Artists Ask Me Anything! (Social Media Struggles, My Story, Best Platform To Sell Art, AND MORE!)

Welcome to the Stop the Starving Artist podcast. I'm so excited to have you here with me today, which is a very special episode. This is a Q and A episode. So I put a call out to people inside my community to leave voice notes, and we are going to answer those voice notes live. I'm listening to these for the first time and I'm really excited to do that. So let's not waste any time. Let's just jump right into it. So our first question here comes from Sherry.

I'm struggling to figure out how to make IG content versus YouTube content. I am very familiar with the YouTube content, but I struggle with that IG content and the mind shift that it takes to create that. And I'm just having a struggle with IG in general, like how to automate it so it's easier to create IG content. I don't know. I'm just. I'm just struggling with keeping up with the IG content versus the YouTube and would really like some tips. I know we've talked about this before. I've heard. I heard you're speaking about it, but I'm still in the struggle bus with that.

Okay. Sheri is a part of my heart based sales accelerator. She's also a one on one client. And by the way, our heart based sales accelerator community has sold $195,905 so far this year. Super, super exciting. So the question is, how do we take a familiarity with YouTube and use that familiarity to create Instagram or more short form content, specifically a mindset shift, being able to automate that content and then being able to keep up with it. Okay, so there's something you need to know here, which is Sherry has two audiences. One audience being artists because she teaches and talks about art and creativity and the other one being buyers. Can these be the same audience? Sure, they could be. But the way that I teach things in the heart based sales accelerator is that it's smart to focus on having one specific audience that you're trying to reach. And so when I hear Sheri's problem, I hear an underlying question that she's not really asking me, which is what do I choose here right now? Okay, so let's look at this from a big picture perspective. If you have two audiences, one is artists, one is not artists, and one is working, meaning she understands it. That's her YouTube channel. These are the artists and. And the other one is the more buyers, not necessarily just artist people. And she's having a hard time with that. Then what do you think is the best thing to do? Well, my thing here in this. You know, the context of this question is let this one go. I would actually encourage Sheri to focus on one audience. If it's still taking too much effort to try to pick up both and just go all in on the one and go ahead and try to sell the work to the one audience and not worry so much about another platform, another potential audience, all those kinds of things. Which means that you might have to make some shifts and you might have to adjust the way you present and show your brand over here to other artists, but that's totally fine, right? That's going to be a lot easier than trying to pick up, you know, and hold these two bags, right? Because the way my coach said it to me is like, if you try to catch two rabbits, you end up catching none. And I think that that is really, really true. So here's what I want people to think about, because I know this isn't the exact answer that maybe everybody was looking for, but I think this is a much more important thing. Number one, consider that if you're in a position where you're good at one type of content, but you're not so good at another, let the thing you're not very good at go. Don't think about it for a while, Go all in on one thing and get really freaking good at it, right? And that is going to allow you to have the mindset that I don't have to do all the things at once or be all the places at once. I can just do this one thing that matters the most. And then how do we think about automating it? Well, what I do is I just make it as simple as possible. I have four or five different things that I prompt myself with every week. Those could be questions, you know, like, what do I think my person needs to hear this week? Or what's on my mind that I'm really excited about that I want to talk about? Or what's a project that I'm working on that I need to be discussing so my audience is aware of it. Those three questions can help get you on the right track. And I have another video that you can watch that I'll try to remember to link up at the end of this video or at the end of this podcast where I go over a specific plan that you can use every week on social media. But for me.

I like just having things in my brain, a few prompts, and then going for it. Other people like to batch, produce Things. Right. But the main thing you have to ask yourself in order to get things automated is how do I make this sense? Simple. Because you can't automate something that is complex. The more complex you try to make your content, the more tied up you get into making it perfect, the less likely you're going to be able to not only automate it, but also keep up with it. Which is what Sherry's talking about. Right? Sherry is asking, how do I keep up with these things? I actually think for Sherry, she should only pick one thing and try to keep up with that. And that would be my suggestion for all of you watching. Pick one platform, one audience, sell one thing and do that for one year and see what kind of progress you make. Guarantee you it's going to be pretty powerful stuff. All right, let's move on to question number two. This one comes from Douglas.

