Contents

Preface
Benefits of an audience 3
It's not just about numbers 4
Starting with the right attitude 5
Why social media is an opportunity 5
Why are the big artists successful 6
Self-awareness and objectivity 7
Proactivity 9
It's a marathon 10
You need a strategy 10
The best platforms to grow an audience 11

Instagram
Optimization 16
How to post consistently without burning out 34
Growth tactics 71
Building a strong personal brand 158
How to monetize your artpage 164

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 Legal disclaimer!

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Preface
Before going into the tips, tricks, and tactics, it's important to first explain
the power of having an audience to increase your motivation to grow one of
your own!
This eBook tries to explain the whole economy and concept of social media
so you can even derive your own tactics from it. Therefore I advise you to
read it from start to finish and take notes while doing so, to get the most
value out of it.

The Benefits of Having an Audience

The first and of course, most obvious would be the monetary benefits.
Without customers, you won’t make money. If you wish to sell anything on
the internet, your artworks for example, you will need to reach out to
people. The hard truth is that you cannot expect anyone to buy from you if
they don’t know of you.
Being a “good artist“ alone is not enough to also be a successful one! You
also need to understand how to market yourself correctly.

A great example of this is Dwayne the Rock Johnson: With $65 million
annual earnings he's the best-paid actor in the world. Does that mean he's
also the best actor? – Of course not -, I bet you can list at least 5 more
talented actors than him -, but Dwayne Johnson knows how to put himself
out there. Knowing how to gain reach and sell yourself are the two most
crucial things you need to master if you want to become a successful artist.

We live in an attention economy. Attention means money. If you know how

to gain attention you will never have to struggle financially again.

If you think about it, there are so many artists who build up legitimate
businesses through their online presence alone. You can do so too!

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The monetary value of an audience is not the only benefit. Having a
community of followers can have an added spiritual benefit. You can
create something bigger than yourself.

What does this mean? Let's say you inspire and help a lot of people in your
community with your art and your advice.

You’ve started a domino effect. This has the potential to last for
generations and the thought of being able to contribute so much value to
society is amazing in itself. You created a legacy.

It's Not Just About Numbers

Having a lot of followers is great, but it's not enough. What's even more
important is that you also create a strong community and personal brand
as an artist.
Let’s demonstrate why having a strong personal brand is so crucial using
this real-life example:

Ever heard of the influencer @Arii? She has more than 2 million followers
on Instagram. According to her engagement, it is clear that these are real
followers.

One day she decided to start her own clothing brand. She chose a supplier,
created a few designs, did a photoshoot, and everything you need to start
your clothing brand.

But on launch day her supplier refused to create the products because she
couldn´t even sell 36 products of each unit. That´s a conversion rate of less
than 0.01%!

This real-life example shows that having a big following is meaningless if

you don’t also build a strong connection with your community!
That's why this eBook will also teach you about building your personal
brand, which will help massively if you want to sell your art.

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Starting With the Right Attitude

Before going into the strategies, you need to have the right attitude about
growth on social media and success.
First, reject the false assumption that growing on social media is based on
luck. Most people have this assumption because they only think about “the
algorithm”.

The algorithm isn't the only way to gain attention. There are many more
ways to gain attention by just being proactive and thinking outside the box
(more of that in “growth tactics“).

In addition: the algorithms for every social media platform are only
random to some degree. They represent what people want to see and are
more sophisticated than you might think. They analyze how long people
watch, engage with, and are interested in certain posts. Depending on
these (and many other factors) the algorithm decides whether your post
will be shown to more people or not.

Social media is about people; the algorithm is just a tool to find out what
people want.

Social Media Is an Opportunity, Not a Problem!

Many artists see social media as an unfair threat. To succeed, you need to
acknowledge the fact that social media is the biggest opportunity and gift
of the last decade.

Social media is the democratization of reach and exposure. Regardless of

the message you want to share, nowadays you can do that entirely for free!

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Let's say you wanted to promote your art prints in the 1970s – good luck
with that because then you would have to spend thousands of dollars to
advertise it through traditional media. Because earlier, exposure was only
available to big companies with money. Nowadays everyone can create
their own media channel. Of course, it's not easy and takes time but that
shows how valuable an audience is.

Why the organic reach of most social media platforms is rather low:

Every social media platform only has a limited amount of attention

(people only have a certain amount of time per day to consume content),
and this attention is fight for hardly. The rules of supply and demand also
apply to content. Therefore, a low organic reach (like we have on
Instagram) is just the result of lower demand for content but a high supply
of it.
The cool thing is that everyone has the opportunity to fight for their piece
of the attention cake, unlike before the existence of the internet where you
only got attention if you were in a privileged position.

An audience is a really valuable asset. Influencers and brands are able to

earn millions with this asset. You could compare it with real estate which
enables you many profitable income opportunities. But just like with real
estate you need to work for it – you also wouldn´t expect to get a free
house through minimal work, right?

Why Are the Big Artists Successful?

Before answering that, why do people follow in the first place?

Many people falsely assume that if someone leaves you a follow, they are
doing you a favor. But that's not the case. We people are always somehow
egotistical. We only leave a follow if we think that the account will bring us
value or entertainment in some sort of way.

So, if someone leaves you a follow, they don't do you a favor. You are
doing THEM a favor.

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To grow a following, you need to be extremely selfless and give value to
other people. Always ask yourself “What is in it for them“.

You might ask, “Well, what kind of value are the bigger artists
contributing?“ They do this in many ways, but the main reason why people
decide to follow them is that their account is somehow unique, whether it is
their style, their personality, the advice they give (or all of it).

The biggest key is to create a unique selling point – something that

differentiates you from any other art page.

If you simply do what 99% of all the other artists do you don´t give people
a reason to especially follow you.

And I don't mean here that your art style needs to be unique – you can
become unique in many ways (personality, content, unique IG stories,
etc.). You also don't need to panic and desperately search for something
that can make you unique. Finding your unique voice is a long process that
also requires trying out a lot of things – it's just something you should
keep in mind and aim for in the long term!

Self-awareness And Objectivity

On social media, it's very important to be objective and self-aware about

yourself, your art, and your content.

The hard truth is that people only will follow you if THEY enjoy the content
on your profile. Now, why do I tell you that, it's obvious, right?

The truth is that I get a lot of messages from artists, asking why their page
doesn't grow, and often the quality of their art isn't that developed yet – or
their art is really good, but they just present it in a bad way.

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So always be very self-aware and objective about your art and content.

To achieve that get critiques from others. Make sure that they don’t just
compliment your art, rather they should be brutally honest with you. That is
the only way you can grow as an artist. It is effective to especially ask non-
artists for feedback because they are often more honest than artist friends.

How to find people who are brutally honest:

Create an artwork where you do some mistakes on purpose (for example

draw a body with a crooked anatomy) and ask your friends to give you
feedback. If they just compliment it, you know that you will need to look out
for other people to give you honest feedback in the future.

And with ‘feedback’ I don't only mean feedback about your art, but rather
about your art page, because as I mentioned it might be the case that your
art is very good, but that the way you present your art is not. So, make sure
to get feedback about your art page too!

Do not stop growing your page, if you believe that your art is not so
developed yet. Growing your page will be a long process either way. While
your page grows, your art will grow with it.

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Proactivity

Proactivity or the ability to act proactive plays a major role in success! You
might ask what proactivity means. Proactivity means actively searching for
solutions and executing them if a problem occurs. The opposite of a
proactive person is a reactive person – they just accept the problem and
let it have control over themselves.

Here is a real-life example of proactivity:

Let's say you're a student on the borderline between two grades, and your
teacher says that you will get the worse grade. Reactive students will now
accept this and get sad – their emotional world reacts to the outside world
which controls them. Proactive students would ask if they could do a
volunteer presentation to still get the better grade – they actively change
their reality.

In every situation, there are always moves you could do to actively better
your situation. These moves might not be obvious – but they are there.

To contextualize this to growing an audience as an artist:

Reactive artists just post their artworks hoping that the algorithm will bring
them followers, only to become sad when they notice that the organic
reach on Instagram alone won't make them famous.

Proactive artists however actively execute multiple smart tactics to

leverage attention. You will later learn these proactive tactics in the
“growth tactics” chapter.

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It's a Marathon

It's important that you don't have any false expectations about how long it
takes to grow an audience. Most people think that it's a matter of months,
but it's rather a matter of years! If you observe bigger artists, you will
notice that they all have been posting for at least one or two years.

If you have any false expectations about your growth, it will just
demotivate you when reality hits. Have zero expectations about your
growth and just focus on dedicating yourself to being consistent with your
content and strategy. Speaking of ...

You Need a Strategy And a Plan

Success is plannable! But just like in every other area (for example in
fitness) you need a plan you can follow to see results. If you don't have a
plan you will get:

a) Lost. Quickly.
b) If you don't have a plan and don't see any results - you don't know what
you've done wrong.

With a plan, you can tell which aspects you didn't execute, or which aspects
need to be reworked.

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The Best Platforms to Grow an Audience as an Artist

“Don't put all your eggs in one basket”

It's important that you are not present on only one social media platform,
for two reasons:

1. You are missing out on a lot of reach: Let's say you only post your art on
Instagram. With just 2-3 more clicks, you could also post your art on e.g.,
TikTok. You already created and shot a clip with that artwork, so why
should you not also upload it on TikTok and gain some additional
attention from this platform?

2. It's risky: Again, let´s assume that you're only active on Instagram and
built a following there. What if your account gets shadow-banned, hacked,
or Instagram the platform itself loses relevance? You need other social
media presences you can drop back on.

“So, what are the best platforms to grow an audience as an artist?”

Before telling you which platforms you should focus on, let’s first highlight
which platforms you should not focus too much on: Platforms solely for
artists, like DeviantArt or Artfol.
You might be confused now, but let me explain:

1. It’s almost only competition: On platforms where only artists show their
work, that's what's going to happen – artists only show their work. Only a
few artists also check out the artworks of others, because everyone is there
to promote their work. So, the supply of artworks is huge on these
platforms, but the demand is rather small. That's why the organic reach is
rather low.

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2. Non-artists are also potential followers of yours: As we've seen the
problem of platforms like DeviantArt and Artfol is that no one consumes
content there. That's different on platforms like Instagram or Twitter, there
are also non-creators who just consume content – like art.

3. These platforms also have a smaller user base – so your potential

growth is limited. That's why the biggest artist on DeviantArt has ~300k
followers/watchers, while on Platforms like Instagram some artists and
designers even have 1M-10M followers.

4. You probably also want to sell your art one day, right? Well, think of it
as rather, who is more likely to buy art from you? Artists who can create art
by themselves or non-artists who need an artwork for their projects (for
example a book cover)

That doesn't mean you must avoid these platforms, they are a great way
to get feedback and tips from other artists, but you should not expect
much growth on them.

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The Platforms You Should Focus On:

Instagram

Probably the best platform you can use as an artist. You can post photos,
videos and with stories you can connect very well with your community.
This eBook will also mainly focus on Instagram because most tactics and
concepts are applicable on the other platforms as well.

TikTok

TikTok is a big opportunity for two reasons:

1. The organic reach is huge there. The reason for this is that the platform
has a lot of users but not so many creators, so the competition there is
rather low. That´s why my third TikTok I´ve ever posted got immediately
15k views:

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Just to demonstrate to you how big the organic reach on TikTok is, here's a
quick comparison:
On YouTube, it took 14 years before any channel hit 100 million
subscribers. The most famous TikTok star was able to reach that milestone
in a year!
And no, TikTok is not just for dancing kids. Many artists already take
advantage of this opportunity by uploading artistic TikToks.

2. Additionally, to the huge organic reach TikTok has a different algorithm

than Instagram. Instead of a home feed where you only see posts from
people you follow, TikTok has a “for you page” where you see posts also
from random people across the platform. That's why it's even easier to be
discovered by new people.

In contrast to Instagram, TikTok uses a content-graph algorithm and not a

social graph algorithm. This means that your account doesn't need to gain
“trust” on the platform first before going viral. TikTok mainly curates only
your content and not your audience size.

Social Graph: Content graph:

What is this piece

How big is your audience? of content about?
Who is your audience? How much are other people
interested in this content?

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Twitter

Twitter has a very big and supporting art community. Twitter has two
advantages:

1. The “retweet” function, where other people can retweet your posts, many
tweets go viral that way.

2. On Twitter you can post content without having to post your art (You
also don't have to do that on the other platforms - more to that in the
content-creatio chapter).

Your New Roles

We artists have many roles.

But if you want to market your art via social media you must adopt two
new roles:

a) The content creator: Most artists think that as an artist you can only
post your art, but that's not true. You can post anything related to art that
somehow gives value to people.

b) The marketer: On social media, it's due to the high competition not
enough to just post your content and hope that it will go viral. No, you also
need to execute strategies and tactics with which you can gain attention,
you will learn these strategies in the next chapters.

The next chapters will discuss how you can become a master in each of
these roles:

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Instagram
This chapter will discuss:

1. Optimization: How you can optimize your Instagram profile (because the
best growth tactics won’t work if your page doesn’t effectively convert
visitors to followers)

2. Content creation: The variety of content you can post as an artist so that
you will be able to post consistently without burning out.

3. Marketing: The growth tactics, with which you can gain attention
independently from the algorithm.

Note: We will always start with the "basic" advice to make sure that also
beginners get the most from this eBook. The further you read the more
advanced the tactics will get.

Optimization

Now let's talk about the basics. That way we make sure that your
foundation is strong – you can't build a house on a crooked foundation.

Have a Clear Idea About Whom You Want to Reach!

What I had to learn the hard way is that, if you want to grow on social
media, you need to be consistent with the topic you post about.

When I was starting out two years ago, I genuinely had no clue what kind
of content I want to post, therefore I mixed a lot of topics. One day I was
posting my art, another day I was posting a motivational quote, after that
I posted a cover design – you get the idea.

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Therefore, I didn't grow as fast as I have could because:

a) people who checked out my profile didn't follow – because they didn't
know what to expect from my page

b) the algorithm didn't know what kind of content I was posting, therefore
it also didn't know which audience it should show my content to.

I often see artists mixing up their content, for example, posting screenshots
from video games, or photos of their food, but as an artist, you should
focus on one topic: Art!

But keep in mind that ‘art’ does not just mean your artwork.
There are a lot of different styles and vibes you can create with your
content, so let´s do an exercise and find out who your ideal follower is.

Create a persona

In marketing, a persona is a fictional character that represents the target

audience you want to reach. That way you get a clear image of what type
of content you should create, which vibe you want to give off and you will
also know where you can find your ideal follower (which is important for
the growth tactics)

I will show you the persona for my page:

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Persona for @teezytheturtle

This is Alexandra

Alexandra’s gender:
She/her

Alexandra‘s age:
18

Alexandra's job:
Graphic designer

Alexandra‘s favorite art medium:

Digital

Alexandra‘s favorite artist:

@reenostus

Alexandra’s favorite Instagram page?

@arttipsandtricks

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Alexandra’s favorite Youtuber?
Samdoesart

Alexandra's favorite movie?

Inception

Which culture does Alexandra feel connected to?

Pop culture

What is Alexandra’s goal in life?

Turn her passion into her career and preferably earn a lot of money while
doing so

What is Alexandra’s biggest struggle?

Not growing enough on Instagram to promote her art

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Now your turn:

This is ________________

___________ gender?
__________________

_____________age?
_________________

____________job?
_______________

_____________favorite art medium?

_____________________________

____________favorite artist?
________________________

____________favorite Instagram page?

_________________________________

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____________favorite Youtuber?
___________________________

____________favorite movie?
________________________

Which culture does ____________feel connected to?

__________________________________________

What is _______________goal in life?

______________________________

What is_______________biggest struggle?

__________________________________

To make it clear: That doesn't mean that you now only should target
people with the name x and age y.

It's just for you, so you have a better idea about what your page should be
about, what you should post, write, etc.

