Welcome, guys, announcements, we're gonna talk about the Art Marketing Calendar and the fact that we've rebooted it.

We're gonna talk about how to generate Instagram and by extension Facebook post ideas, and then we're gonna get into some additional Instagram tips and hacks, and then we'll have a Q and A at the end. And as is always the case with these webinars they're for you, we want to answer your questions, so at any point in time throughout the course of the webinar feel free to use the question box, throw one in, there's a couple of us that are always on these webinars so your question might get answered right away, or I will deal with it during the course of the presentation.

So, again, many first timers, I know. For those that have been on this you guys know what the Office Hours webinars are, but live webinars and they're just for customers. They're bi-weekly throughout the year. Updates on the software. Marketing insights, strategy, and tactics. We blog and we podcast, we do, but we share the best of the best in here, and share some stuff that we just don't share anywhere else on these webinars. So definitely encourage you guys to attend. They wanted me to make a note about paid services, I don't know if you guys know that we even offer this, but, and we'll put this in an email to you guys after the fact, but they're shop.artstorefronts.com. If you're just struggling with your SEO and you just want someone to help you out, and advise you, and pay you to do it, we've been offering this service kind of quietly for some folks, and apparently there's been tremendous demand for it. So you guys can find out more about that by checking out shop.artstorefronts.com.

We'll put an email in this thing after the fact if you want to see it. Webinar replays, I've mentioned that we were eventually gonna get this in your dashboard, but there it's in there now, education coaching office hours. So you don't have to remember any links or where to go, you can just go there at any point in time. And a quick note, we've locked down the Office Hours website so if you try to go to it and you're not logged in to you art storefront account, you're not gonna be able to view this. These webinars are really just for customers, so we didn't want the general public being able to see 'em.

So in order to get it, the best way to do it, is rather than go to the site itself is come here, log in, and then just, boom, go there and hit it, and you're in. So, quick update on that. Questions as always we want 'em, if you've got 'em, go ahead and hit us with them. So, let's get right into it, the Art Marketing Calendar, AMC, we're kind of a abbreviating it, it's just a mouthful otherwise. So first, before I talk about the Art Marketing Calendar I want to talk about the big picture, the 30,000 foot view, the philosophy, the plan, the small things, the big rocks, the one thing, whatever buzzword you wanna give it. It's actually two things let me hit you with the quote, and I love this quote.

"If you do the little jobs well, "the big ones tend to take care of themselves." Dale Carnegie said it, it's a version of I think an Emily Dickinson quotes. But I really believe in this, so in this case the little jobs, like in my heart of hearts what will be a win for us is if every Art Storefronts customer is romance marketing throughout the year, and is offering sales, discounts, and offers when it's time. You do that, you focus on those two little jobs, which are admittedly not tiny jobs, but romance market throughout the year, hit the sales, the discounts, the offers, whatever your version of that works out to be, when it's time that's the goal. If you guys do that, I'm telling you, the big things are just gonna take care of themselves. Obviously we're gonna give you all the tactics and tips and ways to do that along the way, but you do those two things and you spread it out, it's just pressure over time at that point. Year after year they get bigger and better, your lists will get bigger, it's the small things that you take care of.

So, what do I mean? Yeah, look at this email. It's working for my buddy Randy. Hi Garret and Patrick, my biggest online sale to date, thank you. It all came from one of Patrick's suggestions, our email and Facebook, boom, love that. But look at that, $742 order. Biggest order Randy's ever gotten, why? Because he's focusing on the small things, which is just romance marketing, and discounting, and having sales when it's appropriate. And the big things they take care of themselves. The sales will come if you focus on this and do this. So let's get back to the main question, right, we're talking about the Art Marketing Calendar rebooting this thing. How is it gonna help you with the little jobs? And this is our opinion on this, it's by keeping you focused on what you should be doing and when, and by keeping you ahead of the game, and organized. So let's take a look at where we have this thing now, and then I really, really want and need your feedback on this. We're really curious to see what you might think of it.

So this is the piece of software that we found that best does this, and there wasn't any it's kind of a weird thing that we've created with this calendar. And I think some of you guys might have seen the previous version and in some it might be completely new to you. But at a quick glance it is a calendar, in which we want to lay out all of the holidays throughout the entire year. And when you should be emailing your discounts, when you should be having your sales, when you should be having your promotions. You can see the next one's around Father's Day. And so we want to get all of these holidays on a calendar. We want to link 'em up to all of the content that we've created to help you do this. You know, the blog posts for Mother's Day, subject lines for Father's Day coming up, or what to do for Thanksgiving, and Black Friday, and Cyber Monday and all the various other ones. So we want to get a 100% of these items on the calendar in a visual format that you guys can see and act on.

