Hey guys hopefully you can hear me, we'll get started in just a moment, if you can hear me you can comment and say yes I can hear you, oh fantastic, thank you Steven I appreciate that. Alright so that's good, cued up. Wow it's just always something, there's always something technological, but anyway happy Friday everybody we're gonna get started in just a moment. Just making sure a few last things are properly set up and configured here. Give people maybe just another minute to come on and then we will jump on board.

Hey everybody, how are you doing, nice to hear it's fine in Michigan, it's fine where I am, southern California, just another day in paradise, really. As you would imagine, and I just upgraded my internet speed which is supposed to help out with streaming, we'll see how that goes. Whether it does or it doesn't, but let's give people just another 30 seconds or so to get on this thing, thanks Raymond, good to see you. And then we will get into it. It's just always so buggy in this live webcasting business, never super easy, never super easy.

Alright that's all we know, it looks okay. I'm trying to go to the group so I can see the comments, and I might just have a look on my cellphone which I suppose somebody can get a test cast, we'll see. And let's just give another 30 seconds or so and then let's jump into it and get going, I'm excited, I've got a good one today. Alright. I think on that note I'm just going to close it after a while. One of my chrome tabs is giving me a spinning wheel of death which is never a good sign. Alright boom, let's get into it, I'm ready. We're trying this full screen slideshow presentation this time which is a little bit bigger, there's not that sidebar on the left hand side so hopefully it's just a little bit easier to see on mobile devices and whatnot. But let me know as we go along. And I'm just gonna dive right into it.

So on today's schedule, the holidays, the playbook, the steps and the why, and Q&A. Quickly, announcements, we're skipping 'em, that is all. On a side note, those that were around for the webinar two weeks ago, this is a bit of a rehash of that last one but I made quite a few adjustments and I think it's quite a bit more advanced and we really recorded this thing on a visual standpoint that I think is incredible, I'm certainly a visual person, visual learner, and it's easy to talk about this stuff hypothetically but we're really gonna be able to dive in today and show you what these various different pieces look like which I think will be really valuable. So the holidays are coming. And this is more just mad post stuff but I want to do it, anyway, the holidays are coming, how many days left, and I gotta move this over, hold on, I have a fancy little countdown timer and I don't know if it's gonna work or it's gonna be a pain in the butt here, here we go.

So we made a nice little page which we really liked, I'll share this with you, Chris you can put a link to this if you want in the desktop bookmark for motivation, 27 days, 10 hours and 55 minutes until Thanksgiving, look at the way Thanksgiving sales trended to 14, 15, 16, we've got Black Friday on here, we've got Cyber Monday, we've got Christmas, so this thing is helpful in a number of different ways and it's just gonna be constantly counting down and let us know how much time is left until the big holidays which we need to be on top of, right? So I'll take us back into presentation mode again. Alright, so more art, and this is the real why, right, more art is usually sold in the fourth quarter than any other quarter all year and in many cases than the other three combined, it's not the case for every year, it's just the case for quite a few, so it's just a really important season to be in for. This is just showing the cyber Monday growth rate, I think, it's interesting to look at, right, it's all retail sales, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, look where online sales have gone, the direction they've gone, especially these holiday discounts, it's like where we're moving to as a culture.

And I realize you're going meh, that's retail data, what about our ability to sell art on it. The best data we have is the Hiscox report, you have to take this data with a grain of sand but it's the best data that we have, so if you've never looked at this report I think you should look at this report, I think you should download it even if you don't think it's interesting, Chris put a link to the Hiscox site, I think it's just Hiscox dot com, confirm that and throw that in there. In case anybody wants to read it, it's a good report. Yep, so already did that, so do we even really need that data though, do I need to look at those graphs, trending up to know it, feel it in the moment so to speak, we've seen online sales exploding as a culture, it's art or otherwise, there's no sign the trend's going to stop anytime soon so the big question in all of this of course is what does your holiday marketing strategy look like? Right, there's Oprah looking at you, what does it look like? What's that strategy look like, hmm?