Every time you post something, ask yourself: Would __________ enjoy
that?
The answers to these questions are playing a big role in the strategies (for
example in the 1.80$ strategy, or in other strategies, when we talk about
how you can reach your ideal followers)

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Have a Clean Username!
You need to make sure that your username is easy to pronounce and easy
to remember because your followers need to be able to find your name if
they want to check out your art. Preferably use your real name in
combination with other words. Or use a pseudonym artist name if you
don't want to use special characters.

It's okay to use special characters but make sure that it doesn't contain
more than one (preferably a “.” - because this special character is the
easiest to remember). And if you use a special character, place it where it
makes sense (to separate words).

A username like [Link] is much easier to remember than

_.xxinsertnameart.xx_

If the second username reminds you of your current username, or you

noticed that your username is hard to remember, it's time to change that.

A very good username shouldn't be longer than 8 characters and have

max. one special character

Profile Picture

Your profile picture is very important, based on that, people may decide if
they click on your profile or not. Your profile picture needs to stand out
from other profile pictures, especially in the comment sections.

There's not much that you can do wrong with your profile picture, but there
are still some avoidable mistakes, which are unfortunately seen a lot.
It doesn't matter what your profile picture is, it can be a selfie, a picture of
a character you drew, or even a logo.

The mistake many people make is that they don't consider that your profile
is often only seen as an extraordinarily small image on Instagram, so it
needs to be clear and visible:

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 Don't use any text (except if it's a logo), but if the text is too small no
one will be able to read it.

Use a clean background. It doesn't have to be just one color, but make
sure that the background doesn't contain any important element
because just like with the text, it will be distracting therefore your
profile picture will look too busy.

Make sure that you work with contrasting colors in your profile picture,
as it will often be displayed very small. By working with contrasting
colors your profile will look clear.

The Profile Test

So how do you find out if your username and profile picture are optimized?
Do this easy test:

Go on a smaller art page you follow (50-300 followers) and go through

their followers (where you're one among them). And if your page doesn't
heavily separate from the other profiles you need to work on your
username and profile picture.

A good example of catchy profiles:

Recently I tried to find out my “famous followers” because I was curious

how many artists with a bigger audience follow me. Of course, I couldn't
click on every profile of my 28k followers, which is why I only clicked on the
profiles which had the best usernames and profile pictures. It was
astonishing to find out how often these profiles had a bigger following
than the profiles with no optimized usernames and profile pictures.

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Your Instagram-bio

The next thing people will see when they land on your profile is your
Instagram bio.

Therefore, you need to precisely describe:

• who you are (as an artist)

• what the visitor can expect from your page.

You often can do this in just a few sentences.

I've analyzed the bio of some bigger artists and they often have a 2-3
paragraph long bio, where they exactly do this.

Some bigger artists also have more “edgy” Instagram bios like a cool
ﾉ ﾉ ･ﾟ ･ﾟ
quote or just stuff like: “( ⋋⋌) *: ✧ *: “
(@reenostus).

But the reason why these edgy bios work is because these artists already
have a community and a personal brand. These edgy bios are a cool tool
to demonstrate your artistic nature, but if people don't know you yet, you
need to explain in your bio who you are.

That's why it’s advisable to use the first type of Instagram bio I described
until you have a bigger audience.

So here are some examples of good and bad Instagram bios:

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 1. Divide your bio into short paragraphs - no one wants to
read a block of text
2. Too self-centered - doesn't give people a reason WHY
they should follow

Each of these paragraphs shows what YOU gain if people

follow you - but you don't give them an egoistical reason to
do so

A good example for a bio:

1. People immediately know what your page is about
2. You give them a reason to follow
3. Clean paragraphs with cool emojis
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You can of course also add additional paragraphs and it's fine to promote
your stuff (for example commissions or your shop). But make sure that
your bio includes the important features listed above. Your bio shouldn't
be longer than 3-4 paragraphs.

“Do not repost!”

Many artists have this phrase in their bio, and the issue is understandable
but this is a phrase that prevents optimal growth. It is totally wrong to
repost art without permission, let alone without credit, but if you allow
reposts you only can benefit.

If someone reposts your art by giving credit you just can gain followers
from that - maybe not many – but you also don't lose anything. And if
someone reposts your art without credit you can easily report that.

I know you might not find and report every stolen artwork, but you still
don't lose anything from it. Yes, some random kid acts like they created
your artwork – but so what? The random kid will probably never gain a lot
of reach or will be reported sooner or later by others – and you don't lose
any followers or time from that, so rather focus on yourself and your
growth.

In the end, it's a personal preference and you must make this decision for
yourself, but it’s important to understand how it could benefit to allow
reposts with credit.

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Change to a Business Account

It may sound unnecessary to specifically address this aspect, but there are
still many artists who haven't changed to a business account. With a
business account, you gain access to many more insights, analytics, and
data about your posts as soon as you have 100 followers. So, if you don't
already have one make sure to change that. You can change to a business
or creator account in your IG settings.

Keep Attention to Your Follower-to-following Ratio!

You probably know the accounts which have 200 followers but also follow
3000 people, right? Well, you don´t want to be one of these.

Example:

The reason for this is that Instagram might classify you as a bot, spam or
someone who wants to exploit the follow-for-follow tactic (which is a bad
and outdated tactic to grow) and therefore decreases your organic reach.

So how many people should I follow?

Try to follow fewer people than you have followers, and the best rule of
thumb is to follow fewer than 1,000 accounts.

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Storytelling

This may not be considered as basic, because only a few people take
advantage of it. Let’s discuss how you can! After people landed on your
profile and checked out your bio, they might not be convinced enough to
leave a follow. What might encourage them to follow is if they get to know
you better. You can present your character and your background story in a
story highlight like this:

Why is storytelling so powerful?

By showing your artistic background people can relate much more to your
person. And the more people think that you're like them, the more likely it
is that they will leave a follow.

There are countless neurological and scientifically approved reasons why

storytelling is so powerful – which is why many salespeople use it.

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“But I don't have a story to tell”

Everyone has a story to tell - you might just need to make things sound
more dramatic than they were. Here´s a blueprint of what an engaging
story could look like:

1. (Instagram) story – a hook:

A good story always needs a hook that catches people’s attention. A good
way to hook people as an artist is to show a comparison of an old (bad)
artwork to a new one, for example:

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2. (Instagram) story – the beginning:
Explain how you encountered art and how you found out that this was your
passion.

3. (Instagram) story – your idol:

A great way to make people relate to your persona is to show them a
famous (art) idol of yours, who is most likely also an idol of the one who
watches this Instagram-story highlight.

4. (Instagram) story – the issue:

All great stories need a conflict. Portrait a conflict you encountered and
which also many other artists encounter -for example, you didn't like your
art because you compared too much to others. This is both relatable and
engaging.

5. (Instagram) story – the solution:

How did you counter that problem? Maybe you practiced more and started
only comparing to your older artworks rather than other artists’ work? You
can also add some progress pictures to visualize your solution and your
audience will see how far you’ve come.

6. (Instagram) story – open end:

Now where you displayed your story, you also need to show where the
adventure is heading to. Here you can talk about your aspirations as an
artist. Do you want commissions? Open a store? Become a famous artist
displayed in galleries? Maybe you simply want to share your art for the
love of doing it.

After you created the Instagram story you can add it to your story
highlight, as displayed above. You can either write these Instagram stories
or you can also create a story where you talk to the camera; that way
people get even closer to you.

To get a better feeling for very good stories just google for “my art journey
thread twitter” – you can easily replicate these kinds of threads in your
story highlight

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New Pin-feature
Instagram has a new pin feature that allows you to pin 3 posts on top of
your feed. This allows you to show new people who visit your page your
most amazing posts – which increases the chance that they will leave a
follow:

Cred: @sceneaart on IG

I wouldn't just pin the posts which you personally enjoy the most, but rather
which also have the most number of likes – because these posts have
already been proven that also other people enjoy them!

To use this feature just click on the three dots at the corner of a post of
yours and then click on “pin to your profile”.

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Post in English!

Of course, not everyone has the privilege to speak English, but if you have
some basic English skills, post in English. If you post in your mother
language, the number of people you can reach decreases heavily. Post in
English even if you're insecure about your English, it's an incredibly good
way to improve your English skills – double win.

You can also post your captions in both languages: English and your native
language.

When I was starting out two years ago my English was very flawed. A lot of
people were often making fun of some writing mistakes, but some posts of
mine even went viral because of that (due to the high number of
comments correcting me). And now two years and 30k followers later –
after writing English every day because of Instagram – I wrote a well-
selling book in English. So never get discouraged by these kinds of
comments – just ignore them.

How Often Should You Post?

Feed posts:

When it comes to actual feed posts you should post at least 3 times a
week, but you should aim for one post a day – don't panic; that doesn't
mean you have to post an artwork a day. You'll soon learn what kinds of
content you can post as an artist.

The reason why you should aim for one post a day is on one hand because
the algorithm rewards people who post regularly. On the other hand, if
people see your posts every day, it becomes much easier to build a deeper
connection with your audience.

32
Stories:

The Instagram story is a strong tool for multiple reasons:

With stories you can show much deeper insights into your character
and your process (personal branding).

If you post a story, you get a colorful ring around your profile picture
and that separates you from accounts that don't have a story online.
This results in more profile clicks because your page looks more active
(that's why you should at least have a story online every day).

If you post engaging stories Instagram will reward you with more reach
in general, because the algorithm sees that people like to watch your
story, therefore people also might like your posts.

With stories you can promote your products and commissions to your
most loyal fans. Therefore it's always desirable to keep your story views
high with cool content. You will also later learn what kind of content
you can post there, which people like to watch.

That's why you should aim for 3-6 stories a day. Don't spam in your story
– I often see artists just spamming their story full of other posts. If you
post too much stuff into your story (which people don't want to see) people
get easily bored, and your story views will decline.

And if your views decline you don't get the benefits mentioned above. You
also can post more than six stories sometimes (for example if you do a
Q&A), but in general, it should be 3-6 stories.

33
How to Post One Post a Day

Most artists complain that it's so hard to post regularly as an artist. What
most artists get wrong is that they assume that one artwork = one piece of
content, and besides that, there's no more content that you can post as an
artist. That's completely wrong and I will prove that in this chapter. As an
artist, you are so much more than your art.

If you analyze many successful artists and designers from Los Angeles, you
notice that they are masters at recycling their work for more content. They
also don't just show off their work detached from their persona; they
manage to also present the artist behind the work (this doesn't mean you
have to show your face by the way).
Think of your favorite artist on social media – do you just like them
because of their work – or also because of their character, values, and how
they inspired you? That's the power of personal branding.

In this chapter you will learn all the kinds of content you can post as an
artist – and some of these strengthen your personal brand. You will also
learn how to recycle your existing artworks – without people getting bored
from it.

Always keep in mind that it's always about somehow giving value to the
viewer of the post, that's why successful Instagram accounts will only
present you content that is pleasing to watch.

34
Finished Artworks

The most obvious content we can post are finished artworks. Most artists
believe that this is the only piece of content they can create and are
therefore very frustrated, but that's not the case.

Time to create: Multiple hours.

35
Wips (Work in progress)

Here you just post a photo of an artwork you're currently working on.
What's important is that it should be aesthetically pleasing. You already
should have started with the coloring. It's incredibly boring to just see the
outlines of an artwork.

Here is a good example of a WIP:

WIP: 550 likes Finished artwork: 657 likes

Time to create: A few minutes (just a photo) – you create the artwork
nonetheless.

Cred. @[Link]/Instagram (I got the permission of every artist who

comes up in this eBook)

36
Aesthetic Pictures of You While Creating an Artwork

Another piece of content you can create while making an artwork – is to

simply post you in your process. Here is an example:

Time to create: A few minutes

Cred: @[Link] / Instagram

37
Print on Different Mediums

Print your art on different mediums and create new aesthetic pieces of
content. Here is an example from one of my artworks:

Time to create: 30 min. – 1 hour, depending on which medium you print it

on.

This way you created a completely new, cool-looking piece of content –

which people want to see, without much effort.

Here are some ideas on what kind of mediums you can put your work on:

Polaroid film
A T-shirt (you can create a photo of you wearing it for personal
branding reasons)
A cap
Stickers, and then shoot a photo where you placed that sticker on a
cool location / cool object.
A bag
You can photoshop your work on cool places/objects, for example on
huge banners.
And much more, just do what you can do best as an artist: Be creative!

38
Example from another reader:

cred: @[Link] on IG

Digital artwork edited on an aesthetic photo

39
Showing Your Existing Work in an Instagram Reel/ TikTok

Another way to recycle your work is by showing your work in an Instagram

Reel or TikTok.

There already exist many challenges where you can show off your existing
artworks in an entertaining way (for example 3D-challenge, show your
first vs your last artwork, etc.). Just go on Instagram reels or TikTok and
see how other artists are recycling their work.

As mentioned at the beginning of the eBook, you shouldn't put all your
eggs in one basket, therefore it's good to use TikTok and Instagram Reels.
You can create just one clip and upload it to both platforms. So, with a few
clicks, you can profit from the organic reach of both platforms.

Just make sure to not upload any clips with a TikTok watermark on
Instagram. Instagram is a competitor of TikTok and therefore decreases
the reach of Reels with a TikTok watermark.

Do one of these options to avoid uploading Reels with a TikTok watermark:

Create your clips in Instagram and upload this clip (which has no
watermark on TikTok and Instagram Reels).
Create your clip in another video editing app (which doesn't leave a
watermark) and upload this clip to Instagram Reels and TikTok.
Download your TikTok with an app that doesn't leave a watermark and
upload it on Instagram Reels.

40
CapCut - Templates

One way to recycle your art into Reels and TikToks within literally 5 minutes
of work is by using CapCut Templates.

What are CapCut Templates?

CapCut is one of the best apps do edit videos. Recently CapCut also
introduced Templates. There people can create video edits and export
them into Templates. You just have to use the Template, choose 3-5
artworks, and the Template will create the video for you. This way you even
can create content on your "very lazy" days.

How to find CapCut Templates?

You just have to search on TikTok for "CapCut Templates" or "CapCut

Templates art" to find dozens of templates. You also can filter by date to
only find the most trending ones. After you've found a template you like
you just have to click on "Try this template".

41
On my discord server I even share with you the most recent and trending
templates:

42
Progress-posts

Compare your old and new artworks! These types of posts work well
because:
a) you show your art and progress
b) you also give many other artists a lot of motivation

It’s recommended that you compare your artworks to similar artworks, for
example, it's not very effective to compare a landscape artwork to a
portrait. But it's for instance very effective to compare an older fanart of a
specific person to your latest fanart of that person.

Time to create: A few minutes (just a photo) – you create the artwork
nonetheless.

43
Use Your Art in Meme-templates

A funny way to recreate a new piece of content out of your art is to

implement them in trendy meme templates. Here's one example from my
posts:

Time to create: 3-8 minutes

44
Create Motivational Posts With Your Art

Within just a few minutes of work you can recycle your art into a new kind
of content, which gives a lot of value to your community – as you can see
there are many creatives way to recycle your art into new pieces of content:

Time to create: 10 minutes

45
Tips, Tricks and Tutorials

A great type of content that you can create, which takes less time to
produce than fully fleshed artworks while also giving a ton of value to the
community, are tips and tricks.

There are many ways you can create tips and tricks posts:

Infographic (multiple slides)

One way to present an art tutorial is by creating an infographic with

multiple slides. The advantage of this type of content is that it has a much
higher potential of going viral.

The algorithm notices how long people look at a post, and posts with
multiple slides need a longer time to be consumed. Another reason why it
has a higher potential to go viral is that artists who think that this
infographic is extremely helpful will share it in their [Link] way more
artists can see it and maybe do the same – a snowball effect occurs.

Here's an example from one of my posts. If you're an artist, rather than a

graphic designer (which is whom this post was aimed at) I would advise
you to create infographics with an arty touch (handwritten, implement a
drawing character that explains this tutorial, etc.). Just watch how other
artists create infographics.

46
Time to create: 30min – 2 hours.

Infographic (single photo)

If you only have a simple trick, which doesn't need much explanation, you
can create it in a single post. For example: Do/Don't - posts. Or perhaps
posts where you explain how to draw a certain item with a few simple
steps.