And so, we've got the, we're in May right now, so there's the May view. This is as much as we've populated so far, because we want to get your feedback. But how it would work, and let's just say here we are, here's the month, you could log in, and at any point in time get a view on here, and we'll tell you exactly when we think you should send, what Father's Day email, what it should look like. We would link directly to the content that goes over the technique or the tactic, you know, male chimp in that case. And we would just give you a view, month, after month, after month, of what you could do, when you should be doing it, like the rest of the time we just have on here publish romance content. And if you expand the record we've got various different posts that can explain to you how to do that, and how to go about that. But it would give you this system where you can log in, you can look at this monthly calendar, and really answer the question like what should I be doing this month, when should I be doing it? And in addition to that, it's got some different views that you can use. So it's got a calendar view. It's got an image grid view, so we could talk about all these various different things that we recommend that you be doing. It also automatically pulls in the Art Storefronts' content that we publish, and so you could say, oh I was at the webinar two weeks ago, what was the stuff that they covered? Let me go back and take a look at that is it here, is it there, what is it? So that's there too, and again, it does this grid view which I like 'cause I'm personally visual. So this is everything we have populated on, so far. But you can just go back and say when was that blog post, or when was that podcast? And you can see all of it in here. In addition it's got a pretty accurate search engine, so you can search there, as well. So that's what we've got, that's where we're at with it so far. And a few points why we wanted to do this. It's really visual. It's a compelling search engine. In addition to the calendar itself and being there, it would also come with a monthly email and so like, hey here's what's coming out this month. There's a holiday, we think you should be getting ready for it immediately, if you want a discount for it, if you don't, understandably here's some romance marketing and you know just have some recommendations for what you guys should be focusing on.

What we advocate you should be focusing on. And you know it would just give you the entire year at a glance to understand and to get ready for things. All of you are artists and producers for the most parts, but you haven't really gotten heavily, most of you, into content marketing. And coming from someone that is heavily in content marketing, having a schedule, and being poked and prodded when deadlines are coming up, is so essential otherwise you just, you procrastinate, life gets busy, you're dealing with your business, your in your studio, you're doing whatever you're doing, and then the next thing you know you're supposed to have your content ready to go for this email or that email and you just don't. So this is the huge idea that we've got for this. You know really handy for reference. Also you can subscribe to the calendar and bring it in as a layer, whether you're using Google Calendar or Mac Calendar, it would come in as a layer like that as well. So the point I want to stress about this though is that we think it's a good idea but we haven't gotten a tremendous amount of feedback from you guys. So the question is, if we build something like this would you guys, we sort of already built it, so if we really started pouring into it would you use it, would you be fired up to use it? And then we would really build into it and iterate and expand on it. We've got a poll I want to ask you guys via a quick poll. Taylor, will you draw up the poll, of if we're on the right track or something like that, and if it really would be valuable, valuable to you guys? Is is this something that you would use that you would like to see? Where you get a monthly email, we tell you about what you should be doing, we're linking to all the blog posts, and then just give you another a search engine type of a thing? And Randy, I see your question, and thank you for that too, Sarah. And yeah, we're gonna just embed the thing in the dashboard somewhere. We'll figure out a way to do it, but that's what it would be.

And it sounds like you guys are on board or I'm seeing from some of the questions, I'm not seeing from the poll. But we just think, like it's so hard to stay organized, that especially like I realize you know let me just toot my horn without tooting my horn, while I toot my horn, we're very good at marketing, and we're very advanced at marketing what we do at Art Storefronts. And I realize that I love it so much that I just expect you guys to understand it and do this, many of you are new to sending one email, and now I'm asking you to send five emails with discounts, and expirations, and everything else. So I just feel like having it all in a calendar and poking, and prodding you, and getting you ready and giving you reminders it's just gonna be mega valuable and I really do believe it's like a great way to just get you guys doing it. So that's the poll. Taylor, you can close out the poll, let's keep rolling, because I really want to get in to this Instagram stuff. So what we'll do guys on the Art Marketing Calendar, by the way it's pretty much ready to go, we just gotta, we just have to put in a few more things on it. For you guys on the webinar if you voted, fantastic. I want to take a look at that feedback.

I will send the replay to everybody on Tuesday of next week, hopefully after they come back from their holidays. And get the rest of the customer's feedback that aren't on this webinar and see what they think and then presuming it's a go, we'll hammer it and we'll really get into it and then you guys will get emails about it. So, thank you for all of that. So let's get into how to generate Instagram and Facebook post ideas. Man, I can't wait for this. Now, quickly, did you know Instagram is one of the most amazing search engines in the history of mankind? I don't say that lightly.