So that's our goal, that's what we want to do, we want to give you one so let's talk playbook, again and this is your holiday marketing strategy for sales, sales and more sales. Now I started this analogy two webinars ago or a webinar again and I really really like it, I'm sticking with it and I'm gonna continue hammering it because I think it dovetails so so nicely with all of it, and it's really the soccer field match, depending on how you want to look at it, it's the holidays, and I think just like a soccer match, this game has a clock, right, once the clock starts, it's counting down, you have a finite amount of time that you get to play this game. Sales are the goal, you wanna score as many of these things as possible, that orange guy in the middle, yellow guy, represents your marketing campaign, right, what you're attempting to score with so the key thing is what do most artists do, not just most artists, most marketers period, they think their holiday campaign is Lionel Messi, or Michael Jordan, they think the greatest player in the world is going to score all day.

The problem is all those red guys represent distractions that come along for the holidays. It's other people doing sales, it's family dinners, the Christmas parties, the holiday carnival, whatever, it's Instagram updates, it's cat videos on the internet, it is distraction, it is a problem, it is a massive problem and you need to do everything you can to be able to score and get by all of those players, right, so you try to do that, you try to send one e-mail, you try to put one player, Lionel Messi, you're gonna lose, right, the attention today is too fleeting, too many distractions, so what is an artist to do to survive against these odds? And you're gonna put a bunch of other players on your team that are all gonna work together, Lionel Messi in the middle here, to score as many goals as you can, everybody's gonna work together as a team, and I really like that analogy, start throwing some of your players in here, you've got e-mail, you've got Instagram, you've got Facebook, you've got Instagram ads, video potentially, Instagram stories, Facebook ads, so the goal is to get all of these guys on the same team all in the boat going in the same direction. And you do that, you get noticed and you win.

So it's just about being taught how to align those pieces together and working together and this literally works 100 percent of the time, try it. So what do you need, yes you need a website equipped to sell art, you guys are on art storefronts, you need an e-mail service provider, you need an e-mail list, and I think once you guys are on the e-mail service provider, ESP, like Mailchimp, you'll get there, you need a Facebook page, Instagram account, Facebook ads account and your e-mail list updated to Facebook. And again, I can't stress this enough, regardless of where you are, how sophisticated you are in terms of your marketing chops, your marketing acumen, you can use this playbook. All it takes is practice so you just run what part of it you can run and you get to the other parts as you get better and you'll do much much better even just running the most basic parts than probably what you did in years previous, right, which was just send an e-mail and maybe Facebook update.

So let's talk about the steps, let's talk about the why, this can feel complicated, and we're gonna break it down and make it sound easy, which it is, it really is. And so here's the game plan in plain picture. Special offer, we're gonna create a discount. We're gonna give that discount scarcity, meaning it's gonna expire, there's a finite amount of time that it's on and then we're gonna do a coordinated e-mail and we're gonna blast all channels, right, that's the bigger picture. On a sidenote, very important sidenote, I don't know if you guys follow the financial markets but yesterday Amazon had it's earnings released and it's utterly and totally, completely beat expectations which is weird, right?

Amazon is a massive e-commerce company, at the end of the day, and you know they're no different than all of you guys, the fourth quarter is the biggest quarter for Amazon, how did they have such explosive growth before fourth quarter's even upon us? And there are a number of things in that report, you've gotta look at it a little bit, but one of the things I picked up that was pretty interesting that I think everybody would understand as interesting, is one of the reasons they did so well, that they generated so much income, is because they invented a holiday out of thin air, which they call prime day, they discounted like crazy and created a feeding frenzy, the likes of which was enough to make Visa another five to seven billion dollars in a day, or whatever such ridiculous amount of money that got generated, so it's an interesting side note to think about.

So let's get into our playbook, it's easy enough, right, but there is really a lot of nuance involved, tactical parts so I do want everybody to understand and never gonna stop beating the drum, right? So number one, pre season training, this is how I break the stages of this game down, the soccer down right, number one is pre season training, you can be thinking of that's off season, that's what you do before you get to the holidays, number two is the warm up, right, we're on the field, running around the field getting ready for the game, just warm up, number three is when we send the offer, that's the game, number four is the re-sending the offer, calling that half time to keep it nice and simple, and number five is the 24 hour warning, that's the last minutes of the game when you gotta get those last goals.

