Long-Term Success for Artists: Grow and Maintain Your Income Streams | Mimi Purnell | Skillshare
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Long-Term Success for Artists: Grow and Maintain Your Income Streams

teacher avatar Mimi Purnell, Illustrator & Content Creator

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      What This Class Is About

      1:27

    • 2.

      Set Yourself Up For Success

      4:09

    • 3.

      Diversify Your Income

      2:41

    • 4.

      Selling Products As An Income Stream

      5:00

    • 5.

      Illustration Work As An Income Stream

      4:47

    • 6.

      Content Creation As An Income Stream

      4:26

    • 7.

      Build A Realistic Timeline

      6:26

    • 8.

      What's Next?

      0:56

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About This Class

If you dream of growing a creative business that is sustainable and successful long-term, then I’m so excited to help you learn the basics of building and maintaining creative income streams in this short class!

We’ll break down some of the most common income categories for artists and how to grow in each of them, I’ll show you the power of diversifying your income, and by the end of this class we’ll have put together a rough timeline of the income streams you want to grow to make sure they’re prioritised in a sustainable way.

We’ll be covering:

  • Setting yourself up for success
  • The power of diversifying your income
  • Selling products as an income stream
  • Illustration work as an income stream
  • Content creation as an income stream, and
  • Building a realistic timeline

I’ve spent nearly four years now developing my art and business skills to become a digital artist, content creator and picture book illustrator, and being realistic about how long my income streams would take to grow was crucial to my success.


I can't wait to help you plan out a sustainable creative business, so download my Long-Term Success For Artists Workbook from the Resources tab and let’s get started!

Learn more from me:

YouTube

Patreon

Etsy

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

Mimi Purnell

Illustrator & Content Creator

Top Teacher

I’m an Aussie girl who likes to illustrate.

I started Mimimoo Illustration as a way to improve my art and share my creative journey. I’ve always loved being creative, but have always struggled to find the motivation or inspiration to create when I don’t have an obvious project or purpose.

So, I started illustrating every Monday through Friday, and shared the inspiration and lessons that I found along the way to give my illustrations purpose. Perhaps you’re also someone who likes to be creative but always finds themselves looking at a blank page thinking ‘but what do I draw?’.

Join me on my little drawing adventure for creativity tips, inspiration and just cute, wholesome illustrations.

