How to Achieve Your Creative Goals Within 90 Days

You have BIG creative goals, right? You want to achieve them, but maybe you're struggling to make progress?

Well, you're in the right place, because in this video I'm chatting with my friend & productivity expert Monique Malcolm about how to achieve your creative goals within 90 days.

In this video, we'll discuss how to break down a BIG goal into tiny actions and smaller, more manageable chunks so that you can reach your goals faster! We cover:

• why to focus on a 90 day timeframe

• example of launching a podcast in 90 days

• project management for creatives

• our thoughts about choosing the right project management and productivity software & tools for your needs

Monique Malcolm is a seasoned productivity expert, writer, and the founder of Take Tiny Action.

She is dedicated to helping people achieve their goals in a sustainable way.

Monique’s approach involves taking small and consistent steps over time, which allows people to achieve their ambitions while maintaining a healthy, balanced, and fulfilling lifestyle. She lives in Florida with her husband and son. When she’s not working, she loves soaking up the sun at the beach or hopping onto her bike for a spin class.

Monique was also a guest on Episode 29 of the Badass Creatives podcast, talking about setting goals and taking action.

Takeaways

• Setting 90-day goals can make long-term planning more manageable and allow for consistent progress.

• Big projects can be broken down into 90-day segments to make them more achievable.

• Examples of projects that can be completed in 90 days include writing a book, launching a podcast, or starting a new business venture.

• Managing projects and tasks as a multi-passionate creative requires finding a system that works best for your individual needs and preferences.

• The hierarchy of goals, projects, tasks, and tiny actions can help in effectively planning and executing projects.

• Choosing the right productivity software depends on how you process information and prefer to organize tasks.

• Avoid overcomplicating productivity by focusing on taking action and avoiding excessive tweaking of productivity tools.

• To work with Monique and learn more about her approach to productivity, visit her website at TakeTinyAction.com.

Video Transcript:

Mallory

Hello Monique! Thanks for joining me and talking all about how to achieve your creative goals within 90 days!

Monique Malcolm

90 days, 90 days. That is my number.

Mallory

Yeah! So why focus on a 90 day timeframe? Why is 90 days such a helpful number for achieving creative goals, and breaking it down into something that feels actionable and doable?

Monique Malcolm

Well, I like to think about 90 day goals because planning for the entire year is really hard.

I know that in the past you've probably heard people say like, "What is your 10-year plan? What's your five-year plan? What is your three-year plan?"

I'm going to be honest. I can't tell you what my plan is sometimes by the end of the week. So how am I going to plan a goal that is supposed to be five years out? And then, today, the person I am right now has to figure out that plan? It's a lot.

90 days for most people is more manageable, especially since we tend to operate on quarters. People understand quarters and how that all works. So it's a really good time to be consistent, see some progress, and then make adjustment if you don't really see any progress.

I think anything longer than that is probably too long for most people. Anything shorter than that, it's probably not enough time to really have like data and progress to measure against, to see like is the thing you're doing really working?

Mallory

So what's an example of like a really big project that you could break down to 90 days?

For example, I know that you wrote a book, right? Don't Let Fear Have All The Fun: and other advice for making bold moves even if you're afraid

And I know I've written a couple of books. They're tiny little things that I've written. But writing a book, no matter whether it's tiny or like the great American novel is a huge project, right? So did you write this in 90 days or did you break this down into like, mini projects that were 90 days each?

Monique Malcolm

Oh, so that is a spicy question. So technically, it took longer than 90 days to write that book. But I also spent a lot of time procrastinating with writer's block. So if I had to be honest, I think I wrote the majority of that book probably in the last six weeks because I was just running out of time. I really needed to get it done. So I think that I could make the argument that it was done in 90 days over the course of like,

I think it was eight months that I wrote it, which is kind of terrible. I spent a lot of time procrastinating. But I have heard people say that like, they could write a book in 90 days. And I honestly think for my next book, I don't know, I feel like 90 days might still be too tight for me, but I think I definitely could get it done in five to six months, just because I understand the process now and I would be better about it, even though writing.

Second, third, fourth books, it still sucks. But I would be, I kind of know how to manage that. But going back to your original question about like a project that can be done in 90 days, you could do a book in 90 days. If you say wanted to write like a 40,000 word book and you committed to like for two hours or an hour and a half every day, I'm just gonna write. I think that's totally possible to get that done.

If I could think about a project that people would do in 90 days, I think like, realistic, you could launch a podcast and like, you could launch the podcast. It's not gonna take you 90 days, but you could like have a 90 day project for your podcast where you planned it, you launched it, and you started getting data. And that would be realistic for 90 days.

Mallory

Yeah, and well, because that's something you're super experienced with, right? Like you've had a couple of different podcasts.

So launching, you mentioned like launching the podcast would be 90 days. So then would there maybe be like a second podcast project that's like another 90 days after that initial launch? Like, how do you kind of like use 90 days more than once?

Monique Malcolm

Yeah, so for something like a podcast, I wouldn't even, I teach people how to launch a podcast in 30 days. It just kind of depends on how quickly you want to go. I think 30 to 60 days is realistic for a lot of people and like their time constraints. That if you took 60 days, that last 30 days would be like getting out there and then gathering some data.

So figuring out like, how do you want to promote this show and how you want to... get more downloads and stuff and kind of tracking that over that first 30 days. But if you wanted to, let's say 90 days later, continue on with that podcast process, then I think a lot of things could be repeated.

So in that 90 days, like the second round of 90 days, you're going to be one focused on tracking data over 90 days because you want to know like, what am I doing that's working?

So you might want to pick one marketing platform to use and go all in on that and try to test some different things out, whether it's I want this to be on Instagram or I want to share snippets on TikTok or I want to write threads that are related to my show. You would do that over a 90-day period.

That doesn't mean that you have to do it every day, but you would decide how often am I going to be posting these snippets from my show in this platform and then tracking that. As far as the content creation, well, great. Are you a weekly show? Yay.

Do you want to try to batch all your, all 12 episodes for that quarter in maybe a week or two? Maybe you want to have one content week at the beginning of every month where you do all your shows for the month and then you kind of let that go. You get to determine the timeline for that. But if I had a podcast project that I was like trying to track every 90 days, like the thing that I was doing, that would be how I would break it down. Like when do I want the shows to get done? And um, whatever data that I want to track. So whether it's downloads or how I'm marketing, getting guests, that kind of thing.

Mallory

Yeah, so say that you're, well, I know we both are like super like multi-passionate creative people, right? And especially if we are working by ourselves, don't have like a big team, right?

Can you talk about how you manage projects and like how you might recommend that people like us try to like self-manage projects like this, especially over the course of like a little bit of a longer period, like 90 days and kind of keep track of all of those moving parts?

Monique Malcolm

Yes, so I have this hierarchy in my mind of like how goals translate into projects.

So a lot of times when people think about goals, I feel like there's a lot of focus on the setting of the goals. So like, I'm gonna do this thing and it's gonna be actionable. I'm gonna get it done by X date and that's great, but that doesn't actually help you get that thing done. It just gives you like a container for like when it needs to fit into.

For a goal, you set your goal, and then you turn that goal into a project or maybe several projects. It's gonna depend on what the goal is.

So if we're going back to the podcast example, the goal of launching a podcast within 90 days, great, that's the goal. There's a bunch of projects in that. You need to plan out your show basics. So what is the podcast gonna be about? That could be one project. So just figuring out.

What am I going to talk about? How often am I going to be publishing? Am I going to have guests? What is the vibe of my show? That's a project.

Then you might have creating your podcast branding. So that could be a different project. You need to think about cover art. Do you want to have intro music? Do you want to, like, how do you want to have templates that you use that are branded for social media so that when they show up, people know, like, this is my, this is so-and-so's podcast. That could be a separate project.

If you have guests, coming up with a process for booking guests and making sure that that's seamless, that could be a project. Actually recording the audio, that's a project.

So you go from goals to your projects, and then from your projects, you go down one more level to tasks.

So what are the tasks within that project?

So again, if your project at this moment was like coming up with podcast branding. So the task might be getting photos done if you wanna be on the cover of your show. You're gonna have a project for like actually designing the square.

Your task might be designing templates for sharing on social media. These are all tasks. But a lot of people stop there at the task.

I think those are still too large.

I go down one more level to the “tiny actions” because those are like the individual pieces in that task.

So an example I love to give to people when it comes to podcasting is, when somebody tells me I'm going to record a podcast, I always ask them, what do you mean? Do you mean that you have already planned out the episode, it's been outlined, everything's ready to go, and you're gonna hit record?

And you're just going to literally only record and be done? Or does recording that podcast mean you need to outline the points that you want to do? You need to write your script. You need to, I don't know, come up with pictures for your episode. Do you need to then sit down and record, and then you're going to edit it, and then you're going to upload it? Because those are two different things. And one of those... is a task and the other one is a tiny action.

The tiny action is saying, I'm gonna record the podcast and it's literally only you sitting down to record the podcast. That's the tiny action.

The other thing was a task list of things that you wanted to do.

And this is why people get frustrated and feel like they don't have enough time because they're not really clear on, did I need to do a task, like a series of things, or did I just have like one solo action that I need to take in this moment? So...

That's the hierarchy for me. It's like, what if the overall goal, turning that goal into a project or a series of projects if I need them, breaking that project down into tasks.

So what things do I need to do to move this project forward? And then from those tasks, breaking them down into even smaller steps that I can check off, you know, outlining the podcast show, writing my script, recording the episode, editing, those are all smaller actions. So that's how I look at it.

Mallory

Yeah. So, okay. Speaking of spicy topics, so, because I know whenever the topic of like tasks and project management and all this stuff comes up, people, especially multi-passionate creatives, especially like… I know you have ADHD, for example, right? And I, some of the people I work with also have ADHD. And I know for those of us that are, you know, have a lot of big ideas, there's always this question of...

What software should I use to manage all my tasks, right? Like what's the best productivity software?

Monique Malcolm

I don't have a definitive answer to that because I believe that you should answer that question by thinking about how do you need to process information.

I have used pretty much every project management software under the sun.

I think that you should think about how does your brain process information?