So let's talk about number one right, pre-season training, and I think of this line this one gal used to say, just fantastic guru figure, she used to always say, summer bodies are created in winter, right? And I do believe that I really like that line, there's a lot of merit to it, and it's the point of it is there's something you should be doing is e-mailing your list regularly, what we call romance content, ie non salesy stuff throughout the year well ahead of the holidays. Why am I telling you this now, there's so little time until the holidays, because I want you to be in the mindset and understand that doing that, doing that makes your sales significantly more effective because throughout the year you give this amazing content away and that subtle psychology of reciprocation goes to work for you when it's actually time to discount your sale.

So training, let's talk about this. There's basically three different levels to it, depending on who you are who's watching. You are regularly e-mailing your list romance type of content let's just say at least once a month, maybe you're sending romance infrequently every couple of months and c you've never e-mailed your list once, you have six e-mails to show, it's okay, it's okay, all of you will do this next one right, the important thing to understand is if you've not e-mailed your list in a while, or ever, if the first e-mail you send them out of the blue is buy my art, that's gonna be a little visually jarring, it's gonna make it less effective than it would be, think about a relationship where it's like hey, I haven't seen or heard from you in months, given you a phone call or anything, nice to see you, wanna come home with me?

Right, think relationships like that is a cad, don't do that, that is completely tapped, so you want to use this technique, and you want to send it and look, you can send three or four of these e-mails before Thanksgiving comes down the pipe or you can just send one but even just sending one e-mail like this ahead of going, here's my discount, here's my sale, here's my offer, will increase your chances, it's an important nuanced piece of this technique, it's important, and I mentioned in the webinar two weeks ago how this needs to look, but today I actually created a fictitional art business which is me, I like going out to the bottom right corner of California, you ride your motorcycle in the sand out there, it's really neat, take some pictures out there, so that is going to be my new business today, Patrick's Calamus photos, I'm gonna walk you through visually what this stuff looks like.

So this is the romance e-mail that I would send, right, and so there it is, motorcycle riding, in the desert, that's what Calamus is all about, I realize I have a lazer pointer now which is awesome. So pre-season training, this is the type of romance content that I would send, you can shoe horn this with the nuances to how you roll, but you have the title, there's motorcycles, dogs and sunsets, the only thing better than reading this is here's a guy riding a wheely in Calamus, and there's a link to my website. But there it is, just some content, cool photo, cool piece of your art, maybe there's a longer story, whatever, but here's the P.S. and it says I don't often have sales, but when I do, I'm not sure this is really clear, it's probably not on your phones, so let me just read it, PS I don't have sales often, but when I do, the discounts are steep like the Calamus sand dunes. Boom, on brand. Stay tuned, and as always, ride safe.

So you can see that that's the example of a piece of romance content that you could send ahead of the next step, so even something as subtle as that, this could be, you've got three e-mails scheduled from now until you plan on doing your sale, then put the PS in every single solitary one of them, start warming things up, start doing your pre-game training. Okay, so literally regardless of where you are you can get started with this right away, put a PS in the footers of the e-mails you have coming up, just make sure, make sure there is no salesy language in any of those e-mails, they have to be pure romance. Pure romance, okay.

So that's stage number one, I see a question, is there anything you can do if you don't have an e-mail list yet, you do have an e-mail list, you just don't know it. Chris, take Deborah's, I want to write her a note, take Deborah's question, put it on a slide and let me answer her question at the end and then I'll give you some tips there, Deborah. So stage two, the warmups, so this is right before the game goes down, right? Now, number two, e-mail your list and let them know the deal is coming and give them more details about it so this is getting ready for the game, so this is just letting you know, in a couple of days, you're gonna send them an e-mail that the sale's gonna be on.

