your main intention. Remember, it's not all sell. Try to give your followers helpful advice too. So we will now look at some of what the top pins are on Pinterest. Starting with infographics. What could you create an infographic for? Infographics are huge on Pinterest and get some of the most repins. What's your area of interest that you could share? Include your web address, logo, and any graphics to help spread the word about your business. Lists, checklists, and top tens. This graphic here, this design was created by layer form. This clicks for you to a blog post on their site all about ways to stay creative. Then you'll also have the option to buy this post as a pin. Maybe you could do a top 10 typefaces to use on wedding stationary or if you're a life coach, maybe a top 10 ways to reach your goals. Something that relates to your product or service. You could write a post on your blog including a nice graphic that you then pinned Pinterest. This will link directly to your blog and when people click on it so it's also good practice to include a link to your website in the description box. The description box on Pinterest is important, it helps when people do searches for keywords. Make sure any keywords that you might use to search for this, you've included in that description somewhere. But also include a web address on the graphic itself in case it gets saved off and then pinned or shared by someone else entirely. You don't want to lose all your recognition for creating it. Tutorials: what can you teach people? A craft, a kid's art and craft product? The Hawaii tips, photography tips, how to knit. Maybe consider uploading videos to YouTube and posting these on Pinterest. You can pin videos. We will talk more about YouTube later. Also images that have call to action, like click here, gets more engagement too. So bear that in mind when creating any graphics. Quotes and inspirational messages, so this is pretty big on Pinterest for repins. But don't just pin them for the sake of it, think about how it enhances your brand message or maybe your designer who is linking through to an image that you sell. This print links back to the designers society6, shop, fiddle, and spoon. So it's not just about repinning, think about what original content you can create to become paint yourself and spread the word about your brand. There's apps and sites that can help you with the graphics too, like Instagram, PicMonkey, and Canva. My best advice with getting started on Pinterest is to start following people you like in your industry and get a feel for what they're doing and using Pinterest for. This will suit some businesses more than others. The majority, 70 percent of Pinterest users are women. Some might say that it's not the right network for targeting men. But don't forget, 30 percent of the users are still men. That's still a high percent actually and it's growing, so don't discount it. My second piece of advice or warning is Pinterest is very addictive and you'll find yourself getting lost pinning. If you want to keep your page looking professional, be careful here. I'll be the first to admit that I repin all the time much more than I post original content directly for me, which is probably the wrong way to do it. But when I started using Pinterest, I didn't think about how to use it for a business. It was purely another site or app that I enjoyed using. If you are new to Pinterest, maybe think about how you can use it to come up with a strategy before repinning everything that's already on that. If you're already using Pinterest for your business, then share your stories in the project gallery. Maybe upload some pictures of your boards. As part of your project steps, I would need to create one piece of original content to share based on the lists that we've just gone through and upload it to your project. An infographic, a list, a tutorial, or a quote. Or if you have another idea, go with that. Just create one piece of original content, start you on your way. Maybe it's part of a blog post or a link to something for sale in your shop. So rather than a quote, maybe it's a piece of artwork of a design. You can all also post this to your Facebook and Twitter pages. Share your links plus any imagery you create in the project gallery. Then we'll move on to Instagram in the next video. 5. Instagram: Instagram. The last of the social networks in our main spotlights is Instagram. Now, Instagram is a place where people post pictures with short stories or messages and anyone can see these images, especially by searching through hashtags, so people might then choose to follow you. It's like Twitter, so the feed gets updated with the latest posts and not all your followers will see your posts unless they specifically click through to your page. Now Instagram has 30 million monthly users and 70 percent of those check in daily. There is a lot people out there to potentially reach. Can you start on Instagram, you need to upload a profile pic. I'd probably advise you to keep this to one you're using on similar other networks like Facebook or Twitter, either your logo or your profile photo if your business is more about you as an individual. Then you need to set up a short bio as well. Now keep this brief, but be sure to include any info you need, and at the moment, I'm promoting this Skillshare course so I've included a link to that in my bio. If you are a physical shop, you can include opening times, addresses, phone numbers, etc. Otherwise, go with a brief description of who you are and what you do, your website URL, you only get one web link, by the way. Think of this as your way of saying hello to new followers. You want to describe what you do, a bit briefly and on point. Then what should you upload? Think about the first impression someone might have when clicking on your username. Are you someone they'd want