Welcome to another edition of the Art Marketing Podcast, Patrick, your host, and today we're covering a Black Friday, Cyber Monday wrap up, what we learned, how it went, and how we can get better for next year. Hope you had a tremendous Thanksgiving holiday. I think it's a fair assumption, I think, to say you know we all have so much to be thankful for. I am truly thankful for all of you that listen to this podcast, love you guys. I'm thankful for you. For our non American listeners, while Thanksgiving was perhaps not a part of your last week, I hope you had a good Black Friday, Cyber Monday. I'm certainly thankful for you guys, too.

Now I'm not sure if any of you've paid attention to the headlines and articles that have come out since, both of the holidays have been done. I love diving into these pieces every year as I think they're just really quite toned about the direction of our world and the corresponding economies.

So, what jumped out at me this year as a macro headline I would say, Not In The Black Yet, It is Tough Times for Brick and Mortar Retailers, I think. Brick and Mortar's Traffic is Still in the Negative Column, was the headline on Forbes. Black Friday 2018, A Not So Wild Day for American Shoppers, said the New York Times. Brick and Mortar Stores Cling to Life, Put Black Friday Deals Online, said Axios. Black Friday Shoppers Choose Their Screens Over Brick and Mortar Stores, said Reco Daily. And their stat was that Black Friday foot traffic to traditional stores fell between five and nine percent compared to last year.

What this tells us, no surprises here, but online shopping continues to be killing brick and mortar. It is literally a death by a thousand cuts, one by one by one, bit by bit, online transaction by online transaction. Sales and their corresponding dollars are certainly moving online.

What does that mean for photographers and artists who are trying to sell art online? It means that the party is heading even more online, and if you wanna be a part of it you need to be up and online and running and marketing, and growing that portion, that pillar, that section of your business. To which I get the often hurled retort, "Not for me, Patrick. "I'm still selling great in my brick and mortar gallery, "so I don't need to be online." To which I always respond, that is great, stoked for you, but it's not a zero sum game, is it? Online is a different vertical and you ignore it at your peril. Doing well in a gallery, by all means ride until she kicks you, but do not ignore online, it takes time to build up. Also what jumped at me, Amazon Cyber Monday was the biggest shopping day in the company's history. I read that on Tech Crunch. What more does one need to read? Everything is going online.

No lines, no finding parking spaces, no brawling over who's going to get the new 60 inch flat screen before they're sold out. So, everything's going online. And certainly, you know audience of one here, but not sure about you but the headlines certainly squared with my personal shopping behavior. Did I buy a decent clip of stuff and take advantage of the deals? Yes, I did. Did I go to a bunch of brick and mortar retailers to do it? No, I did not. I found and bought pretty much all of my deals online. I had to go to Home Depot for regular stuff, and they got me on a few things I needed, but other than that 90% of my shopping activity was online. So, I think that's the same headline every year, I feel like, for the last however many years but it's so true. It's crazy. All of shopping is moving online, so I just think it underscores where things are going and it's just an important one to understand and to reconcile it.

And for those of you that have listened to the podcast for a long time, I'm also fascinated with what's going on in China. Because they have invented, kind of like how Amazon, Amazon stole the idea from them actually, but they invented a holiday over there called Singles Day. And it's basically their Cyber Monday or Black Friday, however you wanna say it, but it's an invented day. So, Amazon copied them and you know, Amazon's got Amazon Prime Day. Just for context, so some of the early stats, I don't know how accurate they are but they're close enough. This year's total Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined numbers were 13 billion for us. The Singles Sales Day in China, so keep in mind that's Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined 13 billion, the Single Sales Day in China was 30 billion in one day.

Crazy, crazy to think about China's coming up. So, I think some interesting learnings about where we're headed and I think they're important because they're gonna underpin everything we discuss today and of course, some context. So, for some context, and I think this is important to mention because it's gonna be where I'm gonna go in the 10 that I'm gonna give you, but art storefronts is a SAS business. And I think I've mentioned this before, but it bears repeating, back in the day if you wanted to succeed in SAS. It stands for Software as a Service, by the way, and it's basically any app that lives online, you pay for it with a subscription, that's SAS. That's an easy way to think of it, anyway. All you had to do was create your product back in the day and sell it. You had sales people, little competition, all you had to do was sell your product. The companies had all the leverage back then.

