While dreaming of having a studio assistant to clean your brushes, deal with customers and make you coffee may seem like a faraway fantasy, a virtual assistant may actually be closer than you think!
Virtual assistants (VA) are big news right now, and while it may not be possible to employ someone to work with you in your studio full-time, an overseas or remote virtual assistant could assist you...
I believe that resilience and grit are two of the most important skills we need as artists. Even more important than talent for some! There are a lot of talented artists out there who get knocked back or rejected a few times and give up. Don't let that be you. Success comes from learning how to handle rejection, pick yourself up, dust yourself off and keep going! These are the artists who...
My advice to artists starting out is to always buy the best art supplies you can afford. Someone once told me that, and ever since, my materials have improved as my income has grown. I didn't need the best paints or linen canvases when I was just beginning and going through my 'experimental' phase, but as my work started to sell, I upped my game and invested in both myself and my materials.
I...
Put simply, everything you spend money on for your art business is an expense. It’s important to keep track of all these items in order to make informed decisions so that you can get a clear picture of how much you are actually generating from your business.
It also takes some of the emotion out of pricing your art. Knowing how much each artwork cost to produce helps you price each...
I often get asked by artists when is the right time to increase their prices, as it can be tricky and needs to have some reasoning behind it if queried.
I have raised my prices steadily over the six years I have worked as a professional artist. After working out my initial prices for my paintings, cards, and prints, there was a lot of testing and measuring to find out what worked well. This is...
The true measure of your business is not what you say about it, it is what other people say about it.
Testimonials lower the risk or fear factor to making a decision. They can help your customers overcome objections, and improve their chances of buying.
Testimonials offer social proof from others. We are more likely to buy from someone we know and trust, and getting this feedback from other...
There is a certain amount of content we need to regularly produce for our art businesses. This may be blog posts, social media posts and newsletters. Rather than spending time creating these each week, why not put aside a day or two at the beginning of each month, and get it all done in one go!
Content planning days make batch-creating your content so much easier, so that you never get stuck...
In a nutshell, you need a website because you don't own your social media platforms.
An artist website is a place where people go to learn more about you and your work. It is your digital shop front, a place to display your best work and share your achievements, then make it easy for people to contact you and subscribe to your email list.
Nowadays on social media, only a tiny fraction of your...
Most business training will tell you to follow a certain framework in order to reach success. I thought about this framework, and whether I'd subconsciously been following it to create my art business. In some ways, yes, however art is a slightly different kind of business (it involves more emotion for a start), so I adapted it slightly to make it easier and more relatable for artists.
Here is...
It may come as a surprise that I am an introvert, but I find a lot of artists and creative people are, so maybe you are one too!
It can be seen this as a disadvantage when it comes to business, as it's usually the extroverts who get noticed first, but I want to show you how you can use it to your advantage, and focus on your strengths.
Being an introvert is not about lack of confidence or being...
It’s been a challenging year. Your contributions and perspectives make every year a better year, but we are especially thankful in 2020 for you and for the power of art in society.
Thank you for your perseverance and flexibility.
Being able to respond, adapt to, and then thrive within difficult situations is always a part of human nature. However, being able to arrange and rearrange...
If you are at the stage where you are looking for a gallery, either to exhibit your work or represent you as an artist, it is important to research them beforehand. Knowing the ins and outs of how a gallery operates, as well as how they work with artists, will help you to find the right gallery to work with. Knowing more information upfront ensures a smoother relationship down the...
