Why Your Art Business is Destined to Fail

all right coming up on today's edition of the art business mornings we're talking about why your art business is destined to fail specifically uh the basics how art really sells and why you're failing at your facebook ads okay um welcome to another edition of the art business morning show the show that will put you on the path to a six figure a year plus art business and you know as i was writing this one if it occurs to me that you know all of these shows recently sort of follow the same trajectory uh people attend the art business workshops they ask questions uh oftentimes they tell me how something they are doing is working really well for them i know they are lying to me i know this uh because i'm the professional and i do this for a living stated another way i've already made all of those mistakes that you're currently making i've already wasted all my time all my energy all my effort all my money making them sometimes i've wasted other people's money making them it's way better when you do it that way by the way uh oftentimes i make those same mistakes again uh i i i continue i forget the lesson i learned and i make them again so it's you know it's it's i could care less about the lying part right i want to help them i want to help you uh get these erroneous thoughts out of your heads uh get off the path to nowhere and get on the path to actually growing the business right and you know i already made the mistakes for you you don't have to do it i already did it uh you don't have to do them again i already didn't so lately and for whatever reason i don't have a good answer for this i've been getting bombarded with people just talking to me about facebook ads facebook ads facebook ads facebook and instagram ads facebook and instagram ads and how well they're working for their business right and you know whether we're talking about facebook and instagram facebook ads we'll just call them or paid traffic in general pinterest ads linkedin ads uh youtube ads uh google display ads of any kind the same rules apply okay the same rules apply for both so i wanna i wanna cover this and then i want to give you some context okay i teased the basics and you know i've mentioned the basics a lot i'll continue mentioning the basics a lot it's like you know really going over this again you know the loyal listeners will have heard me say this a bunch of times and i'm going to repeat it again why persistence is essential because knowledge is rarely imparted on the first attempt i stole that quote from somebody and i don't know who persistence is essential because knowledge is rarely imparted on the first attempt i like that quote um your art business is destined to fail because you are ignoring the basics what are the basics and these are the basics updated to version 3.0 uh the 2021 and beyond version okay what is the best way to sell art or photography it's in person direct face to face uh you should be doing as much of that as possible uh as creatively as possible given the pandemic that we're living through problem though with with just relying on that is you're geographically fixed on this earth okay you have to sleep and you're incapable of having 25 concurrent conversations so yes you need a website to take care of these problems for you and yes you need a website to take care of additional problems for you the website needs to be set up to sell art to take a credit card and do this while you sleep also an important part so you want to sell your art or photography right um so i have in person to the left of me i've got on my website to the right you have those covered uh let's get stuck in the middle right i love that song and i believe that the live art shows uh the zoom calls the face times the whatever type of video chat google hangout microsoft teams whatever you use doesn't matter whether you're doing those one-to-one with a potential buyer doing a showing or whether you are doing one-to-many a live broadcast a live art show you know you have those three covered in person sales whenever you can do them website the live art shows which is sort of in the middle uh uh you you you focus on that and you can regular consistent marketing so you have the three you're doing regular consistent marketing you start off doing what you can and what you're capable of doing what your technical acumen gives you the ability to do uh and you just keep leveling up you get better you know you have the perspective of how long things take you know the basics often get get get put aside or or passed aside is unnecessary or too difficult or you know i could never possibly do that you know it at art storefronts we we run office hours right and and these are zoom sessions uh where and we bring our customers in we teach them the thing um had one yesterday on how to sell art commercially so how to sell art into commercial uh gigs and you know banks and hotels and the like it turns out we have um a customer shout out to jim livingston uh incredible human being to boot but we have a customer that's really really good at this and he's been doing it a long time so he recorded a session on that that was just straight fire great work on that by the way jim if you're listening um why am i telling you that at the end of the session we we dropped the feedback form okay and and the feedback form says hey um what topic do you want us to cover next on a future session right so we can get some feedback from our customers on what else they want to learn and the form is completely anonymous okay the form is anonymous so whoever you are i don't know who you are so i don't have a problem calling you out but i'm gonna call you out okay because you're anonymous and again i feel zero guilt for this so the the prompting what topic would you like us to cover next and here is the answer in quotes another idea is to hear from artists who are able to be successful early on in their careers not folks have been doing this for five plus years and who have thousands of followers end quote read that and you know i was scared that i was gonna fall out of my chair uh uh enrage when i read that right and i've got this other quote that i