Supercharging "The Loop"

In this episode of the Art Marketing Podcast, Patrick delves into the tactical aspects of 'supercharging the loop'—a marketing strategy aimed at getting art and photography in front of massive audiences. He discusses the benefits of this tactic for artists and photographers with varying levels of followers, the importance of setting correct expectations, and how to excel through persistence despite rejection. Patrick emphasizes the use of a numbers game approach, the significance of building relationships, and omnichannel messaging. Additionally, he provides practical steps for research and outreach, underscoring the importance of respect and flexibility when engaging with potential partners. Finally, he encourages a mindset of making it easy for others to say 'yes,' highlighting the long-term value of relationships over immediate gains.

Podcast Transcribe

Patrick Shanahan: Welcome to this edition of the Art Marketing Podcast. We're talking about supercharging the loop. Last week, I covered the loop; this week, I present the tactical guide on how to supercharge it—the who, what, when, where, why. Let's go. First and foremost, I've got to shout out one Karen Wallace for leaving me a five-star iTunes review asking me to make this episode. So Karen, you know what, this episode is for you.

What's something that I say often? Right now, where we are in 2023, it really is the greatest time in history to be an artist or a photographer attempting to sell your art or photography. Why? The fact that tactics like this are even possible—namely that you, an artist, a photographer with a very small amount of attention, notoriety, following, email list awareness—can simply, by leveraging a marketing tactic like this, get your art and photography in front of thousands to tens of thousands to even millions of eyeballs without leaving the comfort of your house, and all for the negligible cost of printing and shipping a piece of merch or a small commission or original. It's really amazing when you think about it.

And better still, you know who this tactic is best for? You, me, and everybody. Yes, it solves the chicken and egg problem for those with low followers, i.e., you only have two Instagram followers, your mother and your significant other. Yes, it's great for those who've been at it for a while and have some following. Yes, it's great for those that are really, you know, humming, the business is cooking. And you know, you go a couple of episodes back, and you re-listen to how Meg, who's already passed the one million threshold in sales, used it on that Ted Lasso deal to sell thousands of mugs and acquire thousands of customers.

The reality is that when you supercharge the loop, you're just advertising. And it does not matter what size business you are—all sizes, i.e., everyone can benefit from advertising, especially, dare we say, when you deploy the level of creativity and temerity in the plan I suggest here. This thing is bold.

Now, before we get started, if you're listening to this episode and you're saying to yourself, "What is the loop? What is this Yahoo talking about?" then pause this, go back an episode, and get up to speed on the loop. We'll wait here for you. So what we'll now follow is the tactical guide on this process from soup to nuts. And man, I haven't recorded an episode like this in a while; this thing's going to go deep.

Let's talk about our objective in all this, okay? We actually have several with this tactic. In other words, we have what's called optionality—we have multiple ways to win. So I want to state these upfront. The obvious: gain fans, followers, friends, depending on the venue. Capture email addresses if that's applicable—that's what we're going for. It can be other things as well, but email addresses are the core of it. Then generate sales from the campaign at the end of the loop. Now that's the obvious.

Let's talk about the subtle. The subtle is getting better at this process. You're going to be running it for the rest of your life, so don't gloss over this one. Even if you get a massive goose egg here—you got nothing, okay? If you ran it, you won. You won because you got more comfortable with it. You got better and more comfortable with the mechanics of it. And there's a lot. In some cases, it helped you realize that your art or photography is not resonating. If nobody enters to win, that might be a problem with your subject matter material. And now you know that for sure, and you can pivot to try some new ones.

Also subtle: start conversations with potential buyers and buyers, right? I'm going to need to do an entire side episode on this, but the whole ball game is you're going to be starting conversations with people that are interested in your art. It's a huge win. Also subtle: you developed a relationship with a high-value person, organization, or group, okay, that has attention. The idea here is that if you develop this relationship, you get to know this person. The first one went well, so you can go back to the well again and again and again, year after year after year.