So let's go back to Patrick, his brand is photography, number two warmups, subject line, I am done with wheelies for at least the next 48 hours. Why, there should be a question mark there. I need to get the store ready for the steepest, craziest sale I have all year. Store favorites like this wheelie time here. And then let's just assume this is one of your best sellers, right? Speak soon, Patrick, photos, so I'm announcing that in the next 48 hours I'm going to drop the sale, so just letting people know the sale is coming, get prepared, get ready, if I'm lucky they'll go check the store out, get an idea of some stuff that they want to see, that they would potentially want to purchase when the sale is on, okay, and so there's the link in there, just a simple warm up, really quick e-mail that you can send, okay, that's what we want.

Oh yeah, and personality works for you, you'll notice throughout it and again I did this all this morning, literally I made all of this stuff this morning so you can totally do this, but you want to have your message coordinated and working with one another, so I'm done with wheelies, right, kind of a theme is riding the steep Calamus dunes and wheelies and motorcycles and start your engines, you can see throughout this thing I've coordinated it all together so it really feels like it's all stitched together and working together, right, and by the way this is what this e-mail looked like in g-mail, and this is what you call an SHI something post, it's like this e-mail internet meme thing where you trick people into clicking creatively, right, and so presumably, everybody who follows me loves riding motorcycles in the desert pulling wheelies, you know and again I'm stretched here, but so I am done with wheelies, and you would look at that and be like what, he's done, how could that be, I love wheelies, at least for the next 48 hours, right, so they call that an SHI post and an excellent post and it's just a creative way to hook them but I'm on theme here, you'll see I'm on theme.

Okay so that is it, the warmup is done, so now I'm moving to the offer. So what is the offer, the pro tip here is it does not matter, do what works for you, what you're comfortable with, just make sure there's something on the table, probably the more significant it is the better off you are, but there's no magic number for everybody, right? We've done a bunch of documentation on this post, we've done sample offers so we'll include that like we always do but just stay focused on the big picture.

So here we go, this is my offer e-mail that I sent, start your engines, again we want the lazer pointer, start your engines, the sale is on, subject line. Hey Steve, it's Monday, from now until Friday, we've gone full tilt, supposed to say tilt, typos everywhere, take 20 percent off store wide, using code wheelie time. Deal expires Friday at midnight, see I've got scarcity, expiration in there, and when it's gone, it's gone, knock out your gifts early with some of my best sellers, just assume these are my best sellers, you've got fireworks going off here, you've got another motorcycle wheelie, you've got the sand hound, it should say sand, I am the worst typist. Questions, comments, hit reply, let me know, we are standing by and ready to help. Okay? So simple, simple offer type e-mail, obviously again you adjust this to your pace, your style, your brand e-message, right.

So now, the offer is done, so now we've sent the offer e-mail out, next is the re-send, right, there's a reason we've got that boomarang, cause it comes back to get ya. This is the e-mail you send to people who did not open the first e-mail right, Mailchimp makes this very very easy, most ESPs make it very easy, e-mail service providers. You can just re-send it to un-opens and set the separation between 24 and 48 hours and we have some documentation on this, and so why do you do this, it just works incredibly well. Right? People are busy, not likely, they're going to ignore your first e-mail, it's just what's gonna happen, those are the stats, they're gonna ignore it, this give you a second bite of the apple, so to speak.

So, look at my case, the re-send, and I love this, I see why it's worked well for me in the past, perhaps it'll work for you, in case you missed it, it's our biggest sale of the year right now, and I don't want you to miss it, what's up Steve, not sure you saw my last e-mail, I'm sending you another one, we're all crazy busy around the holidays, I know. Take 20 percent off store wide, wheelie time, get some wheelie time on the ball, questions or comments, hit reply and let me know, we are standing by and ready to help. So there's another e-mail, it takes very little time just get it scheduled, it goes automatically and done.