really like which is you know in this age uh which believes that there is a shortcut to everything the greatest lesson to be learned is the the most difficult way is in the long run the easiest that's from a author henry miller you know there is no shortcut there's never been a shortcut there's no hack there is no secret facebook ads formula that exists the target high net worth buyers or any space special facebook ads targeting or google ads targeting the most difficult way from that quote truly is it's it in the long run it's the easiest and i learned this again and again and again and i don't mean to pick on that anonymous person but it's like another idea is to hear from artists who are able to be successful early on in their careers not folks who've been doing this for five plus years there are no artists that have been really successful early on in their careers there never will be any artists that's really successful early on in their career there's not usually anybody that's really successful at anything really early on in their career you know the reason jim session was so good is because he's been doing it for five plus years probably 15 in his case and so everyone is just constantly looking for a shortcut right they're constantly looking for the shortcut there is no shortcut there will never be a shortcut i feel like i'm just being redundant on this recently maybe i'm reminding myself because i mean i spent a career looking for shortcuts in in in my youth and it's like you start to get older and you realize that there never was there never will be let's talk about how people think art sells versus how art really sells and first i will give you the regular version and then because i'm talking about facebook ads i'll give you the facebook ads version the regular version says people for whatever reason and and i see this almost universally they think art and they think photography uh sells online offline sort of the same way it does let's just say lumped in with a myriad of other goods in which you show the product and you know the particular piece of art or photography strangers see the product and you know whether they're searching for it or they have an actual need a white wall in their house or you know it's an impulse buy or you know they're generally inspired and buy it the artist makes money great good job go find another one right um you know and perhaps let's just say that the people that think cards sell this way they're following the rules and they understand a sale and the mechanics where you need to have an incentive plus scarcity uh you need to have a percentage off and it needs to end at a certain day okay great you've got that sorted right you sold one rinse and repeat let's go find another one that is the way that people think art cell you just go from stranger who does not know you to next stranger who does not know you you show you you show an ad or a post uh and they see it and they instantaneously buy it right like the facebook ads version is the exact same version except instead of a regular post or however they found you they found you as a result of a facebook ad because you understand cold targeting or you took some course or whatever right um this infuriates me okay it absolutely infuriates me because one of how infrequently it happens and i'll get to that in a second but two it is impossible okay impossible you never been done to earn a positive roi by showing your art your photography to cold traffic in this fashion and thinking you are gonna see an roi in that investment you are lighting that money on fire okay you are lighting that money on fire and whilst it does happen okay what i just outlined occasionally very occasionally someone will put an ad on facebook and they will show that ad to someone that's never seen their art before and that person will buy it it does happen right but i've got data on this and i could tell you back of a napkin let's talk about how often that happens stated another way uh let's say you know uh uh a thousand people saw your ad on facebook okay maybe one out of that a thousand people will buy a piece of art in that fashion maybe one but there's no way you're ever gonna see the roi on that stated another way if an artist sells a hundred pieces of art one out of those hundred will maybe come from a post to somebody first time that doesn't know you that's never interacted with you that buys it for the impulse reason or or any of the other reasons right it just doesn't it just does not work that way right uh there is no way that you could build a business on that that anyone is building the business on that the odds are just too low the numbers are just too low and and yet people keep telling me time and time again this is what they're doing and they're having a great level of success i'm just like no you're not stop it stop telling other people this like you know you think you are going to boost post on facebook and instagram instead of doing the basics and somehow build a business it's just not going to work you cannot run ads cold facebook ads with fancy targeting or whatever core audiences you think you have and somehow pull that off and you know what what is the normal oh yeah patrick patrick patrick i'm getting a ton of likes and comments and shares you want to see my impressions patrick let me tell you the impressions i'm getting impressions impressions you're not in business of impressions there are no impressions that come spitting out of an atm machine and pay for the ads ah it gets me fired up so you know people wonder where this starving artist moniker come from and i'm and i'm looking at elizabeth thank you for that elizabeth on instagram she's like yeah i spent a bunch of money on facebook ads and i lit it on fire trust me i know i know i've done it myself i get it you know every time somebody comes on these calls and they tell me that they have done this successfully which is now getting to be like a weekly basis it causes me to cringe inside okay i picture that's what i picture every time these people say this to me and i'm sorry if you were the ones that did i still love you but this is how i picture it i picture a morbidly obese person