They didn't have to worry about whether or not their customers were successful, or how well they were doing, because they likely had nowhere else to go. There were very few places to go, there weren't a lot of options, so the customer was just stuck. Fast forward onto today, and we really do live in this era of abundance, right? The power balance has shifted, it's all in the consumer's hands now. The sheer number of options that exist out there for a photographer or artist to host their website and business on, it's never ending how many options there are. There's new ones popping up all the time, so in order to compete in that arena in today's day and age when there are so many options, so many options for the consumer, you really need to have a strong brand and you need to constantly invest in, obsess over, the success of your customers. You do that, and they'll never leave you.

So how does a company do that, right? How do we intend to do that? In a sentence, it's the right content. Content that teaches the customer how to grow their online business, where to focus, and then assistance in the implementation of what the content teaches. It's something we're working really, really hard at a business and getting better at everyday. And I think if you focus on that and your customers are gonna grow their sales, what happens then is they refer you to their friends, they shout your company's name from the mountaintops. They'll never leave your business, and that's the goal. It's an awesome, awesome time for the consumer. So, how do we do that in our storefronts? Yes it's the blog, yes it's the podcast that you're listening to, and the webinars, and the Facebook lives, and the YouTube videos, the playbooks, and everything that we put out.

But equally important is the implementation help, and in our case, we facilitate that through our private Facebook group for customers. You know, people post their issues, they get help from the other group means, they get help from ASF staff, to sort their tech issues they're hung up on. Whatever it might be, Facebook Ad help, or email help, or MailChimp help, or pricing, coupon codes, et cetera. It's sort of like having an art consultant, an art marketing consultant, in your back pocket. And we've really been invested heavily in the group over the last few years and the results have been amazing. This year we staffed it pretty much all weekend long. We had people helping with ads, and content, and copy, and on messenger, even on Thanksgiving Day. And the results for us as a business have been absolutely staggering.

Our customers more than doubled what they did last year in terms of sales for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and we don't even have all the data in yet. And I know you're asking, you're like great, fantastic for you guys, why are you telling me this? Let's get to the marketing. Why am I telling you this? I'm telling you this because a tremendous amount of the learnings that are about to follow all flowed out of real situations, with real artists and photographers, that in some cases sold a ton of art this Black Friday, Cyber Monday. Many cases, a good amount. Many got their very first sales, and yes, some are still struggling. But from the success to the epic fails in between, everything that we're gonna put in this podcast today is real, on the ground, in the trenches info. And we've been breaking down and combing through all the data in all these situations and it's been amazing.

So, what will follow are not some esoteric learnings we gleaned from reading marketing articles about other niches or studying what has worked in the past or what's working in our business, this is frontline intel from the trenches. It's real, and I think many of these learnings can help you. They will apply for the time we have left, from now 'til Christmas. They will apply all year long without question, and especially apply when next year's Black Friday, Cyber Monday comes along again. It comes along, every year, doesn't it? This is the long game, we're in this for the long haul. So, I'm fired up to get into these. To get them on wax, as they used to say, so we can leverage them ahead of next year. And that was one of the other awesome, profound learnings is a lot of the sales playbooks and media that we created, that we talked about in this podcast, were the ones we created last year and we just updated them a little bit.

And they're running, so I bring that up to say this stuff changes a little bit, but not that much. The core of all of it is going to be the same thing that we're gonna be talking about 10 years from now so it just makes so much sense to learn it and get your head wrapped around it. And shocker here too, a great deal of these subjects we have covered on the podcast so this will just serve to reinforce them. And some new learnings too though. And lastly, this episode is aimed squarely and informed at by our customers, but I imagine it applies equally well to anyone that's trying to sell art out there. So, I'm happy about that, it's gonna be a good podcast. Now, most of the time the podcast covers some pretty advanced marketing stuff and I'm reminded, and reminded from a lot of the feedback at the group, that occasionally we gotta slow down and take a step back and cover some more of the basic stuff.