So for me, I'm very visual and I need to plan in a certain way and then I need to put it into a digital format and I need it to look a certain way for it to be useful to me. Otherwise, it's just gonna be a list of stuff in the digital cloud that I'm not gonna use.

So I like to plan on paper first. It sounds redundant. People are like, you're wasting so much time. But I literally cannot plan directly into my computer. My brain won't let me do it.

I have to write things by hand to process on paper. So I have a lot of post-it notes of different sizes so that I can break down ideas. So I have post-it notes of a specific size that I like to use for planning projects and getting out all those tasks.

Usually once I get the tasks, I don't necessarily mind taking tiny actions and putting those directly into the computer, because a lot of times I usually know what that is.

But the big ideas of like how things need to move, dates and stuff, I like to do that all on paper and then put it in the computer and then kind of move things around if I need to.

But as far as project management systems go, you have a lot of options. Are you a person who likes things to look, to live and list? If you do, pretty much every project management to-do list app has a list view. I love things to be in the Kanban view because I like to see processes flow through.

So if I'm doing like podcasting stuff, I like to have a Kanban board. You have these columns and you move that task through the board. So I like to see it go from like idea to planned to outlined to record, to edit. I like to see that flow. And especially if I'm doing multiple episodes at one time that might be in various stages or I might have somebody helping me with things.

It's really helpful for me to look at the computer and be like, okay, great, this is an edit right now. It needs to go over to upload and then that will be done.

But that might not be how you plan.

So the most important question that you need to ask yourself is outside of like, what is the best software to use? You need to ask yourself, how do I need to receive and process this information?

Is it enough that you just see it as a list? Then great.

If you're a person who just likes to have like a list with giant tasks and you just know to do the tiny actions, that's great.

I like to see not only my task. I love to see the sub tasks. I love to check off those things. It that makes me feel like I'm progressing.

Some people can just have a task that says like record episode with Mallory and like they know what to do and they'll do it. I'm not that person. I needed to be like: “Record episode with Mallory.” So what parts of this am I responsible for? Okay, so I need to come up with some topics. I need to have some questions. Like I need that checklist of things to keep myself on track.

Mallory

For a lot of those tasks and tiny actions, I tend to prefer a list view and have like subtasks and sort of like list it out.

And I use a lot of digital tools because I like to add visual things like emojis to kind of cue my brain quickly about like what the thing is related to. And so that I can capture those ideas on my phone, right? Cause I'm like constantly coming up with ideas. So I need a way to capture them so that they're not like rattling around in my brain.

But like you were saying about the Kanban and like those like column views, I actually do a sort of analog paper version of that for my YouTube videos.

I have a big poster on my bulletin board over here and I use Post-its for like, so there's a Post-it for each individual video topic and I kind of move them where it's like, okay, I'm scripting this one, this is the next one I wanna record, I'm recording this one, I'm editing this one, and then this one is like post-production stuff, right? So yeah, it's figuring out what works best for you.

Monique Malcolm

And you hit the nail on the head with saying things will change over time.

That's another reason why I don't like to give people a blanket answer of you should do this. I'll tell people what I use.

At this moment, I'm using a combination of Post-it notes, ClickUp, and Notion. And neither of the digital tools am I loving right now.

So I actually am thinking about just going back to paper for the moment, because there's just times during the year where writing things by hand just is faster and it's more effective for me.

And then there's times of the year where maybe there are a lot of moving parts. Like right now, I don't feel like I have so many moving parts that I couldn't just manage it on paper. But there are times where I have deadlines and I have like things that I'm trying to make sure that I stay on top of. I wanna put all of that into a digital system so I can be reminded and I know what's going on.

But like you, I love having an analog Kanban board. I actually have a whiteboard on my closet door. And every so often, I feel like at least once a year, I draw up a Kanban board on there and I just do everything with Post-It notes because I don't know, for whatever reason, like the digital systems, they create a lot of noise.

And I think that's kind of like the quiet secret of productivity people and productivity apps.

And I even see it, I hang out on Reddit sometimes. I feel like there's a lot of quiet snark on Reddit boards and like the Notion forums and the ClickUp forums about how like all these productivity tools are just… we're just tweaking them. We're just tweaking them more and more instead of actually getting in there, planning what we need, using them for what we need.

We just get in there and we just play around with them and tweak them and make more features. And so I feel that. I feel that from time to time, I live in that space. And so when I find myself there, I'm like, all right, well, you need to go back to paper because this is not working.

Mallory

Yeah, because at some point that stuff can just become another form of procrastination and can prevent you from actually achieving those goals, right? You actually have to take the “tiny actions.”

Monique Malcolm

Pretty much, because I mean, at the end of the day, we have all these productivity apps because we have this idea that we could be doing more and we could be more organized and really out of our own way if we had this app to make things easier, to recall the information, to remind us of the thing.

But I feel like there's a scale, right? There's a point where it does that, and then there's a point where it tips, and it's like, it's not doing that.

That's my complaint with Notion. I feel like somebody's gonna be mad in the comments about this. And the thing is, I get it. Notion can be so aesthetic and so beautiful, but man, can you really tip the scale into this was really helpful to this is taking so much time.

Mallory

Yeah. Well, so I know that you work directly with a lot of creatives to help them achieve their goals and help them figure out how to like be productive in a way that works best for them, right?

Can you tell people how they can get in touch with you, how they can work with you, all that good stuff?

Monique Malcolm

Yeah, so if you like my brand of productivity, snark, you can find me on my website at TakeTinyAction.com.

It's super simple to find. It's spelled exactly like it sounds. No weird spellings of punctuation. And you can find more details about me and what I do there.

If you are interested in having somebody that's gonna help you like actually get things done and help you make time and space for that, then I'm your girl because I want to help you do things. And I don't want to have you sitting on endless calls with me talking about what you're going to do. I actually want you to do it.

Mallory

Awesome. Well, I so appreciate you doing this and being here with us, Monique. Thank you so much.

Monique Malcolm

Thank you for having me.

Connect with Monique Malcolm

• Website: Take Tiny Action

• Monique’s book: Don't Let Fear Have All The Fun: and other advice for making bold moves even if you're afraid

• Monique’s YouTube: @TakeTinyAction

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Inventory Management for Creative Business Owners

Do you want to increase profits and bring down costs in your creative business?

In this video, I'm chatting with MY business coach, Gwen Bortner, all about how effective inventory management can help bring down your expenses & boost your profits:

In this conversation, we'll cover:

• how to figure out if you have too much inventory (your inventory turnover ratio)

• inventory management best practices including Open to Buy for retail shops

• the pros & cons of wholesale vs consignment for makers & independent retail shops

• whether it's better to do pre-made or custom order products as a maker or artist

Gwen Bortner is the founder of the business operations advisory firm, Everyday Effectiveness.

Gwen has a background in the craft industry, with years of experience as a professional knitwear designer & knitting teacher.

She helps visionaries scale their businesses to seven figures and beyond without the stress and overwhelm of trying to do it all on their own. Her approach comes from the belief that personal and professional success looks different for everyone, and most business owners waste time and energy trying to conform to outside expectations and definitions of success.

Video Transcript:

Mallory

Hi, Gwen, and thanks for joining me to talk about, I know, I think this is one of your favorite topics, inventory management and how that can be used to increase profits and reduce cost and expenses, right?

Gwen Bortner - Everyday Effectiveness

Yes, I am a weirdo. I actually love inventory. I love talking about inventory. And I am so glad that you invited me to be with you and to talk about this topic. Because it is kind of, it's a weird passion for me. And it's also something that doesn't get talked a lot about because it's kind of confusing. And almost every time I talk to somebody about it, they're like, well, no one's ever said that. No one's ever told me that.

Why is no one talking about this? So I love any opportunity. So thank you for inviting me. I really appreciate it.

Mallory

Yeah, so what are some of the common mistakes that people have when it comes to inventory? Like, is it possible to have too much inventory?

Gwen Bortner - Everyday Effectiveness

So the answer to that, almost always, is yes. For years I was a business teacher through the National Needlearts Association. And anytime someone would come up to me and they'd say, so I'm having a little trouble and I'm not sure, I'm not quite sure where to start. And I would say, you have too much inventory. And they're like, but I haven't even told you how much inventory you have. And it's like, yeah, that's almost always the...

The first issue is you have too much inventory. Anytime people don't have too much inventory, they have nothing to talk to me about because their businesses are super profitable, they're running really well. So it really is, the answer is probably yes. If you're feeling like you're not super profitable, you probably have too much inventory. And any client I've ever worked with, when we get their inventory to a correct level, they're automatically making more profit. And it's so counterintuitive, and they're always shocked, even though they trust me, they know I'm right, I've got plenty of case studies, that it's still like, I don't get it, I'm making so much more money, and I don't have as much inventory. So yeah, so the very... Short answer to that long blathering I did was, yes, it is easily possible to have too much inventory.

Mallory

So when we're talking about inventory, is it, and maybe it's both, is it like the finished products that we're selling? Is it the materials that are going into those products for like, you know, you spoke about working with needle arts and I know you have a background in knitting. So is it like craft supplies and the materials that are going into those finished goods too?

Gwen Bortner - Everyday Effectiveness

Well, you know, and so to be completely honest, most of the people I work with are in the retail side. So they're selling a finished product. But I also have a number of clients who were doing small business manufacturing, which may be a little beyond where a lot of your audience is more in the maker category. But really, they're doing small business manufacturing as well. And what I find is it's a mix of both. Right?

It's a mix of having too much finished product and either having too much of some raw materials and not enough of others, but it's really about the right sizing of it. So it's not as much about too much or too little, it's really about, are you right sizing your inventory, whether it's the raw goods piece of it that you're using to create, you know, whatever your product is that you're creating, or is it the finished product sitting on the shelves based on, you know, what your model looks like, so.

Mallory

So how do you figure out what the right size is then?

Gwen Bortner - Everyday Effectiveness

So this is truer for finished product than for raw material. So let me just be clear on that. So we're going to start with finished product because it's an easier piece.

Generally, for anybody in the kind of maker space, we fall into what is called specialty retail, that we're selling something out. And I say retail, it can also be wholesale, but it's still that same space.

