Clint Watson: 0:00

So you have to be out in public channels such as Instagram building awareness. And once you find people on that channel that like what you do, you're trying to move them into your audience meaning trying to get them on your email list. Once they get on your email list, now you're using that tool to try to get them interested to take the next step, the next step often will be to buy something from, and that's where your website comes in.

Laura Arango Baier: 0:23

Welcome to the BoldBrush podcast where we believe that fortune favors the bold brush. My name is Laura Moringa. Bear, and I'm your host. I recently sat down with our CEO Clint Watson to talk a little bit more about some FAQs on FASO marketing tips for both FASO and non FASO artists, as well as other tips on how to sell your work and get new collectors and buyers on your page. The first topic of conversation is actually passive income, something that not many artists can do, but it is actually quite possible. So let's hear what he has to say.

Clint Watson: 0:56

One of the difficulties for a lot of artists, I think, is understanding, unlike a lot of other industries is it's hard to make passive income, how do you make money if you're not painting once you sell an original? That's it? Right. And historically, that's the struggle we've seen with artists, you know, we've when I ran a gallery, that was always a problem, because we would ask artists, you know, we'd love to have a show for you. And they'd say, that's great, but I don't have any, you need to give me two years to, to work up a new body of work, right. So this is one of the things that technology has a lot, it's the ability to generate a kind of passive income, even if you don't have new work and new paintings, for example, we just integrated print on demand. And as a matter of fact, someone was just writing these and they wanted to sell prints. And in the sovereign artists club, we're recommending a method whereby people can sell and build an email list using Instagram and email. And one of the keys is having prints to sell. And but the lady said, Well, I don't have friends. And we said, No problem, because you have to do is upload your images to FASO at turn on print on demand, you could sell unlimited prints in about six or seven different sizes, her image. And that's something that, you know, once you turn that on, it can generate income, pretty much theoretically forever from that point forward. And so as you add more and more, that becomes an increasing catalogue of work to sell even when you don't have work to sell. Another way to generate passive income, if you teach is and we turn this feature on during the pandemic, because so many artists had to go, their workshops were canceled, and they had to start selling over zoom or start offering other ways to teach do a course recorded, you can do it in zoom, get the recording uploaded to your FASO workout. And when you upload it, you can specify this is a free video or a paid video, specify paid and you can add a trailer because one of the features we're actually proud of that I've never actually seen on any other service. When you upload a video, you can add the trailer right in there, you don't have to upload them as two separate as two separate things and figure out how to put them together. And then when people go to that page in your FASO account, they'll see the trailer, you can put in the pitch to buy the video, they can check out using their credit card as long as you connect your stripe or PayPal account. And then FASO will handle sending them the link where they can access the paid video after they've paid. And every user gets a different link. So it's not something making sure links. And we've got another way coming that I can speak about

Laura Arango Baier: 3:28

keeping secrets. There's also a really neat trick that Clint is about to tell us about how to grow your mailing list by using a video course.

Clint Watson: 3:37

So the way FASO video feature works, you upload your video, you can make a class, make a video class, upload it to FASO and promote that. And when people are ready to purchase it, the way that works is they buy it, it checks out in your integrated shopping cart. At that point, when they check out in the cart, you will get the customer's information. So you get their email, their address their I believe it asked for their phone number, but most importantly, you get their email. And you know, it's at that point, you know, it's correct. So when they check out, you'll get notified that you've made a purchase, they'll get notified that they bought the video and have a link to download it. And now you have another email address to add to your list. So now you can make a second class and target those people who bought the first class specifically because you know that they are people that are interested in taking online classes and workshops and so by iterating through this this process multiple times. It's a good way to grow your email list especially if students over time.

Laura Arango Baier: 4:36

So we have someone asking how can I directly reach out to buyers and collectors interested in realism via FASO?