So there it is, now we're on to number five, right? The clock is ticking, deal expiration. And this e-mail is the last e-mail you send, you let your list know one last time the deal is going to expire in 24 to 48 hours depending on how you're doing it, right, so here's mine, the re-send, 24 hours left until the sale leaves the desert, right, I'm still on brand here, wanted to send a final reminder, the sale is about to ride off, with 24 hours left to lock in your biggest discount of the year, 20 percent off store wide, use code wheelie time, and you know this nice little photo of a sunset, you know. So that would be an example of my 24 hour expiration and I think it's usually pretty good, again I think we have in our documentation some examples, come on, load load load, anyway, what I was gonna mention is that you should put the expiration in the subject line but we have a couple of really good blog posts that will give you examples of subject lines.

But let's sum up what we've done there, five to seven e-mails all hyping up, promoting a single offer, this sale, whatever you want to call it. That alone is more than what 98 percent of artists out there are gonna do, you do that and only that and you will win, you will win with just that, it's just the start of the playbook though, it's the collegiate level, so let's talk about going pro. Why? Because nobody wants to read your excrement. Great book by the way, Pressfield, I don't remember if I mentioned it before, it's a great book. But it's the absolute truth, nobody wants to read your stuff, okay, nobody is gonna read your e-mails, they're not gonna click your links, they're not gonna buy you're art, they're all too busy.

There is too much noise, the holidays are too crazy, we all know this, it's like there's something... It tips into fourth quarter and life just goes bananas, right, people are crazy busy, you are competing against other advertisers, so, what's gotta happen is you've gotta do everything you can to stack the deck in your favor, you have to make them read your e-mails, you have to make them read your e-mails, you need to be remarkable, right? And so how do you do that, you coordinate everything you have in your arsenal, and now this is when we go back to the analogy, so there's all my pieces on my team, all these things I have at my disposal, and again, it's how I arrange these pieces and get them passing back and forth all together as a team that's gonna allow me to score more goals and I do mean more sales.

So all your players, everything you have at your disposal, all on a team, the sooner you start thinking this way the quicker you'll be able to create and really come up with some ways to do this, so your job is to get them moving together, and playing together, in formation and you'll just win, it works 100 percent of the time, let's try it. You're at war, and this is a very important thing to understand too, you are literally these Scottish barbarians running with the English, you're in a war for attention. So march on your forces, line them up, and get them ready to attack. The stages of the game, let's go over this again. Stage one is pretty much taken care of, we mentioned the off season training, it doesn't feature into this next part. Stage two, warm ups, now I'm gonna break this section down for beginner, intermediate, and advanced, wherever you are there are things you can do, the beginner side of things completely free, even on the intermediate side of things, it's completely free, you go pro, there's gonna be some associated ad cost but you gotta start somewhere, and it doesn't matter where you start to get rolling, so we got the little pee wee soccer, I love it.

So what are you going to do, you're gonna e-mail your list, you're gonna have an organic Facebook post and you're gonna have an Instagram post all coordinated with the same message, easy to say, what does it look like? E-mail on the left, get my pointer back again, laser pointer, done with the wheelies, at least for the next 48 hours, here's the image, so I'm going to post on Facebook, there is an example Facebook post, the wheelie party's over for the next 48 hours so I can get the store ready for the biggest sale we have all year, stay tuned, you see how these two are coordinated, they're different images, they might go to different people, the language is the same and you're gonna see it, people are gonna see this in two different venues, Instagram included, the wheelie party is over for the next 48 hours, get ready for the biggest sale, language is similar, so I might get ya on e-mail, you might ignore my e-mail, I might get ya on Facebook, you ignore Facebook, I might get ya on Instagram, and get ya on Facebook again, and finally we go on the e-mail, so you beginners, don't tell me you can't author an e-mail, author a Facebook post, and author an Instagram post, easy, right?

No problem. Alright, let's talk about warmups. Here we've got the high school team, intermediate. I would say e-mail your list, plus an organic Facebook post plus an organic Instagram post, plus an Instagram story, you definitely can do a story, all free for you to do still by the way, for the next 48 hours, this is just an example to start, for the next 48 hours gonna be in the trailer cooking up my biggest sale of the year, that's sort of like, meth headish, he's like you're in the trailer, but anyway, get ready, what is that movie, why am I blanking, with Heisenberg, I don't know, gonna be in the trailer get ready, keep an eye on your e-mail, right, so there's an Instagram story added to the mix, and that plays into it too, so now instead of just just one on Facebook, Instagram, you've got Instagram stories all working together all trying to get attention.