The guideline is you want to be having somewhere between two and six turns of your inventory per year. Now we're starting to get into jargon and people, I'm sure there's at least someone that's listening to this whose eyes just roll to the back of their head. And so we're going to take it down, we're going to make it really simple.

So a turn, an inventory turn is the theoretical number of times that your total inventory value gets sold in a year. I'm going to keep it really simple numbers for a moment.

So like if you've got a thousand dollars of inventory sitting on your shelves, in whatever theoretical shelves you have, and that's kind of the average that you're doing most of the time, that means that you should be selling two thousand dollars of that inventory a year. That would be two turns. If you were selling 6,000 that would be six turns, right? Because it's 1,000 times six, right? 1,000 times two.

And so the way to figure out what is the right level is to work that number backwards. To say what are your average sales per year. So picking a number just another number out of random. Let's say your average annual sales is ten thousand dollars.

For specialty sales, particularly in the maker market, really if you can get to two or three, you're usually doing really well. This is particularly in the retail side of it. But somewhere between two, two and four is where you really wanna be shooting for. If you can start getting above four, you're often having to make too much or spend too much on shipping and there's other downfalls, but somewhere in there.

So you're gonna take your total sales for a year, and you're going to divide it by whatever turn number you want.

So if we take 10,000 and we say we want four turns, we're going to take 10,000 and divide it by four. That means that your average inventory value that's sitting on your shelf should be 2,500 at any point in time. Does that make sense? Was it simple enough? Do you think? And this is not the super accurate way to do inventory turns, but it's the relatively easy, I can do the math in my head. I don't have to spend hours, you know, gathering numbers to try and figure out, you know, what I'm doing way to, you know, and if you're getting close to that, then you're in good shape.

Mallory

Yeah, it kind of the turns thing kind of reminds me of like within restaurants...

For example, I was at a pizza restaurant last week and on a busy Friday night with my best friend. And we were sitting at the table and the waitress kind of forgot about us towards the end. And like, I was fine. We were having a good time. But they weren't able to turn that table. I'm pretty sure there were people waiting outside that if they were able to get us checked out and out of there, they could be making more money on next guests.

Gwen Bortner - Everyday Effectiveness

Yes. That is exactly the same concept and where the table is an inventory in a restaurant because only one group of people can be sitting at it at a time, it's the exact same thing.

Every dollar of inventory sitting on your shelf is exactly that. It's like a dollar that's sitting there and how many times can you sell it to make more money? Right? And you're sitting there as a dollar, as a cost, but your value of it is $2, because that's what you're gonna sell it for if you're doing just a kind of standard keystone market. And so how many times can you do that in a year?

I will tell you in the retail world, in the craft market, and this is typically more brick and mortar, but it also applies to online businesses. What I typically find when people do the numbers is it's usually one or less.

that when they start working with me, they're only getting one or less than one turn per year. And it's like, yeah, you need to cut your inventory in half. Which of course is a very scary thing. Because most people believe more inventory creates more sales, but that's not actually a true statement.

Mallory

Yeah, and when you're talking about retail, specifically with like independent boutiques and things like that, there's something called open to buy, right? This is related to what you're talking about?

Gwen Bortner - Everyday Effectiveness

Yes. So the open to buy is a way to help manage how much money you're actually spending on inventory. Because almost everybody that's in any sort of maker environment is in it because they love the thing. There is no like just hardcore business person that says, I wanna open a yarn shop because it's gonna make me lots of money.

That is not the way this works. We all know that, right? That is just not how this is. We love knitting, we love yarn, or we love woodworking, and we love the process of building something. Doesn't matter what it is. It's all about the passion and the excitement for it. And so we get excited about the products, and if we don't have a way to manage how much we're spending, it's really easy to spend a lot of money on stuff because...

It's fun. We love it. It's exciting. It's all those things, right?

So the open to buy is a way to manage that. And the idea is however much money got for the product that you just sold. And I'm going to use a simple keystone situation, right? So we sell the product retail for 10. It cost us five to bring it in. You know, like I said, oversimplifying, but we're, you know, so we can keep the numbers in our head, right?

So if we're selling a product for 10, but it's costing us five, if we sell $100 of that product, that meant that we probably spent $50 of cost on it, right? And so the idea is you then now have $50 to replace that product, not 100, right? You have 50.

Now, if you're needing to decrease your inventory, which most people are, what I encourage you to do is not say, I've got $50 to replace, but you only do a smaller percentage of it. Okay?

So for instance, if your cost of goods is 50%, which is our example there, right? 50% of 100 is, well, 50. Maybe you say, I'm only going to allocate 45% to replacing inventory. And so over time, you start decreasing it gently without doing a big sale where you're losing money. It happens over time, way less painful. And you're not seeing this huge change in your business model so aggressively that it becomes problematic.

If you need to do it a little more, a little bit faster, then maybe we say we only take 40% of our cost to put toward open to buy. But the way I find that's the easiest way to do it is to set up a separate account, a completely separate checking account, bank account, savings account, whatever you want. Generally, I'd recommend some sort of checking account where money can come in and out pretty easily. Every time that you're making a sale, either daily or once a week or whatever, you look at your total sales and you say: "We sold X amount," and so we're going to move X percentage over to this account.

It doesn't mean I get to spend it every day. I need to know how much money is in here. But by putting it in a separate account, it makes it so much easier to track and say, "Oh, I've got $40 I can spend." And then when you spend it, you're still going through that same process, like I said, daily or weekly, whatever actually makes sense.

Mallory

Okay, so we've talked about, okay, so inventory management for retail shops and inventory management for like makers and artists who are possibly creating products for those independent retail shops.

I'm curious, I have another video about how to get started selling to those boutique retail shops as an artist, right? And I know, you know, there's different ways that that's often handled, especially in small independent stores.

There's wholesale, which is kind of a lot of what we've been talking about, but there's also consignment. And I'm curious from both a maker artist perspective and a retail shop perspective, maybe you could kind of talk through some of the pros and cons of that as it relates to inventory management.

Gwen Bortner - Everyday Effectiveness

So there's pros and cons on both sides, which I love that you're aware of. A lot of people are just like, oh, you've got to do this. And it's like, no, they're different answers for different people, right?

So as the maker, getting your product into the retail shop, it's technically better for you most of the time if you can have them buy it wholesale.

Now here's the downside, typically wholesale, they're gonna pay you less than if they're doing it consignment. But the thing is, when it's sold, it's sold. It's never coming back. It's their problem, as it were, to make sure that it gets sold at that point.

And so a lot of folks shy away from wholesale because it's like, but I make more in consignment. But you may or may not make more depending if or if not it sells, right?

So there's an upside to doing the wholesale. The downside is exactly that. Typically, where wholesale, and I'm using really generic numbers, and I'm not saying this is what has to be, but typically wholesale is 50% of what expected retail is, where consignment can run to 60% or 70% of what retail is. So the maker is making more, but it could sit for two or three or four months before it sells. And when it's sitting in their shop, it's not sitting anywhere else to be sold. So there's only a narrow place.

Now, if you find a shop where your product is turning really consistently, then consignment might be a better option. Almost like it's going wholesale, but you're actually making more money, you know, in the process.

The reason a retail shop likes consignment is because they don't have the obligation to pay you until they've actually made their money, right? So that's, you know, that's, that's the advantage for them. The reason that they like to buy wholesale is because generally the cost is less.

So there's pros and cons in both sides. And I think you have to look at each situation case by case.

Years ago, when I lived in Missouri, there was an art studio that had lots of maker things. And I used to make a little bit of jewelry and a few things that she had on consignment. It wasn't my primary business. It wasn't the primary thing. So it didn't matter to me if it sat there for two or three months before it sold. So it wasn't a big deal. But like 90 plus percent of her product was all consignment. But it allowed her to bring in lots of different artists and be moving things around and have lots of variety, which, in fact, actually made the shop more interesting to people and potentially brought in more customers.

So there's a lot of reason for the various business models and why you might choose one over another. But you really want to look at it with the full picture in mind and not just look at one narrow element of it.

Mallory

Yeah, I think it's so important to understand like the goals and the pros and cons of both because I had one of my members of the Badass Creatives Marketing Accelerator was dealing with a consignment situation where the shop, you know, wasn't turning over her inventory very fast and then they stopped communicating with her and she could have used that inventory for craft shows that she was doing, you know, and eventually she was able to like go get it all back. But it's so important to like understand your own goals when going into that situation.

Gwen Bortner - Everyday Effectiveness

Well, and having an agreement that you both understand ahead of time. So to say, you know, if a product doesn't move in... (I'm making this up. I mean, it can be whatever agreement you want.) But, you know, if a product hasn't moved in three months, you will ship it back at, you know, whatever cost or, you know, whatever the thing is because you may know it's like, well, then it's just the wrong product for this particular shop. Right?

Especially when we're talking about maker, you know, items, because a lot of times they're all pretty,

a fair bit of uniqueness and it's like, hmm, somehow this particular thing doesn't work well in this shop, but this other thing does and allows you to make the switches, right?

Mallory

Yeah. Okay, then one final question related to maker businesses and artists.

I've heard this come up where people wonder, should we be selling pre-made items? Should we be like creating a bunch of inventory upfront? Or should I do custom made, made to order? Like is there one that's better? (Again, it depends, but...)

Gwen Bortner - Everyday Effectiveness

Well, and it's back to what is the overall goal, right?

So the value of making product ahead of time is often you can do it a little more assembly line-like, right? And they're similar in there. And you can do them a little bit faster because it's repetitive. And so therefore, your time investment and their for-profit margin may be a little bit...The time investment is less, so your profit margin is a little bit higher. And if you know it's something that people are buying consistently, then there's also the upside of that, right? That you've always got product that people are looking for.

On the other hand, doing made to order allows you to not invest time and money in product that just sits and never sells. And so there's some upside there. And often you can charge a little bit more for that made to order because it really is, it is customized to the person that they're potentially buying it for. Because they're picking their color, they're picking whatever details that come into it. So there could be an advantage there.

But the downside is, what if you get 100 made to orders all at the exact same time? Because you probably can't fill them in the time frame that you normally want to do. So it's a little bit of looking at both and seeing where does this particular piece fit in, and also how generic the piece is.

