E-Com isn't fun-com, the final marketing strategy.

 Well, I have to say. Since I started my Artistic Journey I sure did oversimplify the difficulty of actually marketing out my talents and bringing in that remote income I needed at the time. I suppose that is why companies outsource all their work. I Guess two hands learning and doing it all is time-consuming and difficult, and though I was always in the supportive homeschool dad and homemaker role, I now find myself as being the one supported by all those around me. My gratitude could never be enough to make up for their hospitality. My thoughts feel great to have it, but the shadows parts make me feel more of a burden. Hopefully, if I can make my passion become a reality, I can then support them to make theirs come true too.

   

    My masters and mentors list never really talked about the money side of things as their goals were to get you the talents to either land a job or freelance out your talents. So it was back to LinkedinLearning to scour across ways to sell my designs. Marketing classes galore were immediately overwhelming to take in so I started with a small start-up story around nine minutes long titled “Selling $100K of T-Shirts w/no inventory. Introducing me to the Idea of 3rd party marketplaces and digital print on demand.

    Okay okay, we all may know it. But I still needed that path, direction, guidance, or whatever to connect everything. So I hit up the courses running a design business; Freelancing by Petula Vvontikis, Art and Illustration Courses: First steps to  Kristin Ellison, E-Commerce Fundamentals (2020) by Patrick Ireland, Graphic Design Careers: First Steps by Cara st. Hilaire. A few Other courses I began but will be done shortly are Marketing on Instagram, Writing Ad Copy, Google Ad Essential Training, Content Marketing: Blogging for Business, Digital Marketing Foundations, and Social Media Foundations.

    Touching on google ads essentially led me down the path of google's skill shop where they give their own widely acknowledged certificates. The tests are hard and if you fail you are locked out of farm typing for another 24hrs. The professional certificate tests have you install an honor lock extension where your screen microphone and camera are on, and during tests, it will lock out windows and tabs until the end of the test. They then verify it was taken in integrity before issuing the certificate. The certificates expire in a year forcing you to keep up to date within their industry. During the month of march, I was able to obtain two certs (Google Search Ads, and Google Display Ads), Studied hard to finish the professional Certs of those two but I need to get a new Photo ID to continue further. So another thing shelved until my income began to float, which is a shame too because when I went to look for commission work for doing just google ad campaigns, my mouth dropped. The fact those free courses can land you a $120k annual income just freelancing was insane, it’s not art so of course, it would, but boy wouldn’t that be a certification worth having. For now, I’ll use this knowledge in my plan of attack, to market my things before worrying about commissioning that kind of work to others. I need to prove my success to help others after all.

    The google skill shop was the biggest time sink in a week or so around and through my birthday. Yay ⅓ of the way!  I needed to get the ball rolling on setting this all up so I can get back to focusing on the illustrations. So the rest of the month was the research in these LinkedIn Courses to discover, contemplate, and plan out my art business model using a no inventory solution, creating a target audience via persona and niche, coming up with product lists, and conducting 3rd Party Market Research, envisioning a brand identity, build an awareness campaign using content, social media, and google ads. Creating each account to these various networks and linking them into their manageable marketing funnel, getting analytics going to track conversions to fine-tune my audience and hopefully create an optimal ROI while being relevant, non-intrusive, and providing the content. Also, Getting a routine Post schedule built around traffic times of that particular niche.

    Now so far for some of my audience, this knowledge may come off as easy to you, but for those who have been around my blog since I first picked up that chalk. You could easily guess I'm not a social media savvy person. I have been digitally off the grid since 2011 when I first freaked out and got into the end of the world doomsday prepper and primitive survival mindset that led me down that crazy path of Humble Beginnings. This being said I am not only popping what feels like my social media cherry but also kinda coming out of the off-grid closet. Embarrassed to say I started a How to use Instagram course just so I could navigate it. Hoping not too much longer, I’ll feel confident on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. Yes, I have a LinkedIn, but I have never posted and only have used it to hold my history of employment as a master's resume and to do its learning courses. I will need to begin using that as well. Lastly, I will need to increase my blog posting schedule as well. It was used more like a journal/Ramble but I believe may become the meat and bones of my content.