OK, so I started this particular site to help me collect my 25+ years of work and give myself an overview and inspiration on a way forward. After being a part of the larger community and seeing other people make a living off of their art I am still firmly convinced that all you need to do is find and connect with your audience, that the opportunity is there if you can find it.
It’s been about a year now that I got off my butt and started organizing and posting things. I thought, oh hey it would be kind of cool to be able to offer some of this work as digital prints and what not cuz I am fairly proud of the work I’ve designed and wanted to be able to offer it to the world…lol…
With the pursuit came a sort of snowball effect finding online resources that let me post my designs for sale on their sites, but then finding Woocommerce and Shopify that let me set up my own store with plugins that allows me to easily splash my designs across all kinds of merchandise and I have been a gleeful little person doing so.
I’ve pulled out older designs and tweaked them, worked on branding and marketing and pricing and all the bits and bobs. I had false starts and frustrations figuring out the paid advertising space and got help from FB and Google in setting up ads that would get my work in front of people all over the world, literally. I track my metrics and am surprised by not only the locations, but the number of people and I can track their journey across my site to see what pages are being looked at, what designs, seeing them get to the checkout and…leaving?
3k+ people a week.
Hundreds of people looking and no one is buying?
I’ve made a few sales, which ironically, were on items discontinued by the vendor…lol…
I was thrilled to find Lately Social a site that lets you take a single post and put it across multiple social media platforms. More recently I found Minta and Onollo that take it to another level by letting you connect it to your store (Shopify in this case) and let’s you auto-post images and videos with links, which to me was the ultimate time-saving solution I’d been looking for.
I turned off my paid ads on FB and Google recently and have started watching my traffic numbers fall. For the past year I was paying almost $500 monthly for marketing, which would have been totally worth it if people were buying. If just a small percentage of the traffic I was getting were buying, but they’re not and I do not know why.
I understand this wasn’t going to be easy.
I didn’t expect it to.
There’s building equity and trust with consumers.
It’s just me creating original designs and doing all the work and I honestly thought it was going to catch on better.
I like doing it and I’ll keep doing it and keep the posts going to my social media and hope it catches on.
dang…lol…