When you contemplate the ads-based way of thinking about this, it's like you're just trying to establish an ads account with Facebook or Meta or Instagram or Meta—this terminology thing is killing me. You're just trying to open an ads account with Meta. Except this ads account is highly unconventional, and there is no formal way to put a credit card down, sign up, and start an entity and just do it. What you have to do is get permission, and then you have access to their entire network. You can do it again and again. It is the single solitary highest ROI of this entire thing. It just is. Doing this 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 times, if you get one account, one account that you have a great relationship with, it could utterly and completely change the trajectory of your business. It's that big of a deal.

The next subtle one: you cultivate social proof. If it's a notable account, you can talk about it, get testimonials, list their logo on your site as featured in. For the sophisticated among you, also subtle, those that are running ads, it can be very handy to charge up your warm and/or remarketing audiences, especially if you are leveraging engagement audiences on Meta or Google. It doesn't apply to most of you, but for those that know, you'll understand.

Is there anything better than having multiple ways to win? Is there? We execute this tactic with optimism and excitement, for we know it could sort of hit, really hit, or it could go right out of the park. The results are usually not binary, i.e., you either win or lose. And it really does make the whole thing quite exciting. They love this thing.

So next, I want to talk about expectations. Okay, expectations: very important mental and psychological components to this, very important to sort this upfront. The wisdom here comes from experience. You know, a few years back, I taught this tactic to my entire customer base. Now, while a few leveraged it successfully, a great many did not. A great many failed at it. And we had so many people fail at it, we actively pumped the brakes on teaching it and then continuing to encourage our customers to do it. What I've come to find out or came to find out, I should say, the reasons for this were primarily based on setting the correct expectations upfront.

So let's get this out of the way now. I want to emphasize two main points here. Number one: this is a numbers game. I'm going to say it again: this is a numbers game. As I'm contemplating this point, I realized something too, by the way. You know, I have two small children, and when they get older, I want both of them, regardless of what they decide to do with their careers or their lives or where that's headed, to either A) spend a summer doing a door-to-door sales job or B) spend a summer doing telemarketing. I might even demand it. Because in both jobs, you suffer terribly. You are rejected a lot. Sometimes you are met with hostility. You learn to get over it. You learn it's all part of the job. You still suffer and hate it. You fight through all of it. You learn to tolerate the pain of it, and as a result, you end up winning. You learn it's a numbers game. You inure yourself towards this negative feedback. And you know, my goodness, what a valuable life skill set to have. And when you go through something like that, you know—you ever see The Princess Bride? I'm dating myself, sure. But you know Wesley wins the battle of wits with the poison cup, not because he was smarter, not because of any other reason than he conditioned his body to the poison through regular exposure. None of which was fun. Both cups had the poison in them. He won because he was conditioned to it. And I think you need to remember this classic movie scene when going through this exercise.

You are going to suffer. There is going to be rejection. People are not going to get back to you. It is very difficult to keep going through that. And it is one of the primary reasons most of my customers burnt out on it. They tried it one, two, three times. They're like, "This is terrible. I can't deal with this rejection." And they moved on. Man, just remember that movie scene. You have to suffer a little bit on this. You learn that it doesn't matter how good your pitch is, how good your product is, what you are offering. A large portion of these people you contact are just going to ignore you. They're gonna ignore you. They're not gonna say anything. They're not going to come back to it, and you have to get over it. The rejection is just a part of it. It's just math. There's no room for emotion in any of it. All of which is very easy for me to say and none of which is easy to deal with. It's perhaps the most difficult part of this entire tactic. You're going to contact a bunch of people, and a bunch of those people are going to ignore you. You will find this deflating. You can let it slow you down, but you can't let it bother you. We're humans; it's going to affect us. You just have to learn to get over it. It's all part of the game, right?

So now that you know that where everyone else quits, you're just getting started.