to follow? Is there consistency to your posts? Do your photos look like they belong to you? There are some real beautiful Instagram accounts where you can totally see that each post is thought about in detail, and it all looks like part of the same brand and business. It is worth going through similar people that you might want to follow and see what they post each day. Other things that you might want to consider if you're an artist, a baker or jewelry maker or something similar. People like to see behind the scenes shots. A story behind your products, show your work in progress. You can treat this like a mini blog. In fact, many people do and they are actually moving away from blogging a little bit now. People also like to see sneak peeks at new products too, so you can do some crop photos of new photos coming up. Think about how your page looks when people will click on your name. Does it look interesting and on-brand? Here's some really creative Instagram users and great looking pages. Times in Seed from Studio Seed has a very defined color palette throughout her brand. She carries out through with her Instagram account. Also notice to make her page look consistent. She's chosen to not use any frames around her photos. Adidas Originals use a fun technique of uploading a few photos to make a large picture. This can work out well, but remember, the next time you upload one image, all the others will be knocked out of sequence. But you could look into doing photo montages every now and again for little bit fun. The other technique is finding a niche and sticking with it. Ida Frosk is a fabulous food artists with a massive following on Instagram. She now even has a book published full of her creations. One of the biggest Instagram stars is Murad Osmann, with over 2.5 million followers. He took photos of his girlfriend on their travels and adventures together whilst holding onto his hand behind. Recently they got married and has even one from their wedding day. They've also released a book, [inaudible] photos. This idea captivated people and it has gained a massive following. Now just take a little step back and think about your business. What imagery would you post? Is there a slightly different angle that you could come from to enhance your brand? Then think about how you can go about getting new followers. A lot of this involves the art of the hashtag. I recently took part in a 100-day art challenged to create some new art every day. I just decided to focus on some hand lettering as I needed to practice in that area. I would use a bunch of popular hashtags that a lot of hand letters and topographies use. You can mention popular accounts if it's relevant to what you do as well. So today's type and type matters often regram people's topography related posts, for instance. To find out what hashtags are relevant to your business. Again, find people that are similar in a similar industry to you. What they're doing well on Instagram and see what they are hash tagging and all just try typing in something and see if it's popular. Also don't dismiss Google searches. I literally just typed in top hashtags for the fitness industry and a whole blog posts come up dedicated to it. Other ways to find new followers include offering contests and giveaways. Ask people to regram your image, comment and like it to be in with a chance to win. Maybe tag someone they might think we'd like to join in with any luck that person might start following you too. You've really got become involved. Comment on other people's posts, try to start conversations with people you admire or like, share your friends work. The top left image here with some lovely goodies I received from Casey Clemens, who most of you will be familiar with from the previous courses. I took a photo and tagged her in the comments to thank her. This is a nice way of sharing another friends account with your followers. In terms of editing your photos. I should probably talk a little bit about photography first. Now, you can either choose to take photos with your smartphone or you could use a more professional camera and then prep for Instagram. If your business is photography, you will probably want to show off your best photos from using your high-end cameras. You might also want to avoid over processing them too much with various apps. Remember when taking photos, try to make them interesting. Don't have loads of junk in the background that distracts from what you're trying to show off. Set up your scene. You can use a few props like pens or materials you used to draw if you're taking photographs of some art for instance. I tend to mix this up a little. But there are a few apps that are really good for quickly polishing up smartphone photos. Some of the best ones are, Visco, Snapseed, Faded, and Afterlight. These range from free to costing a little bit. It's worth having to play with these and finding out what you might be suited to for your brand. Then as you can get to know them, you can start to treat all your photos in a similar way for consistency. You could decide to just go with the Instagram basics too. In terms of frames, arrange images, I'd say either used them or don't use them. I'm guilty of not keeping this consistent. Whenever I see a page that has either gone for no frames or maybe all white frames. I think they look really good. Let's just recap. Work out how to use Instagram for your brand and what you could post to gain a following and be consistent in your content and imagery style. Spend time on your bio and profile pic. It's what people will see first when they click through to your page. Engage, by this I mean, get involved with the hashtags, challenges, comment on people's photos, tag people offer giveaways and do contests, etc. We have a new project step now. I want you to take one photo that sums up your brand, your products or your