Time to create: 30 min – 2 hours.

Instagram Reels/TikTok

Another way to present tips and tutorials is to just record a short TikTok /
Instagram Reel of you executing this tip. The advantage of this is that the
organic reach on TikTok and Instagram Reels is extremely high and in
addition to that Instagram even pushed the feature. It also strengthens
your personal brand because you're able to help people and a videoclip is
much more personal than an infographic.

Time to create: 20min – one hour

47
Twitter-posts

The quickest way to give value to the art community is by just creating a
helpful tweet on Twitter, screenshot it, edit it in a way that it fits to
Instagram (square) and then just post it on Instagram. Here is an example
from one of my posts.

And if you´re afraid that this will ruin the aesthetic of your page, you can
become more creative. For example, here I used a zoomed in extract of one
of my works and used it as the background for a tweet to create a very
aesthetically pleasing and informative post:

Time to create: a few seconds!

48
You even can create such a post as a Reel::

Short tutorial on how to create such a Reel:

1. Screenshot your Tweet (in darkmode)
2. Go into Inshot and choose an artwork as a background
3. Zoom into the artwork
4. Go to Filter and lower the brightness of your artwork
5. Go to Filter -> Effects -> and add the "zoom out effect"
6. Go to "Bib", add your Screenshot and use the blend feature to get rid
of the black background of your Screenshot
7. Make the video 5-9seconds long
8. Add some good music on Instagram (e.g. Lofi)

You can also use a video of you creating art as a background-video

instead of a static artwork.

49
How to create one month of content within 30 minutes

This is a content-creation hack I learned recently. And trust me - it truely is

powerful. We can use AI to create lots of Reels for us.

And before you freak out - no we won't use any AI that steals the work of
artists, we will only use ChatGPT. If you personally believe that ChatGPT is
also unethical to use - this hack can also be done without ChatGPT:

First go to ChatGPT and use this prompt:

"I am an artist on Instagram. I encourage other artists to [aspects you like

to talk with your community]. Give me 30 unique quotes in a table that I
can share with my audience that will make their day. Make each quote 3-4
sentences long"

This e.g. can look like this:

50
Paste this table into your own spreadsheet and rewrite each quote using
your own words. We don't just want to copy-paste ChatGPT's answer
because people will be able to tell - and you also want to embrace your
own authentic voice in your posts. ChatGPT only gives us the ideas.

Then go to [Link] and search for a "Tweet quote Instagram reel" -

Template

Then click on "Bulk Create" (Disclaimer: This feature is only available in

Canva pros plan. I personally have Canva Pro and can genuinely
recommend it. It truly is a great investment for creating content.)

51
Then click on "Add data manually" and copy and paste your own table of
quotes.

52
Then you only need to click on the text in your Template -> click on the
three dots -> click on "connect data" -> click on the quote -> click
continue -> generate pages

53
And finally you only need to drag and drop different background videos
where you create art - and no, you don't need to show your face in these
videos:

*Drag*

*And drop*

54
Disclaimer: This type of content isn't meant to make you go viral. This
content is only for your lazy days when you have no content ready to post.

But even with this kind of posts you can reach a good amount of new
people:

55
Recreate Successful Post-ideas

A way to get unlimited viral-potential content ideas is to just take post

ideas that are going viral and recreate them in your style.

Take for example these posts where you draw a certain object in 1 minute,
5 minutes and 30 minutes and share the results in a post.

You can find these ideas very quickly by just scrolling through the explore
page. The great part about this is, that you don't have to try out ideas and
see if people like them or not. You just take ideas where it was already
proven that the community likes them – reproduce what's already working
– Proof of concept.

Time to create: 10 minutes – 2 hours – depending on the idea.

56
Instagram Reels/TikTok

The same thing applies to Instagram Reels and TikToks – there are almost
unlimited Reels and TikTok ideas you can create as an artist. You can also
get inspired by other artists and observe which kinds of Reels/TikToks are
working well and which don´t. But here’s some inspiration:

Already mentioned:
Showing off your existing work in cool ways, for example:
3D-filter challenge
Turning your art into album covers
Showing your oldest vs your newest artwork
Tips
Tutorials
CapCut-Templates

New ideas:
Stop motions of the artwork you're creating (take photos of a few steps
of the process and create a video where you can see how the artwork
gets created piece by piece)
Scenes while you're drawing which are satisfying to watch (for example
slow brushstrokes with chill music)
Answering questions, you often get (for example which tools you use)
Art-supply hauls
Art challenges
Presenting funny artist struggles
Tell a story (related to art) of yours and present it with photos –
remember: Storytelling is a strong tool
The art vs the artist- challenge

57
And much more – it doesn't even make sense to try to name all ideas
because every day there are new cool trends artists create you can hop on.

Similar to the posts you also need to get inspiration from other artists. For
example, just showing your work can be done in 100 different ways. That's
why you need to get on TikTok and Instagram Reels and first observe, to
get an impression of how many reels and TikToks you can create.

Time to create: 5min – 1 hour depending on the idea.

58
As you can see there are so many ways to create valuable content as an
artist other than just showing pictures of your finished artworks. As an
artist, you're way more than just your artwork!

After you've seen some ideas you're now also able to come up with your
own content ideas. Do what you can do the best as an artist: Be creative
and don't limit that creativity to your art, also expand that creativity to
your content creation and marketing skills.

You - who have seen all the endless possibilities

on how to recycle your work for multiple pieces
of content

Artists who believe that

they only can post their
art

59
Quick guide on how to create viral Reels / TikToks

To save you a lot of time of trial and error I’ve created a little guide on how
to create good Reels and TikToks. Being able to create entertaining Reels
and TikToks is a huge advantage and needs to be part of your content
strategy, no matter if you're an artist, a designer, a producer - it can boost
your career in every creative domain.

How does the Reels and TikTok algorithm work?

It's quite simple: The algorithm just checks how many people are not
skipping your video, and how long the watch time is – the watch time can
even be >100% if people decide to rewatch the video. Depending on this it
will increase or decrease the reach of your video. There are also some other
parameters like comments, shares and likes -but the watchtime is the
most important one!

So here's how to increase the watch rate and watch time of your video:

Your video needs a hook: At the beginning of your video, you need
something that catches the people and encourages them to watch till
the end.

This can, for example, be a caption where you quickly explain what this
TikTok is about (“How to draw a nose”, “Doing my first commission
ever”, etc.) or you can tease the result of the video with a smart
thumbnail. Consumers on social media want content faster and faster,
so if you can't catch them in the first 3 sec, they will just swipe to the
next Reel/TikTok.

It's not about you – it´s about them. This applies not just to reels but
also to normal posts. You always need to somehow give value to the
consumer. This doesn't mean that you can't show off your work – you
just need to do it in an entertaining way.

Use trendy music/sounds

60
Participate in cool new challenges.

Use jump-cuts to increase the perceived speed of the video

Make it so that some parts of the videos need to be rewatched – for

example by showing interesting scenes or text very quickly. That way
you can reach watch times of 200-400%.

Add Subtitles to your videos! Many people watch videos outside or on

the bus without sound. If they only can understand your videos with
sound, they will scroll away which is bad for the algorithm. Therefore,
generate subtitles automatically (automatically with TikTok or Capcut
– or add them manually)

Do something controversial. If you have an art-related unpopular

opinion, don't be afraid of telling it. That way your comment section
will be full of discussions and therefore the Reel/TikTok gets boosted
by the algorithm (due to the high engagement).

Use Zooms in and out to increase the perceived speed of the video

Post often – Virality can't be planned and is kind of random. It's like
throwing a dice: If you throw it once the chance to land a “6” is low. But
if you throw the dice 100 times it's almost impossible to not land a “6”.

And the most important tip: Consume TikToks and Reels by yourself,
analyze new trends or other viral videos, and reverse engineer why they
are doing so well. Do they have a hook? Why do you want to watch till
the end of the video? Do people comment a lot and if yes, why exactly?

61
The best tip would be to always also share your videos on TikTok. Not only
because of the high organic reach. But also because TikTok gives you
interesting insights about the average watch time of your video.

There you will exactly see at what point people started to stop watching
your video - and you can try to improve that next time.

Here's for example the average watchtime of a flopped TikTok:

Watched full video: 14.77%

That means out of 100 people only 14 people watched the 8 second long
video until the end, which is why it flopped.

62
Now, let's compare this flopped post to a viral post from Chloe - also a
reader of this eBook:

Watched full video: 69.63%

Views: 3.8M

63
“But I don´t like TikTok and the whole new short video-trend.”

It’s not a trend. There are many scientific reasons why short-video formats
are blowing up like this.

Short format video content will play a huge part in the future: Internet gets
faster and cheaper (videos can be downloaded faster and in better
quality), the quality of phone cameras gets better, etc.

Taking advantage of the benefits of short video format content is currently

the fastest way to grow on social media. Many creatives on TikTok started
their small business successfully just because of TikTok. If you're
passionate about something and want to reach many people with your
passion in a short time – mastering short format video will help you a lot.

Here’s a case study of an early follower of mine, whom I advised to start

TikTok and crushed it:

64
 From 0 - 112k Followers In 1 & 1/2 years!

At the end of 2019

@dza_arts DM’ed me and
expressed how exhausted he
is about the high competition
on Instagram and therefore
the low organic reach. That's
why I advised him to start
posting on TikTok because
there the organic reach is
much higher (back then IG
reels wasn't developed yet)

65
And he immediately took action. At the end of
2019 he posted his first TikTok and then started
to post consistently:

66
He is mostly posting about his line art and watercolor artworks – so what
he's done well is to stick with his concept.

In these 1 ½ years he posted over 582 TikToks.

That's 1,06 TikToks a day – here you can learn another thing from him –
his work ethic. If you want to become a successful artist, you can't do the
work a hobby-artist does and expect to get lots of followers.

If you want to become successful, you must do more than the average
does. Do you think that he was every day 100% passionate about creating
and uploading a TikTok? Of course not, he probably also had many days
where he was unmotivated to post something – but especially in these
days you must be consistent, so you don´t fall out of the routine you've
worked so hard to maintain.

His most viral post has 1M views and is ironically based on a hate comment
who was making fun of his “dead account”.

67
Here´s another thing you can learn from him: Never let other people tear
you down.

You always must think about it this way - while you´re working every day to
achieve your dream, these people are spending their whole day on the
internet to tear other people down. Rather feel sorry for and give love to
these people, because it seems they’re projecting their dissatisfaction with
their life onto you.

But there´s one thing @dza_arts hasn´t figured out yet. How to promote
his Instagram through his TikTok-reach successfully. He has 109k followers
on TikTok, but “only” 1-2k followers on Instagram:

68
Why is it so important to also promote your Instagram?

There are two reasons why you should cross-promote your IG through
TikTok:

1. Security – if your TikTok account somehow dies for whatever reason,

you´re back at 0 again.
2. More qualitative followers: TikTok is like a double-edged sword: It's
extremely easy to get followers, but if everyone gets followers easily, a
follower isn't worth that much – supply and demand. If every user
follows a lot of TikTok accounts AND sees other people they don't
follow on their for-you page, it's very hard to get seen by your
followers.

That's why many TikTokers with 100k followers often “only” have 2-3k
views on their videos. On Instagram, you can reach your followers much
easier.

How do you cross-promote your Instagram account successfully?

You can try out to just announce your Instagram-page in a TikTok and
have your Instagram account linked in your TikTok-bio but that's often not
effective enough. Keep in mind: People are lazy and to follow you on
Instagram they must do a lot of steps (leave the TikTok-app, go on your
Instagram-profile, leave a follow) and this without getting any value in
return.

That´s why you need to give them better incentives to follow you also on
your Instagram page. You can do that by:

Hosting a giveaway on TikTok: Announce that every person who follows

you on Instagram becomes part of a giveaway and can win a cool
prize.

69
 Posting an interesting clip on TikTok – but the clue here is that the clip
is divided into two parts: In the first part you tease what's going to
happen and in the 2nd part (the interesting part) - the thing people
want to see - will happen. The 2nd part is of course only posted as a
Reel on Instagram, and people must check out your Instagram to see
the 2nd part.

Post a cool TikTok (one where you used a cool art technique) and only
post the “behind the scenes" on your Instagram. Same as before you
just announce that people can check out your Instagram post to find
the tutorial.

Now that you know which platforms you should use and which kinds of
content you can post, let's discuss some tactics to get more reach on these
platforms. Just posting content and getting reach is, due to the high
competition, almost impossible, you also need to implement some tactics.

I will not just show you which tactics to use, but also tactics you should not
use!

The most important part you should take away from this chapter is that
you can post much more than your art, the great opportunity of TikTok and
Instagram Reels and that you can even recycle your art for more content.

Most artists do this:

One Artwork = one post, but that way they will just burn out

You need to do this:

One artwork =
One WIP-post
One artwork-post
One reel of you creating the artwork
One reel where you show off your work and this artwork is among them
One trick post you learned while creating that artwork
One post where you printed the artwork on another medium
Etc.

70
Growth Tactics
Before we go into the growth tactics you first need to be educated about
the two main phases when it comes to growing an audience.

There is first the grind phase:

This is the phase of the beginning of your art page, when you only have a
few followers. In this phase, your posts don't get much reach because… you
only have a few followers. Most artists desperately try to post and post in
this phase without many results. Therefore, they declare the “Instagram
algorithm” their enemy, even though it's just their lack of knowledge.
Because in this phase you aren't supposed to get the most growth from the
algorithm, you need to grind your first one hundred and thousand
followers through other tactics, which I present to you in the next chapter.

After you grinded a smaller following (a few thousand followers) you enter
the next phase:

The exponential growth phase:

When you have a little audience, your posts are much more likely to go
viral or land on the explore page where you can easily gain new followers
– your earlier grind finally paid off.

As you can see from my growth: I had to grind my first 5k followers through
smart tactics, and then – boom – exponential growth

71
Writing Good Captions

A basic aspect, where already many artists fail, is to write good captions.
The Instagram algorithm measures:
a) how long do people watch your posts and
b) how high the engagement is (likes, comments, etc.) and you can
increase these two factors with a professionally written caption.

Most artists just write a few words in their captions (for example just the
name of the work they posted), but it's important that you write a longer
caption that people like to read. That way you can increase the time
people look at your post and by accomplishing that the algorithm will
boost your post.

What can you write in your caption? If you post an artwork you created,
just talk about it but in more detail – What inspired you, does it have a
deeper message, what complications did you face while creating this piece
and how did you solve these, which techniques did you use, etc. Take 5-10
minutes to write a good caption.

CTA- Call to action.

All good captions need a call to action – a clear sentence that encourages
people to engage with your post (preferably a comment). The easiest way
to do that is by asking questions people want to answer. It can be a simple
question or a more complex one where you're asking for the opinions of
others.

For example, I once posted an art meme where you saw a ball where the
shading was placed incorrectly and I wrote this simple caption:

72
As you can see this caption resulted in more than one thousand comments!
And you can see a correlation between the number of comments and the
number of likes (18k) – this post went extremely viral. The reason why it
went viral is because Instagram noticed that it was getting a lot of
comments and therefore pushed it to more people.

You always should try to combine a CTA and a longer caption. You can do
that by discussing something in your caption and then ask for the opinion
of your community.

If you do that place the CTA at the beginning of the caption and then
present your point of view – that way you make sure that everyone can see
the CTA and can comment their opinion.

Also make sure to work with paragraphs if you write a longer caption – no
one wants to read a huge block of text.

It´s especially important that you write all your captions out and not just
copy and paste them. Instagram notices that and might decrease your
reach.

Template you can always use for writing captions:

[Question to the audience]

[Main caption written readable in paragraphs]

[Main caption written readable in paragraphs]

[Main caption written readable in paragraphs]

[Main caption written readable in paragraphs]

[CTA to follow you or check out your story highlight @yourusername]

:
:
Hashtags

73
A Funnel

You need a clear funnel that converts impressions on your posts to visitors
into followers on your page.