I did drop a podcast on this technique earlier in the week, and I did want to follow up on it. Now, I still want all of you guys to listen to that podcast and it's right here, it's this one, to give it to you from another angle and hit it. I wanted to follow up further on that podcast and give you a few of the tips, and tricks, and hacks, that I love and I'm not gonna put on podcast because it's for customers only. So, do listen to that podcast, but man this thing is just incredible. And the why behind this is I get all of your feedback. I know you guys are like I don't know what to post on social media, or email, or on Facebook, so this is an attempt to answer that question. That's where we're going with it. Now, what about Facebook? We're talking about Instagram. Yes, we still love Facebook. No, we're not forgetting Facebook. Instagram is the darling right now, but Facebook is also insanely important, so just know it's for both. Okay, so why Instagram? It is a creativity fire hose. And it's got social proof built in to boot. And there is no better hack out there that I am aware of, right now, to fuel your creativity. To give you the kind of ideas of things that you should be posting, that you can be posting on your social accounts, and by extension including in your emails and just your content marketing in general. So I want to show you this first technique, and instead of just talk about it like I did in the podcast, I get to nerd out and show you which just makes me so happy. Here I am, I'm in Instagram, I'm gonna use the search engine, and I'm gonna type landscape, I can spell, landscape photography, let's just see it filter.

And instantaneously you can see that there's Top, People, Tags. I usually go to Tags because I want to see the tags. And when I'm in here in Tags, I'm looking for what has the highest post count, because then I know it's hot. And actually now when I go back, I see this one, is the hottest one. So what you do is you figure out what your niche is, and again, let's just say I'm a landscape photographer. I'm gonna do an example for a painter and one other offbeat one. So just roll with me on this one. Instantaneously, you'll notice that it gives me related hashtags. And I love these hashtags, too. This is something that you can just absolutely go down the rabbit hole on. But what you see up here is you've got Top Posts, and let's see, let's scroll, and then you've got Most Recent, right? So the Top Posts is where I like to focus when I'm doing this, and I'll just instantaneously come up here, I'll click on an image, and I'll see what I find. Now, immediately I'm drawn to this image, this is pretty amazing. Wow, 3,000 likes, obviously this is a big deal. So I'm gonna go ahead and click on this account. This guy's got 107,000 followers.

Obviously this is a big deal. So I would probably say, wow, this account is impressive, it's gonna keep me inspired. If they're doing things this well, obviously this is somebody I wanna follow. So, boom, I follow him. I also can look at his individual images and say if they have a follower count like this they know what they're doing, 107,000 followers is a lot. Some of things that people need to learn about Instagram is that it's a primarily hashtag driven platform. So you see this bank of hashtags down here. So what I get to see when I see somebody like this that's kicking butt, I get to see all these various different hashtags that people are using, and these can be thought of as channels. Just like let's say you're on your DirecTV and you're going through your guide. These are all different channels, these hashtags, that's how I like to think about it. So this gives me ideas about things that I can click through and go on. And really what you just do is you start going down the rabbit hole. I'm gonna go back to the hashtag and say, is there another landscape photo that I really like? That looks awesome, travelers, let's just see what this is, a magazine or something. Yeah, so maybe I'd follow this one, maybe I wouldn't. But you see right away that like, when you're coming in here and you're doing this and you're just exploring, you get to see who's killing it and who's not. And you just start following the ones that are killing it. Like this one's doing really, really well, Santiago, Chile, 18,000 likes. Let's see if there's another image in here I really like. That one's beautiful, I like that one. See what kind of hashtags they're using. On this one doesn't look like they are using a lot of hashtags. Oh yeah, they're there. So there's some other ideas. Okay, travel blog, maybe I want to go down to travel blog and this is like literally the rabbit hole that you go down. And you just start finding more, and more, people that are really, really good at what they do on Instagram. And these are the types of people that you want to follow. You start following a group of these folks and the next thing you know that every time you come in your Instagram feed, you're seeing how great people are storytelling on this platform. And I'm telling you the ideas that you get will just be absolutely amazing. It will be ridiculous. So let's see, what was my next example? Okay, yeah, painter. All right, good, so painter, let's just go down and painter is really generic, I know, but I'm just gonna stick with it anyway. So let me just do this. So I'd go painter, and I want to do tags, painters, painters life, painterly, painters nation, 41,000, and let's just see this might even give me house painters, so I've gotta be careful. Oil painting, so let's just say I wanna do oil painting. All right, great, so there I am oil painting. You can see I'm on some of the other ones too, depending on what your art is and instantaneously I'm gonna click in and I'm gonna start finding out some stuff that looks awesome. And let me tell you, that looks awesome. So I'm gonna click in 1.2 million followers. This might be an interesting one. And this is, we're gonna talk about this is a hack a little bit later on, but you find some people that are awesome, and again, you start following them. And again, you ride the hashtags and you just go down the rabbit hole. Find some stuff that looks really, really interesting, click on it, that looks really interesting let's say, and gee, let's just see what hashtags they used, art select, art, egg, miniature, miniature art.