So, we're gonna have some of that cooked in here, but there's gonna be some advanced, big picture stuff too. So, it's gonna be a mixed bag of everything. Now, before we get into it, some quick secondary data points that I thought were pretty interesting. We sent out a message in Messenger, so if you're a subscriber to the Art Storefront's bot you would have got this, you would have saw this. And we polled our audience, and the question was that we asked was how did you sell over this Black Friday, Cyber Monday holiday? And I think the choices that we said, the options were none, a little, sold a lot. And so, we got a total of 488 respondents and it's a mixed bag of anyone who's on our Messenger list. So, a sample portion of then are customers, a large portion of them are just Messenger subscribers from everywhere else, all different types of photographers and artists.

And so, out of that 488, 337 said none. So, 70% of them said they sold none. 122 of them said they sold a little, so about 25% sold a little. And 29 said they sold a lot, which is 6%. So, I thought was a pretty interesting little breakdown. 70% none, 25% a little, 6% a lot. And we asked a follow up question which was, of those that sold none, how many ran a special sale for the holiday? 66% of that group did not, 18% of that group did. So, I thought that was really interesting too, and it doesn't add up to 100% because the rest of them didn't respond to the second question. But I thought that was pretty interesting, pretty fascinating, figured I wanted to share that here on the podcast. Now, what's gonna follow are 10 learnings, 10 takeaways, 10 reflections from this last Black Friday, Cyber Monday. And number one is one word, test. Test. Test everything ahead of Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

This one is self-explanatory but it is so, so important and it's so easy to glean over, gloss over and forget. What did you do this Black Friday, Cyber Monday, did you run a sale? Use a coupon code, did ya'? Was your store working? How do you know? Are you running lead capture on your site? You've got forms on your site gathering emails? Are those emails making it into email service provider? Are they getting your follow up email sequence? Are you doing things in Messenger? Are those flows firing correctly? Anytime you are ahead of a big sale or a promotion or a special event, you have to make sure everything is working correctly. And we were reminded about this once we got a ton of posts, not a ton but a good amount of posts, about things that were not working correctly. Like people getting emails saying they couldn't get their order through, couldn't get their credit card in.

And you gotta test, you gotta test, you gotta get out credit card, make a test purchase on your site. If you're using a coupon code, use the coupon code, did it subtract the correct value? You know, depending on what coupon code you were using and what you were using it for. Opt in to your email list, make sure the emails all work. Test everything. You worked all year long at marketing to get to this point, ahead of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and yes, Christmas, so you gotta, gotta, gotta make sure your store's working. You never know when something could go down. And in some cases, it is a very painful lesson to learn. So, test everything. Very important one, simple but yes, so so necessary to say. So, do that always ahead of any launch or any big sale. So, test everything, poignant reminder. Number two, run the playbook. Run it. For those that did, it worked, why?

Because it works every time, it's tried. It just does. It gets you attention, it gets you eyeballs, which is what you need to gather more emails, more traffic, and yes, obviously more sales. So, we have a number of podcasts on these as well as additional video resources in the podcast post. Gonna put a link to everything in the show notes. Not gonna rehash all the details here, but in a macro, you warm up your audience, you let them know a sale is coming, you offer them a discount. You let them know the sale is ending soon, you include ads if you have that ability. That about wraps it up. You do that, you do that and obviously there's varying layers of sophistication that we cover in it, but you do that and it will work. And again, what I love about them is again there are simple version, there are advanced versions, you run what aspect of it you can, you get better at it, you level up your game, and each time you run it you build in more sophistication.

You know, you don't have to stress over what you can do or what you don't know how to do, you run what you're capable of and you run it. And what happens is you end up making a bunch of noise, even if you do the basic version, a bunch more noise than you would have made if you didn't do anything. Certainly, a ton more noise more than likely than you probably ever made before and that noise ends up leading to great things across the board and it's the noise that gets the attention, right? And that really is the whole ballgame. How are you gonna get your email list, collector, and fans, and followers' attention over the holidays? The playbooks take care of this and then some. We saw everybody from the most basic to the most advanced, in terms of marketing acumen of our customers, do significantly better than they did last year. In a massive amount of cases, the best they've done, ever.