What's a funnel? A funnel is a clear process that converts a person from

one state into another state.
In our case: Impression ➔ Visitor ➔ Follower

I think I can explain you this the best by showing my funnel on Instagram:

When a new user sees a post of mine, they see the following caption:

As you can see, in the last sentence I highly incentivize them to check out
my profile/story highlights so they can benefit from free value. And when
they check out my profile, they get to see my highly compelling storytelling
highlight (the one you learned earlier), free tips, and my valuable posts –
which leads to a very high conversion rate from profile visitors to followers:

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I once even got a DM from a new follower, and I immediately asked them if
they went through my funnel – to find out if it works. Spoiler alarm, it
works:

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The Funnel On Social Media:

First Impression

CTA to check out your page

They check out your highlights and posts

They follow

You gain their trust over time

They buy from you

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Okay, so how can you create such a funnel for yourself?

CTA's:

On your posts, you always need two Calls to action – one at the beginning
of your caption (which you learned earlier – to increase comments) and
one at the end of your caption where you incentivize people to check out
your page or follow you.

Examples of such Call to action:

“If you struggle with finding your art style, check out my story highlight
“My story” to find out how I found my art style: @yourpagename”

“If you ask yourself how I create watercolor artworks like this feel free to
check out my story highlight “art tips”: @yourpagename”

A/B test your CTA's:

When it comes to CTA's you want to use a CTA which converts impressions
to visitors the most effectively. And to find out which type of CTA converts
impressions to followers the best you need to test different CTA's.

Here is an example from my CTA analysis:

I tried out two different kinds of CTA's:

CTA nr. A: “Follow @teezy.v2 for instant back pain”

CTA nr. B: “Check out my story highlights “free tips” to learn how to grow
your art page: @teezy.v2”

And here are the results of my analysis:

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Caption A - “Follow @teezy.v2 for instant backpain”:

Non followers Reach/Visits Reach/Follow

Postname Pofievisits Follows
reach ratio in % in %
fastest 25,725 47 6 0,18% 0,02%
dolphin 18,047 22 0 0,12% 0,00%
this old 50,046 18 0 0,04% 0,00%
caveman 18,070 23 4 0,13% 0,02%
stranger 660 19 0 2,88% 0,00%
draw car 22,529 30 2 0,13% 0,01%
rick 1,604 29 2 1,81% 0,12%
choosing 15,819 49 2 0,31% 0,01%
opens IG 16,645 39 8 0,23% 0,05%
elon musk 66,338 200 16 0,30% 0,02%
you what 27,524 57 6 0,21% 0,02%
half price 15,770 30 6 0,19% 0,04%
sister 4,607 31 6 0,67% 0,13%
ross 20,905 120 24 0,57% 0,11%
mom can I 85,405 122 4 0,14% 0,00%
are you ok 88,136 415 146 0,47% 0,17%
style 1,584 33 2 2,08% 0,13%
art ass 5,914 25 6 0,42% 0,10%
AVERAGE 0,61% 0,05%

Here you can see the average profile-visits/non-followers-reach ratio in %

and the gained-followers/non-followers-reach ratio in %.

In this case it´s 0,61% and 0,05%. Which means out of 10.000 new
reached people on average 61 people check out my page with this caption
and 5 people follow directly.

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Now in comparison to caption B: “Check out my story highlights “free tips”
to learn how to grow your art page: @teezy.v2”:

Non followers Reach/Visits Reach/Follows

Postname Pofievisits Follows
reach ratio in % in %
Bob ross 1,013 11 0 1,09% 0,00%
autumm 367 29 3 7,90% 0,82%
james bon 1,228 30 4 2,24% 0,30%
IG 5,616 44 4 0,78% 0,07%
artists 1,056 38 2 3,60% 0,19%
plan 490 21 0 4,29% 0,00%
monkey 2,875 27 2 0,94% 0,07%
living 2,152 59 8 2,74% 0,37%
algorithm 5,213 15 2 0,29% 0,04%
gaming 3,090 22 2 0,71% 0,06%
listening 1,597 5 2 0,31% 0,13%
deserve 9,940 40 10 0,40% 0,10%
parents 2,441 30 8 1,23% 0,33%
never 22,432 48 11 0,21% 0,05%
hello 1,988 13 0 0,65% 0,00%
12 tips 8,680 42 8 0,48% 0,09%
someone 3,726 37 2 0,99% 0,05%
AVERAGE 1,70% 0,16%

Here we have a 1,7% profile-visits/non-followers-reach ratio and a 0,16%

gained-follower/non-followers-reach ratio. That means the second
caption converts people 2,7x better to visitors and 3,2x better to direct
followers.

This means just with a single sentence in my caption I can accelerate my

growth by 3x. That's a difference between gaining 20,000 followers in 9 or
3 years – again just because of a single sentence!

And maybe there exists an even better caption I haven't tested yet – that's
why it's so important to regularly try out and test new things. Similarly, you
also can A/B test your story highlights and pinned posts to see which
constellation results in the highest profile visits/new-follower ratio.

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It's important that you use many data to make conclusions. You really
can't make good conclusions if you only tested a caption on 4-5 posts

You don't just can A/B test your CTA in your caption. You can A/B test
everything: Your storyhighlights, your IG Bio, etc:

= 16%
profilevisit
/follower
conversion

Variaton A
A/B test of
Bio
= 9%
profilevisit
/follower
conversion

Variaton B

These few % don't seem like a lot - but with enough attention and over a
longer time they add up to a lot.

On the long term these very few % can differ between thousands of
followers.

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Hashtag-strategy

There are many uncertainties when it comes to hashtags. No one really

knows which strategy you should apply. It's extremely hard to measure
which hashtag strategy is the best because the success of a post is the
result of many factors, not just the hashtags.

That's why I want to present you the most common hashtag strategies you
can try out and decide for yourself which are working the best for you.

But no matter which strategy you use it's important that you write the
hashtags out (like the caption) and not copy and paste them (Instagram
notices that and might categorize you as spam/bot). Because of that you
should also re-arrange and change some hashtags from time to time, like
every 2-3 days.

15-22 Hashtags:
You can use up to 30 hashtags on a post, but you should rather aim for 15
to 22 because then Instagram doesn't categorize you as spam.

Which hashtags should you use? Hashtags have different sizes. For
example, these hashtags have way more than 1 million posts, therefore
they are very competitive and it's quite unlikely that people will see your
work here if your page is small:

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While on these long-tail hashtags there are less than 200k posts,
therefore it's easier to rank higher on these hashtags (if you're a
watercolor artist):

Now you understand the meaning of “the size of a hashtag”, let's talk
about the hashtags you should use. The tinier your community is, the
smaller and less competitive hashtags you should use, because you don't
have a community who likes your post to let it rank high on bigger
hashtags.

Here a little guide on how you should distribute your hashtags depending
on the size of your page:

Small hashtags: 100-100k

Medium hashtags: 100k-1M
Large hashtags: 1M+

Account size: Hashtag size to use:

0-1k followers 10-15 small; 5-7 medium
1-10k 7-12 small; 2-5 medium; 1-2large
10k – 100k 5-10 small; 2-5 medium; 4-5 large
100k+ 0-5 small; 0-5 medium; 7-12 large

Make sure to always use relevant hashtags, hashtags that fit your art style
and the post you post. It's for example not useful to use “popular”
hashtags like #beach or #like4like.

You can find relevant hashtags with a fitting size through websites like
"inflact". Just search for a keyword like “watercolor” and it will show you
small, medium, and large hashtags for this topic.

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Explore page-hashtag strategy

As you know, landing on the explore page is also a good way to get reach
on your post. This hashtag strategy is quite new and the goal of it is that
the algorithm gets to know you and your targeted audience better, so it
can roll your content out on the explore page.

Here's how this strategy works:

In this strategy, you only should use 8 hashtags: 3 larger hashtags that
describe the overall topic of your page (for example, #watercolorart,
#watercolorartist, #artistoninstagram) and 5 smaller hashtags that
describe your post. E.g. if you posted a sketch, you could use long-tail
hashtags which include the keyword “sketch”.

As I already mentioned it's extremely hard to tell which hashtag strategy is

the best. Therefore, it makes sense to track the success of your posts and
then decide which strategy works best for you, but keep in mind that many
more factors determine the success of a post.

You can easily do that by clicking on the “insights” button of a post and
then scrolling down. There you will see how much reach you get through
hashtags, explore, etc:

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1.80$ Strategy

This is an example of a “grind phase” tactic. What's the secret to

becoming successful on social media? Be social! That's what this tactic is
about. It's especially useful if you have very few followers and don't know
at all where you should start.

Start by leaving 90 qualitatively valuable comments a day on other posts

in your art-niche (90 comments * leaving your 0.02cents = 1.80$, that's
where the name of this tactic comes from).

It's important that you don’t just spam generic comments like “Wow, so
good” because
a) Instagram will action block you for that and
b) people will notice that it´s not genuine.

Also, don't confuse this tactic with posting self-promotional comments,

this tactic is 100% about giving value to the community and expecting
nothing in return. Rather really take a few minutes for a good comment,
ask questions regarding the post, write something funny, start a
conversation/discussion, refer to their caption, etc.

How does this tactic help you?

1. You can create deeper connections with other creatives which can be
even more valuable than a follower.

2. You also gain followers from this. Let´s say a good comment from you
gets seen by 5 other accounts on average. 90 comments * 5 people = 450
impressions a day! Let´s say out of these 450 impressions only 4 people
would leave a follow a day, that would still be 120 followers a month. That
might sound like very little but keep in mind that one gained follower can
also result in much more followers in the future (for example by supporting
and sharing your content) – that's gone unnoticed in the calculation
above.

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3. Do this tactic 30 minutes before and after you posted a new post to
boost your new post because people you interacted with might check it out
and leave a like. And because the first 30 minutes of a post are the most
important ones it has a higher potential to reach more people.

How do you find posts you can comment on?

Just search for hashtags in your niche (Use the persona you created earlier
to find relevant hashtags to your audience!) and sort them by newest, that
way you make sure to not comment on any older posts where no one will
see your comment.

You also can leave the artists you really enjoy a follow. Over time your
home feed will turn into an exhibition of posts of artists you enjoy a lot.
And this way you also can do the $1.80 strategy more genuinely.

Make sure not to post all 90 comments at once, because currently you can
only like and comment on 60 posts an hour before you get action blocked
by Instagram. That´s why you should split the 90 comments a day into 2 *
45 comments a day, or 3* 30 comments a day.

You will notice that it's quite hard and exhausting to write that many
different and genuine comments and it's okay if you don´t exactly reach
90 comments in a day. But that's what it takes to become successful on
social media, especially at the beginning – it's a hard, but worthwhile
grind.

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Update: June 2023

I am updating this section since there has been an Instagram update:

Now hashtags can only be filtered in "top posts" and "recent top posts":

This makes it harder to find new posts in hashtags - but I have three
solutions for that.

First Solution:

Search for very big hashtags with many posts and filter with "top recent
posts", since it is a big hashtag where many posts are shared a day - it
willl be easier to find recent posts.

Second solution:

Use the desktop version of Instagram. Here hashtags are still filtered
normally. You can easily use the desktop version of Instagram in your
browser - you don't need to install something on your computer.

Third solution:

Train your home-feed algorithm to show recent posts (you will learn about
it in the next chapter).

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Top-comment Strategy

Take the 1.80$ strategy, inject it with some testosterone and you get the
Top-comment strategy. This tactic is way more efficient when it comes to
gaining followers than the 1.80$ strategy – but I would still advise you to
start with the 1.80$ strategy to also create some connections with other
artists in your niche.

So, what´s the Top-comment strategy about?

You´ve probably noticed that on some bigger meme pages there are
always people in the comment section who become top comment (a
comment with the most amount of likes which is therefore ranked at the
top of the comment section). These comments often have thousands of
likes and therefore get a lot of attention. You can do the same to also get a
lot of attention, and even if only a very small percentage of this huge
attention will check out your profile – that´s still a big win.

Here is an example from one of my pages:

It´s quite easy to become a top comment on a post because there’s little
competition. You just need to write something quite funny and related to
the post. But what's more important is, is that you have to be fast. If you
want to become a top comment you need to be one of the first commenters
on a post, because later if the comments are already ordered by the
number of likes it´s too late.

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How to become top comment consistently:

Search for a few bigger accounts in your niche - go with the following
criteria:
A high following (100k + followers), the more followers the more the
potential attention but the competition also increases
A good engagement rate.

Don´t become irritated. These pages don´t have to be meme or theme

pages, they also can be other bigger artists. Use the persona you created
earlier to find pages your persona follows.

Find 20-30 of these accounts and do the following:

Follow them
Activate the notification on feed posts:

That way you will get a notification if a page posts something new, and
you can comment within seconds.

Like a few posts - that way the algorithm notices that you like their
content. If the algorithm doesn't think you like the content of the page you
might get no notifications even though you activated them.

That's the secret to how you can comment very fast on new viral posts, but
you also can take steps further:

88
Train your home feed algorithm!

You can also train your home-feed algorithm to only show the newest
posts, so you can become top comment even more efficiently!

To do that go on your home-feed and only engage with posts that were
posted less than 5-20 minutes ago until it only shows you posts that were
posted a few minutes ago when you refresh.

When you engage with the post make sure to like, save, and look at it for
10-20 seconds.

Then only engage with posts that were posted a few seconds ago, until you
only get the newest posts if you refresh.

This way you can systematically try to become top-comment on recent

posts.

But what kind of comment should you write?

Most top comments are quite funny and are often related to the post. No
matter if you think your top-comment idea is stupid, just post it anyways,
always shoot your shot. What also works well is to ask simple questions
with only two choices.

Here are a few of my top comments so you get a sense for it:

89
Context: George was a cute baby ape shown in the post

Context: Meme about shrek

Context: The post showed a video of an artist doing a crazy challenge

90
Context: The post was from an artist whose art has been stolen

91
After you posted your comment, you can also like it with other accounts or
ask your friends to like it; 3-5 likes are more than enough. This way your
comment gets ranked higher and the probability to gain more likes on your
comment is higher.

But how many followers can this tactic gain you? Let's do the math:

Let's say you become top comment on 5 different posts a day (which is
totally achievable, if you leave 20 top-comment potential comments a
day)

You get ~ 1k likes per top comment, that would be 1k * 5 comments = 5k

likes on your comments per day.

Not everyone who sees your comment also likes it, so the number of people
who saw your comment is much higher than the 5k likes, probably more
like 15k = 5k * 3 (every third one who sees your comment also liked it).

That would be 15k * 30 days = 450k impressions a month on your

comments

Let's say only 1% of these impressions check out your accounts out of
curiosity: 450k * 0,01 = 4 500 profile visits.

As already mentioned, – it's very important here to always have a story

online. If you have a story, online, you get a colorful circle around your
profile picture, because of that your account looks much more alive and
people will more likely click on your profile.

Back to the calculation: I currently have a 10% conversion rate, which

means that for every 100 profile visits on my page 10 leave a follow, so I
will calculate with that:

4 500 profile visits * 0,10 = 450 follows a month! That´s 5 400 follows a
year – just from top-comments!

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Here´s also a DM from an artist who uses this tactic very often:

93
Comment-Stacking

Another way to get displayed at the top of the commentsection - without

really becoming top-comment is through comment-stacking.

Here you simply reply to the top comments. This is especially helpful if the
top-comments are questions.

Here an example from me:

In this Reel a bigger artist showed transparently how much they earned as
a full time artist. Many people in the comments ofc had questions about
that. And since this is my excat niche I simply jumped into the conversation
and answered those:

94
The mere exposure effect:

To fully understand the effectiveness of the three tactics above (Top-

comment, $1.80, and comment stacking), I think I need to explain the
"mere exposure effect". In psychology, the "mere exposure effect" is a
phenomenon by which people tend to create a preference for something
because they are familiar with it.

What does this mean for our comment strategies?

Imagine you scroll through IG daily. Every day your favorite artist posts
something and you check out the comments to see what other people are
saying. And every day you see the same profile as a top comment. You
might not notice it the first 2-3 times. But after seeing the same catchy
profile picture for the 6th or 7th time you probably will get curious and
check out their profile.

That's why consistency is so much more important than intensity when

implementing these tactics.