Now I'm in miniature art. Now I'm in tiny art. Now I'm in watercolor paper. So it'll really just give you, you can just get lost in here and it's amazing. And what's great, when I said it's the greatest search engine of all time I'm gonna expand on that. But it's not just like the greatest search engine, it's got social proof built in. These top posts are all things that have gotten usually a ton of likes, a ton of admiration, and so you're instantly seeing the best of the best, the cream just kinda rises to the top. So, that would be doing it if I was a landscape photographer, that would be a painter, and this is gonna be unrelated and I just wanna show you this also, because I think it's important. And before I go into this unrelated one, what I would say is you spend some time doing this for one, for your niche, yeah you've got to know about your niche whatever your niche is, whether you're a landscape photographer, or an underwater photographer, a drone photographer, or you're a mixed media artist, or you're an oil painter. Whatever the case may be you definitely want to understand your own niche, and your own hashtags, and roll around in there, right? But, but, but, but, you also want to go a little bit out of your comfort zone and something that you don't do. And I give this as an example because it just shows the power in Instagram as a search engine. And my wife wanted a dog. She set her mind on this sheepadoodle thing, and I was like, what am I getting into? I said yes, I said she could get it, so here it is, I've got a hashtag about sheepadoodles. And there's just nothing but sheepadoodles, so now I get to see what I'm getting into, what is the size of this dog potentially gonna be, and what do they look like, what are the really cute ones? Everybody's trend in today's day in age is to have a glamor pet that you put on Instagram that has its own Instagram account. Which is equal parts awesome, equal parts ridiculous if you ask me. But you end up finding the really popular pets. Okay, 18,000 followers, so now I'm gonna get to see what size my sheepadoodle, oh my gosh, did I get a dog that's that big? I'm in trouble.

So anyway, it shows the power of how you can search anything that you're interested in and I highly recommend you do search some things that you're interested in, in addition to doing your homework in your own niche. And if you do that, and you invest time daily in doing this, you're gonna learn, you're gonna get inspired, you're gonna be able to see what people are doing, and you're gonna be able to copy it. I mean it is just a creativity fire hose that you can drink from, and you just dip into your phone, spend a few minutes, get inspired, get your inspiration, and go create some stuff. You guys are naturally creative to begin with, you're artists, so it's gonna come very easy for you to do this. Here's where I want to get into some additional Facebook and Instagram hacks. Okay, so hack number one. I recommend that you run the emulator hack. What does that mean? Do you see this little box that's running that I'm doing all of this on? Essentially what this is is a piece of software that allows you to run an Android phone on your computer, and this becomes incredibly handy.

Now, one thing I'll say already, is in the handouts section, this is the first time we've done a handout and I don't really know how these things work but we're giving it a shot. But in this handout section which should be in your little Go to Webinar bar thing, we actually have a video of how to install this thing. I highly recommend that you guys do this, because you can't do all of this on your phone, all of the time, so this emulator essentially gives you a phone. I mean this is just a phone, that's what this thing is. Because at the end of the day you're not gonna want to screw things up. But look, it just gives you a phone on your screen. And you can run it just like a phone. It's Android, it's not gonna be an iOS, I know most of you guys are iOS. But you click, you run apps, and you can run Instagram in here. And so, we don't use it for everything, I do like being on the mobile, but this is a really, really handy hack. Because you can do a number of different things on here, and it just works, it works awesome. So hack number one, if you guys are interested in doing that, do it. One disclaimer, Instagram doesn't like these things. They want the experience to be mobile, and they want to maintain it.

So while technically you can post, you can absolutely post with this thing, we're not recommending it yet, we're still testing whether or not your posts will get throttled. But for your homework, for research, for being on here, for responding to comments, oh it's a joy, it's a joy. Especially when you start getting a bunch of comments. So that's a hack if you guys want to use it, you can do it, we've got the video in the handouts. Watch it later, it will walk you through the whole entire process. Hack number two, Patrick, I realize I have to do all of this research, but I like Instagram, I've spent a lot of time on Instagram. I like seeing my family and my friends. I don't want to muck up my feed with all of this other stuff, right? Either do I, either do I, I like my Instagram too. And so, start a dummy account, very easy to do, takes two seconds, once you have one, look at this. I click this button and I hold, that's how easy it is to switch between accounts. So now I'm on the Art Storefronts' account. Click this button and hold, so, I'm clicking with the mouse for you it'd be a thumb, ah, Joeartprints, I wonder who that is? That's Joseph in our office that started it. It's a complete dummy account. We use it just for research purposes.

So don't feel like you have to do all of this on your personal Instagram account if you don't want to mess up your own feed. Get a dummy account, takes two seconds to switch between the two of 'em, and then you can do your research and you can do your homework in that fashion. And that's a great way to approach it and do it. All right, hack number three, I like to call this one the hire a private eye hack. And I know what you're saying, you're like, Patrick who has the time to do all of this searching on Instagram, not me certainly? Okay, fine, let somebody else do it for you, let a PI do it for you. So what do I mean when I say this? I love this hack, too, it's just genius. It's genius if I don't say so myself. So, out there, and let me see there's gotta be one in the feed, I followed one. Out there you'll find operations like this one, and this one I just found in two seconds. And this one's called Picame. It's some guy from somewhere in Italy, whatever. And they're just content curators, that's it. These guys are just searching Instagram all the time, and you'll find these on a regular basis as you're doing your exploration. And they're great to follow. They'll always have tremendously high follower accounts, and what they're doing is they're not sharing art they themselves have created. They're going out and finding the best, coolest, most unique, most interesting stuff out there, and they're curating it for you. So what's great about these guys is you follow them, one, they're totally gonna blow your mind creatively. Because you're just gonna see a bunch of different looks. I mean look at how cool that looks. I mean there are some really cool wacky stuff in here.