When did you first realize that you wanted to help artists from a heart based perspective? Was it a one off event or was it lots of little things that added up to something bigger?

Beautiful. Okay, so when did I first realize that I wanted to help artists from a heart based perspective? This is a really interesting question because it wasn't a one off event. This was actually.

Number of things that happened over the course of my life. So I was a professional touring musician for 10 years, was very fortunate to tour all over the world, got to do festivals like Lollapalooza, Sundance Film Festival, Austin City Limits, got to be on television, got to do, you know, just a lot of really cool stuff.

And when I left that life and started doing more production work where I was helping bands regionally sort of make their records, what I noticed is that we would sit down and talk about the business side of being an artist sometimes as much as we did about their songs. And I had so much fun talking about those things. And so I thought, well, there's an itch here that I think I could scratch for musicians and for myself.

And so at the same time.

I realized, well, maybe I should put on YouTube videos and sort of automate this process. See what I did there. We just talked about automation, meaning I could reach more people, make a bigger impact, and, you know, kind of send videos even to clients as they were coming through. So I took a class on.

YouTube, specifically from a guy named Tim Schmoyer. And Tim helped YouTube write the curriculum on how they taught their platform in the beginning. And so he's very connected with them. And I took that course. And at the end of the course, he put out A call for potential strategists on his team. And I told my wife, I was like, I think this could be really valuable for me. I see some potential here. Do you think I should apply? And she said, sure, go for it. So I applied. I ended up getting the job with my friend Delanna. Delanna and I both. I didn't know Delana then, but we both became his first salaried employees. And so the strategists on the team were Tim, Delana and myself. And we were responsible over that time for billions of views for our clients. Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars. You know, it was a pretty incredible situation to be in, and it was a thing where I didn't realize I would have a knack for something like that, like brand strategy, storytelling, all that sort of stuff, coming from a background in music. So I realized at the time that my wife wanted to be putting out her own art to help moms with pope postpartum depression, because we were going through that with our second kiddo, and I said, babe, well, let's, like, try to put together a brand message based on what I do with the YouTube clients and see if that helps, like, move your art more, maybe impacts more moms, and let's just see what happens. So we did. And that grew her Instagram account to about 20,000 followers. She got cold called by Netflix to do illustrations for them. She got called by two publishers about potentially doing a book, got written up in Bored Panda, HuffPost, all these things. And so I started thinking, like, well, maybe this works for any kind of artist, not just music artists, right? And so I started presenting the work or the work that I was doing to some visual friends, like, oh, this absolutely works for me too. Like, I don't think you should do this just for musicians. And I had a lot of imposter syndrome around that because, you know, I'm not a visual artist first. But what I saw is that it actually worked really, really well for visual artists because they had something that they were already selling that was of a higher value.

You know, the unfortunate truth is that music itself has kind of become a commoditized thing, right?

And so I started testing it with some visual artists and seeing it work. And at the same time, I'm still working over here at Video Creators. And one very pivotal thing happened there. What I would see really often is that our clients would come in and they'd say, we want to learn how to get views. And to get a lot of views, you have to play a really specific game. And that's the game we taught. And it worked. But the problem was that people would get views and they would at the same time be sacrificing who they were and what they were trying to say just to get views on a YouTube channel. And so when it would all be said and done, they'd end up trapped, feeling like they had to make a certain kind of thing in order to get views. And that's not really what they wanted to do. And so I thought, well, when I do this for artists, I'm going to start with a heart based.