And that's also why it's more effective to engage within one certain niche -
and not 7-8 different niches, where no one will recognize you again.

95
Accountability:

From my own experience, I can say: When doing tactics like $1.80 we often
OVERestimate the work we actually put in. You might think that you
engaged with 22 posts, while in reality you "only" engaged with 9. The
best way to eliminate this bias is by downloading a "floating counter" app.

This is a simple button that floats above your screen, and when pressing it
the counter will increase. So whenever you leave a comment you can
increase the count. This way you get a true representation of the work
you've put in:

96
TikTok And IG-Reels
This eBook already showed why TikTok and Instagram Reels are such a
huge opportunity, but I can't emphasize this enough.

One big misconception about growing through IG Reels and TikTok:

If you analyze the growth of other successful artists who use IG Reels and
TikTok you will notice one thing – their growth wasn't consistent – at one
point they just landed a viral clip which brought them thousands of
followers.
One year ago, I was posting IG Reels every day until one hit suddenly 2.7
million views which resulted me in gaining thousands of followers each
month! – Many artists don't grow by that even in a year!

97
Reels and Retargeting tactic

Did you know that you can retarget people who watched your Reel but
didn't leave a follow yet? Well, you can't - but the algorithm can if you
play it right. Maybe you also experienced the following scenario:

You scrolled through IG Reels and the algorithm showed you a viral Reel
from a creator. You saved or liked this Reel - but you didn't leave a follow
to this creator. And then you notice that the algorithm shows you more -
less viral Reels from this creator - even though you didn't leave a follow.

Now - how can you use that for yourself?

You want to hit a viral Reel - so other Reels from you can retarget people
who watched that Reel. Viral Reels often have in common that they are
somehow mainstream. Very niched videos are harder to go viral, because
it's harder for the algorithm to find people who might be interested in
them. Viral Reels are interesting for every user.

So don't be afraid to create some "mainstream" Reels from time to time

(e.g. participate in trends, do some fanart of a hyped movie, etc.)

Many artists are afraid to do this because they believe they will get less
relevant followers. But due to the "retargeting feature" you actually end up
with the exact followers you want.

Your viral video The algorithm You get

gets played to the retargets the followers
"mainstream" your persona you want

98
How do you land such a viral hit?

You only can optimize a video so it has a high potential to go viral (hook,
watch time, etc.) - but you can't predict if a video will go viral or not –
many artists had to post hundreds of Reels and TikToks before they landed
such a hit – but other people only see the tip of the iceberg. They only see
that “lucky” viral video – without seeing all the other work the artist put
into the videos which didn't go viral:

99
I really want you to take advantage of this opportunity because one main
way to grow on social media is to find out and focus on the “growth
content”.

Growth content is the type of content that currently has a lot of demand,
but not many creators are using it, therefore it has a lot of organic reach.

And currently, this type of content is short format videos posted on IG

Reels and TikTok.

Success is always about adaptation. Companies that didn't adapt to the

internet are out of business, Professional athletes who neglected the power
of social media get paid less money.

So, to become a winner in the social media game you also have to adapt
to short format video content.

100
YT-shorts

A brand new marketing channel with a similar high organic reach like
TikTok and IG Reels is YT-shorts.

YouTube isn't only a social media platform - it's also the 2nd biggest
search engine worldwide. This means artists are searching daily for
solutions to their problems. And they could potentially find your YT-shorts:

How does YT-short work?

Unlike on Instagram and TikTok you don't use any hashtags. You just use
your video, add a title and upload it. Therefore the title is important. It
needs to be interesting and search engine optimized - so other artists can
find it when searching for a question.

101
Make sure to add "#shorts" at the end of your title. That helps the
algorithm to categorize your video.

The YT-shorts algorithm works like this: YouTube runs your video against
many different audiences - until it finds a fitting audience. That's why it´s
possible that some of your videos could get 0 views (when it doesn't find a
fitting audience). That's also why it´s important to use keywords in your
title (e.g. "artist", "art", "manga", etc.) so that the algorithm can
categorize your niche better.

YT-shorts however isn't a platform you want to build your main audience
on - because it's harder to reach them. That's why you definetly should link
your other socials on your YT channel.

So, every time you create a video for IG Reels also post it on TikTok and YT
shorts. This way you get 3x the reach with the same amount of work. You
also get way more data to analyze and improve your content.

It only takes an additional 5 minutes but the upside is huge.

102
Reddit

The great thing about Reddit is that it's very democratic, there are no
followers etc. which means that every user has the same chance to go viral.

The goal of using reddit:

Reddit isn't a platform where you can build an audience, instead use it as
a tool to push your art and other social medias.
Example from one of my followers:

Of course, this might not happen with your first post, but if you keep trying
and upload great artworks to many different forums you will land a hit
sooner or later.

103
How to go viral on Reddit:

Whenever you create a new artwork, also post it on Reddit forums like r/art
or r/digitalart, etc. There are Reddit communities specifically for your art
style, so create a list of all the Reddit communities you could post your art
on.

Make sure to not advertise your username on other social media platforms
directly, most Reddit forums prohibit self-promotion. Instead, add a
watermark or name your username n the comments of your Reddit post if
other users ask for it.

Reddit works like this: People can ‘upvote’ or ‘downvote’ your post and the
more people ‘upvote’ your post, the more people will see it (snowball
effect).

After you posted your Reddit post, make sure to send it to your friends so
they can upvote it and trigger the snowball effect.

Also, on most Reddit forums you can't post with a newly created account.
You first need some “karma” – which you get by gaining upvotes from
others. And the easiest way to gain karma is by just leaving some nice
comments on new posts.

Reddit threads

Another way to gain attention on Reddit is by writing valuable threads for

the community you're in. For example, if you're a watercolor artist you can
write a thread about the “top 5 common mistakes most watercolor artists
do”.

The amazing thing about threads like this is that they even can be found
through Google – many people often write a question in the Google search
engine and add “reddit”. Which means if you write an awesome thread,
you can gain traffic for eternity! Every single thread you post on Reddit has
the potential to land in the google search engine at the top:

104
As an example, the artist who wrote this thread in 2021 could potentially
still get follows on their social media accounts – because people in 2022
are still searching for that question and find their amazing thread.

It's important that you link your socials on your reddit like this:

Also make sure to add some photos of your art in your threads to
incentivize people to check out your socials (Don´t be self-promotional –
you need to do it in a more subtle way – e.g., refer to your Instagram
highlight to show an example)

105
How to find a good title?

You want to write about a topic that gets googled a lot. It's very ineffective
if you write about a question that doesn't get searched at all.

For that, you can use Google keyword tools like "Semrush". Here you can
search for a term and see how often it gets googled per month.

For example, “How to improve your art” gets googled ~570 times per
month:

Keep in mind that most art-related questions rather get Googled seldom,
so a few hundred - thousand searches per month are quite good.

Imagine how many long-term traffic sources you can create for your social
medias if you commit to writing 1-2 good threads a week! Make sure to
post your threads in multiple forums to increase the chance of getting
seen.

106
Besides posting threads there's another way to get a similar effect:

Writing good reddit comments:

Besides threads, google also shows people who asked that certain
question themselves on reddit. And if you click on the reddit post you will
see a top comment by someone who answered that question really well.
This could be you – who gains again attention for eternity – because of a
question you answered in 2021:

Post you find when googling the question “How to improve your art reddit”:

Top comment on this question who gains attention passively forever:

107
It's important that you now don't comment on older posts – you can't get
top comment on older posts since people stopped upvoting the comments
there.

You need to search for brand new questions in art related subreddits and
try to give as much value as possible in your comment. Do this 20-30
times a day and on the long run you will get top comment on questions
which might get googled in the future.

I once even got a new customer and a very valuable member of my

community through this tactic:

108
Discord Servers

Discord servers are another way to drive traffic externally on your social
media. There exist thousands of art-related servers – and the cool thing is
that most have a self-promo channel where artists can promote their
socials and art.

Now, since many artists promote themselves there you can't expect a lot of
profile visits and follows from that. However, if you think bigger and
promote yourself on 40+ servers regularly it looks very different:

Most bigger servers have ~5k active members per day.

Let's say out of those only 3% see your art. If you would advertise regularly
on 40+ of these servers that still would be 5,000 x 40 x 3% = 6,000
impressions on your promo.

You can find servers related to your style on websites like "Disboard" (tip:
sort by servers with the most members):

Make sure that your promo separates heavily from any other promo in the
discord channels. Work with storytelling or even edit an awesome trailer
for your art. Also always add clickable links - no one wants to manually
type in your username.

109
Use Extern Channels to Drive Traffic

Most artists don't do everything in their power to grow their audience. They
think they already give 100% by posting on IG but that's not enough. If you
see social media as the “is the glass of water half full or half empty” –
problem, it doesn't matter how full it is – you need to drain every single
drop of that glass.

What do I mean by that?

Instead of just relying on IG you also can use extern sources to drive traffic
onto your IG page. I already showed you TikTok, Reddit, and Discord as an
example, but there are many more.

For example: Becoming a guest at a podcast show - There are thousands

of smaller podcast shows desperately searching for interview partners, you
just need to proactively approach them.

Getting interviewed by a (smaller) art magazine and getting shared on

their blog – same as podcasts – you need to be proactive.

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Leveraging Influencers

Another way to leverage the reach of others is to try to get shared by

bigger influencers. There are many ways to accomplish this:

Getting shared by asking them first:

The safest way would be to just DM and ask other influencers if you could
do them a commission or portrait for free. I wouldn't even ask for a
shoutout in return, because then you might seem like a choosing beggar.
They probably gonna share it either way. Make sure that you also already
follow the influencer if you approach them.

“But I thought we artists shouldn't work for free?” That´s right- you should
never work without compensation. But the story of an influencer is often
worth several thousands of dollars. That's why working for free for an
influencer can be an awesome deal. Here is a DM-template I would use
with which you can approach bigger influencers:

“Hey name of the influencer . I really like the work you're doing and love
how you motivate me and others. I am an artist, and wanted to ask you if I
may draw a portrait for you for free . If you´re down for it let me know
which picture of yours I should use as a reference.

The problem with this approach is that bigger influencers get hundreds of
DM's a day and therefore the chance that they will find your DM is
extremely low. It’s important to send many DM´s to many influencers and
don’t give up on the first approach.

Also, try to find out their email through their bio and contact them that
way.

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Getting shared by trying to get noticed:

This second tactic is useful if you already have a little community, because
here you just post the artwork of the influencer without approaching them
first. To increase the chance that the influencer will see your post you need
to do the following:

Tag the influencer and fan pages of the influencer

DM the fan pages and ask for a repost:

DM-template: "Hey there, I just created an artwork for
@nameofinfluencer. I thought your community might like it so you’re
allowed to repost it . Make sure to tag @nameofinfluencer, maybe they will
see it.

Ask your community in the caption to tag the influencer and the fan
pages

Post the artwork in your story and ask your community there to tag the
influencer and the fan pages

Ask your friends to tag the influencer and the fan pages

Use hashtags related to the influencer

This way my artwork of garyvee got reposted by his team page with 400k
followers:

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My post The share in the story

But even though I got shared by a page with 400k followers I only gained
approximately 10 new followers and here you can learn from my mistakes:

Find influencers who are somehow art-related or in your niche. For

example, Garyvee has a community full of people who are interested in
business and not interested in art, which is why I didn't gain many
followers.

The best would be to just find artist-influencers (like @zhc) and draw
them. Look for influencers who have at least 50k followers (these
“influencers” also just can be other successful artists).

Keep in mind that the more followers the influencer have the less likely it is
that they will see your post. Therefore start with influencers with 50k –
200k followers and if you have a bigger following you can try to draw
artist-influencers with more than 1 million followers.

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You don´t necessarily have to create an artwork for Influencers!

You can create anything for the influencer as long as it helps them. For
example I once created an infographic about why IG Reels is an
opportunity for artists, and I send it to other IG-Reels artists who loved to
share that infographic for their community:

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As you can see, I was able to leverage an extra reach of almost 300k
followers, just by sharing a helpful post to bigger artists and explaining
why it's helpful for them and their community – a win-win situation.

The post must give value to them, you can´t for example just share your art
and ask them to share it because “it might inspire others” or something
like that. Keep in mind that YOU want something from THEM, so you have
to offer them something worthwhile to them and their audience.

Also, keep in mind that these 3 influencer artists who shared my post are
just the tip of the iceberg, I sent the post to around 30-50 artists, and all
the others left me on read, or didn't even see my message. Shoot your shot
as much as possible!

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Getting Shared by Bigger Media/Theme Pages

What are theme and media pages?

Media pages are pages on Instagram that just focus on reposting user-
generated content – content which doesn't belong to them. I know these
kinds of pages are very hated by the art community, but they can be a
great opportunity for us artists. There are many types of these repost
pages:

Professional media-pages:

These pages are often run under bigger media companies and are very
professional: They ask for permission, credit properly, etc., Otherwise, they
could easily lose their business. You want to be shared by these
professional pages because there you get the most followers in case you
get shared.

How do you recognize if a page is a professional media page?

The page should match the following criteria:

• Has a high number of followers (500k+)
• High engagement rate
• They credit the artist in the first lines (“via @theartist”)
• They post a lot of content daily (5+ posts a day)
• They post very consistently

These pages often don't have to be specifically art related. There are
pages (like @pubity or @9gag) that have such a huge reach, that they
post about almost anything related to pop culture. And because they have
such a huge following, the artists who get shared here also often get a lot
of followers.

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I've analyzed a lot of artists whose work were shared by these media
pages.

I did that by searching for posts by these media pages and then looked up
the analytics of the shared artist on socialblade. Here are the results:

The posts on the media page got around 281.000 likes on average.
Meanwhile, the artists (creators of the OG content) gained 3,4k followers
on average!

Just to compare it:

Some artists need multiple months or years to reach 3-4k followers, these
artists grew by that in 1-3 days, just by a repost!

That´s why you should try to get posted by these pages - it's incredibly
achievable, you just need to take action.

Here, for example, you can see the number of followers an artist gained
after they were shared by a professional media page:

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Unprofessional theme-pages:

These pages are often run by one person who doesn't care about giving
credit and often the community of these pages also don't care where the
posted content comes from. Avoid contacting these pages as it’s not worth
being shared by them.

Criteria with which you can tell if it´s an unprofessional page:

Low engagement rate

They don´t give credit
If they give credit, they do so at the bottom of the caption
They often just use the same caption (for example "Rate from 1-10")
Badly cropped posts
Posts have low quality
They don't post consistently

Scam pages:

Currently, there are also a lot of scammers out there who buy a lot of fake
followers on “promotion-pages,” so it looks like these pages reach a lot of
followers. Then these scammers flood Instagram with bot-comments and
DM's to promote paid-shoutouts to artists on these pages. Make sure to
never buy a promo from these, because you don't get any value in return
from these shoutouts.

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How you can identify if a page is such a scam page or just a normal bigger
page:

The posts of the page are often posted as videos (because it's easier to
boost the video-views with bots, than with likes:

And if you click on the views, you will notice that they are botted, because
these posts have way less likes compared to the views:

Low engagement rate: The scam page where I got this screenshot
above has apparently 1 million followers, but only has 41 likes. That´s
an engagement rate of 0.0041 %!
If you catch a bot comment promoting the page like “DM
@nameofthepage” then this page is a scam for 100%

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How do you get your content reposted by these professional theme pages?

1. Create a list of 20-30 pages that fit your niche, let me help you: You can
already add @9gag and @pubity to the list because they often also repost
art content. Use the persona you created to find relevant pages for your
audience!

2. Find out how you can send your content to each page: You can always
send a piece of content per DM and you can usually find an email address
on their profile. Some media pages ask you to submit your content through
their website.

3. Already do the work for these pages. Every media page has its theme.
On @pubity for example the posts look like this:

So, instead of just sending in your raw art videos, already edit it with a
white background and a caption with the iPhone-font. Because these
pages get hundreds of submissions each day, and through that easy task
you can differentiate your content from the rest. You can easily do that by
using the app Inshot. If a page just shares the videos raw, without any
theme, you can also send them your raw videos.

