3 Things You Need To Make Art Your Job
A lot of us dream of turning our love for art into a job so that we can get paid to create, and with a bit of business understanding you can create your own art income. I believe that artists can be wonderfully creative people and at the same time really business savvy and I don’t want us to shy away from that.
The internet has opened up loads of opportunities by giving us access to an audience of people all around the world who like what we make, or who are interested in the art content that we want to share.
I don’t consider myself the most business savvy person (and you don’t need to be either) because I’m an artist first and foremost, but I certainly haven’t created my small business by mistake. I listened to business podcasts, read books, watched tons of videos about other creative business stories and slowly built up my knowledge about the business side of being an artist, and I’m still doing those things because there’s always more to learn and I think it’s always good to be a student.
So, let’s talk business.
To make art or any creative passion your job, you need three things:
A product or service to sell
An audience to sell it to, (this is your target customer), and
A way to tell that audience about your product or service, (which is marketing)
If you can properly understand these three things in your business then you have a really strong foundation for building a great business.
Each one is super flexible: there are loads of different types of product or service you can sell, there are loads of ways to find your audience, and there are loads of marketing options too.
Your product can be anything you want it to be, it just needs to be a really good fit for your target customer, so it should be something that they need, they want, or just can’t live without. Having a clear profile in your mind of who your target customer is and why your product is the perfect fit for them will help you a lot as you grow your business so it’s important to understand that as early as possible.
Then you need to find a way to tell your target customer about your product and why it’ll help them solve a problem that they have. If you have a clear idea of who your customer is then you have a better chance of being able to reach them on social media or whatever your preferred marketing platform is.
For example
Your product might be selling your art directly, it might be illustrating custom commissions, or it might be teaching workshops of your creative skill.
Your audience could be school teachers looking for classroom art, it could be college students wanting custom stationery, or it might be a professional client like independent magazines.
And for marketing you have lots of options, a lot of artists are of course using social media, but you can write blog posts to reach people, email marketing, or in person events like markets.
So basically, you have a lot of directions you can go in, it’s really flexible and totally up to you, as long as your product matches your customer and your marketing if effective.
You don’t need to have everything perfectly figured out from day one, it’s actually a really good idea to develop your product as you go with feedback from your audience to make sure that it’s something they really like, but it is also really really helpful to have a plan and a strong direction from the beginning so that you know where you’re heading.
If you’d like some guidance in planning your creative business then I have a class on Skillshare where I help you get clarity on choosing a direction that works for you and your goals.
Some business resources
There are loads of great resources that you can access for free; here are a few that have helped me.
Personally I find it really motivating and inspiring to listen to other people’s startup stories because they give me ideas and encouragement on my own path and there are always little nuggets of useful information to take away and consider.
The $100 Startup is a book that I read really early on in my journey and has lots of small stories about people starting businesses for very little money. I took away a lot of ideas and inspiration from it.
I also found The Psychology of Money helpful, although it’s not a business book, just for understanding my relationship with money and what I want to prioritise.
Everyone is familiar with Atomic Habits and there are some great points in there that helped me take a slow and steady approach to building all of the skills that I wanted to learn.
I read The Lean Startup very early on and it has some great advice about taking the time to build products that your customer actually wants with their feedback as part of the process, rather than assuming what they want and finding out after you’ve perfected it that there isn’t a market.
You can probably find these at your library either as a physical book or as an audiobook so it doesn’t even have to cost you anything to learn about business from books. I personally only really buy a book if I want to take notes in it, otherwise I hire them or listen to them as part of my Spotify subscription.
The Colin & Samir show is great for content creators, they actually recently did an interview with the head of Instagram which was really interesting and you guys might like to listen to.
Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal is also a great podcast for creators where he interviews people about their business stories.
And then I quite like listening to podcasts like Working Hard, Hardly Working by Grace Beverley and the Diary of a CEO.
There is so much valuable information out there for free about building a small business, so be a sponge and absorb as much as you can!
3 Things You Need To Make Art Your Job
A product or service to sell
An audience to sell it to
A way to tell that audience about your product or service
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