services, and post it in the project gallery and I will be checking in and giving my first impressions of what your photo is telling us about your brand. Everyone else can join in with this too. I'm sure there will be some interesting results. Post up your Instagram accounts too so anyone can starting following and supporting each other. Mine is Faye Brown Designs, as you can see. Instagram was the last in our main social media focus videos. In the next video we will look briefly at some others. Also really important to keep your eye on. 6. A few more...: There are so many apps on platforms we can all get involve with these days. It's pretty impossible to keep up with each one, but just wanted to talk a little more about three of these that you would probably want to consider for your business; LinkedIn, Periscope and YouTube. LinkedIn is often seen as a social website for more corporate business types, but it's definitely worth getting yourselves on there with a profile and making connections. You can update your skills, get recommendations, find jobs, join relevant groups in line with your industries, and update statuses to talk about recent projects or new product launches. People can endorse you for skills too. It's not really the place for chit chat. It has a slightly more serious tone compared to say Facebook. I joined LinkedIn very early on, I don't look on it often, but I do find it very useful for keeping in touch with past colleagues and clients that I'm maybe not friends with on Facebook. I know people in more corporate careers use LinkedIn very regularly and prefer it over Facebook and other social media sites. Periscope, this is the new kid on the block. Periscope was launched in March 2015. Twitter bought it before it was even launched. At this point, it's difficult to say whether it's the next big thing in social media, but I think it probably will be, basically you can live stream video to literally everyone. People can follow you and comment on videos live, you can really start interacting. Your video is then deleted after 24 hours. How can you use this for your business? Again, it's time to get creative. If you do tutorials, you could schedule some live sessions. Truly for the purposes of this class, I decided I best give Periscope a try. Boy, was I nervous. You think I'd be quite used to talking in front of a camera. My first Periscope was pretty bad. I could feel myself going red and had no clue what to talk about. As I was expecting people to ask me questions but hadn't turned a certain button on and it was pretty bad. I'm now trying to do one each week and talking about different area of design or branding. It's early days, but I'll keep you up to date with how I do. If you want to follow me, I'm @fayebrowndesign, by the way. If you're into fashion and attend like fashion shows, a live feed to Periscope would probably go down really well, or maybe your painter, a lot people would find it fascinating watching you work. You need to work out if you want to use it to gain a following or direct people to your product or service somehow. Maybe it's a bit of both. I've been talking about branding and running businesses, and then directing people to my class, for example. Even if he can't quite work out how to use it yet, my advice is to secure your brand name now. Even if you never use periscope, securing your name earlier on means that, two years down the line, you don't have to worry about getting a username that works for you. In fact, I'd advise you to do this on all social media channels, asap. YouTube. YouTube is massive, so why am I not dedicate a whole video to it? Firstly, I'm not experienced enough to tell you all about it, and secondly, video might not be relevant to your businesses yet. How might you use YouTube? You could set up a channel, people can subscribe to your channel and you can gain a big following. Say for instance, I could post up many tutorials on there for free and then direct people to my online classes. I haven't done this, I probably should. Or you could approach it differently, and go for making money through sponsorship and YouTube adverts. If you get big following and lots of views, makeup tutorials, for example, can be a big hit. This makeup artist has over three million subscribers to her channel, and over 8.5 million has watched this one video alone. If you can utilize YouTube for your business, do it. Maybe you make jewelry, you could also do tutorials about making the jewelry, it's all good exposure and YouTube video show up in Google searches as well. You can also embed videos into blog posts. As part of your projects, steps, share at least one idea on how you could make videos relating to your business. Just for fun. A Video is big business these days. Video post get more views on Facebook, Instagram has a video feature, now too. Maybe some of your fellow students will have a good idea for you if you are getting a bit stuck. Think about how you can use video for either Periscope, Instagram, or YouTube, and let us know in your project steps, if you're feeling really brave, why not actually do a video and post it in the project gallery? There are lots of other useful apps and sites to get noticed on and gain a following. I'm just going to click out of here for a minute and show you Behance. A lot of designers, illustrators, and photographers, you might want to consider uploading a portfolio to Behance. My husband is an art director and he often searches on here for illustrators with a specific style, for example. You can go into the different categories, and then let's click on this one. This guy, he's got some really awesome illustrations. That might be perfect. Someone could be looking for something and that is exactly the style I need for this job. I'm going to get in touch with this guy right now, and all you have to do is use these buttons