Scenario, like a heart based strategy that says, who am I first? Not what do I want? Because it's not. I know that artists want sales. I know artists want clients. But it's like we have to start with who am I and what do I want to say, what am I willing to say and what am I excited to say to get those clients? And then we can turn that into a strategy. And so that became the heart based sales method, which, you know, really at the kind of foundational level of it allows you to take your heart, like what's what, your stories, your ideals, your values and all those things are, and use that to build your personal brand around as an artist and then find people that align with your values and your ideas and your mission and all these things. And it's worked really, really well. And so, yeah, it kind of started with me helping musicians, moved into me helping my wife, moved into me helping more visual artists, and then seeing these people sacrifice themselves for views and then being really frustrated even though they were making a living. And so I kind of swore that I would always get people to do the hard thing first, which is look inward before they got the result that they wanted outward. And it's really been amazing to see happen. So thanks for that question. I hope that answers it. I really, I don't talk about that too much. Probably should talk about it more because that's what I say you should be doing. All right, this one is from Will.

I post on Instagram and Facebook and I'm thinking about doing YouTube. Can you talk about the benefits of each of those channels and is there a certain way to market to the different channels?

Okay.

So Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, what are the benefits of each of these platforms and what are the marketing strategies of each of these platforms? So obviously I'm not going to be able to go into, you know, super detailed detail for each of these platforms, but I will talk about the benefits of each of these.

And where I think artists can.

Make use of each of them. So let me start by saying and reiterating the thing that I mentioned with Sherry's question, which is don't run yourself thin, right?

To Will here. It's like if you're posting on Instagram and Facebook and it's not working yet, you don't have it down. But you like these platforms, don't switch to another platform, stay on these platforms, or pick one of those even, and go all in on it, right? And this is really, really important to reiterate, because when you spread yourself thin, that's when you burn out. And the thing I see more often than not is artists burning out because they're trying to do too many things. Or they try something like Instagram and they don't see it work right away. And rather than figuring out what is working and making it better, they switch to another platform and then they don't see it work right away. And rather than figuring out what is working and making it better, they switch to another platform and they don't see that work right away. And now they're burned out because they just keep moving from one thing to another and they're making no progress. They're just literally running in circles, right? So this is why I'm such a big proponent of one thing for one year serving one person.

Selling one product, right? So anyway, have to preface with that. So what are the benefits of these platforms? First of all, let's talk about Instagram. The main benefit of Instagram to me, is relational value. What I love about Instagram is that you can build relationships with your people here.

With short form. How do you do this? Well, with a mix of posting reels to get attention, right? Posting stories to build connection. You can also obviously post reels to get connection too. But I think stories work really well for connection and then going live to build connection and even generate sales if you want to. But these are great ways to do it. And then the power move of Instagram is the DMs. Like, I love when my clients come back and they say, lennon, like, I made a sale because I reached out to the people that were interested in a dm and I just sent them a little voice note and just said, hey, you know, how can I serve you? What do you need? Like, DMs are such a powerful tool. And like, that's the thing I like about stuff like that is because you're doing things that you can't scale, meaning, like, you're doing things that if you did them all the Time, you run out of time. But that's the personal touch. That's the stuff where somebody goes, wow, they really care. So that's what I like about Instagram. Facebook. Now, I don't like Facebook just as a platform too much. But Facebook has both long form and short form content.

You know, people are already there, they're definitely checking things out.

We are seeing that Facebook reels are getting more and more views. So if you watch your Facebook feed now, it's operating pretty similarly to Instagram, except you'll have more long form like text things or news articles or things like that on Facebook then that you wouldn't see on Instagram. So if you think of it like Instagram is like reels and carousels and things like that. Facebook is like some reels, some, you know, text posts that are longer and beefier. Like people will go a little more in depth. It's a good mix of like personal stuff. So I think Facebook works really well as kind of an extension of Instagram. If anything, I would say, you know, take your stuff, make it for Instagram because Instagram has really great discoverability when you're using reels and then repost it to Facebook. This is something I want to start doing in quarter four of this year. So I like Facebook for that reason. It's not as easy to send DMs and things like that. So I don't love it as much as Instagram for that reason. Let's talk about YouTube. YouTube is my favorite platform, period.