Clint Watson: 4:43

let's reframe the minute instead of answering it directly. Because it's this is a mistake. I think, in thinking sometimes when someone asks sort of a tactical question like how can I how can I use this service Get more realism collectors, right? Because you're not really thinking strategically you're just thinking about and what tends to happen is that is if if I say, well, here's how you do that with with FASO, right, and then you don't get whatever magic number of collectors will make you happy, then you'll jump to Etsy. And then, then you won't be happy with Etsy and then you'll jump to red bubble. And then you'll jump to Saatchi art. And I've seen this pattern where artists jump from service to service to service to service, looking for the one that will send them collectors. But that's not really how it works. Unless you get incredibly lucky, the way it works is to think about this as an entire lifecycle and how the tool supports your whole lifecycle. So by lifecycle, you have to move people, people at first don't know about you, then they become aware of them. If they like what you do, they join your audience, meaning I'm defining audience, I'm defining audience as someone who's given you permission to contact them, usually by email, but it could also be by text or by phone or whatever. And then from your audience, they move, you attempt to move them to become a student or a collector, right? You try to or at the very least, a loyal supporter. So this all has to work in the context of this whole system. So you have to be out in public channels, such as Instagram, building awareness. And once you find people on that channel that liked what you do, you're trying to move them into your audience meaning trying to get them on your email list. Once they get on your email list. Now you're using that tool to try to get them interested to take the next step, the next step often will be to buy something from and that's where your website comes in your website doesn't come in the first step, I think this is where people have a misconception is that your website doesn't exist primarily to create new customers, your website exists to serve your audience and close a sale. So they come down through these different levels. And then once you've closed the sale with somebody, those people you stay in touch with personally, and hopefully they buy become repeat collectors, they become supporters. They help you find other collectors, they repost your stuff on social media. So to answer the question of how to use FASO, to find realism collectors, we have a few things that amplify that, that work within the context of this, you know, at the awareness level, we have something called the daily art stream, which is where we are going out and trying to promote our users works to collectors they don't know about if you use the BoldBrush ad credits that I talked about a minute ago, you can reach that informed collector audience, which is around 50,000 People at that as we speak today, then when you move into the audience level we have we have a built in tool called artful now, so you can email your audience and send them back to your website. In addition, we have a feature called New Art alerts. Because we discovered even though we have a tool for artists email, life intervenes, and not everybody always has time to sit down and make a newsletter every time they paint a new painting. So we created a feature called artful alerts, which when people sign up for this on your website, which you can direct them to every time you post something new, that person gets an alert, bringing them back to your site. So this is sort of trying to automate the step of nurturing that audience. But you've got to get them into your audience with the tools at the previous step. Right. And then And then so that's you're attempting to turn them into a collector. And at that stage, the process kind of repeats itself.

Laura Arango Baier: 8:24

This podcast is brought to you by FASO. If you're listening to this, it's safe to say that you're probably an artist, and you've probably struggled like most of us have to sell your work online using some random website building platform that isn't even made for artists. If this sounds like you, then check out faso.com forward slash podcast, FASO is an art marketing platform specifically designed for artists to help showcase your work. And not only that, it will also help you sell your work things too. They're really easy built in E commerce and marketing channels that help promote your work to over 48,000 collectors. On top of that, you'll also get access to marketing tips and help with your social media from top people in the industry. So if this sounds like a really great thing, and you want to take your artwork to the next level and sell as much as you can, then go check out faso.com forward slash podcast BoldBrush would also like to give a huge thank you and shout out to Chelsea classical studio for their continued support in this podcast. If you're interested in archival painting supplies handmade with a lot of patients, go check out their Instagram at CCS fine art materials. Now let's hear about some marketing ideas and tips for people who aren't on FASO and who are actually using a different website platform.

Clint Watson: 9:39

So if if you're happy with your website, but you want to learn marketing ideas, you think that we might have something to offer there we for years, we've offered marketing ideas, tools, information, videos, to our members. And we've done that for a long time. If you were a paid member, you had access to all of this. In fact, if you become a FASO member, there's, I believe, at this point, probably hundreds of videos in the library. But during and especially at, you know, as we got later in the pandemic, and I talked about this on the last podcast, I was on if anyone wants to look back at the one about the sovereign artists era. But in short, I realized that behavior has changed because of the pandemic. And people are live much more online now. Combining that with the fact that there is so much technology now. And the question was, what if you're happy with your site, there's a lot of technology, maybe you're happy with your site, you don't want to move it to FASO, we've realized we've entered an era that I call the sovereign artist era, meaning you can sell in a online first way with all of these technological tools, and so we've sort of repackaged our information and adjusted some of it for this era. And we've spun it out of FASO into something we call the sovereign artists club. And in that club, we have information. We have content written by myself and a couple of other people. One of the main other people is a guy, an anonymous person named Casa mo cash who runs our Instagram account. And we have information in there of how to do email marketing, how to use Instagram to grow your email list, how to run a studio sell, how to use other social media platforms. And we're in the process of launching a discord for club members to help one another. And so this information is all available separately outside of FASO, if you want to join the club, it's a sovereign artists club.com. And it's, you know, it's it's, I mean, it's going really well, people are joining every day. And it's great to see how people are helping one another people are, are loving the direction we're going with this, because marketing seems so hard before. In fact, we flipped in the last five years, my advice uses, I used to say your online. What you do on what you do in the real, what you do online supports what you do in the real world, real world, meaning that if you want to market art, you should have exhibits, have shows, go to the events, collect people's information, and then what you do online would support that. But I've actually sort of flipped my thinking now I think you can actually market first online, and then what you do in the real world support your online activity. In the real world world is always best. But we've entered an era where you don't really need to do as much in the real world as you wants there. So anyway, if you're interested in just the marketing information, we have a way to do that. And there's a great group of artists in there that you can interact with as well.