 There's poison in both cups, right? Number two point: this is a numbers game not just in the number of people you contact to get it set up but also in the number of times you need to run it before you get a solid win. Yes, we have multiple ways to win, but the numbers are still the numbers. And it's really hard to think of it this way at first, right? All of my customers kept quitting because they tried once and they got rejected, or they tried twice and they got rejected, or they got a third one over the line and then the results were terrible, right? And we have to remain in this mental framework. We have to remain in this mental framework. We have just updated our software on our brains, right? This is just running ads. It's running ads. And it's really hard to think this way. You're not giving away a print. You're not shipping out a piece of merch. You're not doing a free commission. You're not giving away a small original. You're just running an ad. The cost for you to do any of the above—the aforementioned—is just the cost of running an ad. When you run ads, you have duds all the damn time. You think they're good. You think they're great. You spend a ton of energy, time, effort, creativity on it. And guess what? Nobody clicked. Nobody came to your website, and nobody bought. And that's the game. It happens all the time. And it's completely normal. You create and paid advertising—20 ads sometimes—in the hopes that one of them hits and you can run that ad for months and months. So the way to think about this tactic is you need to run a bunch of them, especially early on as you get some experience in this. You're going to have some duds. A good rule of thumb to go on that I found is set yourself up in your mind that you're going to execute on this tactic 10 times no matter what happens each time. You're gonna do this 10 times. You can reevaluate after the 10. The 10 are done. The 10 are in the can. But 10 it is. You will not quit. You will not allow a dud early on. You will not let the rejection early on stop you until you get 10 of them over the line. You can't let it bother you, slow you down, or deflate you. It's all part of the game. And when you prepare yourself for these two important points—it's a numbers game and it's a numbers game—you do that before you get started and you're not going to get demotivated. You will end up winning. You will end up winning.

Now, one final point before we get into the hardcore tactical—and again, this is all born out of experience—and I have to call this point, "Don't be a pain in the ass." Nobody likes a pain in the ass. Nobody wants to do business with a pain in the ass. And this is one of these situations where you, in the words of John Fogerty, I'm going to point the canon at you, artist or photographer, or your own worst enemy. Something about the creative brain not being wired for business, this manifests itself in many ways during sales, during negotiations, for instance, but yes, also in this tactic. And I remember back a few years, you know, I was in an office hour session, and a customer said to me, "Yeah, well Patrick, I tried your so-called curator technique," that's what I used to call it, "and let me just tell you, Patrick, it doesn't work." I was like, "Okay, all right, I hear you. So what happened? Show me the direct message exchange that you had." And this was on Instagram. So DM is a direct message. And in this particular instance, the customer got the account to say yes, got the account to respond to his message and say, "Oh, this sounds like a great idea. I'm interested." After that, the person said, "Well, this is interesting. I'd like to talk about it." And do you know what this particular customer did? Responded with a diatribe about himself. "Oh, great, really happy. First, let me tell you a little bit about myself." And then he dropped like two paragraphs in the Instagram DM about who he is and where he got started and how he came up. And I, I, I looked at this, I was actually reading the direct message in front of the whole audience, and I'm like, "Dude, don't be a pain in the ass."

Variations of this abound. I'm going to sum it up like this. Your job is to get one of these folks to say yes. Well, first, it's actually to get them to see your message. We'll get into this in a minute. But then it's to get them to say yes, to actually run the tactic, to run the campaign. These people have large communities and a ton of attention for a reason. They are good at what they do, which means they work hard, which means they are busy. They do not have time for a pain in the ass, so don't be one. Your job is to make it as easy as possible for them to say yes, for you to make their lives easy, for you and interacting with you to be an energy up, high energy, enjoyable type of situation, okay? Very important to remember this.

What is the highest ROI in all of this? A long-term relationship in which you can go back to the well again and again and again. All right. With that in place, okay, I want to talk broadly about your work and how to contemplate about the communities—I need a better term that sums it all up, but we'll just get into this—the communities, the accounts, the influencers, the whatever, that your work might apply to. So let's talk about your work. Some of you guys have defined niches. Some of you don't. Some of you focus on a subject matter material, and some of you are all over the board. All of that is all good. Some of you have work tied to a locality, i.e., you're a Rocky Mountain landscape photographer, or you specialize in the panhandle of Florida beach scenes like Jonah a few episodes back, you know, or your work has dark and brooding political tones. I'm here to tell you that it does not matter what you do. You are not unique. Your situation is not too difficult. There is an audience or a tribe or a following or a group that is into what you do. That is the reality and the beauty of the internet that we live in today. There is a community out there that would resonate seeing your work, that your work would resonate towards. So you just need to get creative in trying to find the accounts that do. You can attack broadly or you can attack narrowly.