up here. You can start following people. Yeah, it's a great way to get seen. I would love it if you could share any actual sites that you're already using regularly and let us know how you find them. 7. Blogging: So a lot of you will already be blogging or thinking about starting a blog that relates to your business. There's a lot of conflicting advice about blogging. Some people say that blogging is hard this day, or there's too many blogs now that you're never going to get found or people don't like to read so much and prefer their reading limited, so say, 140 characters on Twitter. Having said that, there's still a lot of people having huge success via their blogs. I think if you are totally new to blogging, you need to work out what you want to achieve from your blog and be clever in gaining followers by using social media, for instance. The other benefits to blogging is that it can help with your SEO and chances of showing up in Google searches. Depending on your subject matter, of course, you can make money through advertising if your blog becomes popular and it's a good way to keep in touch with followers. Basically, blogging isn't for everyone. Personally, I find it hard keeping up with writing my blog posts regularly. Not so much when I was working full time as I could plan out my time a little better. But working part-time around young family, I found carving out time to write blog posts hard and my blog has been neglected a little, I would say. However, I'm not saying that blogging isn't worth the effort and if you particularly enjoy writing, it can be a fabulous thing to do on a personal level and business side. If you want to use a blog to focus more on a business level, think about how you can use it to A, gain a following, and B, convert the content to direct people to buy or use your products or services. So think about the example I showed you in the Pinterest video, where I directed people from Pinterest to download my box templates from my Misprintables blog. This post has now had nearly 30,000 views. If I could keep that level of viewing up across my blog and posts, I could do pretty well with advertising revenue. Unfortunately, the post wasn't that successful in making people actually buy the main boxes that I wanted them to buy from my Etsy shop. So think about what you like to read online. I'm a bit of a sucker for lists. So maybe you do a blog post on the 10 best logos that have a hidden message and at the end is that blog post, you could direct people to your design services or your tutorials on designing logos, for example. Or if you are a wedding photography, you could do a post on the top five photos you must have on your wedding day. So try to think of posts that people will find useful, as well as update posts on what you do or what you've been up to. You can also create a nice intrographic to your posts that you could then link through to Pinterest, or Twitter, for example. Think about the images you click on Pinterest yourself. What makes you click through to read a blog post about something? So if it was like the top five wedding photos, you probably have the title on your graphic and some of the stunning photos that would draw your attention to that image. So if you're finding yourselves getting a bit short of interesting social media posts as well, a link to a blog article can be really useful. From a technical aspect, you have a good few choices on what platform to hold your blog on. WordPress is perhaps the most popular. You can buy hundreds of WordPress themes. By themes, I mean, the templates and the layouts. You can also get a lot for free. You can also use sites like Blogger and Tumblr. A lot of the websites like Squarespace and Dunked have a built-in blog option now too. If you're serious about blogging, you'll probably want to invest in a template that really does work for you and your brand. Remember, the other aspect about blogging is making sure that it's all visually consistent with the rest of your brands. So make sure you use everything we've learned and created previously from the other classes, your product photography, your visual brand elements, your color scheme, and typefaces. Everything you put out there needs to look like it's part of your brand family. If you're just joining us in this class and having not taken parts 1-3 on brand in your creative business, please do check them out if you're in anyway confused about your brand message. So in the project gallery, why not share a screenshot or a link to any blogs you already have? Or if you're about to start, let us know what you're going to be using your blog for. In the next video, we're going to talk a little bit about press and publicity as well. I'll see you in the next video. Bye. 8. Press & Publicity: So you've done all you can now to get your businesses and brands setup, launched, and present on social media. If you've been on this journey since Part 1 of Branding Your Creative Business, then seriously, congratulations. It's been a lot of work and now you're ready to take your business to the next level. You might find that you get to the point where all your friends and social networking circles have liked your pages and accounts and let's be honest, they might not be your target audience anyway. But now it's time to start thinking of new ways to attract customers and clients. That's what we will talk about in this lesson on publicity and press. We will talk about ways of getting more exposure for your business and brand. So let's dive in. Obviously, we've already spoken about a few ways to market your business on social media sites like getting them published here on Pinterest and giveaways on Facebook and Instagram, etc. Now let's look at some other avenues worth taking. Newsletters. Most business experts say getting an e-mail list for potential customers is the absolute best way