See full profile

Level: Beginner

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Transcripts

1. What This Class Is About: Hello, I'm Mimi. I'm a digital artist, picture book illustrator, and content creator. And I've spent nearly four years now building up my small business from scratch. So in this class, I'll help you understand how to build long term success as an artist with a sustainable timeline for growth. Far more powerful than overnight success is the ability to slowly grow and maintain sustainable income with your creative skills. Because those are the foundations that long term success is built on. Today we'll break down some of the most common income categories for artists and how to grow in each of them. I'll show you the power of diversifying your income and by the end of this class, we'll have put together a rough time line of the income streams you want to grow to make sure that they're prioritized in a sustainable way. I've made a work work for this class that you can download from the resources below, which will recap the most important information and provide a space for you to create your own custom timeline for the next three years. In this class we'll be covering setting yourself up for success. The power of diversifying your income. Selling products as an income stream illustration, work as an income stream content creation as an income stream and building a realistic timeline. I'm really excited that you're here and wanting to grow your income as an artist. And I can't wait to help you on that journey, whether you're right at the very beginning or you're already a little way along, get cozy, download the workbook and let's get started. 2. Set Yourself Up For Success: Set yourself up for success. First, I want to talk to you about what it takes to grow a successful, sustainable business from scratch. It actually all starts with you, because you are at the heart of it all. You are so capable of building an income from your art skills. And I want you to tell yourself that often, because you need to believe in yourself first for this business to work. You also get to define what being successful means to you. And you get to define what being sustainable means to you as well. It's really helpful to think early on in your business about what success means for you, because this is your business. And success can be whatever you want to measure, whether it's about money, community, your influence or creativity. Personally, in my business, success is about earning a comfortable income that I can live off. And genuinely helping people with the resources that I make. It's also helpful to think early on about what sustainability looks like to you, because we all have different boundaries of availability, creative energy, and what we can maintain. The way you build your business needs to be something that you can continue doing for months and years. Whether that's having lots of small projects for variety or just one or two main focuses. Maybe for you, it's only about spending a certain amount of time a week on your business because you have lots of other commitments personally in my business. Sustainability is about working a small amount on several projects at a time because I love the variety and get bored easily otherwise. But it's also about not overcommitting to those projects so that I don't work more than four to five days a week. Long term success as an artist is challenging, and there will be times when you do find yourself pushing your limits. But it's really important to prioritize your own mental, physical, and creative health if you want this to work. Because you are at the core of it all, it's crucial that you balance the times where you work a lot with times where you take more rest. If you don't do that, you might find success, but it won't be sustainable to set yourself up for success. You need three things. A plan, realistic expectations, and patience. Number one, a plan planning is important because a goal without a plan is just a wish. And a lot of people get stuck wishing that their dreams will come true if they put their art out in the world without making a plan to get there. If you watch my last class I took you through how to make a plan for your credit business. So hopefully you already have a really good idea of what it is that you want to do. If you don't have a plan yet, you'll want to sit down and map out what it is you want from this business, because that's really important for it to be sustainable. You also want to know who your audience is and what value you're providing them, and then how you're going to reach them. Get clear on what direction you want to take as a small creative business so that you can start taking steps to get there. Number two, realistic expectations. It is really important to have realistic expectations when we set out on our business journeys. That's why today we're going to break down what's required to grow different income streams. And lay out in a timeline roughly how long they'll take to set up your business won't grow overnight. In fact, I think a healthy time frame to look at when you're growing a business is three years. Because that gives you enough time to develop the skills you need. Try a few ideas, make some mistakes. Fail a couple of times and then get back up again. You'll likely be earning an income sooner. And remember, you get to define what success means to you. But it's helpful to go into it with the expectation of giving it three years to be able to achieve what you really want to achieve. Number three patients. I don't mean patients in a sit around and wait for magic to happen way. I mean the patience of showing up consistently for the plans you made, even when growth is slow, good things take time and growth isn't always linear. Have the patience in your creative business to trust the plan you made and to keep showing up for it, because a sustainable business is a marathon, not a sprint. In the next module, I'll show you the power of diversifying your income streams as an artist so that you can have some stability in your earnings. 