And there's somebody doing this for every niche imaginable. Every niche imaginable there are these curators. And so, you'll find them, as you're rolling through and finding them all you've gotta do is follow a couple of these people, and then they'll find them for you. So like in each case every time they do a post, look, there it is, so this is the person that actually created it. So now I can go and find this person, and instead of me having to search and find this person, Portuguese in Antwerp, you can have them find them for you. So it's like having a private eye in the case for you. So you can find like six or seven of these things that are in your niche, you're gonna be covered. They're gonna just constantly be throwing the best stuff at you, hashtags, all of it, full party. So that's it, that's just a great hack. Great way to find who are the best storytellers on the platform. All right, hack number four, what about Facebook? It's all about storytelling. It's all about storytelling. Yes, I realize that all of these techniques are on Instagram, but that's okay. The people that are really, really good at telling stories on Instagram and have tremendous follower accounts, eight times out of 10 they're just as good at what they do on Facebook. They're just, they understand how to storytell in this modern, digital world of social media. And so, once you find the ones that you really like, that really inspire you, you go and you search. You find these people on Facebook and you also follow them on Facebook. And the combination between the two, you'll know exactly what you do. You get three, or four, or five, or six, or 10, or 15, 20, as many as it takes, and through looking at those things, I'm telling you, just through osmosis your mind will explode with ideas that you can use to, yes, storytell on Facebook, and, yes, storytell on Instagram. At the end of the day it's not about Instagram or Facebook it really is just about storytelling. That's what marketing, good, effective marketing is. So that's a great hack. Number five, if you're playing chess you need to understand what the pieces do and why they're important, so understand the pieces. And first I want to give you a quick history lesson for those that are new to Instagram. So, this is, and I've got to switch to the Art Storefronts' account. Oh, oh man, this is so difficult to switch accounts. God it's going to take so long. Yeah, not, two seconds. So what we have here with the big images is what is considered your feed. What is new, brand new, to Instagram that they didn't have until just a while ago are what are called Instagram Stories.

Which is just this little bar up here. Now, what happens is these are ways that you can put together little slideshows of images, slash videos, and they run for a certain period of time, and you're able to create these, and then after 24 hours they delete. Now, this was a concept that Snapchat created. Let me get through this one because it's annoying me. And it's playing audio, so this was a concept that Snapchat created, and Facebook and Instagram, Zuckerberg being as smart as he is they stole it from Snapchat verbatim. I mean, verbatim, they just absolutely stole it. And it's fantastic, it's an incredible thing, and we're gonna get more into it in a second. But when I say understand the pieces, this is brand new, and it just shows the Wild Wild West nature of Instagram. Very few people, A are even doing this, right out of the gates, unless you're very young Millennial in which case there's lots of them doing it. But there's very few people that are doing it and extremely even fewer people that are doing it really effectively. So once you understand that this is this, and this is this, you're off to a great start.

Because if you know how to use the two of them, man, it's amazing, you can think of this bottom part as a more busy type of a section, where not all of your images are always going to be shown because it's not like you subscribe you get to see every single solitary update, they throttle you a little bit. So, understanding the two pieces and how they work is critical. And I want to say that, just to say that, we're gonna come with some more content, but in addition to what we're covering today you have to understand that you can advertise in both of these places. So you can advertise a story like this one, this one is actually an advertisement. So you can advertise a story, or, or, you can advertise down here. And so both of these are just incredible opportunities, and I'm telling you, despite the fact that Instagram has been around for a while, and it's been huge, the advertising in both down low and up top is still the Wild Wild West. There are so many people scrambling to try and figure it out, and so we're working really hard on trying to figure it out for you right now. And let me tell you a story to highlight that. So quick intermission in which I'm gonna go on my country club rant. And I love giving this rant to you guys, because you're already customers, we already have your money, not trying to sell you anything. But you invested heavily in Art Storefronts, and for that investment you get way more than software, and that's what I love. And I think, to me, the best analogy is a country club, how I like to think about it anyway, right? Boil out the baggage, and the pretentiousness, and the white upper crust male with a sweater, country club part of it.

