5 Tips for Running an Online Creative Business
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As you start growing your creative business, you’ll notice that you take on more and more tasks that don’t directly relate to making art. It can be unpleasant for sure - we got into this business to spend our time creatively, right?
One option would be to hire some support to help you out with some of those administrative responsibilities, but if you’re on a shoestring budget, like so many of us are right at the start, there are other tricks you can try to save yourself a whole bunch of time and energy.
Thanks to all of the wonderful tech we have at our fingertips nowadays, there are a lot of ways that you can automate different aspects of your creative business, so that you can spend that time making art and developing your craft.
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Here are a few of my favorite ways to do that:
1 - Social media
There are a number of tools out there designed to help you schedule social media posts. If you are posting regularly to Instagram, a scheduler will not only make it easier, but will save you a ton of time.
How I do this: With Planoly, I’m able to upload feed posts, stories and reels to my account. I can see what the grid will look like, easily move posts around, save and add hashtags and save groupings or folders of posts that I might want to add later. Once a post is ready to go live a notification is sent as a reminder with all the data saved and at your finger tips.
Tool of choice: Planoly
2 - Email marketing
A while ago I wrote a post about why you need a mailing list and how to start growing one. The only way to get the most out of your email list is to actually email them, and to do it regularly.
You can automate these regular emails by setting up a series of emails that will automatically be sent out to your subscribers when they sign up.
How I do this: When someone signs up for my one of my freebies, such as my free Artist Life Private Podcast, they receive a series emails giving them guidance and direction on how to access and listen to the podcast. They’ll also receive a series emails sharing some of my best, most helpful content, as well as workshop recommendations.
Tool of choice: Flodesk
3 - Payments
Make it easy for people to pay you for your creative work.
There are so many ways you can go about this. If you’re selling directly through your website, you could use Paypal or Stripe to ensure automatic payments. You can also set up bespoke payment links for commissions, which makes everything even easier. And then if you sell on a third-party website, such as Etsy or Teachable, they’ll take care of it all for you.
How I do this: I sell my art and digital products through an ecommerce website that automatically takes payments and deposits them in my account. I sell my creative workshops through an online school, which runs on Teachable. It’s such a great tool that will automatically take payments and then give my students access to the training materials without any input from me.
Tool of choice: Stripe, Teachable
4 - Booking your time
Everyone’s creative business looks a little different. You might be the type of artist who stays at home painting all day, but you might also be the type of artist who gives talks, participates in interviews or gets involved with big projects.
If you’re that second type, a big portion of your time could get taken up emailing back and forth trying to schedule meetings… but if you have an automatic calendar booking system, you remove the need for all of those emails altogether.
It is pretty simple. All you have to do is set up a calendar, add your available schedule, share the link so your potential customers can easily schedule a day and time that works best for them.
Tool of choice: Acuity Scheduling
5 - Intake and interview
If your creative business involves dealing with people, in any capacity, you might find yourself spending quite a bit of time figuring out if those people are the right fit… and that’s time you could be spending on your art.
Set up a form to filter out those interested parties who aren’t quite right for you.
How I do this: Last year when I was looking to grow my team, I had some really specific ideas around what I wanted from my new VA. I put together a form that acted as a pre-interview, so that I could select the most suitable applicants to chat with face-to-face. This could also work if you have people applying to be on your design team, interested in commissions, or wanting to be interviewed for your blog or podcast.
Tool of choice: Typeform or Airtable
How to Get Started…
I hope that by reading this you’ve started to see the many different tasks that you can start automating in your creative business. If you feel like you want to embrace automation even more, here’s what I would recommend:
Pull out a sheet of paper and divide it into two columns.
In the first column, write down all the things that you love to do in your business.
In the second column, write down all of the things that you find a little tricky, or boring, or overly time-consuming.
Research hacks and tools to help you out with everything on that second list.