3. Diversify Your Income: Diversify your income. There are lots of options to earn money as a creative person online, and I'm going to go into more detail on those options in the next modules. But first, I want to show you how powerful it is to diversify your income streams to give yourself more stability If you were to completely focus on one income stream for the next three years, for example, shop, selling physical products, and you grew it to be financially successful and pay you a good living. If something then happened to and customers couldn't shop there anymore, you'd be left without the income you've worked so hard to grow. But if you were to focus on two or three income streams over the same three years, let's say an Etsy shop, a Youtube channel, and a patron, even though they might each grow slower because your energy is being split. If you then lost your Etsy income, you would still have your other two income streams to rely on. It's quite rare for an entire platform to disappear overnight, but it is common for algorithms to change, for customers to shop less on certain platforms for a while, or for people to just be spending less when times are tough. If you want a reliable and sustainable income from your art skills, it's really powerful to diversify where your income comes from. It'll take longer to build several income streams than it will to grow one. But we're thinking long term here. If at the end of three years you can have two, or maybe even more income streams, then you're in a much safer position than having one. I've spent a few years growing my income as an artist and content creator now. And here's a simple breakdown of my income for last year and where it came from. About a third of my income came from my Youtube channel and sponsorships for my videos. About 28% came from my Patriarch community. Just under 20% came from my online shops. Then about 16% came from professional illustration work for children's picture books, and the other few percent were from affiliate marketing and educational classes. You can see that if I removed any one of these income streams completely, I would still have money coming in. And even though a lot of them are connected and losing one might impact others, some of them are still completely separate. You don't need to be as diversified as I am to have a safety net. You might focus 90% of your time on professional illustration clients, but having multiple clients might be the thing that gives you some safety. If you can, I definitely recommend that you diversify your income streams to give you the best chance of long term success. In the next module, we'll start looking at some common income categories for artists and how you can grow and maintain selling products as one of your income streams. 4. Selling Products As An Income Stream: Selling products as an income stream, let's start exploring the most common types of income for artists. The first category that I want to talk to you about is selling products that incorporate your art. These could be physical products or they could be digital. You could have an online shop, or you might sell your products in person at markets. It's probably the first thing that comes to mind for a lot of artists when they think about making money from their art. How can you grow and then maintain long term success selling products as an artist? Stage one, growing to grow this type of income stream. First, you need to create a product. You need to make sure that the products you're selling are something that your target audience really wants. Something that helps them express themselves. Something that helps them achieve a transformation, or there's something that's solving a problem for them. You need to think about what people want to be and how you can help them be that version of themselves. For example, your customer might want to feel really cute and bubbly and express that adorable, vibrant clothes or accessories with your art on it would be a good fit for them. Or your customer might want to express that they love books. Artful book lovers with book quotes would be a good fit for them. Then you need to set up a way for your customers to buy from you, like an online shop or a market store. Then you need to develop a way to really effectively communicate to your target customer the products that you have and why they're perfect for them. For a lot of artists that's using social media to showcase your art and build a relationship with your target customer. Because people are more likely to buy from an artist they feel connected with versus one that they don't. Social media provides a great platform to reach people, but if social media isn't your thing, you can also reach customers in other ways. Like selling on an online marketplace like Etsy, where there are already shoppers searching for what you have to sell. You could have an e mail list and market yourself there, or go to in person market events. There are lots of ways you can build a community and market yourself. And you'll need to use one or a couple of these marketing platforms to be seen by your target customer. Stage two, maintaining. Once you've got a great product and a marketing to your target customer, you'll hopefully start to see some success selling your art products. To maintain that success, you can do two things. One, come out with new products to sell to your previous customers who are already fans. To expand your marketing to reach new customers, just be sure that the ongoing weekly or monthly work required to keep selling your products is sustainable for you beyond the initial excitement of starting it up. Because selling products can be really time consuming, a realistic timeline. Let's think realistically about how long it might take to grow this income stream. I would realistically expect it to take anywhere from three months to 18 months to start seeing some success and stability in sales, depending on how much time you have to invest each week. Let's think about why that is. First, you'll need some art to put on your products. Consider how much art you want to be in your first collection of products and how long that art takes you to make. And then add an extra 20% because everything takes longer than you think. Then you need to make the actual products that might be making art prints, ordering enamel pins of your designs, printing stickers. Whatever your product idea is, try and roughly calculate how long everything will take to make. Then you need to add time for marketing and selling, because you'll probably need to do things like photograph your products, make online shop listings, maybe set up at a market, or build your