Let's get down to the brass tacks, you join a country club because of the amenities, right? So let's just say the software in this case is the beautiful golf course, and you get that because you joined ASF absolutely. But in addition to that, you get the amenities. Which in this case let's just talk about the pool, the banquet hall for parties, for rooms for meetings, everything else. And so in that case I love to explain to you guys, how we're doing it. This webinar, this webinar, is part of it, right? But let's go behind the curtain. So this is the graph of podcast downloads, this just kind of puts into context where Instagram is right now in terms of popularity. We published that Instagram podcast, whenever it was this week, and look at the spike. How popular do you think Instagram is right now as a topic when the episode got that, and that was the next closest one, right? Like it's just night and day, it's just hugely there. So, Instagram is rolling massively. It's our job at Art Storefronts to figure out how you guys can best take advantage of it for marketing purposes. And that's what you invested in this platform for. And yes, I know it's been huge for a while now, but it's just getting bigger, and bigger, and bigger, and bigger, and better. It's coming with these new features, and as a result there is an arbitrage opportunity. It's where the attention is and a lot of people are not truly taking advantage of it, yet. So, even us, we ignored it for so long as a brand, as Art Storefronts, and we didn't get into it full steam because we weren't able to advertise in it, and now that they've opened that out it's huge. So, we're pouring resources into really, really taking Instagram extremely seriously. And to give you an example of what that looks like, with the minions and I, we've been busy. We've actually because we really love these Instagram stories so much, we've been watching these things, and recording these things. And we're actually making a huge database of the ones that we think are really impressive, when people are selling art, and they're storytelling, and we're gonna put together a podcast and just during the course of that I mean look at how cool this is. And this is something that just no one's talking about because it's cutting edge. I mean we are talking about the stories up here, and as we talk about what we always talk about, yes, there's romance marketing to be done in these stories. And, yes, we're gonna teach you how to do it. Yes, we encourage you to learn about as much as you can and start experimenting, but in addition to that, there's gonna be selling that's gonna be going on in there. And one great one I found, I love this, somebody should steal this idea if they have original pieces, or doing limited editions. Look at this, look at what I found, this gal.

And you have to imagine I just screenshotted it, but you have to imagine, I think it's actually this gal. It works like this, like the slides just go one at a time. So it's slideshow fashion, but look at this. She's selling this print only two left, then the next slide said only one left. I love that. You've got scarcity built in to an Instagram story. So you better believe I'm gonna try to get it in for Father's Day. We'll show you how to, in addition to your email marketing for your discounts for Father's Day, we'll also show you how to cook in some selling and some right hooks if you will on Instagram, as well. All right, hack number six, don't just follow artists. This one's important, most artists suck at marketing. It's just the reality, I'm not pointing the cannon at anybody, it's just a reality. So you have a tendency to want to do that, right? I'm just gonna follow artists, I'm just gonna follow artists. Follow some other great ones, right? Follow some other great ones, follow some people that are storytelling, and completely different things that interest you. I think I said in the podcast if it's craftier follow somebody if you love craftier, if it's cats, if it's sailing, if it's horseback riding, if it's crochet, I don't care what it is. Go down the rabbit hole on another niche, preferably one that's got some sex appeal to it, sorry Crissha. But, follow some people that are storytelling in those niches and you'll also build. So it's a good tactic. And again, I talk about him all the time because there's nobody better than he is in the business right now, follow Gary Vaynerchuk and see what that guy does, it's just amazing. He's killing it on another level. Hack number seven, what is this one? Ah, ah, yes, I love this one, I love this one. And I'm gonna conclude it with this one, because we're rolling already. But I mentioned Gary Vaynerchuk, right? And every single solitary podcast episode that guy has he always says send me an Instagram direct message, it's going down in direct messages. And I'm gonna show you what these are in a second. And he ends all his podcasts with it. And I love this technique, works for many, I highly encourage you guys to potentially do this, too. But it brought up another little mini rant for me, and it's we run that on the podcast. I run this chat box thing here, right?

And so you open up this chat box and you can send me a message at any point in time. I got a message from someone that said, how do I get my art to directly reach designers and art collectors? And I love this question and I hate it at the same time, because I know based on Facebook and based on a bunch of things I've been on over the years, everybody always complains like, it's too hard to find the interior designers and too hard to find the collectors. That's like the one thing that's holding me back. And it infuriates me because it's never been easier in the history of mankind. Let me hit you with a quote. You're either gonna find a way to get what you want, or you'll find an excuse why you can't. I love that, the choice is yours and I truly believe that. I truly believe that. So, how do I get my art in front of designers? Let's just see, interior design. Okay, interior design, 29,000 pics here. And I look at this, interior designer, interior decor, interior decoration, interior this, interior that, so what am I gonna do? I'm gonna do the exact same thing I just taught you to do. I'm gonna go into these things. I'm gonna find out some people that are interior designers, and once I find some I'm going to start following them. And if I find these, okay, Studio McGee, home decor, all right, I'm gonna follow this person, I'm gonna see what they post. I'm gonna see what kind of art they put on the wall in their interior design pictures. Hmm, the art that these guys put on the wall on the houses that they interior design looks very similar to what I offer. Maybe I'm a landscape photographer. Hmm, they're putting landscape photographer. Hey, Studio McGee, and I'm gonna send a direct message. I'm going to send a direct message to this person. And I'm gonna say, hey, Studio McGee, really like your style. Just wanted to let you know I'm a fine arts photographer, if you ever need some stuff for your house, I'd do anything to work with you. Here's my website. Here's my website. And that's what I would send to her.