Laura Arango Baier: 13:09

And now for something we've all probably wondered, which is why does the BoldBrush Instagram page sometimes feature nonfederal artists? And what benefits does it have when you are a FASO artist?

Clint Watson: 13:21

So we've probably done a poor job of this in the in the branding area. But BoldBrush and FASO are actually although related and that they're owned by the same company are are sort of two different things to get in and serve two different purposes. Somewhat related, we have some pretty ambitious goals. And one of the goals of BoldBrush is to is to empower artists to inspire the world by connecting them with collectors and one another, which was kind of the mission of BoldBrush and BoldBrush is his BoldBrush is basically a big media company in the art world. I mean, I don't know if it's big compared to other media companies, but it's for the purpose of promoting the arts in general, the visual arts that's what BoldBrush exists for. So BoldBrush has a podcast BoldBrush has at least two newsletters for artists. BoldBrush has a newsletter for collectors BoldBrush Has social media channels. BoldBrush itself doesn't actually have any paid products with the exception of if you place them if you place an ad in one of these newsletters. But for the most part BoldBrush Is is a pure media company for expanding the art expanding the art market, so to speak, and we want to empower a million artists to live off of their off of their art and to do that we have to reach a lot of artists and we have to do our best to expand the art market and drawing collectors. So by utilizing BoldBrush as a way to reach more and more artists and more and more collectors we feel But that benefits our paying customers in an overall sense, like the more collectors we drawings and network, the better it is for everyone. And the more artists we go on and the network, the better it is, the better it is in terms of for people who sell classes and workshops, every artist is a potential student. And every artists that comes into the network powers that flywheel to bring in more collectors. It's like building a two sided market, right? Every collector you bring looks from artists, every artist brings in more collectors, and this thing keeps spinning. So our goal with BoldBrush is basically to expand the market for our customers and for ourselves. Our goal for FASO is our paid product, obviously, we have to make money. And that's what we do with FASO, our Instagram page for FASO is where we actually promote our paid members, among other places. It's not the only way we promote we, we promote our paid members on that site. I mean, on that social media channel, we promote them in the daily art stream, promote them and informed collector, we promote them in the free BoldBrush contests. By the way. That's why that's another reason the BoldBrush contest is free is because we're trying to expand the entire market and opportunity for everybody not we're not trying to make money off of a contest. So I guess that's the display. That's what the distinction is BoldBrush Video is the media company trying to expand the entire market for everybody. FASO is our paid product. And we have other channels to promote FASO members besides

Laura Arango Baier: 16:27

BoldBrush. Yeah. And then one of the other benefits that I found is that this Cosmo cash guy guide who runs the BoldBrush page, love the name. I've also found that he has really great ties with arts materials, companies and arts organizations. And since I'm a faster user, I know that I'm on his radar. And it's much more likely for me to be posted on all of these other pages, which has then led to a lot of my posts getting a ton of attention. And I've gotten so many more followers ever since I started working with FASO and a lot more collectors. So that's another great plus.

Clint Watson: 17:01

I would add you know, it's it's a case of us following our own advice in in a slightly different way. One of the things in the sovereign artists club that we've been teaching people about Instagram in particular is that you should form a collaboration with we generally give the number six, six other artists but you know, it could be slightly more or less. But essentially, you want six other artists that you can cross promote, do collaborations or get them to post your reels so that you're so you're not limited to only your audience that you can reach and you can reach a different audience and they can reach your audience and you help one another that way. So essentially, through Cosmo cash, we are, we're doing the same thing at the company. You know, we have us there's an art supply company that's very famous, our organization in New York, that's part of this. And I don't know the exact number, but there's six or seven companies. And I guess each company maybe doesn't always have only one account. So you're probably looking at maybe 10 or 10 or so accounts that are all cross promoting one another. And this is helping everybody reach a larger and larger audience, including the FASO members, they get posted to the FASO sites accounts. And by the way, if you want access to Kosovo caches ideas join sovereign artist.

Laura Arango Baier: 18:18

If you're interested in learning a little bit more about the sovereign artists club, we suggest listening to one of our previous episodes called the sovereign artists era. And if you're interested, go check out the link in our show notes to join the sovereign artists Club.