Lastly, on the playbooks, there are so many comments on our Facebook ads of people that complain about our prices or say, I'll sign up if you just take a commission of what I sell and I'll join for free and you'll get paid when I get paid. Or, I'm just getting started, throw their hands up in the air, I can't do anything. And they bounces, and it's like comments in that spirit, and I say the same thing to these people every time. You don't have to sign up for us, the playbooks work incredibly well. Yes, if you're a customer you're gonna get coaching and hand holding through them but you can run them on your own and absolutely do great. Take them, roll with them, we give them away for free and we ask nothing in return. We can do this all day because I know, we know, that so few will actually take advantage and put them into practice, right? 66% of those respondents just didn't even run a sale at all, didn't even try.

So, run the playbook, it works a hundred percent of the time. It's tried, it will get you results. Okay, so number two is run the playbook. Number three, the elephant in the room. You tried, you made no sales. Are there people in this group? Yes, there are. I wish it was not the case, but there are. So, let's address what's usually going on if you're in this boat. It's usually a few different scenarios. Number one, it all starts with the validation of one's art. We have two episodes where we covered this in the podcast, number 13 and 14, put them in the show notes. But if your art or photography is not selling offline, thinking you're going to go online and it's gonna work is a recipe for failure. You have to get your art into the marketplace and validated, i.e. make sales from people that are not related to you or your best friends. Make sure folks are willing to part with their hard earned dollars for your art before you invest all of the time, energy, and effort to put up a site and start marketing. There's no skipping this step.

And by the way, if you art does not pass the test, if it does not sell offline, it does not mean you're a no talent hack of an artist or photographer. No, it just means the market does not like what you're producing so you've got to pivot. And I think one of the top selling artists on our platform, Bill Stidham, episode number four, was about to hang up his hat, quit the holy game of poker, leave the art world. None of his work was getting any traction, what did he do? He pivoted to a new style and his business took off. Now he's selling six figures plus of art per year, all online, without even having to touch the orders as they go out. He sells all day, all night, does not even live in the US. It's an amazing story, it's worth a listen and if you've not heard it, it's incredibly inspiring. And again, I'll put it in the show notes. So, you need to validate your art. That has gotta happen, that's the first scenario.

The second scenario, you're brand new. You've just launched your site, you're just getting started marketing. No, fish do not jump in the boat. Sales are not a light switch you just get to flip, Google is not gonna send you waves of traffic because you filled in your meta descriptions or paid some dodgy SEO firm your cousin recommended $500 to optimize your site. Building an online business takes time, it just takes time. Number three scenario, you've had your site up for a while but you're not actively marketing, not following our teachings, not building your email list all along. Then you go for the jugular during the holiday season, do a very minimal version of the playbook and make no sales. The length of time your site is up, or your Facebook page, sadly has very little to do with your sales volume. You have to be marketing all year.

Now, every once and a while we'll get a frustrated customer in the Facebook group and they tell us about how they made zero sales since launching over a year ago, or whatever the case may be. We'll read it, get super bummed, then start to investigate, right? We take a look at their work. Hey, this looks really good, this is some impressive stuff. Then we'll dive into the site, are they following best practices? Then we'll dive into their marketing, are they sending emails? Posting regularly? Are they capturing leads on their site? Did they run any contests throughout the year? In pretty much every case we find out that they've done almost nothing or very, very little in terms of their marketing. So, the outputs equal the inputs, they just do. So, if you take care of number one, two, and three above, it is absolutely a simple game of pressure over time.

Now, allow me to quote ASF customer, Bill Wenzel, from a recent post. And I quote, "I don't think there's a good way "to quickly build a client base. "The main things is make sure you collect emails "on your website, and you have a Facebook business page "then yes, start announcing the website. "I very much recommend an Instagram page, "do your best to follow the marketing calendar ASF provides. "It's a bunch of baby steps but each one is important. "Last year was my first holiday season with ASF, "I didn't do much at all. "This year, I've already sold five times more "than last year's holiday sales. "The only reason that happened is "I took all of the baby steps. "I'm not saying quick results can't happen, "some artists have had them happen, it's just not the norm. "Try to be consistent, "post on Facebook and Instagram on a regular schedule, "send out a couple of romance emails a month, "and post blogs when I can, "and that seems to be working for me." End quote.