Now preferably you follow these people for a while, and you get to know them a little bit, and you get to know what they like so you don't sound like a schmuck just coming in and saying, hey, buy my stuff. Get to know what they like. Get to know what their style is. Like and comment on a couple of their things. Then send them a direct message. And you know what I would do, if I had an art business right now? I would be in Instagram doing this for two hours a day. Two hours a day, every day, I would probably send 50 to 150 different interior designers that same message all day, every day. And you know what's going to happen out of the 150, 250, 350? Maybe only two or three are gonna get back to me, maybe 10 get back to me. But you know what? Those 10, or two, whatever the number is, all it takes is one of them to love you, and start putting your stuff everywhere, and the next thing you know you're rolling. I get these questions, and these people, that are like, oh it's so hard to find interior designers not when you know how to look for them. And the technique works for anything. It's like, okay, okay, okay, I don't just want to do it on Instagram. Fine, fine, fine, fine, fine, you don't want to do it on Instagram? I don't want to do it on Instagram, I don't even like Instagram. Let's do living room, here I am on Houzz. Okay, now what usually pops up on Houzz is immediately they have these people that are design companies. So here I am on Houzz, Unite Design Co, whatever. Okay, 10 reviews, all right this is a style that looks like something I like. Let's go to this person's website. I wonder if, I wonder if, maybe, maybe if we get lucky, you never know. Maybe if we get lucky I'm just doing this I could fall flat on my face. But usually what happens at the very bottom of their websites, close, ah, ah, look at this. Can't believe it, United Design Co's on Instagram. You know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna follow, United Design Co. Then, I'm gonna find out what United Design Co Likes. Maybe I'm going to leave a couple of comments. Then, I'm gonna send them a direct message on Instagram. Hey, Unite Design Co, I've seen your style. I've seen a number of different rooms that you've done. I just want to let you know I think my art would fit really well in some of your stuff. If you ever feel like taking a look here it is. Love to work with you, love what you do, Patrick. Rinse and repeat, I don't care if you pull 'em off of Houzz or if you pull 'em right out of Instagram.

But you guys should be doing this all the time. I mean I would do this, I would carpet bomb the hell out of this thing, that's what I would do. Too hard, it's never been easier in history. So it's just one of these things where how bad do you want to be a successful artist? How about work for a month straight, DMing every single interior designer you can find. DMing, direct messaging, and exhaust Instagram then exhaust Houzz, do those two things. Hit them as hard as you can, see what happens. You're gonna end up finding out some things, and learning some things, and getting your stuff in front of some people that could potentially buy large quantities of your art. So, all right, I'm gonna go through the questions now. Yeah, Q and A, so let's just get into the Q and A. Leslie says, the huge frustration I have with Instagram is that it's set up to share my Facebook art page when it will only send to my personal Facebook page. I deleted the app and reinstalled. Yeah, that's Google's gonna have to help you with that, and I understand what you're saying. But yeah, in my opinion, if you don't have the horsepower or if you're not ready to post on both, then I understand the connection. And I believe what Leslie's saying is, why can't I just post to Facebook and Facebook post to Instagram? Or the other way around, post to Instagram. How did that just post to Facebook? I think, yes, if you can only do one thing, yes do that. But I also always advocate that each one of these platforms is so insanely important. Each one has its own set of rules, its own set of things that work, and they're a little bit nuanced and different. I think you should treat each one separately.

That's my two cents. All right, let's see, for Mac or PC? They're both for Mac and PC, Randy, either, or. Yes, Sarah, it's called an Aux Player, like I said if you look at the handout video it will walk you through the entire thing. Okay, looks like my guys are answering these. Please show us how to switch the different dummy accounts, I do not seem to find this. Well, Randy, number one you have to create the dummy account. But once you do it's just this little icon down here in the bottom. And you could just switch that way. So you have to have two dummy accounts first and foremost, and you have to be signed in to both of them, right? The other way you can do it is I believe you can do it right here, too. Yeah you can do it right here, too. But the easier way is like you just hold your finger on this, boom, the other one pops up. And you know, you're in between the two. So, let's get into the rest of the questions. Randy, you asked how about workflow? I love this question, awesome. So if you guys are on Macs, you guys totally suck. I kind of wish I had a Mac just for this feature to be perfectly honest with you. No other features by the way, Macs suck, my opinion, but whatever. AirDrop, it's called AirDrop.

You know if you swipe up from the bottom and have that thing called AirDrop. You just drag the files right into AirDrop, and AirDrop puts them right on your phone. Then you get your phone out, and then you post to Instagram. Works with the photos, works with the videos, works incredibly well. If you're a PC person we're struggling with this ourselves. Dropbox is what we use currently. So we just drag the files into a Dropbox. We have the Dropbox on our iPhone, and then we just grab the images from the iPhone, from the Dropbox, and then post it to Instagram, so that's how we do it. Okay, Carol Parker, for the past year I have been boosting my posts on Facebook. Yesterday I dived into the Office Hours 10, yeah so, I think what you're saying is that the ad, this is also like a blessing and a curse. So there's two ways to do an ad. There's run an ad in which case it's not going to show up on your timeline. And that's totally okay it doesn't matter. There's actually some benefits to it. The benefits are is if you start getting some nasty people commenting on it, I don't know if that would happen to you guys as artists. But if you get like a nasty comment, or it's just not working you can turn it off, and no one will ever see it again because the ad is just gone, it turns off. But, the way to get around it is you can author a post on Facebook and then if your campaign objective is page post engagement then it turns that post into an ad, which has some of its own benefits. It's one of those things that you just need to experiment with. If you find that slightly confusing, believe me, Facebook ads and Instagram ads will always be slightly confusing.