Patrick:** I am a painter that loves plants. I paint all types of plants. And I respond, "Awesome, I love plants too." So you can attack broadly, accounts that love plants as well. And let me tell you, there are thousands of big accounts that focus on plants. There are Instagram accounts and Facebook groups and subreddits and YouTube channels that focus on every aspect of plants imaginable, communities—this is where I need a keyword because we're talking about so many different groups. So I'm just going to say communities. There are communities around sustained farming, there are communities around land regeneration, there are communities around urban jungalows—did you know that was a keyword? It's a thing. These are the house plant types. There are flower groups, tree groups, communities that love hanging plants, landscape designers. I could go on for weeks and weeks and weeks talking about the number of communities that exist that your work would fall into. You can also attack narrowly. You like painting, you know, in your plant painting repertoire, you like Japanese maples. Good, I love Japanese maples. You could target small nurseries on Instagram that specialize in maples. You could target individual Facebook groups that specialize in the blood-good varietal or the subreddit that focuses on the coral bark maple, right? There are YouTube channels with 500,000 subscribers that focus on how to bonsai Japanese maples. It doesn't matter whether you go broad or whether you go narrow. There are groups out there. And you know who would love to have a plant painting or a Japanese maple print on their wall? Pretty much any of the plant lovers or Japanese maple lovers that follow these folks that have communities around these topics. This is a fertile ground. Not really picking the plant thing to an extreme.

So that's broadly and specifically. If your work defies explanation—talking about you abstract types here—then hunt down interior designers that you think would be a fit or focus on accounts that like to promote local artists or photographers or charities in your area. You have to get creative in all of this. And you know, I realize in thinking this through and just talking about it out loud in my head is, you know, I could do another in-depth episode on just how to find these folks and how to do it. But for now, broadly speaking, to get you started, I love starting with Instagram. And I love starting with Instagram whether I plan on doing this process on an Instagram account or a YouTube channel or on Twitter or anywhere else, okay? Because Instagram is a lot of things. What I always talk about, it's multiple social networks in one. But it's also an extremely powerful search engine with social proof coming standard. So regardless of what venue you decide to eventually target for the loop here, Instagram is a fantastic place to start. You have Instagram open, go to the search, and search hashtags, and search reels, and search specific accounts, and see who's commented on the specific accounts. Go down the Instagram rabbit hole and come up with potential ideas. You'll find hashtags, you'll find

 communities, you'll find individual influencers, you'll find individual accounts. You can see the follower accounts on this thing. The hashtags especially are completely valid, right? Because to go back to the plant example, it'll be like horticulture and plant paintings and maples and blood-good maples and urban jungle, right? In any of those hashtags, you can just look at the description on the post, click on the hashtag, see if it's widely followed, see who the trending accounts are. Instagram is a fantastic way to start. And you start getting an idea of what all of these keywords are that are potentially related to your work and your niche. And then you can go and take those keywords and input them into the other search engines that exist to find these accounts.

