The Where is your Art Business Quiz

In this edition of the Art Business Morning Show, Patrick introduces the concept of 'The Where is Your Art Business Quiz,' a tool designed to help artists and photographers identify their current business stage and receive tailored advice for growth. The episode details the value of quizzes for engagement and lead generation, outlines the quiz structure and key questions, and emphasizes the importance of validating art sales, building marketing skills, and leveraging disrupted market conditions. It also highlights how the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated opportunities for art sales online, encouraging artists to harness new tools and methods for business success.

Podcast Transcribe

Patrick Shanahan: Not likely, not likely. All right, coming up on today's edition of the Art Business Morning Show, we're talking about The Where is Your Art Business Quiz. Okay, I'm going to introduce the quiz concept, I'm going to talk about the path, and sum things up with a little analogy. Let's get the background going on this one.

My iOS just updated, so of course, nothing's working the way that it should be. There we go. All right, welcome to another edition of Art Business Mornings, the show that will put you on the path to a six-figure-a-year-plus art business. So I'm talking about a quiz today, which is weird. It's sort of been one of the most popular things in terms of lead generation on the internet for quite some time. You could even say engagement to a certain extent too. Think Buzzfeed, which Star Wars character are you, right? Buzzfeed pretty much rode those things to prominence. Or perhaps you could think of like an exercise one where you input your height, your weight, your age, the flabby part of your body that you wanna fix, and the quiz spits out actionable answers on what you can do, right? Start doing a hundred pushups a day and stop eating the fatty food or whatever else it is. Anyway, examples abound, but I've always wanted to build one. We've had the software literally for years to be able to do so, and I just never got around to doing it. So what's changed? While I always had the idea in my mind, I don't think early on, call it even a year ago or nine months ago, I had the value proposition probably strong enough just yet or as strong as it needed to be, anyway.

And when you think of a quiz, it's just like a decision tree, right? Based on your responses, you get routed to certain directions, and if I built one in the past, I would have been, have you sold your art before? And if the answer was no, then I would route you to two podcast episodes that I recorded. Terrible title, that "Does My Art Suck Test," part one and two. And then I would say, go listen to those and get back to me. And if you would have answered, yes, you have sold your art, I would have said, okay, great, we can help you, right? Request a demo. Now, while not particularly complicated or horrible in terms of value, those two podcast episodes, crappy titles aside, have great intel still on how to get started and how to actually validate your art.

And actually, I got an iTunes review recently on the show and I'm gonna read it because it makes me happy and I haven't done this in a while. And it's from Pasta Time, great name, and he says, really great practical advice for artists. Five stars, okay. This show has such a great... you know, I'm quoting now. "This show has such great advice for selling art. "I've used many of the ideas they've discussed "and I found nearly all of the techniques I've tried "to be extremely successful. "I'm very grateful for everything they've shared publicly, "as their advice also applies to folks like me "who aren't Art Storefront members. "The information they share ages well, "so I recommend you start with episode one "and work your way through." So Pasta Time, huge thanks for that. I haven't called out an iTunes review in a while. Really appreciate you guys leaving them. So thanks for that. And I'm really pleased you're getting value out of it, right? Equally so that while some of the episodes in that thing are three-plus years old now, they're still tremendously valuable and working for people.

And especially him, he's not even a customer. That shows the quality of the thought, I think, and the marketing techniques and tactics that they contain. And I'm really proud of that. It speaks to what we were teaching is more about fundamental foundational marketing than, you know, shiny object arbitrage.

Now, of course, there's still some of that shiny object arbitrage in there. You don't exactly hear me talking about a Facebook Messenger contest anymore, do you? Those things are long gone, but since then, things have changed quite a bit, quite a bit. I've had the benefit of talking to literally hundreds of artists and photographers, both customers and non since this pandemic started.

And since we started it on the Lives, call it probably seven months, last seven months or so. And I've had the ability to like take all of those inputs, okay, the combination of the face-to-face Q and A, many of you guys see your names have been on it, and the social comments and even yes, some of the emails, and combine all of those, it's really, really expanded my thinking on what a quiz like this could potentially be.

So the premise for me, when thinking about a quiz is it's not making something cheeky or funny, or for just cynical purposes, right? In creating this thing, which I'm in the process of doing the TVD when it comes out, but if I make it for lead generation purposes only, so cynically, the thing is going to fail miserably, right? It's worthless.