So knitting was my primary craft. I would never do knitting stuff as pre-made because there's way too many choices in details and specifics. But the little wire-wrapped base jewelry that I was doing was fine because it was like, you know, a neck is pretty much a neck. You know, earrings are pretty much earrings. They're going to fit most people. They either like them or they don't. You know, it doesn't have quite the same level of chance of working or not working.

So I think that also plays into it. And really... what is your overall business model? What are you looking to do long term?

If you're looking to really build this as a full-time business long term, handmade is probably not unless you're charging really high prices for it so that you can really make it a viable business, which I've seen people do.

Or if you're looking for a longer term business otherwise, you're probably looking about how can I outsource it? How can I do this so it's repeatable? And that typically is more of a pre-made option.

But go back to what is it that you're looking to get out of the business to help really drive that answer.

Mallory

Absolutely. Yeah, it's so important to be in alignment and clear about your own goals and your own business values.

And if somebody needs help with that... (because you're actually my business coach right now and you're amazing and you're so great at like systems and operations and things like inventory management and figuring out how to get in there and like increase your profits and decrease your expenses.) So how can people get in touch with you and find out about how to work with you?

Gwen Bortner - Everyday Effectiveness

So the best way is to jump to my website, which is EverydayEffectiveness.com.

Or people can just reach out via email at Gwen at EverydayEffectiveness.com and say, oh my gosh, I heard you on Mallory's show, and I've got questions.

And I'm always happy to hop on a quick call and figure out, is it the right time to work with me or not? And if there's a quick question, sometimes I can just do that right then and there and help you move on. I've done that more than once as well. And I'm happy to help if I possibly can.

Mallory

Awesome, thanks so much, Gwen.

Gwen Bortner - Everyday Effectiveness

You're welcome. Thanks for having me.

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Website Planning for Creative Businesses: 5 Questions to Answer BEFORE Building Your Site!

Whether you’re planning a new website, a website move or a website redesign, OR you're still stuck at trying to figure out “What website platform should I use??” ... There’s a few questions you should consider & answer for yourself BEFORE you ever talk to a web designer or developer or go too far down the rabbit hole of researching website platforms.

This is ESPECIALLY true if you’re an artist, maker or multi-passionate creative solopreneur and you're doing almost ALL OF THE BUSINESS THINGS yourself!

In this video, I cover the 5 questions you should be asking yourself and getting clarity on BEFORE building or redesigning your website.

This is based on more than a decade of experience working with TONS of artists, creatives & small business owners, both in my full-time day jobs in digital marketing and through my own program, the Badass Creatives Marketing Accelerator.

Ready? Let’s get right to it:

#1: What do you want your website to DO for you?

It's important to understand what you want your website to actually be able to do for you. Especially if you're considering moving to a new website platform this is going to be really important.

Do you want to sell physical or digital products on your website? Is e-commerce your primary focus?

If you’re building a website primarily for selling your handmade products or artwork online, you’ll probably want to go with a platform that is designed specifically for ecommerce, like Shopify or BigCommerce.

Or maybe you want to sell a few things, but you're not going to have hundreds of different products. Maybe you mostly want to use your website as a portfolio site. In that case, Shopify could still work but maybe you could get away with something like Squarespace or Wix.

Is one of the goals for your website to book classes or sell tickets to craft workshops that you're teaching? If so, you'll need to make sure that whatever website platform you're choosing will integrate with whatever tools you'll use to sell tickets, book classes, or schedule calls with you.

Whatever your goals are, it's important to get really clear on what you're trying to accomplish with your website BEFORE you start the process of building it or choosing a website platform.

#2: Is there specific software you need your website to integrate with, or features you need it to have?

Are there specific features or specific software that you need your website to integrate with and play nice with?

As a multi-passionate creative maybe you're using something like Printful or other print on demand tools to sell your original artwork or designs on t-shirts, stickers or mugs. In that case, you're going to want to make sure that whatever software you choose to build your website with plays nicely and integrates seamlessly with Printful or whichever print on demand tools you're using.

Do you already use an email marketing platform like ConvertKit, Mailchimp, Mailerlite or Klaviyo? If so, evaluate how easily the website platforms you're considering will work with your email marketing platform.

There are so many great email marketing tools out there, and some of them integrate more seamlessly than others with different website platforms.

Here's something to consider in general when it comes to connecting your website platform with other pieces of software:

Even if there aren't direct integrations built in, you can often use a tool called Zapier which is basically like digital duct tape.

Even if there's not a direct connection between a tool like Printful or Klaviyo and your website platform, Zapier can function like duct tape between two pieces of software to "zap" information from one platform to the other. Zapier can help your your website play nice with other tools.

That said, it's basically digital duct tape, so if you start building a whole house or your whole website out of nothing but duct tape - it may get a little wobbly.

So I recommend focusing on what are the most important things that you need to make sure work really well and really reliably in your business? Prioritize those to make sure that the things that are MOST important to your business will work really well and that there aren't big risks of having everything fall apart.

#3: How tech-y are you? And who will be responsible for updating your website?

Will you be the primary person responsible for editing & upkeep of your website?

If not, who will take care of updating and maintaining your website, and how tech savvy are they?

A lot of the multi-passionate creative small business owners that I work with want to be able to manage, edit and update their websites themselves. But what if you're not super tech savvy, or you just don't want to worry about learning a bunch of new tech stuff?

In that case, I really recommend thinking this through very carefully ahead of time so that you know that you'll be able to manage the website platform that you're using.

This is also why I recommend thinking about this stuff before you ever talk to a web designer or web developer.

Back when I used to work in a digital marketing agency I would see this all the time:

Clients would come in and they had already hired a web designer or web developer who had built them a custom website on WordPress.

(Which can be great by the way - there's nothing wrong with WordPress, it's just that for non-techy people, WordPress can be a lot of techy stuff to manage, and can feel overwhelming for some creative small business owners.)

What’s better? Self-hosted websites like WordPress vs Hosted websites like Squarespace or Shopify?

Here's an analogy that I like to use to explain the differences between something like WordPress which is a completely self-hosted website platform versus something like Shopify, Squarespace or Wix which is a hosted platform.

A self-hosted platform like WordPress is sort of like if you own a home and a hosted platform such as Squarespace, Wix or Shopify (where everything's kind of taken care of for you behind the scenes) is more like renting an apartment.

Much like with owning a home or renting an apartment, it's not that one is necessarily better than the other. It's just that they're different for different people, and they serve different needs.

I actually prefer to rent my apartment, and I also now prefer to use hosted websites for myself. (Even though I spent many years running a WordPress website!)

With a self-hosted WordPress website, you'll have to:

• find & pay for hosting

• install the WordPress software

• update any plugins

• make sure the WordPress software stays updated

• make sure everything is safe & secure behind the scenes

Cyber security is especially important when it comes to Wordpress. (I learned this one the hard way, many years ago!)

But on the other hand, WordPress is super customizable and that's one of the reason that so many web designers and developers love it.

I've used WordPress for a lot of projects over the years, it is really powerful super customizable. It's a lot like owning a house, right? If you own a house you can knock down walls, you can put up a swing set in the backyard, you can paint the walls, you can make all sorts of changes.

But when the plumbing breaks, when the toilet backs up, when the dishwasher fails.... you have to fix all of those things or call someone to take care of it for you if you can't fix it yourself.

Running a self-hosted website like WordPress or similar can be a lot like owning a house. There's pros and cons to it.

On the other hand, with a hosted platform like Shopify for e-commerce or Squarespace or Wix, you won't have quite as much customization freedom, but you also don't have to worry about all of the back-end software updates and security updates. All of that stuff is usually taken care of for you.

For most creative solopreneurs and micro small business owners, I generally recommend finding a hosted website platform.

If you are focused on e-commerce, Shopify can be a really great choice. BigCommerce is another good option.

If you only need more of a portfolio type of site and you don't plan to offer hundreds of products for sale, you could use something like Squarespace or Wix .

I recommend if you're going to be the one editing things and maintaining your website yourself, test drive it before you decide if possible.

A lot of these website builder platforms have free trials, so get in there and see what feels comfortable for you.

If you're the one maintaining your website, that's what matters. You need to feel comfortable going in there and editing things.

Now, the exception is if you have someone very close to you like a live-in partner, spouse or roommate who is super knowledgeable about all things WordPress or some other platform, go for it!

One of my students in the Badass Creatives Marketing Accelerator is in this situation. She has her ecommerce website built on WordPress with WooCommerce, but she has somebody who's very close to her who can make sure that all that stuff on the back end is taken care of for her.

#4: What content & information will you put on your website?

You don’t need to know or have EVERYTHING ready before you start talking to web designers, but it’s good to have a general idea of the content & messaging you’ll want to include, plus the types of visual branding & images you might want on your website.

It helps to start thinking about this as early as possible because this can be one of the most time consuming aspects of building a new website or redesigning a website.

A good web designer or web development agency can usually work with you on this to develop these ideas, but the more clear you can be about what content and visual imagery you'll need, the better.

Many web design agencies can pair you with a copywriter or photographer to create the content (this usually costs extra though) — but most often, it’s on YOU to provide this content.

If you're considering working with a web designer or agency, two that I highly recommend who specialize in Shopify ecommerce sites for artists and creative product-based businesses are:

• Ecommerce Arcade

• Aeolidia

#5: What pages or areas will be most important on your website for your visitors / customers to get to?

Much like thinking about what written content and imagery you'll want for your website, it's helpful to start thinking as early as possible about what pages or areas of your site you'll want your website visitors to navigate to.

This will also help make things so much smoother and faster if you can have some idea of the kind of information and content you want on your website, as well as the main pages and areas of your site that you want to have.

Even if you're building a website yourself with a platform like Shopify or Squarespace it's really helpful to consider:

What parts of your website are the most important for people to get to?

When professional web designers and developers start thinking about this and planning what will be included in the top navigation, footer navigation, or primary pages of a website, they'll often create something called a wireframe.

One way that I like to approach this for myself, especially when I'm designing my own websites, is to draw a wireframe with paper.