of getting in touch with your followers. You can't argue, when a Facebook post sometimes may reach 70 percent of your likers, an e-mail newsletter is almost guaranteed to reach the recipient. They can then choose whether to read it or not, of course. Some key points to newsletter etiquette are, don't annoy people. When people sign up to your newsletter, maybe say you will receive a weekly or a monthly newsletter or give them the option. Personally I tend to ignore the ones I get every two days and I often unsubscribe as I find it a bit too much and they just fill up my inbox. Never e-mail people without permission. Never add people to your e- mail list without their permission. They have the option to obtain, just because you have their e-mail list doesn't mean you should stop sending them newsletters. You could send them a personal e-mail saying, "Hey, I've now got a newsletter. If you felt like signing up, please click here." Engage people. Give them value. The key point we spoke about a lot in this course is making sure you're adding value to people's lives. They want to read your newsletter. You need to make it interesting, maybe a link to a blog post, or for a freebie or a discount code. Attract your target market to sign up. We've spoken about a few ways to get sign-ups, usually some give away, whether that's a free printable downloadable file, a free e-book, free short-course or a competition to win something more physical like a product of yours. Remember, you're on your way to win potential customers on your list. Having 10,000 subscribers who will never buy from you isn't good, but 500 subscribers who are highly likely to buy from you is pretty awesome. Then keep track. You got to find out what's working and what's not. Make some notes on what elements of your newsletters convert to sales, what works, what doesn't, who's buying, etc. You can sell newsletters unless with the help from places like mailchimp. There's a Scotia class dedicated to it, I think. Then let's move on to blogs. Other forms of publicity include guest blogging or being featured on some top blogs relevant to your business. Start following blogs and people you admire and would eventually love to team up with. Start building relationship with them and then pitch to them how you can team up for a guest blog or a competition to win something you create. Alternatively, you could pay to be featured depending on your budget on the blog, but my advice is to try and get free publicity first and see how you do. When you make contact with anyone, make it personal. Don't copy and paste a generic letter. Address them by their name why you like their blog, maybe pick out a post you really enjoyed. As I've said before, getting exposure on a big name blog can really help your sales. When one of my products was featured on an Australian site, babyology, my sales went up 70 percent that month. Paying for adverts. Yes, you can pay for various forms of advertising and promoting whether that's on Facebook, Etsy, Google ads or on individual blogs or magazines. Start small and track your results to see what's working. Don't discount paying for publicity, but equally don't spent a fortune upfront as it might not pay off. Magazines. I think we would probably all have to be featured in a magazine. So make sure you're targeting the right magazines and publications relevant to your business and that's obviously key. I want you to write down three magazines or publications you would love to be featured in, whether you are trying to promote a product or a service. Exposure in a magazine can do wonders. Why not pick three slightly different magazines? Obviously, this depends on your business, but you could think of one that's more local to your town or city, then one say for your state, region or county, and then maybe go for one national. When you get in touch, make sure you found the name and position of who to contact. Can you offer the regions and exclusive discount or offer? Can you send them a sample? Send them professional photos is an absolute must. So like we spoke about in Part 3 of this course, launching your brand, if you're selling a product, a photo and a clean white background is desirable for magazine picture editors. If you sell a service like coaching or online courses, you could contact a magazine with a different angle. Maybe you have a really interesting backstory to how you've been inspired to do what you do. So rather than just trying to promote your business, your story might be inspiring to others. So find your angle. Maybe you could write a guest feature with a little promotional paragraph and directing people to your website. Maybe a magazine would like to interview you, that could work well. The other route to consider with magazines and blogs for that matter is to get featured in a holiday gift guide or special features lets say, Mother's Day or Thanks Given. You need to think way ahead. A magazine feature editor start thinking about Christmas in June and July, for example, if not earlier, even. So don't leave things to the last minute. Blog writers don't need to worry so much about print deadlines, so you have a little bit more time with them. Then finally, flyers and cards. You could think about promoting yourself offline, 20 flyers and business cards and try to get them in relevant places for your business. You could offer a discount code on the flyer so you can keep track of their success. I know this has been a relatively brief introduction to getting publicity for your business, but we are now going to complete two projects steps and it would be awesome if you could join in with this. Share with us three publications your planning to contact, either magazines or blog. Make sure they are perfect for your brand and target market, and construct that your pitch to them. Make it personal and a unique offering for each