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.