I find it helpful to step away from the computer where things can get a little overwhelming sometimes. Using pencil & paper can help you to really focus on questions like: What is the most important information that I want somebody to see if they land on my homepage?

I'm a very visual person, as a multi-passionate creative. So I like to grab a piece of paper, preferabily a long, legal sized piece of paper (to kind of mimic the longer flow of a web page) and just sketch out a basic idea of what you want to include.

Here in this video, you can see my example of where I mocked up a basic wireframe.

Here's a great Website Wireframe Beginner's Guide via HubSpot.

If you’re stuck, you can also look at other websites for inspiration & ideas.

Looking at the websites of direct competitors or similar creatives is great, but I also recommend looking for other types of artists or companies who might be similar in size or have similar values as you but they sell completely different types of products or work in a different creative medium.

What questions do you have about planning your website?

I could nerd out all day about website planning, website design, search engine optimization and digital marketing for multi-passionate creatives, but I'd love to hear from YOU:

What questions do you have about planning your website?

Drop them in the comments below this video.

If you want to dive even deeper, check out the Badass Creatives Marketing Accelerator, a mentorship program specially designed for creative, product-based business owners.

I also offer a limited number of 1-on-1 coaching, consulting & strategy sessions for creative business owners.

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Branding 101: Creating a Brand for Your Handmade Business

Just getting started branding your handmade business?

Learn the basics and beginner steps that artists and makers can take to start branding their creative business.

Why branding is important for artists and creative small businesses

Your brand is the foundation of your business.

It’s the thing everything else is built upon.

When I work with artists and makers, I like to introduce them to a framework that I call the Badass Creatives Marketing Pyramid.

It's a helpful visual tool to remember what you should be focusing on the most:

At the bottom of the Marketing Pyramid is your foundation, your brand.

Your brand includes all the things that make your business uniquely yours.

It includes YOUR unique products, your art, your creative vision.

Your brand identity also includes the voice and the tone that you use to communicate with your customers, as well as visual branding elements like your logo, your colors, your fonts, and your aesthetic.

Your brand also includes your ideal customer and your target audience.

Knowing WHO you want to work with or sell your products to will help you determine what type of colors, imagery and language will appeal to those specific people.

Your brand comes first.

It can evolve and grow over time, but you need to have at least a basic idea of the brand you’re trying to create and the FEELING you’re trying to evoke with YOUR people.

A brand is your VIBE. And as they say, “Your vibe attracts your tribe.”

The middle of the pyramid is your owned marketing channels, including your website, search engine optimization, and email marketing.

These are things that you have control over.

They are assets that you can continue to grow and build and develop that will continue to bring profit and revenue.

And at the top of the pyramid is 3rd party marketing channels.

Third party is just what it sounds like: it's another person or entity.

Third party is also valuable, but it's at the top of the pyramid for a reason.

Third party includes things like social media platforms, paid ads, working with influencers, getting press and publicity for your business.

One of the mistakes that I see a lot of small business owners and handmade businesses make is that they start a business and they know that they need to market it. They're familiar with social media from using it as an individual user. And so they immediately gravitate towards social media as their primary marketing tools. But they neglect to build the foundation of their pyramid.

Focus MOST of your time and energy on creating a strong brand and getting your owned marketing channels in place.

Are branding and marketing the same thing?

They are closely related but they're not exactly the same thing.

Marketing is about promoting, communicating, and spreading the word about your work and your products.

Branding is about creating a unique identity for your creative business. It's your reputation, style, and what people think of when they hear your name.

Marketing is how you get your work out there, and branding is how you make people remember and love your work. Both are important for your creative business!

Where to start with branding your business as an artist or creative

In this video, I discussed some branding basics with my friend & small business branding expert Holly Marsh.

Holly Marsh is the founder of Ecommerce Arcade, where you can level up your ecommerce game with strategy, design, and heart. She's an illustrator and branding designer, with more than a decade of experience selling products online and in-person.

Holly says, "I do recommend starting with a really memorable, solid logo that's readable. Print it out in really small print and see how far you can go away from it, until you don't see it anymore. Because if you have a logo that's really unreadable, whether it's a very flourishy script font... it's not really going to make an impact and be memorable for someone who is seeing you at a craft show. If it's unreadable, when they're seeing that banner they may have to really look closely to see what it says."

What does branding include?

Branding is not just a logo.

In the video above, Holly and I also discussed the difference between a logo and a brand mark.

Holly says, "Alternate marks like a brand seal or a word mark can help leverage memorability with a brand. You can think of a logo as your primary logo. It's the thing that you use most often and it's usually the name of your business in a typeface or even handwritten or hand-lettered. A brand mark is usually something like either your brand name, initials or maybe even just a really iconic illustration or icon."

She explains, “A good example of this is Apple. We all remember the actual brand mark, which is the famous apple shape.

“That's the thing about branding that can be surprising. Sometimes you might find that there are some elements that are part of your brand identity that stand out even more than your logo. They're a little more memorable or they kind of take on life of their own.

“It's really exciting but ultimately the goal is so that all of the elements within your branded identity are cohesive and that they are memorable to where someone can even visualize your brand colors or what you make. With a memorable brand, they are immediately going to associate it with your brand.”

Holly suggests, "If you're on a budget, I'd say that a logo and a color palette are probably your best bet just to get started.

“You can always build off of that and maybe down the road you can rebrand with a full identity identity suite of assets. What I mean by assets are graphics, illustrations, patterns, color palette, typography, a couple of logo treatments.... That's like the whole gamut of things that could be part of a full brand identity.

“But if you're going more simple, I would say a logo that's really memorable and it's flexible, so whether you're having to fit it into a wide banner (for printing and hanging at a craft show) or even like a circular avatar (for social media) it works."

Choosing your brand's color palette

Picking a color palette for your brand is one of the best places to start with developing your brand's visual identity.

Your brand doesn't have to be perfect, especially when you're just getting started, but it should be consistent and cohesive in some way.

It should be immediately clear to someone - whether they go to your website, your social media profile, or your craft show booth, that this is YOU.

And color is a great way to do that!

Holly suggests, "Use color as part of your brand identity and try to stick with that. It's okay if not everything matches exactly. For example, if you're trying to buy solid colored tissue paper for your online orders, it's not going to be that exact Pantone color, and that is okay! But if you're using basically the same colors throughout, people will start to associate those colors with your brand."

With a color palette, you're creating boundaries around what you do and don't do as far as colors.

Having a consistent color palette helps with things like social media posts and your website, as well as your packaging and even how you style your booth at a craft show.

Back when I was running my own handmade business, cobalt blue was one of my brand's colors. I was able to find tablecloths that were fitted to my booth and I had little organza bags for jewelry in the same color.

If you are trying to determine your brand’s color palette, one of my favorite tools is is Coolors. It's a really fun and easy to use color palettes generator.

Want to learn more about choosing fonts and colors for your brand? Check out this post by Aeolidia.

Need help with branding and marketing your creative business?

If you want to hire someone to design a logo or brand identity for you, check out Holly's website: Ecommerce Arcade.

If you want support and mentorship when it comes to growing your creative business, check out my program, the Badass Creatives Marketing Accelerator.

SEO for Beginners: Artists and Creatives Edition!

Okay, so you're an artist, creative, or handmade business owner and you want to figure out the basics of SEO (search engine optimization) so you can get more traffic to your website. If so, you're in the right place!

When I was a beginner and running my own handmade business in the early 2000s, I learned SEO through trial and error, plus reading lot of blog posts just like this one.

Now, I've spent more than a decade working professionally in digital marketing and SEO.

I've worked with hundreds of artists, creative entrepreneurs, and small businesses, teaching workshops on search engine optimization, e-commerce, blogging, social media & email marketing at events like Craftcation Conference and New Orleans Entrepreneur Week.

As Adjunct Professor at Tulane University's School of Professional Advancement, I even taught & developed classes on Digital Media Principles & Strategy and Creating Digital Content, which included teaching beginner SEO!

Is SEO hard to learn?

I get it. SEO can feel really overwhelming and complex when you’re first getting started.

And there CAN be a lot to learn, I’ll admit.

BUT, there are a lot of basic SEO tips and tricks that almost anyone can learn and start using to help your website get found by search engines.

I’ve got a full playlist on my YouTube channel called SEO for Beginner Handmade Businesses, Artists & Makers. Check it out, or keep reading for some of the basics of SEO that you need to know to get started.

What is SEO and why does your handmade business need it?

First off, what is SEO anyway? Why should you care?

SEO stands for “search engine optimization.”

It's the process of optimizing your website to get traffic from the “free” or “organic” search results on search engines like Google, Yahoo or Bing.

Many of the same SEO strategies that will help your website rank in those search engines will also benefit you if you sell on marketplaces like Etsy or Amazon Handmade and want to rank well within THEIR search engines.

(Check out this post & video on Etsy SEO if you want to learn more.)

So, as a small business owner or maker, understanding the basics of SEO is a crucial skill!

How does SEO work?

Search engines want to serve up the best, most relevant results to users.

They want to keep people using THEIR search engine, so they want to make sure people find exactly what they're looking for, as quickly as possible.

You could think of a search engine like a librarian.

The Internet is one GIANT library full of information.

When someone goes into that library looking for information (or in this case, opens up a search on their computer or phone) -- they need help to find the information they need in such a giant library.

Just like a friendly and knowledgeable librarian (shout-out to librarians everywhere!), the search engine's job is to help you find the most relevant and helpful information that matches what you're looking for.

Google and other search engines have "spiders," also known as web crawlers or bots.

There is SO MUCH information added to the vast library that is the Internet every day. These search engine "spiders" are constantly crawling around, discovering and cataloguing what's new.

How do search engines pick what goes first in search results?

Well, there’s 2 main factors that help search engines decide, and these are important to remember when it comes to optimizing your own website:

Relevance & Importance

When it comes to relevance, the search engines are looking at things like:

• How relevant is your webpage to a user’s search?

• Does your webpage answer the searcher’s questions?

• Does the content on your website match the intent of the searcher’s question? Does your webpage match the problem the user is trying to solve or the question they’re trying to answer?