How is that valuable to anyone except us? But if my aim really is for lead generation, the more valuable and actionable the intel is in it, the more it's actually gonna work, the more you guys will get tremendous value out of it. And I think the podcast at this point, last time I checked the stats has over 350,000 downloads, over 150 positive iTunes reviews, and most importantly, like the review I read earlier, people are still getting value out of it at every stage of the game and getting success in their businesses.

And so if I can take that same mentality, that same underlying premise, the content in this thing needs to be really, really good. If it is really really good, people will get a ton of value out of it. They'll share it, all of those things. And I think it's going to be a huge win. So given the reps and sets of all the Zoom calls, all the social comments plus the new content that we've been creating on these Lives, I think I'm in a unique spot to make one of these things just massively, massively valuable.

And, you know, depending on where you are in the decision tree, it might be a blog post or a podcast, or blog post, a podcast, and a few Live sessions and a few tactical videos, and I'll get into the explanation on this in a second, if it doesn't make sense. So I got this wealth of content in my hands and I've got all of these artists and photographers that are coming in at various different steps in the journey, whether you're a customer or not, and the advice is a little bit different depending on where you are, right?

So I think once finished, this thing is going to be awesome. It will be incredibly valuable. So let's pivot now to the path, right? The path is the road you must take to grow a six-figure-a-year art business, the whole point of this show. And while the road certainly will have a few forks in it, right, depending on where you're going, it really is the same path for everyone.

Everyone starts at a different part of it based on where you are, depending on your circumstances, but the path is more or less straightforward for everyone. At least the one that we're advocating. So I want to talk about that a bit both to educate as well as selfishly flesh out some of my own thinking.

That's one of the things I really enjoy about these Live shows. It's like the airplane takes off and then you start working on the airplane in the air. Some things might break, might drop a wrench from 30,000 feet, but really, it's quick learning and iteration and it gives you a window on where we are literally right now in this moment in time and in terms of our business and what we're doing, how we're helping our customers.

So before you even get to the path, let's just say that this particular quiz, the map, comes with an introduction of sorts that is just so damn positive and encouraging, okay? Incredibly so. And I think that's brought on, in equal parts by recent while slow technological advancements, right? You don't know the worm is turning when you're on top of it.

So based on the advancements in technology, which have kind of culminated in this COVID period of time, plus, plus, I lost my place, plus the ability to ship worldwide, okay? Plus the ability to easily reach, as an artist or a photographer, a fan base attention that is worldwide. Plus the massive disruption caused by the global pandemic.

I'm convinced that the art and photography markets, okay, have reached their moment, call it an ultimate disruption. And what do I mean by that? I think music industry and MP3s, I think Blockbuster and Netflix, taxi cabs and Uber, I think the industry is fundamentally, and from top to bottom, being massively, massively disrupted.

The paradigm of an artist or a photographer being reliant on revenue sources offline or online for that matter, in which they do not keep 100% of the revenue of their sale, and they do not keep a hundred percent of their customer data are getting blown out of the water, straight obliterated, and it is an incredible thing for artists.

You couple that with the ability of an artist or a photographer in today's day and age to reach people globally, it's a phenomenal, phenomenal time. It's a phenomenal time to be an artist, it's profound. The ability to leverage live video, live video like I'm doing right now, either a one-to-one or a one-to-many format and talk about your work, talk about you, introduce yourself, merchandise the product, the days of having a stupid 2D platform of just showing the images, boring 2D, no one's buying images.

They're buying the finished product on the wall. The fact that you can turn the camera on, introduce people to yourself, show off the work, merchandise it, again, one-to-one or one-to-many, complete game changer. Let's couple that to the rising adoption of e-commerce worldwide. The pandemic has just sped things up by years and years and years.

The buying habits, okay? It is a tremendous thing. So that buying behavior is just going to shift more and more and more of the art sales online. So all of that, all of that, coupled with the fact that obviously the offline sources are not gonna come back anytime soon. They'll be back, of course, but it's going to take a while.

If all of those conditions create this situation that is just so insanely ripe for disruption, if that is a fire that the pandemic has just poured even more gasoline on it. And what do I mean? People not going back to work, people moving out of the cities to the suburbs, IE, they get a lower mortgage, lower rent, more wall space.