So next we go to pros, like this, you've got Chelsea, warming up, premiere champions last season, doing alright this season not great, you're gonna e-mail your list, organic Facebook post, organic Instagram post, Instagram story, Facebook ads, Instagram ads, and I know that sounds like a lot, there are guys of you who are just getting started, you work your way up to it, it takes time, it's okay, it's just about knowing this is all there, going there and waiting so it's as simple as taking the two posts that you made organically on both of the platforms, turning them into ads and running 'em, so it's quite literally that simple I think once you get up to that level you more or less know how to author these ads and know how to make them live, I think probably before, well before the holidays on this next webinar we can go through those, the steps to create these ads if you're so inclined, and you know I would say that, I love that slide, I would say that even if you're just getting started, it sounds so technical and sounds like there's so many steps and it's scary, scary, scary, but you can totally do all this in one swoop, you could totally do all this in a day, like honestly, a day, following these steps would take very little acumen so I want you to stay encouraged on that.

And then I've got this link, let me show you something, Firemarshall Bill, I think this is one of the most profound things and I really hope the audio works on this, this is what we're doing, I want you to watch this, I hope this comes through. Look at these guys all hammering together, destroying this pin into the ground, absolutely amazing, right? Look at that, boom boom boom, I think that one guys doing all the work by himself, I think if you only have a few hits, this is honestly what you're doing, and this is the key thing to remember, in all of this, that is the point of it and that is effective, that just works. And that's what marshaling all of these services, let me show you somethin'. Fire Marshall Bill, I love that guy. So keep that in mind, that's what we're doing, that is what we're after in this entire process, right?

So number three, four, offer and the re-send, let's walk through that, and again, we've got our beginners. The offer, here's the offer e-mail, right? Okay, the firework going off signifies the start of the biggest sale of the year, 20 percent off store wide, coupon code wheelie time, deal expires Friday at midnight, same thing with an Instagram post, so you're gonna see this all work itself out, sort itself out, there they are again, right, that's for the beginners, they do it organic, and this is a rinse and repeat, I do like seeing, seeing what it looks like. So again you're in the intermediate stage, get an Instagram story going too, 20 percent off store wide, wheelie time, deal expires Friday at midnight, it's completely on, biggest sale of the year is live, you constantly just wanna be reminding people any which way you can get 'em, look at this, the pros, she looks like the greatest US soccer player in the world right now.

E-mail your list, again, everything, right, this is redundant because it's the exact same step you did for the first one. So again you would take these posts on the two platforms and turn it into an ad. Carol says, it's a question I just saw and I think it's worthwhile, I've been running Facebook ads and letting them post to Instagram and this is actually, there was a highly contested issue that everyone used to say separate them, Facebook's algorithm has gotten so good that that's, a lot of people were saying it's better to do that, it's just as effective to do that, so yes, absolutely you can do that, it cuts down a lot of the work, right? So that was number three and four, obviously that gets us to number five, 24 hour warning, right, beginner, again, e-mail your list, I still wanna walk you through these little steps.

You e-mail your list, I wanted to send you a reminder, and I realize this is slow, what we can do, I mean small rather, and I'm looking at my cell phone, we're still feeling our way through this process, so we can include a shared slide deck and we can put all these images in a pdf or whatever, so that people can look at them all coordinated altogether, right? But here's the last one, the 24 hour, here's the e-mail, again, here's the Facebook ad, here's the Instagram post. Three different images so you're really really hammering them every single solitary way and again, the story I think this is where it gets really interesting with the story by the way, take a little side detail, but in fact let's just jump in because we made these earlier today, this lets you see what all these stories potentially look like.