So let's talk a little bit about some of these other potential venues. And yes, we've got to start with Instagram. It's one of the best, if not the best. It's the best social network to sell art on. So easy, easy for these accounts to give you an ad mention, a ton of good ones there. Facebook, also great. Facebook groups, also great. Easy to search them, easy to join them. You join, you find out who the moderators are, you message them directly. YouTube channels, yet another incredible search engine, by the way. You figure out what your keywords are, you start hammering them into YouTube. You look for the channels with high subscriber counts. What about X or Twitter? I hate the name changes, all right? Can we just stick with names? But yes, Twitter, X, great search engine. Twitter and X are specifically amazing for sports-type of art or celebrity-driven type of art, just about any type of art on Twitter. Twitter and X are amazing. What about podcasts? I love podcasts. You're listening to podcasts right now. For podcasts, by the way, I have some tradecraft for you. The site is called Listen Notes, all one word. Google it. It is a wonderful search engine for podcasts that will let you search for individual topics of just about any kind and then locate the shows that consistently talk about those topics or, better yet, themed around that. One question: you can go into Listen Notes and hammer around Japanese maples and see if there is a Japanese maple podcast. And if there's not a Japanese maple podcast, see how many individual episodes come up on Japanese maples. You know, you might find—if you do that, you might find that there is one guy that seems to be the Japanese maple expert that is always on everyone else's podcasts. And then you go and you track that person down and you see what's their biggest account. Is it Instagram? Is it Twitter? Is it YouTube? Do they have a website? Do they have a newsletter? So podcasts are excellent. Check out Listen Notes. What about email newsletters? Email newsletters are still a huge thing. There are email newsletters around just about every freaking topic imaginable. And let me tell you, print merch giveaways, the loop in an email newsletter is such a home run. It is such an easy thing for them to include, you know, because they're constantly trying to get people to click and have a good time with that email newsletter. And to have one little block of text down there that is listing your giveaway—home run. Find these email newsletters, sign up for them, read a few emails, and then come up with our game plan, which is as simple as hitting reply and making your pitch. What about Reddit? I love Reddit. I love Reddit so much. If you're not aware of what Reddit is, R-E-D-D-I-T.com, it's just basically a bunch of communities arranged around topics that they call subreddits. And again, I mean, there are subreddits on there arranged about everything imaginable under the sun. And subreddits operate like Facebook groups in the sense that each subreddit either has one or multiple different moderators to it. So all you have to do is start an account on Reddit if you don't have one, join, search, subscribe to some of these subreddits, see what the deal is, message the moderators, right?

So the venues, at the end of the day, it really doesn't even matter what the venues are. It can be anything. For the purposes of this podcast, I'm going to keep it simple. This list we have is a great starting place. But these are some of the venues you can look into to find these folks that have large amounts of attention that your art would work well for. Next, I want to talk briefly about the size of the accounts that you're targeting. And here's a beautiful thing about this. I get this question all the time: What constitutes a big enough community? Does it need to have 500 followers or 5,000 or 50,000 or 500,000? You don't need to acquire hundreds of customers for this exercise to pay and pay handsomely, okay? You don't need a Kim Kardashian level of attention account to win here. The accounts can be small to huge to anything in between. You know, sometimes you can do better with an account that has 1,000 followers or fans than you would with one that has 10 million. It all just depends. So don't worry too much about size. If it looks like there is a decent-sized community there on whatever you found, you know, a couple hundred in the small cases all the way up to the supercharged ones can be great, right? And you know, there's so much variance here. And usually, the bigger the size of the account, the harder it is to get over the line. The less likely they are to respond to you. So you take that into account. It all just depends. Do not get hung up on this part. Do not spend even two seconds. Do a quick sniff test. If it looks like a robust community, small or large, put it on the list. Put it on the list. And yeah, absolutely go after some video stars. Absolutely go after some Kardashian-sized accounts because you never know. They might say yes. You got to take a shot. So don't overanalyze it. Don't think about it too much. You're going to be doing a bunch of these. Remember points number one and two: This is a numbers game, okay? So if you identify one that works and it meets the threshold, big or small, put them on the list. You're going to contact them.