saying that the one thing they want in this world is to be fit and healthy they're saying this to me while sitting in their bathrobe on a couch with a half-eaten cheese pizza box rested on their fat stomachs and there's in in the cell phones in the hand and they're saying patrick i want to be fit don't worry i'm going to get fit and healthy uh no i don't need to get my butt off the couch uh no i'm not gonna put the pizza down and no i'm not gonna start exercising i'm just gonna boost this post i'm just gonna boost this post you wanna see how many impressions i'm getting i'm getting started on the impressions you know i i mean do you do i does anybody know someone that is fit and healthy that does not watch what they eat work out regularly and try to keep their vices at bay to do the best of their ability to keep the devices at day no that person does not exist just like earlier that person does not exist that has had a great deal of success in their art career in the first two months or three years even right like it takes time so you know another idea okay i hear from artists uh who are able to be successful uh in the first five years of their career i mean it's just the weight loss example or the person that gets the instantaneous success or the person seeing success with their facebook kids it does not exist it does not exist it will never exist i love i love the uh this henry quote what's his last name henry i'm so bad with names hold on i feel like i'm hacking it i think it's henry miller yeah american american author but in this age which believes there is a shortcut to everything the greatest lesson learned is the most difficult way in the long run is the easiest and that guy wrote that quote i mean i think that guy died in the 1980s so he had written that in the 60s or 70s imagine what he would say about today's day and age so you know i see these folks they're coming on to these things and they're trumpeting the course especially the one on facebook ads and targeting and how great this is how wonderful it's going to be to their business and i just want to stop them i want to say like look i've been there before okay i i know this is not going to work for you please stop right and and trick me told on courses i always try i always have this memory whenever i think of courses but early on i went and saw my grandma right and you know she lives far away she lived in hawaii we lived in california so we'd have to fly out there so my dad grew up and and i'm the oldest grain kid so she's going to give me this awesome gift and she's like patrick she's she's laughing when she tells me that she's saying i have a special course for you and but she's laughing when she tells me this and i'm like what is she laughing at she's like i bought it online in in in or not online i i bought it off the tv commercial and this was back this was like 30 years ago so you know she saw some sort of infomercial or something and bought this thing and it came in like a plastic container with all these cassette tapes and she's like you know so she starts talking about she's like it's called mega memory and i was like mega memory what does that do she's like it's a special hack uh or she wouldn't have said hack then but you know it's a special trick such that you can have incredible memory and remember everything and i actually googled it and still saw it it's still a product and it's called mega memory by this guy kevin trudeau and it teaches you how to memorize things and and i saw that and i was like but grandma why why is this so funny she's like i can't remember where i put it mega memory i can't remember where i put it i thought about that today and it made me laugh and it's like i'll always remember my grandma with that with that look on her face smiling like she bought the mega memory tapes to like to grow her memory then she you know you get the irony but you know the funny thing is is things haven't changed in 30 years she bought a course back then and didn't finish it and what does everyone do today they buy a course and they don't finish it right um i'll always remember my grandma with that smile though it really makes me laugh anyway i'm not anti-course i'm definitely not anti-learning and i'm especially not anti-facebook ads okay quite to the contrary i am anti-shortcuts silver bullets and anti-lack of perspective so you know let's let's get out of the negative title of this thing um you know how your business is going to fail and let's get on to how we're going to succeed okay how art really sells and i you know i i thought about i'm always using my phishing analogies and i'm trying to steer away from the phishing analogies because i don't even fit i'm a complete imposter i go fishing like once a year if i'm lucky like i have all these phishing analogies but we've covered the basics right if you want to stand a chance okay at running paid traffic and i understand why everyone does it right it's the shortcut it's the easy route uh you hear so many impressive things about how well our people are doing and you can target these high network buyers and it's so easy and you don't have to do anything right like it's extremely alluring right but you're never going to make it that way and i and i use the example of you know a thousand people i said earlier right like one out of a thousand people like you know you get in on cold traffic you target your ads you reaches a thousand people so you spend the money to reach a thousand people and let's just say that one person that bought right they had their hand raised up out of the thousand people they were the only one that had their hand raised and said yes i'm ready to buy you got that sale that's amazing so what about the 999 that didn't buy right are they worthless no they're not worthless so okay let's say out of that thousand people um only one was ready to raise their hand that's fine and instead of going for the sale we went for the email address and you didn't get all thousand people but you got 350 that would be an incredible conversion rate we'll just use that number let's say you got 350 people so you now have 350 people on your email list so let's go to that one person that bought