The fact that everyone's doing these video calls, that home decor is exploding. It's like there were all these conditions that on the ground, yes, the pandemic that is going to cause this disruption in the art industry and photography industry, and then the fact that we're all on lockdown at home, and COVID, and all the rest, it's just pouring gas on it.

So you combine those two things and it's just tremendous. It's tremendous. And we're already seeing the results across the board. It's just gonna be a massive year. So does that mean it's going to be easy? No. No, it's never easy. Nothing good is ever easy. What do you know that is good is easy? It doesn't exist, right? But I think in terms of just situation on the ground, it's just so damn encouraging.

What a phenomenal time for you guys to get these businesses rolling up off the ground, running and producing at levels that they never did for you guys before? So it's exciting. It was all about a quiz, right? And I kind of want to articulate what I mean about this. And I think it'll make more sense, right? I'm expanding my notes, 'cause I had written notes on this one, so bear with me.

But this is the type of quiz that I'm talking about, right? You're gonna come in the top, and it's going to be, have you sold your art before, yes or no? If you answer no, the next question would be, have you tried? And then you say no, then try. Here's how you try. I can show you exactly how to do that in the most judicious and timely manner, effective way possible.

Here's the blog post, the video post, here's what you need to buy, here's the mechanics, here's how much it's gonna cost you, here's where you can potentially order it. Take this step, this step, this step, do not do anything else until you've tried to sell your art. You are not in the game and you're not to be taken seriously.

You have to do it, right? Okay, have you sold your art before? That was if you said no. Have you sold your art before? You said yes. If yes, I have another question. Have you sold your art or photography to people not named mother, father, brother, sister, or good friends, right? If you answer no to that, then you've not sold your art.

I'm kicking you back up to the other step. You have to validate whether or not your art is going to sell, right? So you can see instantaneously, it's like already, okay, have you sold your art? No, you haven't. Okay, then here's what you're gonna do. Go sell your art and don't come back until you do it.

You have to try. Have you not sold your art? Have you sold your art? Oh yeah, yeah, Patrick, I've sold it. Have you sold it to people not named mom, dad, brother, or sister? Well, actually, no, not really. Okay, you're right back up there. Get going, here's what you need to do. Here's the advice, it works.

And oh, by the way, it's like not only am I going to be able to provide a blog post or a podcast or a video, I'm actually, because we have so many customers and non that have done this, I'm gonna be like, look, here's someone we gave the advice to, here is their actual Facebook post, how they did it, go look at what they did.

If you're having trepidations about it, send them a message, send them a message if you don't believe me. They will show you exactly what they did. They used that, they sold $900 worth of their art, okay? I'm not BS-ing you about this advice. Not only is it solid, not only am I teaching you how to do it, here is the absolute example of someone that did it.

And oh, by the way, I have three of them. I have three of them. Follow that advice, you can do it right now. There's your step. See, I'm getting fired up about this because the content is just so strong, right? Okay, let's go further down. Let's say you got through that tree. So yes, you sold your art, well, what is the total amount of sales you've generated? Now, depending on the answer to that question, obviously, if some of these numbers to work out, we make the determination if your art, your photography

is well and truly validated, by which I mean have you determined based on the only true metric that matters the almighty dollar coming out of the wallet that you have a product the market wants, you know? And I can just hear it now. Hey Patrick, it's me, Steve. I post my art, I get tons of likes and comments, shares, but Patrick, my photography has gotten me into shows and won awards.

People tell me my work is awesome all the time, to which I'm just going to go, knock, knock, hear that? Go get the door, it's me. I'm in your driveway with the car running. That's me. I'm outside of your house after you just told me that nonsense. Get in Steve, I'm driving you to the ATM, and you're gonna show me on the ATM machine where the fact that you've got likes and comments and shares on Facebook, that people have told you your work is awesome, that you got into a juried show,

or any of the rest of that nonsense because there's no button for any of that on the ATM machine. There never has been, there never will be. So you still need to validate your art, right? Here's how you do that, go do that. So let's say we get a little bit further down, next step. Your art is validated, wonderful.