That's the game, that's the whole game summed up. That's it, marketing all year long gives you the audacity to be able to send those sales emails in the fourth quarter and really, really do well. So, that's number three. Number four, rescue unsold carts. Rescue unsold carts. Two things here, number one, yet another reason to be running your online art business on a proper shopping cart because you need to be able to have access to the folks that put an item in their cart, got ready to check out, and didn't pull the trigger for whatever reason. Number two to this, do the things that do not scale. They always yield the highest dividends. Meaning, do the extra amount of work, by hand, the things you could never do all year long and put in the extra effort. In this case, on Cyber Monday we jumped into the group and laid out the to-do list for all of our customers.

Go to your unsold carts, does not matter if you've only got one of them, or if you've got hundreds, and you get the email from the unsold cart and you reach out to those folks personally via email and you ask them if they need any help. You reopen the conversation and see if you get the sale with that personal touch. You've spent all of this money, this time, this energy, this effort, these ad dollars, whatever the case may be to get those people to your site, and you almost make a sale, you owe it to yourself to do the things that do not scale. To write them a personal email out of your personal email account, not blasting them out of MailChimp all on one list but writing an individual letter. Hey Patrick, I saw that you put something in your cart and you never checked out. Don't know if you were just kicking the tires or what, but if you have any questions I just wanna let you know I'm here.

It could be as simple as that. And you know, you can even make it a form letter. It just works. The holiday season, it's just so filled with distractions, it's so easy to get distracted, you know? What's this, squirrel! So, the personal touch, the personal email leads works so incredibly well. Again, I quote from the group. Photographer John, "Patrick, I only had two and managed "to convert them both, so I'm happy." I'm happy for you too, John, but that's it. He wrote two emails to two unsold carts and Tuesday or Wednesday whenever he did that, he sold two more sales. Boom. So, the whole activity is the overtime part of the playbook by the way, it's in there. So, you can, yes, you can and should remarket to folks on Facebook and Instagram that add to the cart and do not check out. That's a subject of something else later, but the personal touch in this case. You know, if you've got an e-commerce site and you can see the data on the unsold shopping carts, and you can email those folks, boy does that effort work and so few people do it.

That's number four. Number five, know your audience and speak to your audience. And everybody likes a deal, everybody likes a deal. It doesn't matter who you have on your list, everybody gets wrapped up in the holiday season for the most part. And so, perhaps you're an artist and you have prints, limited editions, and originals. Perhaps you're a photographer, and in addition to selling your prints, you also have portrait sessions on offer, right? If you've got a service component of your business. I think the right message to the right person at the right time. So, I learned this one kind of the hard way because my buddy Matthew Lockett who I've mentioned on the podcast before has got a business and he sells prints, and he takes commissions for the portraits he paints, and then he sells his originals, right? And his whole sale, and I was looking at his data, his whole sale for Black Friday and Cyber Monday was all about the prints and selling the prints, but he's got a ton of collectors on his list and a ton of people that were interested in commissions.

Now, lucky for him, I think he still got a couple of commissions out of it because he did a good job on his playbook and really made some noise. But I thought about it after the fact, and I was like, man, what a bonehead move on our part to not speak to those individuals, and to offer those individuals a way to take advantage of Black Friday and Cyber Monday and a way to get a discount on whatever it is that you're offering. And so, if you're selling originals and you're selling commissions, and you're selling prints. Or you're selling prints, you're selling services, include that in those discounts for those folks on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, they'll take advantage of it. Everybody's just looking for a deal and it's just a fantastic way to close one. So, we're definitely gonna make that a part of the playbook going forward and some better ways to potentially segment and speak to those people.