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4. Send the video through DM, Email, and the website if you found one.
The most important part: your piece of content needs to fit to the page,
and it also needs to be entertaining enough to hold people’s attention. For
example, it doesn´t make sense to send your furry art-speed drawing to
@pubity, because that's just not the content they share. Analyze upfront
which kinds of videos/posts are shared there more frequently on each
page.

At the end of the day, they own the page, and if your piece of content isn't
appealing enough they simply won't post it. So, if you edit the video make
sure to make everything perfect.

Also, don't just aim for pages with millions of followers. There are
thousands of theme pages with 10k – 100k followers in your niche, where
it's very likely that you get reposted – you just need to DM a lot of these
pages per day and show them the benefits of sharing your content (for
example; easy content for them).

You can also combine this tactic with the collabo feature – you don't just
have to collab with other artists:

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Shoutout For Shoutout

This tactic is more helpful if you already have a little audience (like 500-
3k+ followers). Here you're searching and DM'ing art pages like yours with
a similar audience size and ask them if they would be interested in
promoting each other's page.

Here is a short case study about a shoutout for shoutout I did as a feed
post with another page (@[Link]) when we both had around 3-
5k followers:

These are the insights of the shouout-post on @[Link]'s page

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And this is how it affected my page:

Normally I was getting ~20 followers per day. But on this day I gained 121
new followers!
So shoutouts are an incredibly good way to boost your followers within a
short time.

But how do you find people who do shoutouts for shoutouts with you? It's
quite easy.

You just click on a hashtag you often use and try to find pages like yours
and pitch them the idea of a shoutout for shoutout. Highlight the benfits
the other page would gain too!

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Don't get discouraged when people decline your request. You might need
to send 50 DM's before someone accepts. Shoot your shots!

Be selective with whom you do a shoutout for, so you don't end in a lose-
win situation. Your shoutout partner should match these criteria:

Followers:
As already mentioned - the page you do a shoutout with should have the
same number of followers as you do (or even more).

Engagement rate:
Many people buy followers, that's why you shouldn't just rely on the
number of followers they have. You also need to check if they have a good
engagement rate. Work this out by calculating your personal engagement
rate:

(Number of average likes on posts / number of followers) * 100 = your

engagement rate in %

Compare it with the engagement rate of the page you plan a shoutout for
shoutout with – they should have a similar engagement rate.

After they agreed you can discuss if you both should do a story or feed
shoutout, which kind of content you should repost, which captions you
should use, at which times you want to post, etc.

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How to shoutout someone successfully?

A promo is only effective if you do it right. So, you shouldn't just write
“follow @watercolorartistxy” - you need to give people a reason why they
should do that.

You can do that by showing their content and writing what's so special
about this page and then include a CTA (call to action) to follow them.

Here's an example of a story-shoutout I did:

First story:

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Second story:

As you can see the promo was very successful just because I gave people a
reason to follow this account. I also decided to post two stories instead of
one, because that increased the profile visits by 46% with almost no more
additional effort.

The same thing applies for feed promos: Post 1-2 artworks of the other
person (preferably the ones with the most likes) and on the 3rd slide you
can include a screenshot of the other page with a CTA to follow them and
the benefits people get from doing so. In my example, I implied that they
get to see quality and unique artworks.

Make sure to not spam promos on your accounts because people might get
annoyed by it. You can also discuss with your shoutout-partner to delete
the feed post after 24-48 hours because after this time the posts almost
get no additional reach and your feed looks much cleaner if you delete it.

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Investing in Ads

Through ads, you really can accelerate your growth. But first, we need to
declare when it makes sense to invest in ads:
It only makes sense to invest in ads if you:

1. Already monetize your page through commissions or a product – so you

can just reinvest that money to attract more potential customers.

2. Already have a smaller following (1k+) for social proof – so new visitors
from your ad convert to followers more easily.

So how exactly do ads work? On most big ad platforms like Facebook and
Instagram, you always pay per one thousand reached people (CPM – cost
per mille). Depending on how persuading your ad itself is the less you have
to pay for newly gained followers on average.

Compared to other mediums like TV or newspaper Instagram and

Facebook ads are cheap. Currently, an average CPM on Instagram is
about 7-10$ (2022). This means to reach 1k people you need to pay 7-
10$. With prices like this, you´re lucky if you pay ~1$ to acquire one new
follower on average.

I think we both can't invest 100$ just to gain 100 followers. That's why I
want you to present ads that are way cheaper than that: Promos from art-
theme pages.

You must know that most admins of art-theme pages with 100k+ followers
often live overseas in 3rd world countries where the cost of living is very low
in $. This is why most of them sell their reach for way under value.

Recently I experimented how well these promos perform, and here is my

little case study:

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How many real followers can you get for 50$?

Before I bought a promo I first DM´ed 20+ pages for their rates – so I can
just choose the best 1-2 deals. After they sent me their prices – I also
asked if they run more pages (most theme page owners run multiple
pages) – so that I can get a great package deal.

At the end these were the 2 deals I was able to get:

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And:

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Overall I paid 50$ to get shared to an audience of 725k Followers!

I made sure that these pages had a good engagement rate, and legit
comments, and only paid with PayPal goods and services to not get
scammed.

But which post did I choose to promote? You only want to promote posts
that already have done very well in the past on your page. In your insights,
you can easily find your posts that have gone the most viral and brought
you the most profile visits and follows – only promote those.

At the end of the promo post, I also added a slide to follow my page. I also
send these pages captions I wrote which they should include in the post.
You want a good call to action in the caption under the post to follow you.

How well did the promos perform?

So, for 50$ I got:

A story that reached 10.1k people
A story that reached 9.2k people
A story that reached 9,5k people
A story that reached 1,7k people
A story that reached 6,1k people
A post that reached 35,642 people
A post that reached 31,993 people
A post that reached 37,843 people
A post that reached 3,532 people
A post that reached 12,273 people
A post that reached 2,863 people

… only after 24 hours.

So overall a reach of 160,746 people

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Example of the promos:

131
Here are some screenshot of the insights from the promo posts they sent
me:

132
133
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But how did that affect my page?

Right after the promos were posted I immediately noticed a storm of new
followers. And I checked the followers – they were all real artists.

But I experienced that the promo posts did way better than the promo
stories.

I made sure to track my growth before and after the promos (during the
promos I didn't post anything so I only could gain followers from the
promos).

Before:

After:

So overall I gained 675 followers from this promo!

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Here is a little comparison.

Regular Instagram ads:

Average CPM: 9$
Average cost per new follower: 0.8$ - 1$

My theme page-promo:
Average CPM: 50$ / 161(k) = 0,3$
Average cost per follower: 50$ / 675 follower = 0,07$

These really are some awesome results.

Keep in mind that your results may vary depending on the pages you
choose. Do your research and only invest money you're ready to lose.

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Collaborations

This is like the shoutout 4 shoutout tactic – but even cooler. You basically
also search for an artist in your niche with a similar number of followers,
but instead of a shoutout for shoutout you ask if they would like to work on
an artwork together.

You both can later post this artwork but in the caption you both announce
that this artwork was a collaboration with the other artist. That way you
both get new people who check out your profiles.

The reach of your

Your reach
collab-partner

Combined reach when doing a collab

There even exists a new Instagram feature where you can invite others as a
collaborator on a post. If they accept the request you both post the same
post on your feed!

Here´s how to use that feature:

137
Create a new post.

Click on “Tag People”:

Click on “Invite Collaborator”:

138
With whom should I do a collab?

You can also just cold-dm artists you don't know like you do in the
shoutout for shoutout tactic. But I would rather work with artists you're
already in contact with, then you both are on the same wavelength, and it
becomes easier to work together on an artwork.

If you´re not already in contact with other artists, it is time to change that.
It's always beneficial to have a bigger network. Just use the 1,80% strategy
to connect with them – or check out my discord where I gave you access.

How should we exactly approach a collab artwork?

There are many ways how you can do a collab artwork:

Outline + coloring:

One of you does the outline of the art idea you want to execute, and the
other artist does the coloring.

Dividing the artwork up by objects:

If you for example draw a landscape you both can decide who draws which
parts: Who draws the sky, who the people in the landscape etc. You also
can do that with portraits.

You can also collab with artists in a whole different area:

For example, an illustrator can collab with a writer to create a short comic
or an artist can create a cool artwork and collab with a graphic designer
who recreate a new design out of your artwork. This is for example a collab
I did with the designer @mdinustu:

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My artwork After the collab with @mdinstu

If you do these kinds of collaborations (where you partner with an artist

out of your industry) you can't except a lot of followers because the
audience of the other artist differs a lot from yours, but it's also a great
way to create more content easily.

Doing collaborations with bigger artists:

Even as a smaller artist you're able to do collabs with bigger artists. But I
would consider these types collabs rather as helping bigger artists with
bigger projects. For example, if they want to launch a new product and
they need illustrators, designers etc. for that.

Here's a conversation with a smaller artist (@surnamehello, 1k followers)

who was able to help the famous YouTube-artist @tenhun (150k+
followers)

140
141
142
So, you can see, just by approaching the artist with a simple email can
land you such an opportunity – shoot your shot!

The other 3D artist he´s talking about is @[Link], and I was

able to research how many followers he made through that
collab/shoutout by using social blade:

As you can see, normally he´s doing 1-2 followers per day, but on the days
of the shoutout (09.20 – 09.23), he was even able to gain up to 87
followers on a single day! Overall he made 127 followers through this
collab! – And you can do so too!

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Drawing-challenges

As you may have noticed, most growing tactics rely on leveraging the
reach of others by landing on their story or getting reposted. Another way
to do that is by participating in #dtiys (draw this in your style) or other
drawing challenges hosted by bigger artists.

You might think now that it's very hard to win such a drawing challenge
due to the high competition. I once hosted a drawing challenge when I had
around 25k followers and the #dtiys-post got 1k+ likes, but in the end,
only 20-30 people participated. And in the end, there were 3 winners, so
the chance to win was quite high.

Even if you don't win, most artists who host these challenges also post
many entries in their stories.

How do you find these drawing challenges from artists with 5k+ followers?

You can easily search for “#dtiys” and look at the “top”-posts, these are
the challenges hosted by bigger artists. Make sure to participate in
challenges from artists who have a similar art style like you. That way you
get more followers in case you win the challenge because the chance that
people who follow this artist will also like your art is much higher.

How many followers can you expect from winning such a challenge?

It depends on many factors: How many followers does the host have, how
high is their engagement rate, how well do they give shoutouts to other
people, etc. The three winners of my drawing challenge (where I had
around 25k followers) gained around 30-150 followers, so you get a sense
of how many followers you can expect from winning such a challenge.

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Hosting Challenges of Your Own

Because drawing challenges are so desired, these kinds of posts often blow
up. If you have a bigger following (1k+) you can think of hosting one by
yourself.

Hosting a challenge of your own is incredibly good for three reasons:

1. Building a stronger personal brand: Hosting a challenge is a good way to

create a deeper connection with your community and you also can give
them something back.

2. Easy content: By hosting a challenge you get two pieces of content with
almost no effort: The post where you announce the #dtiys challenge (you
can even use an older artwork) and the post where you announce the
winners.

3. #Dtiys challenge -posts often go more viral. This way you also get new
artists into your ecosystem who might even leave a follow.

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The New "Add-Yours"-Sticker

Instagram lately released a new story sticker where you can ask your
community a question which they can answer with a picture:

The clue here is that if people answer they must share your sticker in their
Instagram story too – which means that their friends might use it too and
so on, creating a domino effect.

But how do you get attention from it? It's simple – if you press on the
sticker, you can see who created it and you can even click on the name to
land on their page. That way you can get profile visits which might turn
into followers.

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I even have seen some stickers get shared by ten to hundred thousands of
people:

Let´s do the math:

Let´s say on average every person has 100 story views. Which means
646.000 * 100 story views = 64,600,000 people who see the sticker.

Let's say only 1% click on that sticker and only 1% of these clicks also click
on your username (the sticker creator). That still would be 6,460 profile
visits!

So, create your own stickers! But the biggest chances of your sticker going
viral is if you already have a smaller community which can distribute your
sticker faster.

Make sure to create stickers specific to your niche (art / your art-style).
That way you make sure that if someone checks out your profile, they are
more likely to leave a follow since they seem to be interested in that topic
(else they wouldn’t use the sicker).

Use the persona you created earlier to find fitting questions your ideal
follower is interested in!

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Giveaways

We already discussed that in marketing it normally costs ~1$ to acquire a

new follower on average. Well with this tactic we can acquire real followers
for way less or even no money.

A giveaway normally works like this: You have a product that people in
your community can win. You post a post and a story where you explain
what the people must do to have a chance to win, which includes:

1. They must follow you

2. Liking and saving the post (to increase the chance that the post goes
viral and reaches more people)
3. Sharing the post into their story (so that more people will see it, and
share it into their story -> snowball effect)
4. Tag friends in the comments and one comment counts as one entry (this
also encourages the snowball effect)

It's important that you don´t give away a very cheap product, it should cost
at least 30$+, else people will not be motivated enough to participate.

If you don't have any money you can also give away a free commission or
artworks!

Work together with other big pages!

One way to increase the chance of your giveaway post going viral is by
cooperating with other big pages in your niche (such as art-theme pages
or other bigger artists).

You can work it out like this: You approach a bigger page in your niche and
ask them if they are interested in creating a giveaway.

You are responsible for all the prices and the only thing the other page
must do is reshare your giveaway post (preferably with the Instagrams
collabo feature).

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That way the bigger page can create a cool giveaway for their audience
while investing 0$ - and you get the attention of a big page – win-win
situation.

It might take you a few DM's until you find a partner – don't get
discouraged just because someone says no, shoot your shots as often as
possible!

Doing giveaways always results in a high conversion rate, because they

have a high motivation to follow you. But the downside of this tactic is,
that many people won't follow you because they like your content, so you
will also get a lot of un-follows after the giveaway. Overall, this tactic is
still very profitable and there's also a way to decrease the amount of
unfollows you will get:

Give away a product that is related to your niche. For example, if you're a
digital artist, give away a cool graphic tablet. That way you increase the
chance that the people who participate will also like your normal content
and therefore remain a follower.

Here is a more graphical presentation of this tactic:

Your
Promo from a
Giveaway- new followers
bigger page
post

story
reshares

Important note: Always host your own giveaway and never buy into any
random giveaways from others. There are scammy agencies out there who
specialized in growing accounts with giveaways. They work like this:

149
They cooperate with a bigger influencer who should post the giveaway
post later. Then they sell slots to other people who want to grow their
account. After all the slots are sold, the influencer posts the giveaway and
to participate you must follow all the accounts (the people who bought into
this giveaway) another account (which is tagged in the post) follows.

Why should you never buy into these giveaways?

You will probably make some followers, but you will get way more
unfollows later and have unengaged followers as when you host your own
giveaway. This is because the products these agencies give away are
always very generic (for example a Ps5 or an iPhone) and the people who
participate in this giveaway just mass-follow 20-30 random accounts, so
they have 0% interest in your account.

Posting at the Best Times

On Instagram, there are times when people are the most active on the
platform - mostly in the morning when people are checking their phones
and in the evening after work. Therefore, it makes sense that you post at
these times because then you get the most attention.

I still see many artists posting their work right after they created it, but by
waiting just for a few hours your post can be way more effective. The best
times to post always differ from page to page. You can easily check out
when the best times are to post for you in the insights tab:

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Answering Every Comment And DM

What I also often see is that artists get (real) comments on their posts and
they just like that comment and don't even leave an answer. If you “really
want to build a community” and don´t even have a few seconds for the
people who support you, you don't deserve a community. Answering
comments, especially in the beginning is so important for multiple
reasons:

Increasing the overall comments on your post:

Let's say you get 10 comments on your post – not very much, but still very
decent. Now if you ask every one of these comments a question (related to
the topic of the comments/post) you can heavily increase the number of
comments.

Here is an example:

Random account: “Love this watercolor-artwork.”

You: “Thank you so much 😊, what´s your favorite art medium?