It's evergreen, meaning like when you post a video, it can be found at any given time forever. Like it doesn't go away. YouTube shorts is the same way. It's really fantastic. So you'll see content pop up over and over and over again. Whereas on Instagram and Facebook it has a shorter shelf life.

YouTube is also really great for building connection because long form content is really great for building connection. So if I was going to advise an artist to do something on YouTube, I'd advise them to do something like what I'm doing here, which is just more of a long form podcast where you're maybe taking questions from your audience, you're letting them get to know who you are, talking about your mission as an artist, talking about your values, giving your take on what's happening in the world, things like that. Not just talking about your art, but letting people in on who you are as a human being. So there's an artist by the name of Frannerd on YouTube and this is what she does, really well, she'll share a bit of her working, but she'll also like be talking about who she is as a human being. And I think that's a really fantastic way to connect with people. Downside is you don't have DMs or things like that to connect with people on. But the discoverability factor is great. It's also a much harder game because you need to understand titles and thumbnails, things like that. Whereas on Instagram, you know, I think Instagram is a really great place to get started making content because you can make 62nd, 32nd, 15 second, 7 second videos and get attention and still build a little bit of connection.

You know, whereas on YouTube you do need to get good at just being yourself and showing up as you and making good thumbnails and titles that get people to want to click and watch. So that's the benefits of each of these platforms. If I were going to say, like, what's the marketing strategy for each of these? It really is the same thing. It is get attention from your people, right? Like your ideal buyer, which means you need to understand who your ideal buyer is. Let them know who you are as a human being first, right? Then at the same time showing what you do as an artist, let them in a little bit on like what you're making. Then as you get closer to a release, you start to go all in on the art and we sort of segue out of sharing who you are, which is how we build trust and get that connection piece going into like, this is what I make. This is like really my bread and butter. And then saying something to the effect of like, hey, if you like this, I'm going to be selling it. So let me know if you are interested and I'll put you on email list or find a way to just let them become a part of your world so you can make them an offer of your work. So that's how I would market the same way for all three of these platforms. Now, if you're interested in my marketing strategy, I have.

A free masterclass called Post to Profit that you can check out. I'll have the link for that in the description below. And it walks through that entire marketing strategy. And again, I would use the same one for each one of these. All right, so to recap, first of all, with this, if one platform isn't working, I don't know that I would switch. I'd start with something that, you know, you can get a grip on based on what we've talked about here. And Just go all in on it. You know, Instagram is great for relational value as well as discoverability, because you can use reels and stories that go away fast as well as DMs to connect with people directly. And that's really, really, really powerful. You can't do that really anywhere else. In the same way, Facebook is like Instagram, but I would call it sort of Instagram Lite. But, you know, it's also more for closer relationships, friends, stuff like that. And you can't get into people's messages as easy unless you're friends with them. And I don't really care for that. Facebook groups are fine, but people are so distracted on Facebook because they have so many things to look at that it's really hard to keep attention there. Then you have YouTube. YouTube is my favorite platform because discoverability happens over a long amount of time. Posts don't go away in 48 hours like they do on Instagram or Facebook. And that's really, really powerful. So people can discover you over and over again. So I would recommend artists that can handle it. You know, doing a very simple podcast like what I'm doing here, where you're just showing up, talking to your people, keeping it cut and dry, not a lot of edits, just, you know, a chance to connect. So I hope that that is helpful for you. Will, I appreciate you being a part of the community, and I want to thank all of you here for listening and for being a part of this community as well. If you would like to leave me a question that I might answer in a few. Sorry. A future episode of the podcast, you can go to speakpipe.com stopthestarvingartist again, speakpipe.com stopthestarvesartist and for those of you on YouTube, make sure you go check this video out here where I walk you through a weekly content plan that you can use for marketing your work now. So check that video out. So that's all we got for today. Thanks again. And don't forget, you don't make art. You are the artist.