One Simple Trick Will Make Sure Marketing Doesn’t Run Your Life

Sep 18

You want to expand your reach and broaden your audience in a way that really, truly works. You want it to not only work, but work for you. In your perfect world, marketing would compliment your personality so you could spend that time in ways that light you up - just like when you are creating art.

In reality, you’ve tried marketing every which way, but still aren’t sure how to get more traffic to your website.

The gurus each tell you “the best way” and they’re all different. Besides, you aren’t sure any of those are right for you - they don’t really fit your style. They feel boring and uncreative, or soul sucking, or not quite ethical.

So what are you to do?

I’ll tell you the answer. It’s SO easy. It does require a little trial and error - but you’re doing that now anyway - and soon you’ll be saving time out the wazoo.

READY???

All you have to do is take out a pencil and paper (or note taking app or whatever you’re into) once a week and write down these three things:

The date
How many website visitors you received in the past seven days
Anything you did differently in your marketing. Be as specific as possible about what you did and how much time it took. (examples: changed up your bio, added new hashtags, pinned extra images, boosted a post, added a new offer to your commissions, changed the way you talked about something, made it a point to comment on other people's posts, etc.)

If you want bonus points, you can also write down where your website visitors were referred from (for example: which of your social media account links they clicked to get to your website), but if you don’t know how just start with the above.

That sounds too easy right? How could that possibly help?

Let me tell you a little story.

Last year, I had an emergency appendectomy. If you don’t know what that is, it doesn’t matter, it’s a surgery. It put me out of commission for awhile and the pain meds meant I wasn’t worth a whole lot. Instead of giving up on social media completely, I took a look at the numbers I’d been collecting.

Turns out, I was spending about 10 hours/week on Instagram and 1 hour/week on Pinterest. They were bringing me the exact same number of email subscribers. Guess which one got cut?

I added an extra hour or so to Pinterest to make up some of the difference and still cut my marketing down from 11 hours per week to 2.

Side note: I’ve gotten back to posting on Instagram once a week so I don’t lose all that hard work I put in in the beginning. It doesn’t bring me a ton of traffic, but I’m only spending about 15 minutes my post so I don’t mind. It just makes me feel good to have an active account in case I want to go back to making it my ‘main man’ again someday.

How can I use this to find a marketing strategy that works AND that I enjoy doing??

Make a list of marketing ideas

Add all the things you’ve heard of that worked for so-and-so
Add any creative ideas you’ve had that sound like fun to try
Leave space to add more as you think of them
Cross off anything that sounds like something you really don’t want to do

Try one at a time

Pick one thing off your list that you want to try right now
Decide how long would be practical to keep doing it to get your results (maybe you want to try it for one week and decide at the end if it is working, or maybe you think it’ll take a little longer to work so you’re going to do it for four weeks and then decide)
Keep track of your numbers every week
If you find something that increases your website visitors by 15-20% or more, try it for a few more weeks to see if you get the same results. Consider what else you can do along the same lines to increase your numbers even more.

The more you pay attention to what is working, especially if you’re already testing fun ideas, the closer you’ll get to turning your marketing into something that fits your personality and gets your creative juices flowing.

This is my #1 recommended strategy to turn marketing dread upside down. It takes 10 minutes/week. It doesn't cost you anything. You don’t need any special programs or software. ANYONE can do this!

Is there any reason you haven’t already pulled out some paper to start? If there is, tell me! I want to talk you out of missing out on this amazing and simple tool.

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About the Author

I’m a mentor for intuitive visual artists to sell more work, more consistently, at higher prices — with better work/life balance. Founder @ The Artist Market Co.