Are you capturing leads and emails on a regular basis, yes or no? Do you have a website, yes or no? Are you actively marketing your art? Are you posting on the socials? Are you running live art shows? Are you having sales when the time is correct? Are you engaging in hand-to-hand combat, real person-to-person correspondence and trench work on hot leads and the like, right? So collectively summed up, and you've heard me say this a bunch of times, can you do 100 pushups? Meaning, you developed and refined the marketing muscles

you need to continue to grow this business? If no, here's how you do that. And I could have a bunch of advice at this stage of the game. This is what we teach all day long. You need to be able to do the hundred pushups. You need to be able to do everything that I just listed. You have to be capturing leads on a regular basis.

You have to have a website that can sell the art. You have to actively market your art, post on the socials, run live art shows, and have sales when they're correct, understand the mechanics of all that. Takes time, that's a journey. So there will be an incredible amount of content for all of that that walks through each and every single solitary step of that.

It's what we do all day long, right? And so you have to get past that, and a lot of people are gonna be stuck at the quiz right there. You're not going to go any further, because even though you had some success, and maybe some offline stuff was working for you, you now have to build up these marketing muscles and there's no shortcut to doing it.

Some people have great technical acumen. They're gonna get there quicker, but some have never figured any of this out. Well, guess what? You have to figure it out. This is the new world. This is the new disrupted world. So there it is. From there, your art's well and truly validated, you can do your hundred pushups, what would my next one? Are you currently running ads on Facebook and Instagram to warm traffic? What's the answer to that question? Is it yes or no? If the answer is no, guess what, here's how to do that.

You need to start doing that. This is an important part of growing the business in 2020. Facebook and Instagram have all the attention. If you're not showing your latest posts which are a combination of romance posts and sales posts. If you're not doing that consistently all year long, you are leaving money on the table, and you are preventing your rocket, the gas, and fuel, it needs to go up, okay? So, that's done, right? So you're going with that.

Okay, are you doing that? Okay, then I'm gonna say, now you're getting some traction, Now, you're doing Facebook ads, let's look at the price point variance in your store. Do you have low to high with the high being seriously high? IE, you have an original priced at

30 or 50K? What about limited editions? What about open editions? What about a healthy diversity in media types? Have you explored additional potential revenue sources, right? These are all things that can be at the next stage of the quiz.

Your business is up and running, you're selling well, you've got some traction, you're running your Facebook warm ads. Okay, well, let's talk about all these other additional ways that you can increase the revenue of your business that most artists and photographers don't do. Now, yes, if you're a customer, we're gonna give you this advice, of course, but there's always refinements to it, right? There's always refinements to it.

And there are a whole bunch of games and things to focus on, once you have traction, that are worthless to focus on when you don't have traction, right? It's really interesting to hear what I'm saying and thinking in your mind, okay, I'm gonna worry about all of that now. And you don't have any traction.

You don't have any sales. So even if you get the recipe right on media types and prices and everything else, you're only gonna make one or two additional sales. But when you start having some traction, okay, you're doing your ads, you're doing your marketing, you're doing all of that consistently.

All of a sudden, you have thousands of people coming to your website on a monthly basis, instead of hundreds or 10, right? When you have thousands, guess what? You start doing the different price points. You start doing some experimenting with some limited editions with some open editions, you start doing a variance in your media types.

You actually have the ability to make some changes, some fundamental changes to the business, increase your revenue by thousands, tens of thousands within a month or two. That's got real teeth. That's the real deal, right? So, you know, it goes on from there. It goes on from there, seriously on from there, right? All of those various different things that we could work on and the pricing will just spit it out, right? Next day down, are you currently involved with a group of contemporaries that are selling as well as you?

If you're selling $50,000 a year, you need to be in a group with other artists or photographers that are selling $50,000 a year. The problems that you have, that you faced in growing the business are different than the people that are trying to go zero to 50, right? It'll just keep going down. Okay, you've got that group? Wonderful.

If not, obviously, hey, we've got when you can join. If not, yeah, wonderful. When was the last time you did an across-the-board raise on prices 20 to 30%? Can you answer that question? When did you answer that question? Oh, I did it 18 months ago or I did it 24 months ago. Okay, well, do it now. Let's talk about your demand, right? And there's an entire playbook there.

And then once you start getting up to this level is as you're moving up to like closer to six figures, oh my goodness, then it gets so fun. Then it gets so fun. The hardest thing to do as a marketer, as an entrepreneur trying to grow a business is get from zero to 100K. Once you're approaching 100K, oh my gosh, you have a little wind at your back.