Random account: “I also enjoy watercolor very much!”

You: “Nice, since do you work with watercolor?”

Random account: “Since a year now, and you?”

You: “Also around one year, did you also watched the
tutorials of @famousartist”?

Random account. “Yeah exactly, his videos helped me a lot!”

You: "Same"

Just by having this little conversation in the comments you made 8

comments out of one simple comment. If you do that with every 10
comments you have 80 comments instead of “just” 10. That's also why
you can answer bot-comments, because then you doubled the number of
comments.

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Another reason why you should answer every comment is that then people
also want to comment more in the future.

Would you keep commenting on an account that always ignores your

comment? You would probably stop commenting after 3-4 comments.

You also can create a deeper connection with your community, and you
already know how important creating a strong personal brand is.

The same thing applies to DM's – here you can also create a deeper
connection with your community.

But not only that – Instagram also notices that you try your best to connect
with your community and therefore will increase your reach.

Instagram's main goal is to increase the time people spend on their app
and by recommending other people's pages like yours who engage with
their community Instagram can achieve this goal.

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How to Increase Your Story-views

This tactic isn´t necessary to grow your audience, but it´s still a powerful
tool which shouldn’t be withheld.

In case you have something very important to announce to your following

(for example if you plan to sell your art) you can use this simple trick to
increase your story views.

Do some story-polls before your announcement. The Instagram algorithm

encourages stories with a high engagement (for example click on polls).
Preferably do some polls related to your announcement.

With this simple trick I was able to increase my views by more than 100%.

My agerage story-performance After using this trick

Keep in mind that this result was an extraordinary one, normally I have an
increase of 30-50%. You also shouldn't abuse this tactic, because if you
use this scheme too often, your audience might get annoyed by it.

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Tactics You Should NOT Use

Buying Followers

It has become quite easy and inexpensive to buy followers. If you buy
followers, you don't buy real followers who engage with your content – you
buy a bunch of dead throwaway accounts who just follow you.

That's the reason why buying followers is the fastest way to kill your
account. If you buy followers, you may have a high number on your page
but besides that, you just get many disadvantages:

Your engagement rate decreases, because you have a high number of

followers, but your likes and comment are compared to your followers
extremely low. Therefore, Instagram will always heavily decrease the
reach of your posts, because apparently, your posts are so irrelevant
that almost no one in your “community” engages with them.

If somehow people land on your profile, they can immediately tell that
you bought followers (because of your low engagement rate). And
personally, if I know that someone bought followers, I don´t leave a
follow, because this profile seems very unauthentic to me – and many
people probably agree with me. So, you might have a lot of fake
followers, but it becomes more difficult to gain real followers.

Instagram is strictly against buying followers because they want to

create an authentic environment on their platform. If you buy followers,
you have a higher chance of getting shadow or normal banned.

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Follow For Follow

Everyone will stumble across this “growth-tactic” sooner or later. If you

don't know what follow for follow is, you just mass follow the followers of
bigger pages like yours, in the hope that they will follow you back, and
later you just unfollow them.

And in fact, it's a fast way to get your first followers without even having to
post at all but follow for follow does more harm than good and is a very
outdated tactic. First, you ruin your following-to-followers ratio we talked
about in this book. The more important point is that you get a lot of
followers who are not interested in your content. If you follow someone,
they get this notification:

The people who will follow you back because of this tactic won't even check
out your profile, they just will click on this “follow”-button. Most of your
new followers won't ever see any of your content because the probability
that they are interested in your content is extremely low – again, they
followed you without checking out your content. Normally you only get
followers if people checked out your content and liked what they saw. Here
your content will also get a lower reach due to your low engagement rate.

Not only that, but now your “community” is full of mixed people with
different interests. And the less Instagram knows about the interests of
your community the harder it gets to show your content to new people. So,
your organic reach will also decrease because of this aspect. That's why
follow for follow is an awful tactic that you shouldn´t use.

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Begging For Shoutouts/Follows

This isn't a tactic that results in a lot of harm, but it is just very ineffective
and a waste of time. Keep in mind that we people are egotistical and are
always striving for win-win situations. If you now beg a bigger account for
a shoutout (an account that has greater leverage than you – which means
that they need nothing from you) you create a lose-win situation and
that's why they will just ignore you (or even expose you in their story). The
same thing applies to begging for followers in the comments.

All the good growth tactics rely on creating win-win situations, which is the
reason why they work.

Tagging Random Accounts

Many artists tag a lot of bigger art-accounts on their posts in the hope
they get reposted, and I must admit that I also did this. But what I learned
is that Instagram notices if you tag people or pages, you don't know (for
example if these pages don't check out your post or don´t like it) and
therefore Instagram will punish you with less reach.

Only tag people you know or have contact with. Of course, there are
exceptions (for example if you drew a celebrity) but you shouldn't spam-
tag many bigger accounts.

Engagement Pods

Most of you probably don't know what an engagement pod is. An

engagement pod is a group of hundreds – thousands of people who only
have one goal: growing their account. On Instagram, the performance of a
post in the first minutes is the most important one. If you get a lot of
engagement in the first ten minutes after posting something, the chance
that the algorithm will push that post is extremely high.

That's why people just post their posts in these groups and the other
people are liking and commenting on it, in the hope that the post will do
well because of that.

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Now, what's so bad about this?

The problem is that this tactic is outdated, and Instagram can easily tell if
your engagement is authentic or not. Instagram will also notice that most
of the engagement comes from a group, and therefore can conclude that
you're using an engagement pod.

It's of course not in Instagram's interest that people use this kind of tactic.
Therefore you can get shadow banned for using it. Just like with the other
tactics you get engagement from people who have nothing to do with your
niche, so it gets harder for the algorithm to find people who are interested
in your content.

Another problem is that your page will look unauthentic based on your
comments, and that will result in fewer follows from other people.

Would you follow an account whose comment section looks like this:

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Personal Brand Building
Now that you know how to gain attention, we also need to discuss how you
can create a deep connection to this attention, to create a strong brand
around yourself as an artist.

Why is this important? Remember the influencer who couldn't even sell 36
T-shirts to her 2 million real followers? If you also want to earn money with
your art, you also need to create a deep connection with your audience.

In this chapter, I will show you ways to do so. You already know most of the
tactics from the growth chapter, but let’s revisit all the brand-building
tactics in one chapter.

The two key points to creating a strong personal brand are

a) by providing value to your followers and

b) by being humble and reachable to them.

The major reasons people buy from others are trust, sympathy, and
expertise.

By providing free value and being humble you attach yourself to these
attributes.

You can encourage this in the ways detailed below.

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Answering Every Single DM (Direct Message)

If you want to create a strong personal brand, people need to have the
feeling that they can reach you. Think about the most successful
YouTubers, for example, Mr. beast: Mr. beast seems like a good friend
rather than a superstar, which is why he has such a strong community.
That's because he communicates very often with his community.

You can do the same through your DM's. I run my Instagram account for
almost two years now and get like 2 DM's a day, and I make sure to answer
every single DM, even if it's just a little “thank you”.

So, I answered 1000 DM's or probably more, these are 1000 people who
now have a deeper connection to me than to other pages.

And the connections you make through the DM's can be very worthwhile. I
for example talk to 20 - 30 people in my community daily. And before I
released this eBook, I asked them to read this eBook and leave an honest
review, which helped me to improve it and increase sales.

So, answering every DM (ofc except bots) is not just good for your personal
brand but you can also create very valuable connections.

Answering Every Single Comment

Another way to communicate with your community is through your

comment-section – we already discussed this in the growth chapter.

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Send Every New Follower a Personal DM

This has become very important since IG's newest algorithm changes. Now
your post gets ranked in the home feed also based on how well your
connection to a certain follower is (Do you leave comments, do you
message each other, etc.) because then Instagram thinks you're friends,
and posts of private friends usually get ranked higher. So, don't neglect
this point!

When you have a smaller following make sure to send every new follower a
DM where you thank them and start a little small talk. That way they
already have a deeper connection to you than to 90% of all the other
creators out there. The chance that they will unfollow you is therefore
smaller.

Instagram Stories

Instagram stories are probably the most important tool when it comes to
personal brand building. There are many ways how you can strengthen
your personal brand with Instagram stories:

Show more of your personality

You can use Instagram stories to show your community some “behind the
scenes”, videos of you creating art, show your humor through memes, post
some real-life content, etc. This kind of content makes you more relatable
to your community.

Provide Value

“Providing value” can happen in a lot of ways, but the easiest way to
provide free value to your community is by giving free valuable
information. For example, you can give a lot of tips around your craft. That
way you show that you have some expertise in your area and people will
feel more connected to you because you helped them.

160
Discussions

Instagram stories are also another great communication tool. You can use
polls or question stickers to discuss certain topics. That way you can create
a cool community feeling, where people in your community can share their
opinion.

You can also use that to provide value even if you know nothing about a
certain topic, by sharing the opinion of others who have more expertise in
that topic.

For example, one time I was discussing with my community about ways to
market yourself as an artist, and an artist who had a lot of expertise in
exhibitions sent me a very detailed DM about how exhibitions work (I only
know how you can market yourself as an artist on social media, but I know
nothing about marketing yourself as an artist through traditional
exhibitions). That´s why I shared her DM to my community and created a
win-win-win situation.

It's important that you create a feeling about which topics your community
is interested in. For example, if you're an anime artist you can talk very well
about anime, but it´s probably harder to talk about physics. Always try to
find an intersection about the topics you like to talk and the topic your
community wants to talk about.

What
to The Interests
Your
talk of
Interests about
Your Community

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Show Your Values

Don't be afraid of representing your values and opinions. If you have a

well-founded opinion people in your community are likely to share the
same opinions. And if people feel like another person shares their same
values, they feel much more connected to this person.

I for example talk a lot about self-improvement in my Instagram stories

and if I get encouraging DM's regarding my page from others, they also
always mention that they like my positive nature (which I represent in my
stories).

Writing Good Captions

You can also start discussions and show your values in your captions (we
already discussed that good and long captions are also good for more
engagement).

Community Challenges

This is probably the strongest way to create a community feeling – with

community challenges. As an artist, it's obvious that you could do
drawing-challenges.

To encourage the community feeling, create a drawing challenge that is

related to your community (for example include insight jokes, make them
draw an original character that your community knows well, etc.)

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Your Own Discord Server

With a discord server, you can give your audience a voice and give them
the opportunity to

• Connect with you

• Connect with others in the community which creates a strong community
feeling

Another big advantage of a discord server is that you can also create a
channel where only you (the admin) can post tips and tricks and give extra
value to your audience.

That way you created another channel for your brand which you
completely own. For example, Instagram can easily decide to ban your
account. If you own a discord server, you can still reach your audience.

It's very easy to set up a simple discord server, there are tons of tutorials on
YouTube, and the best part is it costs 0$.

Here are some channels which shouldn't be missing in your discord server:

1. Announcement channel (where only you can write, if you have something
big to announce, for example, if you want to sell your art)

2. Channel where you give value (keep it locked so only you can write and
give tips and tricks)

3. General (where people can chat)

4. Wips and feedback (where people can show their works in progress and
can get feedback)

5. Self-promo channel (where people can self-promote their social media

accounts)

163
How to Monetize Your Artpage
Now you know how to build an audience and how to create a strong
personal brand - it's time to show how you can monetize your passion.

Most artists think that they can only do commissions or sell their original
paintings to earn money, but that's indeed not the case.

With the rise of the internet and social media, it's never been easier to earn
a lot of money as an artist.

Most successful artists don't have only one source of income, they rather
have built multiple income streams around their personal brand.

They also have learned to not trade their time against money, they have
learned to leverage their personal brand to sell value.

In the following, you will be presented with all the sources of income you
can create as an artist with an audience, how to master them, as well as
the pros and cons of these sources of income.

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Commissions

This is probably the most obvious way to make money which every artist
knows. You basically draw for other people and get paid by them.

How to get commissions:

Many artists who have a small following often complain that they don't get
any commissions. They often don't get any because their page is too small
(you should at least have 1k+ followers) or they don't do the following:

1. SEO Optimize your profile

SEO = Search engine optimization, which means that you optimize your
name for Instagrams intern search engine. Let' say you´re an illustrator,
then you can easily change your 2nd Instagram name (not your
username!) to “illustrator”:

If someone needs an illustrator, they can easily search for one and with a
bit of luck they will find and DM you

I was doing that back in 2019 as a graphic designer and got like 3-4 DM's
per week! Of course, there also were some choosing beggars among them,
but it still resulted in 1-2 commissions per week.

165
2. Create a good offer:

Most artists do the following if they want to sell commissions to their

audience:

They just say in a story what they don't draw and then hope that someone
comes to them with a drawing idea – but that´s not how you sell to people.

You also don't go to a restaurant and order something after the chef told
you what they DON'T cook; no, you have a concrete knowledge of the
products you can choose from. So, you need to create a clear offer. Some
artists also do that, but they still do it wrong. Most artists create offers, but
they don't create good offers which people want.

For example, many artists offer to draw characters, but there are only a
few people who want to buy drawings of digital characters. Here are some
ideas for cool offers people want to buy:

Painting their pets in a funny style (for example as a renaissance

painting)

Painting a couple-artwork for lovers (for example as a birthday or

Valentine’s gift)

Painting them as a character from a famous show

Creating cool profile pictures for them

Creating a custom poster

And so much more

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Many artists claim that people think that art is boring and therefore they
don't get any commissions, but as you can see there are a lot of cool offers
you can create.

How to increase the demand for your commissions:

If you announce such a cool offer through a post or your story create a
feeling of urgency by also announcing that you only will take a certain
number of commissions - E.g. "only 2/5 slots left".

Pros Cons

You don´t need a huge following Trading time against money

Dealing with clients can be

Easy entry to earn your first
tough sometimes
dollar over the internet
(communication, revisions, etc.)

So, all in all it's a good way to get started, but with time you should focus
on other ways to earn money.

167
Working With Bigger Clients

The problem with normal commissions is that you're bound to the budget
of your clients and therefore can’t often charge what your art is worth.

Only a few people are willing to spend 200+ $ for a commission from a
relatively unknown artist. You are more likely to receive get 40-200$
worth of commissions. If you want to make a living from your art, you
would need to make more than one commission a day to earn 2,000$ per
month, which is nearly impossible and will burn you out - fast.

So instead of trading your time against money, you must learn to sell value
against money. You can do that by approaching the right kinds of clients.

Ordinary people see your art rather as a decorative item, which is 50-
100$ worth to them.

Let's consider an author who has written a brand-new book, but doesn't
have a cover artwork yet. A cover of a book is an extreme deciding factor
for the number of sales the book will generate later because we people
indeed judge a book by its cover. A book with an ugly cover could make
only a few sales, while a book with the same content but with an eye-
catching cover could generate thousands of sales. These thousands of
sales have a lot of value for the author, therefore they can also see a huge
amount of value in your art – because it's rather a good investment for
them.

By approaching these kinds of people, who see your art rather as an

investment you can charge hundreds and thousands of dollars for a
“commission”.

168
So how do you get these kinds of clients and can charge that much?

First, we must figure out which kind of people could need your artworks,
have a high budget, and see your art as an investment:

Authors (book cover and illustrations)

Music groups or bands, soloists, and musicians (cover artworks)
Twitch streamers (emotes, banners, backgrounds)
Small brand owners (e.g. clothing brand)
Influencers (e.g. if they work on a product that needs
designs/illustrations)
Businesses (content creation for Instagram, packaging design, etc.)

Make a list of 50-100 of these kinds of people you can think of, for
example, your favorite twitch streamers. But also consider people you
don't really know and just found through researching on Instagram,
Google, and LinkedIn.

The smaller these influencers and businesses are the easier to get work
from, but also the smaller the budget. After you’ve made a list and
followed these people, observe them and see if they are working on any
new projects, or if something could be improved on their existing projects.
And then just DM them and show them how you can help.

It's important that you don't drop a price immediately, because if you work
with bigger clients, you must charge each client individually, each client
has a different budget and expectations.