There is no getting around that. You just keep fighting, and gritting, and punching as hard as you can to get it going. Continue to learn, you're in a great space already, Carol. But the fact that you're asking these questions, means you're hustling, you're doing it, you're giving it a shot, and you've got to just be a practitioner, and you've got to get in there. That's how it goes. Rebecca McMann, when creating a custom audience in Facebook it says that the audience is too small. Yeah, sometimes it takes a little while for those audiences to build. If your email list is too small, then that audience is too small. If your remarketing audience is too small, then you need to get some more traffic to your website, and chicken and egg situation there, right? I want to advertise on Facebook so I can get more people to come to my website. Not enough people to come to my website to advertise on Facebook, chicken egg. So you can try to boost posts. You can try to go after cold traffic. I checked your site if you remember, and this is just a quick follow up for you guys, but we have a blog post on it I know. We recommend this Chrome Extension called the Facebook Pixel Inspector. So you can see it in my little bar here. I go to your site. I click this thing. What it will tell me is it did indeed find one pixel. So the Facebook pixel is in your site, it is active, so your audience will start to build. But yeah, in the beginning it takes time. It's tough in the beginning. You might need to go after cold traffic, or figure out a way to get some eyeballs back. But yeah, you've got to hustle, and you've got to hustle in the beginning to get there, it's tough. Okay, you've also said, I can't this is kind of a, I can't find where to match first name and last name in Facebook. So when you're in your ads account, and you go to update your email list, that's when you do it. And the last webinar covered this in detail. There's a link directly to this section exactly doing it. But it's when you input your email address if you have first names and last names, then it's going to allow you to match at that point in time. This other thing is I was told not to use them at all by ASF. I don't know who told you that. That's not true, I think they were confused. But love to use first names in my emails, totally recommend you do that, too.

And yep, use first names and last names in Facebook to enhance your ad's reach. It basically just increases the size of your audience. But our last webinar went into detail on this whole process from start to finish, so you can watch that one for the results. Angela, do you think fine artists should have a second website without prices, just a portfolio type of site, basically for curators just looking for artists to put into shows? Or does it confuse and divert traffic? I think it does confuse and divert traffic. I think the prices, no-prices thing I'm not sure exactly what you're doing. But especially when you're getting started, it's just to have two different entities to worry about is so important to just have one and drive all of the attention to that. Starting two sites without any feedback, and without getting started, you're trying to outsmart your audience. Wait until it's a problem and then start two sites, that's what I would say. All right, is that the last question? That is the last question. Let me see what else we have in here. I post a lot to Facebook, Randy says. I post a lot to Facebook via iPhone, but I have not figured out how to post to my business page through iPhone. That's a good question. I do it 100% by computer. I'm not even sure how to do that. But that sounds like a fire up the Google on the Internet machine, Randy. I'm looking to do a product promo ad on Facebook, Victoria says. What have ASF artists been selling more frame, print, or stretch canvas? That's a really good question. I haven't dipped into that. And it's a complicated question because it depends. The photographers are selling the crap out of metal and acrylic, more so than canvas. But for other artists that are painters, are they selling more? I haven't dug deep enough into the numbers, so I would just say use your gut and go for it. Yep, and of course Instagram can be viewed on iPads, great way to do it.

The video Instagram wanted to use as an ad did not get approved, totally safe for work. Is there anything to do with standards or recourse?

Yeah I don't know, I don't know. Sometimes Facebook can just be weird, and it can be one little thing. One ad gets dinged and that's just another mega frustrating thing about just about the platform in general. In the ads manager in general like it's just buggy. It's buggy, it breaks, it's hard to navigate, it's not straightforward, they change it all the time. You know, it's my own personal hell sometimes. So, you just have to acknowledge it for what it is. Say it sucks, and just keep fighting to get through it. But hopefully, what I would do with that video is I would tweak a couple of things. One, I would try to do it again, upload it again. Two, I would tweak a couple of things, and then hopefully it's the right size, too. But I don't know it could be anything. You just never know, you never know with these tyrants, you really don't. On that note, looks like all the questions. You guys, thank you so much for spending your Friday with us. Hope you enjoyed the webinar.

Hope everybody has an absolutely fantastic weekend, and holiday, wait is it Memorial Day? I think it's Memorial Day. And look forward to seeing you guys on the next webinar. Have a great weekend everybody.