You've got wind in your sails. You've got attention. You can get feedback on new initiatives, new ideas, and new things. And so there's a whole bunch of different stuff to talk about at that level that I won't even get into, but anyway, I wanted to tease this and put it on the table because it represents the latest and up-to-date thinking that we have, right? And this is sort of summing things up because we're going along.

It's going to be an amazing quiz to build. And even if I didn't even ever use it for lead gen, if I didn't even ever put it out there, which I'm going to, of course, I wanna help out you guys, but it would be so fun to build and understand the thinking. Look, if this thing's a path, okay, if the show tagline is not complete BS well, what the heck is the path? I need to map that out.

I need to be able to articulate what you do at each step, what that looks like, how it's going to help you, right? I think given the video assets we have on this already, and again, contemplate that value chain. What stage of the game are you in? We accurately identify it, we suffocate the BS that you tell yourself or that someone else is putting in your ear, because I've got the reps and sets.

I know where you guys are at. I see this whole business chain. Then I say, here's what you need to do. Okay, here's the content that teaches you how to do the thing, okay. Oh by the way, here is somebody that just did the thing, your contemporary, so don't take my advice, look at this person. They just did it, right? So overall, that's gonna be amazing, right? I'm not going to tell you which Disney character you are or what character you would have been on "Saved by the Bell".

Zack Morris, for sure, arguably. And it could be Screech, it could be Screech, but I'm gonna deliver insane value across the board instantly, right? Better still, It's gonna provide for customers and non-customers alike. Will the value for customers be 10X what the non-customers get? Yeah, absolutely.

We're running a business here, not a charity, but I'm still going to give a ton of value away. And I can do that because no one will usually take any action on it. And the ones that do take action on it are gonna get a success, And they're gonna say, God, you guys know what you're talking about.

I wanna come aboard. So the prospect or the premise is just so easy, right? So I think it'll move the ball forward on our thinking. I think we'll get more feedback. The best things you can do at each stage of the game, And thinking this whole thing through in my mind, I realize what my job is now at Art Storefronts.

What collectively the marketing department which I run and the support department, which I don't, we're farmers operating a farm. That's what we are. We're farmers operating the farm. And on this farm, we have seeds that haven't even been put in the ground yet. We have seedlings. We have seedlings that just germinated and are just sprouting up off the ground.

We have juvenile plants, we have mid-sized plants, we have mature plants that are trees, right? And each one can just be thought of as a step along that path, a step on that quiz, right? Our job is just to nurture and water those plants and keep the disease and the nonsense out of there, keep them growing the right way.

And that's it, just farmers. It's a great analogy. It works a hundred percent, and you take it a step further. Okay, take it a step further. What happens when you have a healthy and producing farm? And the climate just works out that year, rains were perfect, the wind was perfect, the temperature was perfect as well.

Was I looking for temperate? You have a bumper year. You have a bumper year, right? You have the best year ever. You produce 10X what you normally would. Well, guess what? Right now is a bumper year. It's already been a bumper year. As crazy as that is to say in COVID times, it just has been. Our customers are selling more art than at any point in time I've ever seen.

We're seeing Black Friday levels on a week in, week out basis, it's insane. This pandemic and what it's done to home decor is incredible. So how much does that tie it together? The farming analogy, I love it. So anyway, Q4 is coming guys. It's gonna be a huge one. There's still time. There's still time to get your act together.

To start marketing, to run some live art shows. Let people know that you're going to be in the market this Q4 with your art, your photography. what else, wanna join me for a Zoom session thrice weekly? You can get registered anywhere you see the links. So if you're on Facebook, there's a link in the post description.

If you're on Instagram, there's a link in the bio. If you're on Twitter there's no links, but no one really watches on Twitter, okay? Still a stream to it. You can have a little water in that pond, but man, there's no one there. YouTube, a link in the description. So you can get on one of these three-time weekly Zoom calls are usually with me or members of the marketing team.

Ask questions, figure things out, but I'll tell ya, going forward, There's gonna be a whole lot of saying, all right, let's just go through the quiz. You don't have to go through it really, but I'm gonna ask you questions and I'm going to know where you are. I'm going to say, you got to go do this.

So on that note, thanks for listening. And as always, have a great day.