own website. You'll need to spend some time connecting with your target customer that might be growing an audience on social media, which takes quite a bit of time. Or you might be more direct by selling at a local market. For example, if I wanted to start selling greeting cards and art prints without an audience, I would probably spend about 25 hours making art for my products, another 25 hours testing and printing the products, and probably another 25 hours taking photos and making listings for an Etsy shop. That's two full time weeks before getting to any marketing. Of course, if I only had 2 hours a day available instead of eight, it would take four times as long. I might be able to start making some sales by being found through Ts search engine. But if I wanted sustainability, I'd want to bring my own audience. I'd probably spend six to 12 months posting consistently on social media to build an audience with my target customer. About that point, I would hopefully start to see some sustainable success. Realistically, I would expect it to take anywhere 3-18 months to grow an income from selling art products, depending on how much time you have available and how targeted your products are for your audience. In the next module, we'll take a look at how you can grow and maintain paid illustration work as one of your income streams. 5. Illustration Work As An Income Stream: Illustration work as an income stream. Let's also look at illustration work as an income stream for artists because this is another big one that a lot of artists think of when they want to earn money from their art. I'm talking about working for professional clients to make custom art for things like magazines, children's picture books, or any professional project that requires illustrations. You could probably also consider personal portrait commissions for customers. Part of this income stream, stage one, growing. To grow this income stream, you need to build a portfolio of art in a style that you love and that suits the kind of clients that you want. Consider what your target client might be looking for and make sure that it's visible in your portfolio. For example, if you'd like to illustrate for children's picture books, then create art for your portfolio that showcases what publishers are looking for. Which is often your ability to tell a story through your art. If you want to focus on editorial clients, then create art for your portfolio that showcases your versatility in different subject matters. Consider the style and demographic of the magazines that you want to illustrate for and create art that shows off what a great fit you are for them. If you want to work free lance for Disney, then create art for your portfolio that could fit the Disney style and is in line with their values. Or if you want to draw personal portrait commissions for general customers. Then create a portfolio on social media of what you specialize in, Whether it's pets, people, houses, or something unique to you. Then you need to send your portfolio to potential clients. If you're lucky, you might get some replies, but it's also very common to not hear back the first time. Definitely go into it with the expectation that you might not hear a response. You can always refine and develop your portfolio some more and try sending it again after some more practice. That's why it's also a really good idea to have a more public portfolio of work, like on a website or on social media because that way clients can find you. The publisher of my first children's picture book reached out to me after seeing my art on Instagram, which would never have happened if I hadn't been putting my art out there. You can also consider looking for an agent who will have connections in the industry and help you find paid work, but will also take a percentage of the earnings for each project. Keep working on your portfolio. Keep reaching out to potential clients. And keep posting your art in a public space in case a client is looking for an artist just like you stage two maintaining. Once you've started getting illustration clients, you can then use that professional work to strengthen your portfolio and hopefully get more illustration clients. Always check with the client or your contract about when you're able to put that project in your portfolio before making it public. But definitely show off the projects that you've worked on to help you get more work. Generally, the more professional work that you've done, the easier it is to get new and returning clients. A realistic timeline. Let's think realistically about how long it might take to grow this income stream. I would expect it to realistically take anywhere from six months to 18 months to develop a portfolio and start seeing some success and stability in clients. Let's think about why that is. First, you need to consider the time it will take you to make the art for your portfolio. This is something that you don't want to rush. If you want to build a specific portfolio that's targeted to a certain type of client, then take your time creating pieces for it that you really love. Then you'll want to consider the time it'll take you to actually send out your portfolio once it's ready, and how long it'll take for you to get a response. I think it's healthy and realistic to plan to not hear back when you send out your first portfolio. Because if that's part of the plan from the beginning, then you're already prepared. If it happens, then of course you get to do the fun bit and actually illustrate the project for your new client. For example, if I wanted to start illustrating children's picture books and didn't yet have any portfolio pieces, I'd realistically spend about 50 to 100 hours making art. For the first version of my portfolio, that's a few weeks full time or a few months part time. Then I'd spend probably 20 hours putting the portfolio together, researching where to send it, and writing e mails or submission forms. Then I'd keep on developing my art, submitting portfolios, and sharing my work on social media until I found the right client at the right time with the right art. If you're wanting to grow professional illustration work as an income stream, I would expect it to take six to 18 months of active work and development to get it off the ground. But once you have your first couple of clients, it usually gets a bit easier to get your next clients. In the next module, we'll take a look at how you can grow and maintain content creation as one of your income streams. 