But, not a mistake I'm gonna make again next year, that's number five. Number six, done is better than perfect. Two things, one, not everybody's at the same stage with their business, marketing, technical skill level, or available time. You do what you can, when you can, how you can. You get better, you stumble, you learn. Next year, you're really gonna double or triple what you did this year. And number two, saying it a different way, there's no need to overthink things. We notice a large amount of our customers tend to get hung up on the minutia or the little details of a particular marketing technique, tactic, strategy. Or things are getting too advanced for where they are. None of that is to be worried about, you need to have a just ship it mentality. Your goal is to just ship it. Send that email even if the copy's not perfect, the image is not perfect, you're worried about shipping, you're worried about this.

I think we all have this tendency to get so hung up in the perfect syndrome. It's gotta be perfect, it's gotta have this, it's gotta have that, and the byproduct of that is you don't end up taking these extra steps, you don't end up sending that email, you don't end up turning that ad on, and you gotta just get something in the water whatever it might be. And it's a big cliche, but I think it's a poignant reminder, no matter where you are in your marketing sophistication, where you lie, everybody's gonna screw up a bunch early on, that's just part of the game. You can't get let that get in your way, you can't let it be a mental roadblock, you can't sweat the small stuff, you gotta just ship it. Get something in the water, learn about it after the fact. That's number six. Number seven, the contest ahead of Black Friday, Cyber Monday. Whoo, oh man, was this powerful learning.

I'm making this a part of the playbook next year as well. So, if you're a regular listener, perhaps two episodes ago or so I covered the updated version of how to run contests on Facebook with Messenger and I used, again, my buddy Matthew Lockett, and we ran a contest. And I still owe a podcast episode on that that I teased, and don't worry it's coming. But, this ended up being a tremendous, tremendous strategy for him. And the idea is that you run a contest. In the contest you do a bunch of things, but you run the contest with the playbook we have for the contest, with the ultimate guide we have for how to run a contest, and what that does is it just whips up a frenzy of attention. It gets people all fired up. And what are you gonna do with them after the fact? What are you gonna do with them after the fact? And so the analogy that I really like is let's say you own a huge club in town and it's like the hot club or bar, or whatever.

Everybody's in their partying, everybody's in there getting after it, having a great time drinking, dancing. And then at 1:30, the doors close. At 1:30, the doors close, everybody's out. So, what happens at 1:30? A bunch of drunks spill into the parking lot, hopefully to wait for their Ubers, some morons to drive, but they all spill into the parking lot, they've got to home, right? So what if, what if you could own a Mexican burrito stand in the parking lot? What's gonna happen? All of those drunks are gonna come out and they're gonna be looking for a booze mop, they're gonna hit that burrito stand, and they're gonna buy burritos. So, just by putting that thing in there after the party, knowing when you got all these hungry drunks out there, the line's gonna be out the door. Everyone's gonna be buying and eating them, right? And that's just a fantastic way to think about the contest.

The contest is the huge party, it gets everybody fired up, the alcohol part aside, but it gets everybody fired up, and wound up, and pumped up. The idea is to have the burrito stand and be ready to sell, and so in this case the contest was just ahead of Black Friday, Cyber Monday. And so, because that thing generated such a tremendous amount of attention for his business, that they were all wound up, they were all spun up, and then what do we do? We turned them right into the Black Friday, Cyber Monday sale and it paid off quite handsomely for him. And so, the point of it is is that if you have the ability to run these contests, you need to think about how you can position them strategically. Not as a standalone entity, but as something that's gonna roll into something else. And Black Friday, Cyber Monday, fantastic way. Any other huge sale you're doing, fantastic way. A huge gallery opening or show you're having, fantastic way.

So, a new and interesting way to think about it, we are definitely making that a part of the playbook, that's gonna be a thing going forward. Number eight, things break, things do not go smoothly. What did Mike Tyson famously say? "Everybody has a plan, until they get punched in the mouth." It's sort of also like having a birth plan, I've been in that zone over the last six to eight years of my life where everybody is having kids, and everybody has a birth plan going into the hospital. And some of them are really elaborate, and the way they want things and everything else. Oh, do those go out the window quickly when the bullets start flying, right? When you get in there. So, that's always gonna be the case with your marketing plan. All kinds of things are gonna get in the way and wrench it up. I mean, I had Black Friday the entire Facebook Ads Manager was down, you couldn't even get ads in.