publication. Send your professional photos. Share with us who you are contacting and what response you get. By the way, as keen as you would want to be, try not to hustle people. Send your pitch and chase up after a week. If you don't hit back, try contacting them again with a slightly different offering a month or two later. But don't ever be rude. Sometimes you just won't hit back. People are busy and you don't want to burn any purchase. Two, share with us one of the way you promoted your business, and whether you had a success with that or not. By now, your head might be spinning a little with everything you could do to promote your business. Remember, you don't have to do it all at once, take one step at a time. The next quick video is about scheduling your time, which might help some of you if you're feeling that there's just not enough hours in the day. 9. Scheduling your week: I wanted to do a quick little video about scheduling your time. I know I've often become a little overwhelmed with doing work for clients and working on my own ventures, meeting deadlines, and also trying to gain a following on various social media and sometimes you can spread yourself a bit too soon and not really do a great job with anything. You might also have other commitments like other jobs families will conduct. If you find yourself in a similar boat, then it's a good idea to start setting yourself a schedule. In the class resources, you can download a weekly timetable divided into three time periods each day. Now, don't feel you have to fill in every single box. This is just a useful exercise to work out what you'd like to do and achieve each week and when you plan to do it. Remember for social media, you can also pre-schedule your posts using apps like Hootsuite. You can almost set up all your posts on one day for a whole week if you wanted to. Perhaps you don't have much time Monday mornings due to other commitments, but you could grab 10 minutes to quickly post to Facebook and Twitter. Setting out a schedule can help you really think about what post to do and when and remember it's not all about selling. You got to try and remember that you're trying to be useful to your customers and clients as well. It's not all about just selling your products or services. Let's say Tuesday mornings you would post a link that's relevant to helping your clients, maybe an external link to something. Tuesday afternoon, you might post a mini video tutorial or a blog post and Tuesday night you'll post a link promoting your product or service. Getting a structure in place will help you plan your week and social interactions. If you're literally just starting your business, I advice you to get bit more comfortable with social media and blogging first. Find out what you're naturally preferring. If you love Instagram, you could focus your energies more on that and just do a few light posts on Facebook each week. Also take a break. It's quite easy to get consumed by your own business. It's healthy to take some time out. It's actually during my time out I end up probably thinking of some of the best ideas that I've had. It's very important to have a bit of time to yourself. By working out a schedule on a weekly basis, you can start making notes on what's working, what posts are getting a lot of views or comments or likes? What products are selling well? What time of the day are most people interacting with your posts? Start noticing what your followers are really responding to and then adapt. Maybe do a weekly review for half an hour every Sunday evening, and then plan your next week around that. I'd love to see how you get on scheduling your week. Why not try it this week and post your schedules in the project gallery and let us know what worked and what didn't. Also for any serious planners and organizers out there, I've posted a bonus freebie that I usually sell in my miss printable shop. Now this is a daily planner and this can really help you plan your day in a lot of detail. As you can see here, it's got every hour of the day and then a few other little boxes are quite useful for taking things off. I hope you find that useful as well and we're nearly at the end of this class now. We just got our little final video, that I hope you've enjoyed it and I'll see you in the next video. 10. Farewell: Okay, guys. I'll keep this short. I'm looking forward to seeing all your projects, and your social media plans, and links to your businesses. Now, honestly, I really do know how overwhelming this whole aspect can be when running your own business. If you are just starting out, I'd recommend trying to focus most of your energy on maybe one or two social media avenues that you seem really more drawn to. Then once you are a little bit more established, you could then start thinking about other ways of promoting your business and other social media routes, so newsletters and everything else we've spoken about. I would love it if you could join in with the Facebook group to keep in touch. I'd like to see how your brands develop. So that is www.facebook.com/groups/brandingyourcreativebusiness. Also, I've loved reading your reviews that you've left on previous classes of mine. I like to know what elements of the classes you've liked or not liked. So please do feel free to leave a review or get in touch. I always try to then implement any suggestions in future courses. If you've been on this journey for all four of the Branding Your Creative Business series, then thanks so much for signing up. I really hope it's helped you clarify what steps to take, and when, and then move forward. Now, don't forget to keep uploading your projects. Please join in and comment on other people's projects too. Don't forget to download your free daily planner as well that you can find in the class files. Hopefully, I will see you again in another class soon. Bye.