So let me just go through but what I love, what I love love love, is like this thing is almost like a built in countdown clock right, look at this. Deal expires in 24 hours, you can wait an hour, drop another slide, deal expires in 23 hours, you can wait an hour, drop another slide, deal expires in 22 hours, and just cycle through your entire store of best selling pieces, one after another, after another, four, two, that is powerful, that is powerful, you'll catch people at all of these various stages and you're gonna constantly be adding to your story and look you can cheat a little bit, like when you get to the tail end of it, just throw the last five or six hours whatever, don't even put them on but some iteration of that is insanely powerful and I've seen this work, just as an aside, if you're selling a finite amount, but if you're selling a number of originals, every time you sell one you could just go in with six left, and then if you sell another one, five left, you can get so creative with these stories, and they can just be really effective, it's insane, so again the pro and stage five is one last set of ads, Instagram, Facebook, all map the various stages of the game, and you do that, you get all of that going on, give it a shot, even if you don't have all the discounts right, all the subject lines right, you're going to end up having such an incredible impact because people are just too busy, there is no time, no one has any time, they're not gonna see your stuff, not gonna read your stuff so your job as you see it is to ring as many bells as you can, right, to get this message in as many different channels you can and this technique especially when it's stitched all together, I hope visually going through that stitches it all together is just so powerful.

Like you're going to catch people from start to finish it's 25, 35, 45 touches, depending on what it is, bing bing bing bing bing, you're gonna catch your people, you're gonna get 'em, in one way or another, so amazing technique, something I really really want everybody to get on board, we're going to bombard you with throughout the rest, the holiday season, so most artists out there they'll send an e-mail or two, what do you do, we really want you to send all of them. So I think on that note, I think it's a good time to end it, keep things kinda short, gonna go to Q and A, somebody has questions, hammer 'em in and we can go over, and I'll start, I can see a couple of 'em higher and I'll circle back and get to your questions. Holly, is there a timeline, what to do in these steps, yeah we're working on it, we've got a resource page too that we put together, it's almost ready for primetime I would say and it's gonna have literally all this stuff but we'll give you dates, recommended dates on when we think you should get started, how quickly you should do it, for now what I strongly recommend in the time between now and then is figure out which sale you're gonna have, you've got 27 days, let's say 10 hours until Thanksgiving, think about the sale that you want to have, what percentages that you want to offer as a discount and think about what media you're gonna coordinate and put all together to match up what we've shown you, that would be my advice. Chris, get Holly a link to the art calendar.

Okay I'm gonna keep going with the questions, by the way. Mary, have you done market testing for what percentage coupon works best for e-mail signup forms? I've heard that 30 percent is the trigger point, yeah so this is the Goldilocks question, right, and it's what math is most comfortable for you. It's not gonna be the same as what's comfortable for me, you just don't know until you test, right? Everybody's market is a little bit different, there's no silver bullet number, you just kinda experiment and see how it goes, that's literally the best you can do in that situation. So give it a shot, 30 percent sounds like you've got in your head so go for it, it's a good mark and see where it goes from there.

Saya, I read this, so Saya said that her artwork and site focuses on natural colors so she has one theme that's going on the page already but you know she had a series a few years ago that was not natural color, but it sold really well, for me that's enough, I realize this is like an existential question, do I spread myself too thin with a bunch of niches or do I hammer it all in one niche, it's a really complicated question and there's no answer to it but if you, to me, if you had a series that sold really well and then put it up there and see if it starts selling, and yeah, you're gonna stick to it, that's what I would do. Michelle says my site isn't live yet, I plan to get it going November 10th, I will be out of the country for 2 weeks, Thanksgiving to December, what's the best way to handle that in terms of my site for example Etsy has a shop announcement section as well as the ability to turn your shop on vacation so you don't get orders you can't fill, I'd love to sell prints during that time but obviously if I sell the originals that will present a problem, so yeah what I would do, I am someone who absolutely easier to beg forgiveness than to ask permission, and I think that applies to you, leave everything on, wait until the sales come in and then deal with it.