People have different reasons for searching. To understand if your website's content is matching the intention of someone's search - WHY they’re searching for what they’re searching for - it helps to understand the different ways that people might be searching online.

Watch this video to learn more about 3 ways that people search online:

For importance, search engines are comparing your website or webpage to other similar pages. They’re evaluating:

• How does your webpage compare to other similar pages on the same topic?

• How do people interact with your webpage? Do they immediately hit “back” on their browser, or do they spend time reading or interacting with your page?

Click-through rate (CTR) is one way they measure importance.

Basically, out of all the times that your webpage appears in a search result, what percentage of times does someone click on YOUR page, instead of all the other options?

Backlinks from other websites is another way search engines measure importance.

When it comes to backlinks, both quality and quantity can play a role.

Lots of backlinks can be potentially good, but not if they’re all from spammy, irrelevant sites. Getting backlinks from relevant websites that have a good reputation is better.

You can learn more about the basics of links and link building for SEO in this video:

Note: there are 2 types of links that are helpful for SEO: internal and external.

Internal links are links from one page to another on your own website.

Wikipedia is a great example of a website that knows the value of internal linking! Almost every Wikipedia page links to lots of other related Wikipedia pages.

Internal links can help search engines like Google explore and crawl your website. They also help customers explore more of your site and find the information they need.

External links are links to or from another website. Links to your website from another website are sometimes called backlinks.

Are search results the same for everyone?

When it comes to understanding how SEO works, it’s important to remember that no one sees exactly the same search results.

Search engines like Google and Bing take into account your country, location, personal search history and other factors.

SEO Keywords and Keyword Phrases

If you've explored SEO even a little bit, you may have heard of "keywords."

As a beginner, I really encourage you to think instead of keyword phrases.

This is one place where I see a lot of SEO beginners get stuck. As a beginner, you might think in terms of single words like "art."

But in a HUGE library like the Internet, a single word is so broad, and there is SO MUCH information to compete with.

I encourage you to get as specific as possible, and think in terms of "long tail keyword phrases" -- think about phrases around 3-4 words, sometimes even longer, that are super specific to what you make and sell or specific to the ideal customer you’re trying to attract.

You'll want to include these relevant keyword phrases throughout your website in places like your content, product descriptions, page titles, and URLs.

You can get ideas for keyword phrases by using the auto-suggest and “related searches” features built into different search engines.

Pay attention to the search phrases that are suggested to you in Google, Pinterest, YouTube, Amazon, and Etsy. Make a list of search phrases that might be relevant to YOUR products and include those phrases in your website content and product listings.

You can learn more SEO keyword tips for beginners including some free ways that you can get started with keyword research and how to find keywords for your ecommerce shop in this video:

What's the best way to have your website come up on search engines?

The best place to start with optimizing your website for search engines is with "on-page SEO."

On-page SEO basically covers all of the things YOU have the power to change on your website.

This includes the content on your website (think blog posts or product descriptions on an ecommerce site).

It also includes behind-the-scenes content like page titles, meta descriptions, and alt text for your images.

This is where you’ll want to include all of those keyword phrases.

Basically, when it comes to on-page SEO, you want to use words to be descriptive wherever possible.

Watch this video about On Page SEO for Beginners to learn how to optimize your website for search engines:

Essential Beginner SEO Tips for Creative Businesses

To sum it up, here's a few quick tips to remember:

1. Create keyword-rich content

Use descriptive words throughout your website.

Include keyword phrases that people are searching for related to your products, and use those keyword phrases in your product descriptions and blog posts as well as behind-the-scenes in your page titles and meta descriptions.

Ask yourself:

• What questions do people have about your business or products?

• What topics could you write about that are related to your keywords?

Create content and information on your website that is helpful for your users, and include descriptive keyword phrases in your content.

2. Create quality content like blog posts and "evergreen" resource pages

As you start thinking about those long-tail keyword phrases that are relevant to your products, you may find that some of them deserve a little more attention. Maybe they're a big topic that you have a lot to say about.

In this case, you can create helpful blog posts or resources pages that are "evergreen" -- meaning they will be useful for a long time to come.

Think about an evergreen tree that is beautifully green all year round. "Evergreen" content is the same way: it continues to be useful or interesting for a long time.

What are the questions your customers ask you over and over again? Make it a blog post!

As you create this helpful, evergreen content, weave in those long-tail keyword phrases.

3. Make your website as user-friendly as possible

You want to make it easy for your ideal customer to navigate your website.

You don't want them getting confused or stuck. You want a website that is well-organized and created with your CUSTOMER in mind.

Your website should be mobile-friendly and easy to use on an iPhone or Android device.

Make sure that it's both easy to navigate and use on mobile, but also that it loads quickly on both mobile devices and on desktop computers.

4. Don’t bury info in photos, videos or audio files only

Photos, videos and audio files can be awesome and add depth and personality to your website!

But you’ll want to fill out the alt text field whenever you upload photos to your site. Alt text is important for both SEO and for accessibility.

People who are blind or visually impaired often rely on the alt text to describe what is seen in an image. So write your alt text as if you were describing the image to someone who can’t see what you are seeing.

For videos or audio files, include written transcripts or descriptions of what is in the video or audio clip.

Adding captions, descriptions, and alt text helps your customers and it helps search engines understand the information on your website.

5. Remember, SEO is a marathon, not a sprint

It takes time for SEO updates to be “crawled” and indexed by those search engine spiders. So don’t expect to see an immediate change in your website traffic.

It could potentially take months to see your SEO efforts really pay off.

SEO takes patience, but little changes can make a BIG impact over time.

Keep going! You got this!

Want more help with learning SEO?

Check out my full YouTube playlist: SEO for Beginner Handmade Businesses, Artists & Makers

You can also check out more of my blog posts and videos about SEO:

• Shopify SEO: 5 Step Ecommerce SEO Strategy for Beginners, with Kai Davis

• Shopify SEO for Artists and Creatives: 5 Quick Wins for Beginners

• Etsy SEO for Beginners: 6 Areas of Your Etsy Shop You MUST Update To Improve Your SEO Rankings

I try to provide tons of valuable educational content here on my blog and on YouTube (for free!), but if you want to dive deeper, check out the Badass Creatives Marketing Accelerator. It's a mentorship and community for badass artists, creatives & small business owners just like you!

Getting Started with Email Marketing for Artists, Makers and Handmade Businesses

Just getting started with email marketing as an artist, maker or handmade business?

In this beginner’s guide to email marketing, you’ll learn:

• Why email is still worth it for artists and handmade businesses

• How to get started with email marketing

• Selecting an email marketing platform

• The difference between email campaigns and email marketing automations

• How often to send marketing emails

• 3 examples of types of email newsletters you can send

• What to include in email newsletters

As a creative small business owner, email marketing is important because it's a marketing channel that YOU own and can control.

Is email marketing still worth it for handmade businesses?

The answer is, plain and simple, YES, email marketing is VERY MUCH worth it for artists, makers and handmade businesses.

With social media, algorithms may change and you don't truly have control of how many people see your posts.

But with email marketing (or SMS text message marketing), you have direct contact with YOUR customers and fans.

Email marketing is a direct line of communication with your customers.

When I work with handmade business owners, I like to introduce them to this framework that I call the Badass Creatives Marketing Pyramid. It's a helpful tool for thinking about what you should be focusing on:

At the bottom of the Marketing Pyramid is your foundation, your brand.

Your brand includes all the things that make your business uniquely yours. It's your products, your art, your creative vision, your brand identity.

It includes the voice and the tone that you use to communicate with your customers, as well as the visual brand like your logo, your colors, your fonts, and your aesthetic.

Your brand also includes your ideal customer and your target audience.

Your brand is your foundation. It's the thing that everything else is built upon.

The middle of the pyramid is your owned marketing channels, including email marketing.

Your owned marketing channels are all the things that you own and can control in your business.

These are things like your website, search engine optimization, and your email marketing list.

These are things that you have control over.

They are assets that you can continue to grow and build and develop that will continue to bring profit and revenue.

And at the top of the pyramid, we have 3rd party marketing channels.

Third party is just what it sounds like: it's another person or entity.

Third party is also valuable, but it's at the top of the pyramid for a reason.

Third party includes things like social media platforms, paid ads, working with influencers, getting press and publicity for your business.

One of the mistakes that I see a lot of small business owners and handmade businesses make is that they start a business and they know that they need to market it. They're familiar with social media from using it as an individual user. And so they immediately gravitate towards social media as their primary marketing tools. But they neglect to build the foundation of their pyramid.

Focus on creating a strong brand and getting your owned marketing channels in place, including your website and your email marketing.

How to get started with email marketing, with Klaviyo expert Holly Marsh

In this video, I talked with my friend & Klaviyo ecommerce email marketing expert Holly Marsh about some essential tips for getting started with email marketing.

Holly Marsh is the founder of Ecommerce Arcade, where you can level up your ecommerce game with strategy, design, and heart.

She specializes in the Shopify ecommerce platform, as well as Klaviyo for ecommerce email marketing. She is an illustrator and branding designer, and has a decade of experience selling products online and in-person.

Holly told me, "One thing that I hear from clients all the time is they all wish (myself included) that they started collecting emails way sooner."

If you haven't started collecting the email addresses of your customers and fans, that's okay!

Don't beat yourself up over it, but start collecting email addresses as soon as possible.

You can keep this very simple.

If you sell at craft shows, you can simply bring a notebook and have customers write their name and email address in the book and then enter it into your email marketing software when you get home. (This is actually what I did throughout my decade-long craft show career!)

Holly actually tested this a few years ago when she ran her handmade business, Marshmueller.

She told me, "I was doing craft shows pretty regularly and I did an experiment of how many emails can I get via an iPad at a craft show versus an old-fashioned clipboard and pen? Hands down, the clipboard + pen and paper won out. People like that tactile response to writing their name, which means that sometimes, yes, you have to interpret handwriting, but they like that experience better than typing on an iPad."

That's just proof that you can make these things simple.

They don't have to always be overly complicated and overly tech-y if that doesn't feel good for you.

Do what makes sense for YOU and your business.

Which email marketing service is the best for small business?

The next thing to do is select an email marketing platform.