Which brings us to our homework, okay? It's homework time. So let's start our research. Let's start our research. And the way that I like to do this personally, your mileage of course might vary, is I like to start out by starting a Google doc. And before we even get started, let me just stop you right there, okay? Just talking to all my customers, it is a numbers game. Notice the rote and repetition on this. It is a numbers game. You're not starting a spreadsheet to put 10 accounts on there and contact two. You're starting a spreadsheet to put hundreds of accounts in there and contact all of them, okay? All of them. It is a numbers game. So that's number one. Number two: Doing the research for this is actually an art form in and of itself. You'll want to get good at this. And it's honestly, like, it will make you a better and more informed human being generally when you learn how to do this whole entire process. Going down the rabbit holes, finding these communities that dovetail with one another and finding the ones that are outside of that, it's an amazing, amazing thing. So you want to get good at this. So start a Google doc, create tabs around subject matter ideas, and start populating. Start doing your homework. Search on Instagram, search on YouTube, search on Twitter, search on Reddit, search the Facebook groups. And you know, to stick with our plant idea, you'd have a tab for nurseries, you'd have a tab for landscape designers, one for the house plant crowd. You might have nested tabs, i.e., urban jungle types, then monstera types, right? There's no limit to the ones that you can get. I just like to create a tab for each kind of niche or sub-niche and throw them on there. And then you place the account in there, you place the number of followers it has, a column where you can tick the box that you either follow the account or subscribe to the account or subscribe to the YouTube channel or join the Facebook group, subscribe to the podcast. In the next column, the date when you reached out to this particular person and how many times you did it and how you did it, right? You can use whatever system you like, but you're going to need to find hundreds of these accounts. You're going to need a system. I recommend a Google doc, a spreadsheet, however you like it. Yeah, just start doing your homework. You spend a couple of hours, a couple of days, a couple of weeks finding all of these accounts that you're going to go after, and you know the spreadsheet will keep you organized, okay? It'll keep you organized. So that's how I like to do that. It's a great way to do it.

With our spreadsheet in hand, we can approach the next task, which is approaching these folks with respect—R-E-S-P-E-C-T. In relationships, nobody proposes on the first date. Don't be that person, okay? Don't be that person that follows an Instagram account today and then sends the DM the same day and says, "Hey, you want to do a print giveaway with me?" Don't be that guy or gal, okay? In my experience, they're going to look at your account when you send this message, and they're going to check up on you, right? They're going to do some research on you. So it's helpful to identify the account, follow it, subscribe, join the group, opt into the

 email newsletter, whatever it is, study it a bit, hang around for a while, learn something about the account or the group or the person, something that you could even potentially use in the copy when you contact them. And you know, leave a comment on a post, comment on a video, share something in a group, right? Leave some comments there, comment, like, share, look like you're a little active, right? Approach this person that you are trying to get to do you a solid with a little bit of respect and look like you're actually interested in what they're doing. And again, there's a ton of variance depending on what venue, but this is just a good general rule of thumb. After you've done that and after some time has passed, you're ready to send these folks a message. And so at this point, we've done our measure best to locate a whole bunch of accounts and groups and venues and all the rest, and we did our best to approach with respect, right? And it's different in every case. Like an Instagram account, you're following for a while. A Twitter account, you're following for a while, you're liking and commenting and sharing. You're ad mentioning. If it's a group, you're posting, you're liking some things, you're commenting. You're not asking for anything in return. A podcast, you're going to subscribe. They're not going to know that, but you're going to listen to a couple of episodes, right? So we've done our best to approach with respect. Now we are ready for the reach out to contact these folks to see whether or not they want to run the loop with you. And I want to talk about how to do this broadly, how it usually goes when you do this, what to do when you don't hear back, which will happen, and then underscore the two steps of this process. And then I'll touch lightly on the copy, some sample copy.

So how do we reach out? Somebody asked me this on one of my webinars last week. I thought it would have been obvious, and I'm like, "Okay, goes to show me, glad I'm running these." And of course, it's going to depend on the domain in question, the venue in question. Each are a little bit different. Each has their own rules, right? So broadly speaking, you want to reach out however the protocols work for that particular venue. If it's Instagram, you're going to be sending a DM. If it's a Facebook group, you're going to message the moderator. If it's Twitter or X, you can send them a direct message or at mention their account. If it's an email newsletter, you can just hit reply to the email. Now, depending on the size and the clout of the account, this might be really easy or it might be really tough. It just totally depends, which is again why it remains a numbers game.