You know, I get the fact that you're gonna be out of town, but if there're orders you can carve a few minutes to write an e-mail like I'm so sorry, I was traveling, it's not gonna be that easy for me to get this order shipped on time, let me know if there's anything I can do and in the worst case scenario you have to refund the money at least you have a very interested buyer and you know the buyer has already given you money and you can beg forgiveness, send them somehow, I would by all means take the order, absolutely. Debra is there anything you can do if you don't have an e-mail list yet, absolutely, so step number one, for you, Debra, is you're gonna get, I don't know how long you've been an artist, a selling artist, but the first step is, it's like a chicken and the egg situation but you get all your family, all of your friends, everybody who you've ever sold art to, everybody who loves you and would lay down in traffic for you, and you put that entire list up onto Facebook and you let Facebook match those e-mails to the profiles and you can match list to Facebook with first name, last name, address, and phone number without even having an e-mail which is amazing, right?

And you start showing people ads, it's very inexpensive to do this, you can do this for five dollars a day, you can do two dollars and fifty cents a day if you have a very small list, and the hope is that you start posting content and those people are gonna share stuff, it's gonna drive people to your website, you're gonna use the art storefronts lead capture, and it's gonna take time. And you know how the e-mails are built, they are built one e-mail at a time and it takes time, there is no shortcut, there's no shortcut to getting them, and getting those people engaged in your list, it sounds daunting, it's not, it's fun, get going, start rolling, you do it. Art fairs are a great way to get started too, do an art fair and run with it, we have extensive documentation on how to do that and yeah, Debra, I get it, everybody's gotta start somewhere, you're just getting started, it's fine, everybody's been where you've been at a point and that's how it goes, e-mails are built one e-mail at a time, you get started, put your head down, you start grinding and you just get rolling.

Is there a way to automate Instagram stories so you can do each hour, no there is not, not that I'm aware of, but there might be, there's advancements happening so darn quickly in Instagram that there might be some way that you can automate it but you know, you don't have to do it every single solitary hour, you can just use that as an example for how effective it is, the key, the key with Instagram really is that you stay up here, you only stay up here if your story has active slides so that's really the most important thing, but last year I saw people running this technique and I was like ah it's just so smart, like, deal expires in 24 hours, showing off, deal expires in 23 hours, so you could've done, you could do ten hours, five hours, two hours, 48 hours, three days, the long and short of it is just give it a shot, try something, it's just a powerful powerful way to use that countdown timer, so I think you can find that to be extremely effective, but yep, that's all I got, more and more and more will come up, we're really excited to get better and better at this, every single solitary year, and we keep, we're finding that we're improving our documentation every year and this year we're running webinars, and the thing that I want to say to keep you guys encouraged is that you are now all online art gallery owners, you're going to run these deals presumably for the rest of your life, so get good at them, get really good at them, you'll never end up looking back, in a couple of years from now you're running so many different things at once, it'll probably take you like three hours to get down and just automate it all and turn it live.

Not really, it's still going to take work but the point is it seems daunting, it seems like a technological hurdle, even for me, and then I go and I do it, just execute on it, put my head down, figure it out, screw up, I have typos, people e-mail me telling me I'm an idiot, I get nasty comments, and I learn and I get better and next year I do better and better and better, and guess what, these things are coming all year, every year, it does not matter, what was the example I used on Amazon, he invented Prime, he invented Prime day out of thin air, to clear out excess inventory and make a load of money. Who's to say you can't do that for your company, guess what playbook you're gonna run? If it's holidays or not, you're gonna run that same playbook so I find this to be a fundamental, fundamental aspect of your business going forward in perpetuity, so I'm going to continue harking on it, pounding on it, will continue to tell you the best ways to do it and just remember, this world is just so complicated, you need all of your guys to hammer on it at the same time.

So that's what I got, thanks for coming guys I hope you enjoyed it, this video will be live, will simultaneously be recorded so you can go to the bathroom, walk with it, Chris we'll probably Put it on the bottom. You can do that as well, please don't yell at me for typos, I'm consistently full of typos my entire life. So that's what I got, you guys have a fantastic weekend, thank you so much for spending some time with us and the holidays are coming, you guys, let's get ready.