6. Content Creation As An Income Stream: Content creation as an income stream. Let's look at one more common income stream for artists, and that's content creation. A lot of artists create content as part of their business because it's really fantastic for marketing products or for getting your portfolio work seen. But you can also monetize it directly as an extra source of income at the same time, which makes it really powerful. Stage one, growing. To grow this income stream, you need to build an audience online by providing them free and valuable content on a regular basis. That allows you to build a community that you have a relationship with who like what you do and trust your opinion. The value of your content is really important because it's what will keep people coming back. Consider what value you want to offer them. It can be that your art makes them feel something or brightens their day. You might make videos that teach them something or write blog posts that give them tips for improving in some way. If your content doesn't make your audience feel something or learn something, then people aren't likely to follow for more. Once you've built an audience, you'll be able to consider paid sponsorships, which is being paid to promote a company's product or service with your audience. And the right sponsorships can pay well and be something that really benefits your audience. A lot of the time sponsors will reach out to you, but you can also reach out to them directly, or you can get an agent. Some platforms also allow you to monetize your content directly so you can get paid for the views your content gets. Youtube gives creators a share of the ad revenue or no videos. Tiktok has a creator fund and monetization options for live videos. You can put ads on the blog posts on your website to generate revenue. There are also membership sites like Patron where you can create content that members pay a monthly subscription to to access. If you have your own products to sell, then you can use your content as marketing to sell them to your community. You can build an audience on lots of different platforms. Instagram is a popular one for artists because it's image based mostly, and there are lots of community challenges to take part in. Tiktok also has a big art community, if you like making short videos or if you prefer longer videos, then New Tube is a really powerful place to build an audience. Patrion let you create a membership for your biggest fans where they can pay to access your best content. If you'd like to stay away from algorithms, then you can try a blog to share value with your audience and then create an e mail list to be able to market to them more directly. Stage two, maintaining. Once you start building an audience and monetizing your content, the key to maintaining it is to make content that is sustainable for you and that you enjoy creating. Because you have to keep showing up for your community regularly. Keep creating free, valuable content for your audience to continue growing your follower size. Because how many people you reach can impact how much you'll earn. Slowly bringing new people into your universe means more potential customers to sell your products to and more reach for your sponsors to pay for a realistic timeline. Let's think realistically about how long it might take to grow this income stream. I'd expect it to take between six months and two years to grow a community on a social media platform. You might get lucky and grow faster than that, but we don't plan for luck. It's safer to hope for the best, but prepare for the worst. Let's think about why it'll take that long. First, you'll need to spend time making content, which for you might be making art to post, or it might be filming reels or long form videos. Then you need to regularly post that content. And importantly, you need to engage with your audience. You're building relationships with a group of people. And relationships take time to grow. For example, if I were to start a new Instagram account, I would try and create an illustration pretty much every day by spending an hour drawing. I'd spend half an hour posting that art, and then another half an hour engaging with other accounts. That's about 2 hours a day. And I try and do that most days, not necessarily every day, for several months. If you're wanting to grow content creation as an income stream, I would expect it to take six months to two years of regular posting and engagement to get it off the ground. But once you start building momentum, it usually gets a little easier as time goes on. In the next module, I'll help you put together a really rough timeline for the next three years to build up your sustainable income streams. 7. Build A Realistic Timeline: Build a realistic timeline. Let's build out a timeline for you to grow your income streams, because we would all love to do everything right now. But it'll be more sustainable if you set out a really rough plan of what to prioritize at different stages of your art business journey. There's a page in the workbook that you can use for this activity. You'll just need a way to color it in, either digitally by bringing it into your drawing software or by printing it out. Or you can do this activity on your own paper in your own way. We're focusing on three years as our time frame because we want to build strong foundations for our business so that it can last long term. Only you know how much time you have available to spend on growing your income stream. This timeline will be specific to you. Someone who has full time hours available might be able to set up a product shop in a few weeks. Whereas if you have 2 hours a day available rather than eight, it'll take you four times as long. And that's okay. It's important to be really realistic about how long you have available to commit each day. Not just in time but also in energy, because building a business is difficult. How do you know which income stream you should focus on and when? I recommend writing down all of the income streams and marketing platforms that you would like to grow in the next three years or so in the business wish list box, they can be reasonably specific, like a growing an audience on a particular social media