Now, what I like to do on approach is just ship it. Don't wait, don't overthink it, and just send that first message. You identified the thing, you approached with respect, send a message and see what happens. A lot of times, you'll get a response on the very first time on a lot of the small accounts there. They've never done anything like this. They're over the moon. They're like, "Let's go, game on." So you got to just see what happens. And if they respond, great, the game is on. If they don't, that means they didn't see it. If you do not get a response, they did not see it. They didn't reject you. They didn't ignore you. They didn't look at your profile and say, "Your art is crap." They did not see it, okay? And this is where your creativity comes in. Now, what is the one thing, one of the primary things I teach on this podcast all the time? The concept of omnichannel marketing—how an email works together with a Facebook post and an Instagram post and an Instagram reel and an Instagram story and the announcement bar on your website all spread throughout a period of time, all saying the same thing, right? That is how you effectively get attention and reach the maximum number of people with the same message possible. Well, guess what? That works 100% of the time; it's tried and true. And guess what? It also works for messaging. You can omnichannel message. You can whack them in multiple channels in multiple different ways depending on the account to try and get their attention. And until you get a hard no, buzz off, I don't want to do it, your art sucks, no, no thanks, not interested, assume they've not seen your message and they're busy. So in the research phase, it's helpful to try and track down all the venues that this particular person or account is active in. If it's an Instagram account, see if they have a website, see if they have a contact form on the website, see if they have a Twitter account or a YouTube account or a Facebook page. In today's day and age, everybody usually lists all their social media sites and other venues you can find them in. And after you've shipped off the first message and not heard back, it's time to whack them in every single channel you can. Not only that, you can whack them in the same channel a few different times too. Again, it's just a numbers game, okay? It's just a numbers game. And I actually enjoy this part of the process so much. There's something enjoyable about going full Sherlock Holmes in these situations. Yet again, for the third time in this episode, I realize I could do an entire podcast episode just on these techniques or tactics, but I want to stay focused though.

But quick tangent. I read a book, okay? I'll give you an example. I read a book, and impressive author, huge social media following, huge social media following. And he said something in the book that really resonated with me. This guy's on the news doing the book tour. Like I said, huge social following, a name everyone would know. And I was like, "You know what? I want to contact this guy. I want to let him know I really enjoyed the book, and I'm going to pitch him on something." So that was my goal, and I got him. And you know how I got him? I watched. So I knew intuitively that this guy's book just came out. Facebook, no chance. Instagram, no chance. Twitter, yeah, but it's noisy. And so I started watching YouTube videos, and like four or five years ago, previous to the book coming out, I found a YouTube video in which he was teaching a small seminar somewhere. And you know, like 50, 75 people in the audience. And he's teaching the seminar, and he's got his slide deck on the YouTube video. And at the end of the presentation, he had his Gmail on the slide deck. And I was like, "Huh, thank you very much." Emailed him two minutes after. Next day, I got a response. So that's the Sherlock Holmes of all of it, right? You have to employ some creativity on how to get a hold of them. But this particular person, the fact that I got him that easily, and the fact that I got a response, is like, informed a ton of thinking here. Sometimes the bigger they are, the less they're being contacted. Crazy thing to wrap your mind around that because everyone thinks it's too hard. Let's stay focused though, okay? Understanding this whole process is a two-step process. Step one is to contact them in every venue imaginable, okay? And step two is just getting the conversation started. The goal is just to get them to respond, at which point the game is on, okay?

And I bring that up so I can discuss the language you use, some sample copy. And you know, this is where we need to put our conversation hats on. All of us have conversations, and we meet new people all the time, usually once a week, sometimes more than that for some of you. So contemplate your conversation skills, how you open conversations in the real world, how you talk to real people, how you're a real human being, and go at it that way. Don't be intimidated by these folks. As a general rule of thumb, I like to keep it short and sweet. I like to be direct. Nobody has time for nonsense. Here is a quick example: "Hey, so-and-so. Really appreciate your content. Got a crazy idea. I'm an artist, and I create work that I think your group would love. Would you ever want to give a print giveaway to your audience? Love to talk about it. You can see my work here. Thanks, Patrick." Done. If we break that down: compliment them, pitch them, give them a way to see your work. You've done it. Now, you can do a million different variations, but I like that as a starting point. A ton of room for creativity here. You can use some humor. You can really compliment them on something that they did. I'm highly bullish on complimenting them on showing even following what they're doing, seeing a post they poured a ton of energy into, and just saying, "Wow, that was so good. I love it." Those are great openers too, where you don't even ask for anything in the intro, where you just say, "That was amazing." Just compliment them, stroke their ego, encourage them. Any positivity like that is a great way to start too. But again, what I just gave you is a great starting point.

