Marketing Strategies

How to Offer Upgrades for Your Teaching

When you offer services, such as teaching, mentoring, or coaching, seize the opportunity to enhance the experience for your students and clients. This may also be a chance to create extra income for yourself.

I’m talking about offering upgrades to your services.

An upgrade is an offer that adds value to the service for an additional fee.

The most important reason to offer an upgrade is that it improves the experience for your students. The additional income is a bonus for you.

Upgrade Options

Your upgrade offer is limited only by your imagination. Here are some ideas to help get you started:

  • An additional, but different, workshop or class
  • Printed and bound copy of your notes
  • Audio recording of your notes
  • Video lessons
  • “Club” membership
  • A lifetime Facebook group that includes club-only email tips
  • A package of programs and bonuses, like the Art Career Success System
  • Personal coaching, mentoring, or critique sessions (live or via video conference)

If you are hosting a multi-day workshop, consider adding:

  • Private tours
  • 30-minute coaching/critique sessions before or after instruction for the day or an additional coaching-only day at the end
  • Meals

What can you offer to a large number of people at a reasonable price?

How to Offer Upgrades for Your Teaching Read

The Only Gift You Need to Build Your Mailing List

What I love most about the holidays isn’t receiving gifts. It’s giving them.

I love everything about the process: from trying to find the perfect gift for a special person on my list, to wrapping it and watching them open it.

I throw parties and give “lovely parting gifts” to our guests (as if the party wasn’t enough).
I decorate envelopes to delight recipients.

The thrill of gift giving is sacred in my book.

Unfortunately, when building a business, giving gifts can be tarnished by the giver wanting or expecting something in return. It’s part of the list-building process.

In return for your email address, I offered 6 free video lessons or perhaps a checklist, special report, or webinar at some point.

These presents are easy for me to deliver because I offer a service. I have loads of content that will help you gain recognition and sell more art.

It’s harder for artists to offer gifts in return for email addresses.

The Only Gift You Need to Build Your Mailing List Read

Not again! I forgot to market my art!

Marketing As You Go

Marketing isn’t something you do when you are done with the work.

You can’t afford to wait until everything else is in its place to promote your art. You must be marketing consistently.

Marketing is more than taking out an ad or sending an email. Marketing is a combination of everything you do to sell or to gain recognition for your art. Everything.

There will be times when you must focus on the work in the studio, which means there is no room in your life for marketing tasks. But something is amiss if this drags on for weeks without attention to your business.

Don’t wait until you’re finished with a body of work before you start marketing it. Think about marketing daily. Actually, do more than think. DO your marketing daily – as you go.

You don’t want to wake up one day with the realization, Not again! I forgot to market my art!
By this point, it’s probably too late to get the results you want.

Don’t think of marketing as separate from your art. Marketing is the final step of making: sharing your art with others.

But it’s more than that.

Marketing As You Go Read

How to Build a Student Following

How to Build a Student Following – Online and Off

If you want to teach, you need a pool of potential students.

You need a following. And a following suggests there is a leader. If you expect people to sign up for your classes or buy your how-to book, you must step up and be the leader.

You’ve got to position yourself as an expert.

Becoming known for your skills is not an overnight process. It’s a process that you must be dedicated to and in it for the long haul.

I built Art Biz Coach using all of the tactics I share below. I think it would be harder to start my business today because the market is much noisier than when I opened back in 2002.

Your market is also robust. There are more people seeking instruction, and there are a lot more artists who are teaching in their own studios, in art centers and supply stores, and online.

In business terms, this presents both a threat and an opportunity. The threat is that more people are competing for students. The opportunity is that you can differentiate yourself.

The distinguishing characteristics of a successful, independent art teacher are:

How to Build a Student Following – Online and Off Read

Marketing Insights from the Authority Rainmaker Conference

34 Marketing Insights from the Authority Rainmaker Conference

It’s a Memorial Day tradition at Art Biz Coach to offer a list of reminders for your art business.

This is a twist on that tradition.

With inspiration from the stage of Copyblogger’s Authority Rainmaker conference, I opened up my notes and share my biggest takeaways with you.

The thing to remember about live events, books, and even online classes is that not everything shared is going to apply to you. You’re either not ready to receive it, you’re past its relevance in your growth, or it doesn’t match your business model.

You have to look for the nuggets in these situations. I find that there is usually at least one thing from each talk, lesson, or chapter that is worth the investment.

Here are some of the highlights worth remembering.

34 Marketing Insights from the Authority Rainmaker Conference Read

Dharma is exploring her new cat cave, but can’t quite commit to being all in. Are you all in on your brand?

Is Your Artist Brand Missing You?

At the mastermind retreats with my coach and mentor, everyone in the group receives a “hot seat,” where we are given the opportunity to tackle one big issue in our businesses. For my hot seat, I chose to talk about my brand. To prepare the group, I reminded them of some of the websites and

Is Your Artist Brand Missing You? Read

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