platform or launching a particular product. Or they can be brought, If you're not yet sure of the specifics, I want you to make sure that the list includes at least one platform where you'll be building a community to reach your audience because that's really important. Now, you might just have a few things on your list, or you might have 20. I have six things on my list which are the actual things that I wanted to grow. When I started my own art business journey, I wanted to grow an audience on Instagram. I wanted to build a Youtube channel. I wanted to get some professional illustration work of some kind. I wanted to sell some digital products, start a patrion, and create a course that was my long term wish list for my business. Now look over your list and pick up the top three to five things that you think should be the highest priority. And write them down again in order of priority in the priorities box in the workbook. Make sure that one of your highest priorities is a way to build a community even if it's not an income stream, because it's really important for the sustainability of what you're building. Anything from your first list that was left out can still go on our timeline if there's space later. I just want to make it clear what we're going to be prioritizing. Now we have a list of priorities, but we still can't do them all at once. We're going to roughly block them out on the timeline to see what we have time for. Most of us only really have the capacity to prioritize two or maybe three things at once, depending how intense they are and how much time you have. We want to avoid growing more than two or three things in our business at once. Put your first priority in the first spot and color in or block out the amount of time that you need to prioritize it to get it off the ground. Mine is building an Instagram audience and I want to prioritize it for a year. I'll block that out. Make your best realistic guess at how long it will take you to grow that platform or income stream based on what we talked about in the previous modules. Now I know that this platform is not something that I'm going to stop doing after a year. This is just the main growth stage, but then I need to maintain it for the foreseeable future in a lighter color. I'm going to color in the rest of my timeline to show that I'm going to be maintaining this still. Just we have less time and effort than in the growth stage. If you need to maintain your first priority after the initial growth stage, then do the same and fill in the rest of the timeline in a lighter color. Next, let's add the second priority. You might be comfortable growing it at the same time as the first priority, or you might want to offset it a little bit. For me, I want to grow a professional illustration portfolio, which I know I can do at the same time as growing my Instagram account, but I'll give it a little bit longer. I want to prioritize that for about a year and a half to get that off the ground and then also maintain it for some of these might be a big priority for the whole three years and something that you really want to focus on. If you want to, you can color in any of your priorities for the whole time line. I already have two big priorities for the first year. For me, that's a really strong foundation to build for all of the other things that I want to do for your third spot. Add the next priority in your list at a time when you have the capacity to focus on it. For me, I'm going to start prioritizing a second content channel after about a year and focus on growing Youtube. I'll still be maintaining my Instagram account and professional illustrations, but the main focus for a little while will be growing a Youtube channel, which I think will take about a year and a half. Of course, this is all very rough. In reality, you can bring forward or push back any of these. That's totally fine. This is just about visualizing how long things will take so that we don't try and juggle too many things at once. I'm personally going to put patron in my fourth spot because I know that I need to grow an audience elsewhere before I can start getting paid members. So I don't want to start it too early on in my journey. I'll start that after about a year and a half of growing my Instagram account. Lastly, I'm going to spend some time every six months or so making some digital products to sell after I've built up my audience a little bit. For me, those are quite passive, so I don't need to maintain them after I've made them something to be mindful of. That this timeline will really show you is how many platforms and income streams you're maintaining after you've started them. You'll want to be careful of how many things you're committing to that require a lot of your time to maintain. If you can have some passive low maintenance income streams in the mix to keep your business sustainable long term, your timeline might look completely different to mine because we're all on our own unique paths. This is just an example of what I did to grow my business to where it is. Now the reality of growing your income isn't defined though. This is just a rough guide to follow. Do what works for you. I'd love to see your timeline. If you're comfortable sharing it with us, upload a picture of it to the class project section and while you're there, have a look at what others are planning to. 8. What's Next?: What's next. Hopefully you now have a clearer understanding of what income streams you want to grow and maintain as an artist, And a timeline of when to prioritize each of them. Now all that's left to do is get started if you haven't already and work towards your dreams. If you'd like to step back a bit and get some more clarity on what direction you want to take as a business. You can watch my other class, which is plan your creative business, your path to creating income as an artist. And that will help you make a simple plan for what you want out of your creative business and how to define and reach your target customer. I've really enjoyed sharing this class with you. I hope you enjoyed it as well. And remember to share with us your timeline in the class projects. If you're comfortable with letting us see it, pop over to my website to learn more about me and growing a creative business. Leave this class overview if you enjoyed it and I can't wait to see you get started. Bye bye.