The Ads Manager was being buddy or perhaps your email was acting up, or you forgot something. Again, it's important to say, don't panic, there's always gonna be glitches, you just gotta learn to pivot and work around things and not stress about it. You do what you can, and you get done what you can, and you learn from it. And by the way, that's just as true for advanced marketers as it is for the early ones. Number nine, the Facebook Ads masterclass for artists and photographers. I realized painfully over this holiday season, and especially in the run up to it of how badly this product is needed. Facebook is just such a complicated beast, so many moving pieces, constantly changing and updating. I feel like so many artists and photographers step up to the plate and sort of follow the hype, rightfully so which is everybody's advertising in Facebook and Instagram so we should be too.

And I agree with that, it's where all the attention is. Yet, there's just a large number of basics that everybody can do and run that we need to cover. All the basics, from start to finish, once they're in place the advanced techniques that can built upon it. How to leverage Messenger, how to include lead ads, how to do carousel ads, all the various different things you can do with audiences and exclusions. How to advertise to the people that added to your cart and didn't purchase. So, we're creating that now. The best part of it is it's going to be completely focused on leveraging Instagram and Facebook Ads for selling art and photography, that's it. So, it'll be laser focused on that and I think it'll be hugely helpful. So, that was a tremendous learning taken out of this season about just getting the basics in place because some of the basics could be completely automated and run all year long for you.

So, there's a number of tricks you need and to do really well, and we plan to detail and document all of them with video, step by step, take you guys there every step of the way. So, look for that in Q1. And number ten, to wrap things up on this wrap up, is in just a word, it's perspective. It's perspective. And to be honest with you, I really do blame Instagram for this one as much as anything. What does everybody do? All they do is photograph and put on Instagram the most ideal scenes in their lives, even if it's not really their lives. The cars, the handbags, the boats, the planes, the jets, the ice, the houses, all of it, right? I feel like it's really having a long term and sustained, negative impact on perspective, I really do. To build anything of value, especially long term, an often quoted Steve Jobs line, "Takes three to five years of time."

All of the artists on our platform that are crushing it, and whether that be the hobbyist selling 50,000 a year and that's where they wanna be and the full time artist selling six figures plus to even way more than that. Few as those people might be, you know, a few crazy anomalies aside, have been hard at this for seven to tens years plus in most cases. And hard at it for years and years, and often times the first several years without almost any sales at all. And I think Art Storefront's is in its fifth year now as a business and we're just barely getting started knowing our customers and how we can best serve them and deliver a product that's truly compelling. So, I think getting into this game with the wrong perspective, I think is so completely cancerous. You're just setting yourself up for failure and frustration.

By just getting your head in the right place, by realigning how long things take, and having that proper perspective, it's gonna take me years to really get this business going and change everything. You start working with like a different and more realistic time table. You have more compassion and empathy for yourself to fail on some of these things early on, but to really get better step by step by step. You start sweating the small stuff, and you may wake up one morning after years of hard work, all of which tends to blend together and you're rolling. And you're really starting to do well, you're getting traction, and you're getting closer to what your individual goals are as an artist or a photographer for your business. And I think that perspective is so important. And I think that people that have that properly aligned and how quickly I see them learning and how much better they're getting at marketing, and how much more advanced each campaign is getting, and how quickly they're executing it.

The overall attitude, it's tremendous. It makes such a difference for their business and so I think that's a really important one to mention. So, that's the 10. Where do we go from here? Year's not over yet, we still have Christmas coming. So, I hope you're working on your marketing strategy for now until the end of the year. We've some great content on this coming real soon so I hope you check that out. It might be a blog post in lieu of a podcast or maybe even both. To get the resources from this episode if you wanna check out any of the articles, or links, or any of the other podcast episodes that I mentioned, you can Google the Art Marketing Podcast. You can go to ArtStorefronts.com, or you can pull out Messenger on your phone and search for Art Storefronts, get into the bot, and you'll see the podcast episode number links in there. So, as always, thanks for listening and have a great day.