Holly's go-to email marketing software is Klaviyo because she specializes in ecommerce and that's what Klaviyo is built for. It integrates very well with ecommerce platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Wix and Magento.

However, if Klaviyo feels overwhelming to you, our suggestion is to pick whichever one feels easiest to you and that you will actually use.

Holly told me, "I do encourage people to use Klaviyo but at the same time though, I had a student in a group that I was presenting to... She said 'I've been in Klaviyo, I don't get it,' and she just seemed really frustrated. But there was another platform that she had used and was comfortable with. I said just stick with that one then if it causes you to actually send out those emails and to use that tool. There's no wrong tool."

I've used lots of email marketing platforms over the years, and there's no one-size-fits-all solution.

Like most software, different email marketing tools have different price points and different pros and cons.

Some email marketing platforms that are frequently used by artists and small businesses include Mailchimp, Constant Contact, and Mailerlite. I've used all of these at various stages and for different reasons.

Here’s a good article comparing some of the options popular with ecommerce businesses.

Start with a tool that feels simple and easy to use.

As you get bigger and your needs change, you could always move to something like Klaviyo with a Shopify website if that makes sense for your creative business.

Email campaigns and email marketing automations

One thing Holly and I discussed was the difference between email campaigns and email marketing automations.

Email campaigns are basically when you send an email that will be sent to your subscribers once. A monthly email newsletter could be an example of this, or a 1-time email you send to promote your Black Friday sale would also be an email campaign.

Email automations are something that you set up once, and they automatically send emails to your customers.

Some popular types of email automations for ecommerce businesses are:

• Welcome email or welcome series

• Browse abandonment emails

• Abandoned cart emails

As Holly explained, a welcome automation is triggered when someone signs up for your email list, and then they get to know you through one or more friendly email messages.

When Holly works with clients on setting up their Klaviyo email marketing, she also sets up browse abandonment and abandoned cart email automations.

She says, "Browse abandonment is kind of like as if your store online is a brick and mortar, and you're saying 'Hello!' as someone walks through the door. It's just a friendly way to say hello to someone who is already familiar with your business. The next one is abandoned cart. Here, we've almost got them to the finish line of converting on your site. Abandoned cart really helps people focus in a very busy internet world."

Browse abandonment emails and abandoned cart emails are helpful ways to nudge people who were already interested in your products and remind them what they were looking at.

Think about it... our lives are busy and full of interruptions.

What if you're about to grab your wallet and buy those cute shoes, but you're suddenly interrupted by your child or spouse?

As Holly says, "I have ADHD and so the internet is wonderful and also terrible at the the same time. Any sort of browse abandonment or abandoned cart is a really lovely thing for me to be like, 'Oh that's right! I was trying to buy Mother's and Father's Day cards and I got distracted!' That's one of the beautiful things about using Shopify and Klaviyo together, is that sort of stuff is really just baked in."

How often should I send marketing emails?

As an artist or creative business owner, you have a LOT on your plate.

It's important to send emails regularly to your audience, so that your customers remember who you are and why they signed up for your list.

That said, pick a sending schedule that works for YOU and your business.

I typically recommend sending an email campaign at least once a month, but if you are super busy and that feels unmanageable, try to send something at least once a quarter or every 3 months.

If you get into the groove, a weekly email also works well for many creatives.

I also suggest developing a template for your email campaigns to make it easier. You don't have to reinvent the wheel every time!

3 types of email campaigns or email newsletters you can send

In this video, I show some examples of emails sent by some of my favorite artists & creatives to give you ideas of 3 different types of email marketing messages you can send:

This video was actually inspired by a student in one of my Skillshare classes.

Emily asked, "What are some of the loveliest, most creative ways to make sure that people really feel like they're being brought into your community, rather than just being broadcast to? Do you send newsletters (maybe weekly or monthly)?"

I grouped these into 3 different types of emails that I’ve seen many artists, makers and creatives have success with, but you can also mix & match some of these formats together to find what works best for you.

The first type is weekly inspiration roundups.

This is a format I’ve seen a lot of creatives have success with.

It doesn’t have to be weekly if that feels too much for you.

You could use this style and send on a different schedule, but for creatives like Austin Kleon and Justin Shiels, I’ve seen these weekly emails work really well.

Austin Kleon is a writer & artist who’s been using the format for a long time. He’s the author of books like Steal Like an Artist and Show Your Work.

Each Friday he sends out a list of 10 things he’s been reading about, learning about, or interested in.

Justin Shiels is a friend of mine and an incredibly talented illustrator, artist, and author of The Reset Workbook: A Guide to Finding Your Inner Magic.

He has a lovely weekly inspiration email called The Weekly Reset, which features his original illustrations, inspirational messages and pep talks, and a curated list of recommendations and what he’s interested in.

I did a version of this type of email for a long time with my former business.

I’d do an intro section that was focused on something current I wanted to promote or talk about, but in each email, I’d include a "5 things" section: a list of 5 recommendations or links or things I was reading or interested in that I thought my audience would appreciate, too.

The second format of emails that is super popular with artists & makers as well as many ecommerce businesses is product-focused, image heavy emails.

If you don’t consider yourself a writer, are more a visual person, or just want to keep the focus on your products themselves, you can totally lean into using images with maybe a little bit of descriptive text.

You can basically treat your emails like mini ecommerce sites!

My friend Kelsey, founder of Fringe & Company does this. Her background is photography, so rather than writing text-heavy emails, she really leans into her strengths and sends out emails that are photography focused.

The third format that works for certain types of creatives is emails that resemble long-form letters, as if written to a friend.

If the written word is where your creative strength lies, this one could be for you!

A few years back on the Badass Creatives podcast, I interviewed a few of my favorite folks who use this format for their email marketing: Alexandra Franzen and Monique Malcolm.

Alexandra Franzen is a best-selling author, award-winning editor, and entrepreneur. She's co-founder of a company called Get It Done. I took their program, The Tiny Book Course, a few years ago which helped me write and self-publish my second book, We Are the Weird Ones: Embrace Your Weird for a Kinder, More Inclusive World.

Monique Malcolm is a productivity coach, host of the Take Tiny Action podcast, and author of the book Don't Let Fear Have All The Fun. I love her newsletter, Take Tiny Action Weekly. It's full of inspiration and practical tips to help you make progress in small but meaningful ways, every single week.

Both Alexandra and Monique are writers, so this long form written format lends itself naturally to what they do.

I’ve found that this format works really well for creatives who also focus on providing services rather than selling physical products.

HOWEVER you can mix and match!

My friend Emily of Sweet Olive Soap Works is a cold-process soap maker with a love of New Orleans history, so she combines writing with images of her products.

Jill Bliss is another artist whose emails I love. The way she combines storytelling with images of her artwork and products is delightful.

What should you include in an email newsletter?

One of the best ways to get inspiration for what to include in your emails is to sign up to receive emails from artists or brands that you respect and admire.

Don’t copy directly, but see how what they do can potentially inspire you. Take notes, adapt and make it your own!

You'll also want to think about:

• What is the most important information you need to communicate to your audience?

• What information is most helpful and valuable to your audience?

If most of the people on your email list met you at a craft show, you might want to include a list of your upcoming craft shows as a regular section of your email newsletter.

You might also want to promote new products, or products that are being discontinued. "Get 'em while they last!"

You could include joyful things that inspire you, like some of the creatives mentioned above.

It all depends on YOUR brand and YOUR audience.

If you want even more ideas for what to include in your emails, download my FREE guide, 100 Marketing Content Ideas for Artists, Makers & Handmade Businesses.

It’s full of ideas to inspire your email campaigns, blog posts and social media marketing efforts.

Shopify SEO for Artists and Creatives: 5 Quick Wins for Beginners

Just getting started with Shopify SEO as an artist, maker or handmade business?

In this video, I chatted with my friend and Shopify expert Holly Marsh about some beginner Shopify SEO tips and quick wins that you can use to improve your search engine optimization on Shopify.

Holly Marsh is the founder of Ecommerce Arcade, where you can level up your ecommerce game with strategy, design, and heart. She specializes in the Shopify ecommerce platform, as well as Klaviyo for ecommerce email marketing.

Holly is an illustrator and branding designer, and has a decade of experience selling products online and in-person. She springboarded into services after spending 10 years at the helm of her handmade business named Marshmueller, a line of accessories for babies and kids using colorful and quirky fabrics.

How can you get started with SEO on Shopify?

A lot of folks getting started with Shopify (and honestly even people who have been on Shopify for years) feel that SEO is this scary, complicated, very technical and complex thing.

And it can definitely seem that way!

But there are some simple things that pretty much anyone can learn and do to improve the search visibility of their Shopify website.

Also, it’s important to note that Shopify online stores have many built-in SEO features, and some aspects of SEO are taken care of automatically for you by Shopify.

Here are the 5 quick wins for Shopify SEO for beginners that Holly and I discussed:

1. Use descriptive words throughout your website.

The first thing is to remember that words are king when it comes to SEO!

While it can be fun to create all sorts of really cool graphics in Canva, put the text on the image, save it as a JPEG, and just upload it to your site...

Don't do that!

UNLESS you also include descriptive alt text to clearly and accurately explain what is "seen" in the graphic or image.

Google and other search engines can't "read" those images unless you include descriptive words as alt text for your images.

Shopify makes it really easy to go into each image on a product page and add alt text for each of your product photos.

Alt text is one of those things where it has a couple of different purposes:

First, it's actually geared toward accessibility. So folks who are needing assistive devices like a screen reader can actually kind of "see" what is happening in that image.

A good rule of thumb when it comes to what to write in your alt text is to pretend you're on the phone with someone who can't see what you're looking at. (We're talking about an old-fashioned phone call!)

Just talk about what you see in that image. Write your alt text as if you were describing the photo or image to someone who can't see what you're looking at right now.

Adding descriptive alt text also helps with SEO because Google likes words.

By using words to describe what is on that page, whether it's using descriptive words and keyword phrases to describe your products or by including descriptive alt text for images, you're helping the search engines understand the information on your website.

2. Be strategic about website navigation.

When you're just getting started with Shopify, you should also be thinking strategically about your website navigation.