The real objective here is a relationship, you guys. It's a relationship that is establishing one so you can go back to the well again and again and again. And I know I keep bringing this up, but never ever forget this part of the equation. And I said it before, one account, one good account, could forever change the trajectory

 of your art career. That is what is at stake here, okay? So why do I bring that up? The next big question is the mechanics of the loop and how you handle the giveaway, right? What is the loop? You give something away, you get something in return. You announce a winner, you run a sale to everyone that didn't win. That's the loop, right? So how do you handle that? How do you approach them and talk about that? And we know that the hardest part of this process is really just to start the conversation, to get them on the horn. We know that after we do that, the next biggest thing is to make sure you're not the aforementioned pain in the ass so you can get the process over the line.

So what do you do if you start talking to these folks, group owner, person, whoever, and you explain to them that you would like to harvest emails, and how are we going to do that? Are they going to come to my website? Are they going to go to your website? And what if the account wants nothing to do with that? In my experience of running this technique and of hearing the myriad of stories of my customers running it, it is just a total mixed bag, you guys. It is a total mixed bag on the responses that you get. Some of the conversations you have will be with smaller accounts, they're just trying to come up, and they will do literally just about anything that you say to get this going. Others will not want to introduce any friction in the process whatsoever. And I'm not kidding when I say this because we would teach our customers this, and they would come back into our Facebook group and post, "Here's what they said, what should I do? Here's what this person said, what should I do?" So every scenario imaginable comes up. And you want everyone to come to your webpage and opt in via email. They say yes. You want them to do all of that. The account says no. They want to share the emails that are captured between the two of you. They don't want any emails going to you at all, etc., etc., etc. The variance in this situation makes it too damn difficult to list out all the possibilities in a podcast episode. What happens when you get the conversation started is where you play out the scenario to the best of your ability. You need to be flexible and conversant and cool and do the best you can in these situations. Because with each attempt, you will get a little bit better. Remember, it's just an ad. You're not giving away your work. You're not giving away merch or a commission or an original or some combination thereof. You are just running an ad, okay? You are just running an ad. And better still, why? Why? It's a numbers game. After you've done a couple of these and you've gotten them under your belt, and there's usually some sort of social media and/or group history, they'll come back to you and they'll be like, "Okay, well, how does this normally go?" And then you can say, "Yeah, well, I've done it a couple times before, and here's how it went over here. Here's how we did it. I can show you those posts. Here they are. If you'd like to do it that way, great. But if you have another way, if you want to do it, I'm open. I'm open." It's just being conversant and cool and understanding it's a relationship, right?

Now, I've got to close this out. This has been a long one. It's already gone way too long. I want to leave you with one last piece of tradecraft here, as this is really hard for most people to wrap their heads around. What did I start upfront? That getting one really big account could single-handedly change the trajectory of your career. Understand this entire tactic is a gamble. It's a bet at the craps table. And just like the dice at the craps table, there are all sorts of possible permutations and outcomes. Lots of things outside of your control. So be open to that. Take whatever deal you can get and gamble. It's actually pretty damn fun. I love playing craps. But if it's a big account, you guys, and they are iffy on the whole thing, don't be afraid to say this. Don't be afraid to say this: "You know what, man? I love what you're doing so much. I've benefited so much from your account and your content. I would be honored if you just ran the whole giveaway on your own and I'll just ship the print as my way of saying thanks." Then shut up. Ask for nothing in return. You just made it easy, so they do it. Afterwards, you know what ends up happening? The subtle psychology of reciprocation kicks in, and they will likely at mention your Instagram account, send a link back to your website. You could end up with thousands of followers and sell six originals just because you were not a pain in the ass. Just because you were not a pain in the ass and you made it easy for them to say yes. You made it easy for them to say yes. Nice work. By the way, on that note, thanks for listening and as always, have a great day.