This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
All right, always so many interesting questions coming in from listeners. Yesterday we talked about side hustling while incarcerated or building skills while incarcerated so that that person can start a side hustle, do something entrepreneurial, make a living for themselves once they are on the outside. Today we've got a question, how can I scale my art business using social media? This comes to us from Miami. Michelle in Miami is an artist looking to reach a broader audience.
She's seen some examples of artists and authors who have done really well using social media, social media advertising in particular. And how does that work? Like we've talked about all these things in different ways, but have we ever actually put them all together? An artist who wants to scale their work using social media and specifically using ads on social media. So let's consider some practical strategies to help Michelle, maybe somebody else out there as well, take their art business to the next level.
Her question's coming up and my answer as well. Stay tuned. [Music]
Hey, I'm Michelle from Miami. I'm an artist and a big fan of your show and I enjoyed seeing you on your last book tour. Here's my question.
Currently I sell my artwork individually, but I've heard of artists who managed to sell their work at scale, reaching a broader audience and significantly increasing their income, especially using social media ads. How do these artists achieve such success and what strategies can I use to scale my art business? I'm particularly interested in tips on marketing. Any insights would be greatly appreciated. [Music]
All right, Michelle, thank you so much.
Glad you enjoyed the last book tour. I think you mentioned, glad you're enjoying the podcast. And let's talk about scaling your art business using social media ads. I have seen some people recently that have just done so well. I saw this guy who sold hundreds of thousands of dollars, hundreds of thousands of copies rather of his book using social media ads.
And I was like, wow, that's just incredible because a lot of people who try don't succeed with it. They just end up kind of wasting money. They're not able to get to ROI, like positive return on investment and such, but where it works, it works. So so much respect. I think I saw another poet actually, and like no disrespect to the poets out there, but most poetry books do not sell, but this person had also done really well using social media and social media ads.
So with anything like this, you want to test. You want to start slowly. You want to spend $10 in test and then $100 in test before you start spending thousands of dollars. If you can get the conversion, then you keep spending. So how do you do that?
Well, you start small, you start with that modest budget. You test different ad formats. You use targeting to reach potential buyers who are most likely to be interested. You can target by interests, behaviors, demographics, even lookalike audiences based on your current followers. You use compelling visuals.
Like you got to do your best work here. Like the stakes are high, the competition is strong. So do something really good and include a clear call to action, such as visiting your online store or following your page. And by the way, you need an online store. I mean, you could just send people to another platform, but you really want to make the conversion process as seamless and easy as possible.
So that if someone is thinking about buying your art or your book or whatever it is, it should be a couple of clicks maximum, boom, check out. So the easier you can make that, the better. And then sometimes it takes longer to make a sale. So the more you can get people on an email list, that's also great 'cause then you can send regular updates about new works, upcoming events, exclusive offers, send them a discount, do everything you can to get them over that finish line. Those are basically the steps and there's a lot of work to be done within those steps, but that is what you need to do.
So I'm gonna wish you well with the research. I hope that you become the next poet that sells hundreds of thousands of copies or whatever the huge success metric turns out to be. I'll be cheering you on. Listener is always cheering you on, making new episodes every day, seven days a week. This was 2,783.
Hope you'll subscribe, follow, come back for more. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
From the Onward Project.