The menus people use to navigate your online shop are really important, because if you aren't very specific or if you use cutesy names or jargon to describe your categories, people aren't going to understand it.

User experience aka UX is really important to SEO, and your website's navigation is a big part of this.

Think about how people will be using your website.

Where will they be coming from? (A search engine? A social media platform?)

Which pages are they landing on first? (It's not always your homepage!)

Holly also suggests breaking out your navigation, using some of your most important categories as the primary links in your navigation, instead of having a navigation that only says "Shop" with a drop-down that people have to dig through.

The main navigation on your website, at the top, should stay fairly simple and streamlined. Focus on the most important parts of your website that you want people to get to.

Adding too many options in your Shopify website’s main navigation area can create confusion.

Holly also recommends having navigation in your footer where you can repeat some of those most important shopping links.

She said that, "Homepages are really long nowadays, and we can thank social media for that because we're really accustomed to scrolling. People get down to the bottom of the page, and then if you give them some shopping links as part of the links available in your footer, it helps them get back to what they were looking for."

You can also create special landing pages for products that you've featured on social media.

For instance, if you frequently post your products on TikTok or Instagram, you might want to create a special collection page of products "Featured on TikTok" and link directly to that page from your TikTok profile.

3. Improve your SEO with blog content.

Speaking of social media, we discussed how many artists and makers spend a lot of time creating content for social media, but sometimes we forget to repurpose that content for our blogs.

Holly says, "When it comes to social media. I know it's really easy for all of us to post a video or a picture, and just write a caption (and sometimes it's a novel!), and then just move on after you've posted it. But sometimes you can actually take some of those social media posts and put them in as a blog post on your website. I always harp on clients to please, please, please do a blog! Blogging can add more flavor to a topic. Blog posts can also establish you as a subject matter expert."

Holly shared how she has a client who sells dahlia flower bulbs, whose blog is full of great tips for gardening. She uses bits of those blog posts to repurpose and post on social media. It's a win-win for Holly's client. She gets content for social media, but she also makes all of the search engines happy by having lots of blog content.

Holly and I both recommend focusing on "evergreen" blog content.

Think about topics related to what you make or sell that people frequently search for or ask you questions about.

What are the topics related to your business that are always in season, always useful?

Those are great topics for your blog!

Gift guides are an example of a blog post topic that I often recommend for ecommerce brands.

If you can create gift guides that are relevant to your products and your particular audience, that can be a great way for people to find your products.

You can even collaborate with other business friends and share the backlink love to help strengthen your standing in the search engine rankings.

How might you collaborate with other creative small business owners who aren't necessarily competitors, but they're your community?

Are there other artists or makers who have similar audiences, but make a different type of product or have a different style from yours?

4. Use descriptive headings to break up text.

As you're creating that helpful, evergreen blog post content, you'll want to use headings to break up text and add information.

Shopify has a "What you see is what you get" aka WYSIWYG editor. They also refer to it as a rich text editor.

You'll find text formatting options similar to if you were using a Word document or Google Docs. This includes options for formatting headings.

Whether you're writing a blog or just using the editor for product pages, it's a really good idea to use headings to help you organize and structure the content on the page.

There are six heading levels: Headings 1-6.

Heading 1 is the most important and should only be used once per page. (Use it for the main title that someone sees on the page.)

Heading 6 is least important.

For most websites, you really just need to pay attention to Headings 1-3.

Headings tell the search engines that what's inside the headings are things to pay attention to.

You can break up posts using images and headings. It's always a good idea to break up a lot of text, so that the information on your site is easy to read.

5. Optimize & resize images before uploading.

Speaking of making things easy, we also want to make our Shopify websites easy & quick to load.

Make sure to resize and optimize your images before you upload them to your website.

You don't want images to be loading really slowly.

That's a bad experience for your customers, and it's another thing that can really affect your SEO ranking.

If your images are humongous and they're taking a really long time to load, your potential customers won't stick around.

Holly says, "Shopify does do a little bit of compression, but not a ton. They do have recommendations for the minimum size that images should be. I know it's a delicate balance between needing larger images because of retina devices so that they look nice and crisp, but also having an image that loads really quick. There's a few image compression tools out there that can optimize your images and strip all of the unnecessary metadata."

Check out this blog post by Shopify for more info: 10 Image Optimization Tips for Your Website

Ready to level up your Shopify website?

If you need help setting up your new Shopify website or improving your existing online shop, Holly can help!

Holly offers custom website projects that are tailored just for you and your business. She can even help you get everything moved over to Shopify from other platforms like Squarespace, WordPress, or even Etsy.

Learn more and check out her portfolio at Ecommerce Arcade.

Need more help with your Shopify SEO strategy? Check out this video:

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Boost Your Holiday Sales: 5 Marketing Tips for Artists & Makers To Increase Your Sales This Holiday Season

The holiday shopping season is right around the corner, which means if you haven’t already started preparing your online shop for holiday sales, you’ve still got time – but the clock is ticking!

Here I'll share 5 tips that artists and makers can use to get your creative small business ready for a successful holiday selling season.

Whether you've got an Etsy shop or sell on Shopify, these handmade business marketing tips will also help you sell more products all year round!

1. Create at least one gift guide.

Whether you're a blogger or an online shop owner, gift guides can play a key role in growing your income during the holiday season.

Curating gift guides for specific niches and target audiences was a huge part of how I grew affiliate income via blogging. (Check out this post on what I call The Content Upcycle Method for the full scoop.)

I wish I'd realized the power of carefully curated gift guides back when I ran my own e-commerce shop!

If I could go back in time, I would tell my past online shop owner self to write a few in-depth gift guides to boost my SEO, focusing on specific types of gifts or gift recipients, like “fun gifts for co-workers,” “educational gifts for 8 year olds” or “gift for nerdy husband.”

These gift guides wouldn't just feature a few pictures and a link or two.

I would take the time to write detailed explanations about why each product would make a great gift idea for that specific type of person, so that there would be plenty of on-page descriptive content for Google to analyze.

2. Update your product pages for SEO.

Speaking of Google analyzing your on-page content... I would definitely take some time to update my product pages and add more specific and relevant keyword phrases.

Want to help Google understand more about your products?

You've got to be descriptive and write detailed product listings that talk about your products in all the different ways that your potential customers might naturally search for them.

You'll want to use variations of keyword phrases - you don't want to just repeat the same thing over and over again. That's called "keyword stuffing" and it can actually HURT your SEO.

Think of all the different synonyms and ways that your ideal customer might describe your products when they're searching for them online.

Need help thinking of ideas for what to include?

Turn to Google and use their autocomplete and "Searches Related To" or "More to ask" features to get inspired:

Most SEO efforts can take up to 3-6 months or longer to have a big impact on your search engine rankings. That’s because Google’s bots need time to “crawl” and find the updates on your website.

So you'll want to start adding these keyword phrases as early as possible to help boost your revenue this holiday season.

3. Reach out to local media for gift guide features.

It may already be too late to get featured in the holiday issues of most national print magazines, as many of these publications are finalizing their holiday gift guides by late summer.

But if you act quickly, you might still have a chance at a mention in a local newspaper or other local press!

I've had a lot of success over the years by developing relationships with local journalists and reaching out with press releases as well as personalized emails whenever I was involved in a local event or had something newsworthy going on.

I shared holiday gift ideas with host Sheba Turk on The 504 TV Show in November 2015.

Journalists are always working on tight deadlines and need help finding great stories and content.

Be helpful, be interesting, and put yourself out there this holiday season.

Check out episode 3 from the Badass Creatives podcast archives to get more tips on PR and getting publicity for your creative projects.

4. Don't forget about the power of Pinterest!

Pinterest is often a misunderstood and forgotten tool when it comes to marketing products online.

Many people think of Pinterest as a social media platform, but it helps to think of this powerful tool as what it really is -- a search engine!

(And it's a shoppable search engine at that!)

If you make one of those gift guides that I mentioned earlier, I HIGHLY recommend creating a Pinterest-friendly VERTICAL image to accompany that gift guide or blog post. Be sure to pin it to Pinterest!

You should also take advantage of shoppable pins for your products and even consider advertising on Pinterest.

There are a few different advertising options that Pinterest offers if you want to try this. You could run ads for your shoppable pins or run ads that are "conversion" focused which means the goal of the ad is to get people to buy something from you directly.

But what I'd recommend if you're first starting out with advertising is to do a Brand awareness or Consideration ad for one of those gift guide images I mentioned.

If you publish a gift guide on your blog, you could promote the pinnable image for your gift guide to boost your engagement with the image on Pinterest:

I used to create a LOT of gift guides like this, and by paying to boost the engagement for the pin when the gift guide was brand new, it helped contribute to the long-term growth and success of that pin and that blog post.

Basically by paying a little bit for ads at the beginning, I was helping to ignite the fire that would turn into this burning flame on Pinterest that would then send traffic back to my website for a lonnnngg time.

If you want to learn more about Pinterest, check out my Skillshare class, The Power of Pinterest.

5. Create an email campaign designed to drive sales.

In an age where every small biz owner seems obsessed with social media, I see far too many small businesses neglecting the power of email marketing.

Social media channels may come and go, and the algorithms are constantly changing, but your email list is worth its weight in gold.

Back when I was working at a marketing agency here in New Orleans, a local t-shirt company came to us for help with their online marketing.

One of the big things they were focused on was social media. And they had very popular social media accounts!

BUT, after analyzing their efforts, I immediately noticed that they were neglecting their email list.

I knew it was a missed opportunity that also needed to be a part of their plan.

They hadn't sent any emails to their list for more than 6 months, but we created some new e-mail campaigns and email automations, and we began to nurture their list.

We even helped them generate more than $12,000 in revenue during one weekend flash sale alone!

I've got a series of videos on YouTube dedicated to this topic: Email Marketing for Beginners: Artists, Makers & Handmade Business Owners.

What will you do to increase your holiday sales this year?

Plenty of small, positive changes really do add up over the long-term.

I hope you found these tips helpful!

I’d love to – what are YOU doing to get your online shop ready for this holiday season?

Head over to YouTube to leave a comment and let me know your plans to boost your holiday sales!

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