right you've got the one person they raised their hand they were ready to buy 349 people though had their hand down they were not ready to buy so what you've done by capturing their email address is essentially saying that person didn't have their hand up i don't know why they didn't have their hand up i don't know when they're going to have their hand up i just know that their hand is not up right now but by getting the email address you now have the ability to obviously send them content and do regular marketing but just to stand our analogy you have the ability to look in and see if they're raising their hand in the future right so you start marketing consistently okay you market consistently you send them emails you post to the socials you run live broadcast everything that i covered in the basics you're doing the one-on-one showings uh your website is there to service them while you sleep right um and and you know you don't know when they're gonna raise their hand okay attempting to time time things or understand when they're going to raise their hand when they're going to be ready to purchase art and fish think of all the various different things they have roommates nine months from now they move or two years from now they buy a second vacation house or god forbid they get a divorce and they're going to get an apartment all of these various different things that happen in life we never have any idea when they're going to raise their hand and say you know what i'm actually ready to buy art now and so you have to market to them consistently all year long if you don't do that you don't ever stand a chance to make it with any advertising at all any paid traffic at all it doesn't matter whether it's warm or it's cold okay you have to do the basics you have to be marketing consistently all year long your job is to just get a bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger list of people that one day are going to raise their hand and then your job is because of your marketing consistently you are going to have an offer in the water when they do raise their hand and you'll never know when that is no one's smart enough know what it is and you gotta do that for the next 30 years that's the game that's the game and when you play it correctly you're actually destined to win when you run facebook ads you do so confidently knowing that you're going to see an roi and and it's even better than that the smart marketer knows and the person that has the right perspective and the person that's not looking for a shortcut knows you can actually afford to lose money on those ads up front you can afford to spend a thousand dollars on ads in a month and lose 950 of it because over the course of the year out of that particular cohort you're gonna make five or six or seven thousand dollars because that's the way advertising works that is the way that paid advertising works and yet i keep seeing these people who think you don't need this and you don't need that just get on and target people on facebook and instagram it makes me cringe right don't do that okay the hardest way the most difficult way the basics of what i'm suggesting is actually the easiest way over time like henry taught us i would even goes further and say not only is it is it is it the easiest way in the long run it's really the only way that works it's the only way that works you know practice the basics sell some art from your website start running ads to warm traffic first people that have interacted with you not that don't know you that have never met you once you've mastered that then you're ready to go to cold traffic on facebook and instagram or anywhere else people that have never met you never interact with your brand don't know who you are that is the only way to make paid marketing uh pay is just consistent consistent unless you're selling your pieces for like 1.5 million dollars in which case you know maybe you're a little bit different right but that's never going to happen so that is the only way doing the basics plus consistent marketing i love facebook and instagram and it's incredible what you can do but if you're trying those things before getting the basics in place you're gonna be lighting your money on fire do not ever boost a post ever again okay save the money go do something fun for yourself just don't like the money on fire done i just saved you a whole bunch of money okay on on that course i just saved you your paid traffic expenses your lost time etc right and now on that note i'm gonna go find my mega memory tapes sadly i like my grandma have forgotten where i placed them uh which is for the best because i don't have a cassette player anyway so i couldn't play the tapes anyway um as always thanks for listening and have a great day thanks for watching my video youtube and by the way uh came to do some googling and it turns out the mega i guess have to do that the mega memory guy uh was an infomercial specialist and actually went to jail you might even still be in there which is crazy so yeah i don't know about that particular course but i'm curious so you heard my pitch on facebook on facebook ads i'm curious to hear what you think before that i highly recommend you subscribe um we'll put some little details and some motion graphics here about how you can do that you'll always be up to date on the latest video you'll get to join when we go live uh you can leave comments i will address those directly also if you've got just general questions comments i'm going to put a link down in the description below that'll have our link tree which is up there you can register for an art business workshop we run these babies three times a week and you can pop on and ask your own questions directly and find out more about what we do which are always a good time um as a final leave me a comment below are you going to stop boosting posts do you agree with me that facebook and instagram ads are not enough that you need to have the basics in place what are your thoughts good better and different i'd love to hear and i'll respond to all the comments below thanks and have a great day you

2021-02-18 12:29

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