Selling is more like a conversation where you ask the client a lot of
questions, analyze their problems and show how you can solve them
before you pitch them your price. Here is an example of a bad salesman vs
a good one (the conversation is fictitious)

169
How NOT to sell:

The artist dropped their high price too fast without even showing what kind
of value he can provide the potential customer – this does't work in the
B2B (business to business) area.

170
In the B2B – world there's a straightforward marketing funnel you can use
to get your first high-paying clients:

1) DM them with a personalized message which brings value to them (Look

at their profile or products and see if you spot something which could be
improved – and then just tell them what and how it could be improved).

2) Have a conversation with them in the DM's where you also ask good
questions and genuinely give value to them.

3) Pitch them a 1. zoom call where you even give more value (this isn't a
sales call – you just show your expertise here to build up trust and try to
find out the wants and needs of the potential client). If you think they are a
good client, make up a 2nd zoom-call where you talk about price.

This 1. call here is called a “discovery call” in sales. There even exist free
scripts on the internet you can follow during the call.

4) 2nd Zoom call: Pitch them the price and close the deal.

The key here is to go by blow count. I´ve got a few friends who work in sales
earning 5 figures a month using this funnel, and they DM 100´s of people
a day. Here's how it would work:

171
172
 to get a sense for the budget

show them the

problem they
have

and show them

the solution

173
Selling is more an in depth conversation, where you try to find out the
wants and needs of the client and present them the solution for their
problems. Keep in mind that as your following grows and personal
branding becomes more recognizable, the more opportunities for these
kinds of commissions you will receive, because bigger names (e.g.
rappers) can find you more easily.

If you get your first clients, always make use of the power of networking;
many freelancers get their jobs by referrals. Ask happy clients to refer you
to others, or just check out who they follow and send these people a DM. To
increase the motivation to refer you, you can give clients who refer you
successfully a bonus (for example the next cover artwork for 30% off).

174
 Pros Cons

You get paid what your art is

You need to learn how to sell
worth

More money with less clients Still trading time against money

No need of a high following

175
Selling 1/1 Artworks

We now discussed possibilities to make money where you sell art how other
people want, but what about the art you made out of pure passion?

This technique is simple, you set up an online shop (you actually don't
need it, you also can start by selling your art through your DM´s), advertise
your art through your story and/or posts, and wait for a potential
customer.

Pros Cons

You earn money with art you´re You´re still trading time against
passionate about money

You can charge higher prices Need a bigger following to make

since it´s unique 1/1 art sales

176
Selling Prints

Another negative aspect of selling 1/1 artwork is that you have a limited
quantity, so after an artwork is sold you immediately must create a new
one to create cashflow.

You can solve this issue by also selling limited prints, that way you get the
best of two worlds: Your followers still have the feeling of uniqueness since
your prints are limited and you can earn money more "passively".

Let's say you have a 1/1 artwork that you want to sell for 800$, now you can
also create 200 smaller and 50 bigger more premium prints of this
artwork.

Let's say you make a 10$ profit on the smaller and 30$ profit on the more
premium prints.

Instead of earning 800$, you're now able to earn 4,500$ = 800$ + 10$ x
200 + 30$ x 50 just with this one artwork.

Pros Cons

You need to learn more about e-

You can earn more
commerce (shop, [Link])

More "passive" income

177
Sponsorships

As a successful artist on Instagram, you also own (besides your craft)

another very valuable asset: Your following.

Just like you can make a lot of money with your following, other big
corporations can do so too, and therefore they will offer you a lot of money
to advertise their product to your following.

You probably have also seen some product placements by other bigger
artists, because in the time of social media artists can be both: artists and
influencers.

How much should you charge for a product placement?

This often depends on a lot of factors:

Do you also have to create an artwork for the cooperation which you
should post?

Should the cooperation be able to use your placement-post (for

example to display it as retargeting ads), because in this case it gets
more expensive for them, because they also need to buy the license to
use your content

How good is your engagement rate

How many followers do you have, etc.

There are many pricing models you can choose from, but here is an easily
calculation you can do:

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CPM

Set a CPM – cost per mille – the amount of money it should cost to reach
1,000 people and charge that for every thousand followers you have.

A CPM can be anything from 5 – 20$ depending on how engaged your

followers are, some big influencers even charge a CPM of 80$ +.

Let´s say you have 30,000 followers and decide for a CPM of 10$, then you
can charge ~ 300$ = 30 x 10$, for a posting.

How do you get your first product placements?

Many people think that you need a huge following to get product
placements, but that's not the case. There's even a trend where
corporations specifically want to work with micro-influencers (3k+
followers) because they often have a better engagement rate than big
influencers. Indeed, you won't get any sponsorship offers if you don't
become proactive. There are so many micro-influencers out there that it's
hard for corporations to find them, that´s why you need to come to them.

A good way to do this is through a social kit - that's a graphically pleasing

PDF where you talk about your numbers – number of followings,
engagement rate, etc.

You can create such a social kit easily with canva, there are also some
templates for it. Then you need to create a list of potential corporations
you want to work with, e.g., creator of graphic tablets, brushes, etc. Write
50-100 of these down and with Google and LinkedIn you can easily find
out who is responsible for the social media marketing in each company.
You then just send those people an email with your social kit (make sure to
use a business email to appear more professional).

179
The more followers you get, the more you can charge, and the more
partners will approach you.

It's also better to try to build a good relationship with brands you really like
and do longer sponsorships deal with these. Then you're able to deliver
better result for these companies.

That way you don't need to introduce 1000 brands to your followers, and
it's easier to manage for you.

Pros Cons

You´re selling value and not

You need a bigger following
your time

You can just promote products You only can do a limited

you would recommend your amount of sponsorships per
followers nonetheless and even month (You don´t want to annoy
get paid for it your followers)

There are many companies out

there who wan´t to pay less
than your reach is worth

180
Affiliate Marketing

This is like sponsorships but with the difference that you don't need direct
contact with the brand you promote.

Affiliate marketing works like this:

You register for an affiliate program of a brand, you promote their product
to your followers with a special link, and for everyone who buys through
your link, you get a % of that sale.

You probably have seen that many artist-YouTubers promote skill share,
but that isn't a real sponsorship, the YouTuber just registered for skill
shares affiliate program and gets 10$ for every skill share registration.

Amazon also has an affiliate program, so if you often buy your art supply
from amazon you can just create a story highlight where you link your art
supply, and for everyone who buys from that link you earn some money.

Pros Cons

It´s easy to register for an You only get a small % of the

affiliate program sale

Very passive income

181
Creating Your Own Products

The problem with affiliate marketing is that you often leave some money
on the table because the companies also want to earn some money. So, to
become the most profitable you need to create your own products sooner
or later:

With sponsorships/affiliate: Own products:

What the
company earns

The amount
you earn

But what kind of products can you create? We must decide between
physical products and digital products.

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Physical products

These products have an upfront cost to create. As an artist there are many
physical products you can create for your following:

Branded sketchbooks
Prints
Stickers
Clothing you designed
Brushes
A book
Etc.

There are even some print-on-demand websites you can use to offer
stickers and clothing, without having to create them yourself.

Print on demand works like this: you upload your designs to a specific
website and the company behind it will only print something if you make a
sale, that way you don't have any huge upfront costs.

After you’ve made some sales, you can think about working with normal
suppliers to increase your quality and profit margins. But don't make the
mistake many people do with print on demand. They offer too many
products. On most print-on-demand platforms you can slap your design
on a lot of products with many color variations. But the problem is if you
do that it:

a) looks very cheap and

b) a potential buyer has too many options to choose from and therefore
will probably buy nothing.

Keep it simple and clean. The masterclass of physical products are

products you need to rebuy occasionally, like paint and sketchbooks. That
way if you create a really good product and your followers like it so much
that they from now on only use your product, you create a steady cash
flow.

183
Digital products:

A digital product doesn't have any costs to create, you just need to create it
once and then you can replicate and sell it as often as you want. That's
why it's good to start with digital products if you're a beginner. Some
examples of digital products you can create as an artist:

Digital brushes
An eBook
A video course (e.g., how to become better in the medium you use)
Apps
Etc.

How do you sell your products?

It only makes sense to create a product after you have a bigger following
you can sell it to.

But don't limit your visions to your following. After you made your first
sales through your audience, you can also reinvest that money in Facebook
or Google ads to get more new customers.

You can also create an affiliate program of your own where other bigger
influencers can promote your product.

The ultimate goal is to create a brand that also can work without your
personal brand – that´s where the big money can be made.

Pros Cons

Create products your audience Product development takes a

really wants and needs lot of time and energy

Very passive income

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How Much Can You Earn With Digital Products?

To motivate and show you that artists don't have to starve I will present
you two case studies:

Two artists - who aren't much different from you - who just bet on
themselves:

Vegalia:

Vegalia is an artist who managed to grow a following of over 700k+

followers in the last years. (85k+ on Instagram, 30k+ on Twitter and
600k+ on TikTok).

Her love for art goes back to her childhood, but she only took it more seriously
later.

Even though she wanted to pursue art in college her counselor talked her this
idea out. Their exact words were, “I don’t think you’ll make it in the art
industry.”

Therefore, she studied marketing and later product design – but none of these
things made her happy.

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She kept doing her art on the side. And in October 2020 she drew a
character from Naruto in her style (with braids). But it took endless time.
Just to draw the braids took her over 5 hours.

Therefore she stumbled across Procreate and started to create her own
braid brushes.

She also started posting her brushes on TikTok and Twitter – and the
people loved it – so she started selling them.

How much did she earn from this:

Vegalia mainly distributes her brushes on Gumroad and Etsy.

On Etsy you can see that she has made 13.776 sales
With an average product price of 12$ that´s: 13.776 x 12$ = 165.312$

On Gumroad she has 700 reviews on all her products. If you calculate that
only every 10th customer leaves a review that´s 7.000 sales.

That’s again: 7.000 x 12$ = 84.000$.

So overall 165.312$ + 84.000$ = 249.312$.

And that doesn’t even include her ko-fi and other products like her book.

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Marc Brunet:
Marc Brunet is mainly known for his amazing art-turorials on YouTube.
Over the Years he's built there a following of over 1M+ followers:

So over these years he already has helped thousands of artists with his free
advice, and therefore they trust him a lot.
Later on he then created his "art school" which is a 90+ hours long in depth
course to train and develop your artskills which he currently sells for
500+$.

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And based on his reviews you can see that other artists see huge value in
this course despite this high price:

I show you this review because some people would say that creating an
art-course is unescessary since "you can learn for free on YouTube". A
really good course for a fair price is a completely legit product which
creates value for people.

But how much did he earn with this:

According to his own words over 12.000 people bought his course:

12.000 sales x 500$ = 6.000.000$

...also not bad.

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How to Successfuly Launch a Product

Just creating a product isn't enough – you also need to know how to
market it well.

There are thousands of artists who created a product but couldn't sell it in
the end because they didn't know how. But since I launched this eBook
successfully, I can teach you how a successful launch works.

Launching a product can be divided into these simple steps:

1) Product development
2) Get reviews from influencers in your niche
3) Promo phase
4) Pre-sale
5) Launch
6) Later marketing

Product development:

You want to create a product your community wants and needs. So, don't
just make up a product and force your community to buy it, rather derive a
product idea from the problems your community has.

I for example came up with the idea for this eBook because my followers
kept asking me about growth advice. Your community might ask you for
example which brushes you use, and that way you easily have a great
product idea.

You also don't just have to wait until followers of yours approach you with
their problems, you can also identify their problems by asking them smart
questions in your stories.

After you have a product idea it might take you a few months to develop it.
While you develop it always make sure to also get honest feedback from
others – you don't want to create a product that looks subjectively good to
you – you want to create an objectively awesome product.

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Get reviews from influencers in your niche:

After you developed the product, you need to create content for your later
promo/marketing phase. A great piece of content you can create is reviews
from influencers in your niche.

Just approach influencers in your niche (these influencers also can be

other bigger artists) and ask them if they would like a free unit of your
product – the only thing you want in return is an honest review after they
tested it. You can also ask if they could create pictures or videos with your
product which you later can use.

These reviews are really valuable because they later increase social proof
which will lead to more sales in the future.

Promo phase:

When you launch a product, you want to create hype before the official
launch. Many artists make the mistake and launch their products when
they introduce them to their community for the first time. But in marketing,
you say that people need on average 7 impressions before they consider
buying – so that way your launch will just flop.

Choose a date you want to launch your product and start 1-2 weeks before
the official launch to promote and market it.

Post an ad every day where you present the product from a new marketing
angle. Here you can also share the reviews and pictures you got from the
influencers.

You want to create hype - Hype is something you can create. To create
hype, you want to increase scarcity – so don't offer unlimited quantities of
your product – only offer a limited amount which hasthate restocked once
it's sold out. That way you make sure that people want to buy your product
at launch – because they don't want to wait until it's restocked.

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Pre-sale:

Because of the hype you created people want to buy your product for sure
– but since the quantity is limited, they don't know if they can get it. So,
you can offer a pre-sale, a mini launch before the official release where
everyone who wants your product for sure can buy it before release.

Just communicate with your audience that there will be a pre-sale and
they should DM you if they want to be a part of the pre-sale.

The great thing about pre-sale is that it's revenue you can rely on. With a
normal launch, you don't know how many people end up buying.

But on pre-sale, you exactly know how many people will buy your product
since they registered for it.

Launch:

A few days after the pre-sale you can sell your product to all your
followers.

After marketing:

After your launch it's still important to keep marketing your product from
time to time, so your revenue doesn't decline.

One way to do that is by sharing reviews from people who bought your
product at launch and are now very satisfied with it. You also can expand
your business, e.g., by paying influencers to promote your product or
create affiliate marketing deals.

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How Realistic is It to Earn $10k as an Artist?

$10k seems a lot to many people, and especially for “broke” artists. But
now where you know all the options and endless opportunities you have as
an artist, let's break down how much 10k$ per month really is: (I speak
about revenue to simplify it a bit)

10,000 $ a month is:

a 20$ Membership (e.g. patreon) with 500 Members

a 20 $ product (e.g., art prints or digital brushes) to 500 people

a 80 $ product (e.g., an in depth art course) to 125 people

100-500 people compared to a following of several ten thousand - that is

very achievable, also keep in mind that you don't just need to sell to your
following, you can also scale with ads, work with your own affiliate
program, pay other influencers to promote your product, etc.

Of course, it's going to take a lot of work, but always keep in mind that you
can do that, and one day you will – you’ve got plenty of time.

Now where you´re motivated, where should you start?

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The Next Steps to Pursue Your Passion

As you´ve learned in this eBook there are many more ways to gain
attention on social media.

Every day you have the opportunity to reach hundreds and thousands of
people by ACTIVELY putting yourself out there (1,80$ strategy, leveraging
the reach of bigger accounts, top comment strategy, etc.).

You're 100% responsible for your growth, not some random algorithms.

I don't want you to read this eBook and then execute nothing you've read
here. This book also should work as a guide where you always can reread
certain topics if you feel stuck.

For example, if you haven't posted in 2-3 days, just re-check the content
creation chapter.

If you didn't gain any followers in the last week, re-check the growth
chapter and implement the tactics to put yourself out there.

Don't leave anything to chance, really make yourself a plan you can
execute.

If you don't have a written plan you will likely procrastinate and not be
consistent.

Here's an example plan:

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Content creation
Marketing tactics
Posting

-> 5 pieces of content a week, while only creating one artwork.

Keep in mind that this is just an example plan that doesn't consider many
more content-ideas and growth-tactics you learned.

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Have a Clear Goal!

It's always important to be able to measure your success, so you can adjust
your tactics.

So instead of saying “I want to grow my art page”, really define what your
goals for the next months are.

For example: “I want to grow my art page to 1k followers within the next 3
months”. Then what you do is divide this goal into subgoals: To be able to
gain 1k followers within 3 months you need to gain ~11 followers per day.

That way you know you need to implement the tactics and strategies you
learned every day to gain at least 11 followers per day.

I know it's not the best to always look at the numbers, but only that way
you will know if you're doing something wrong and how you can improve it.
You also wouldn't go to the gym without measuring your success.

You need to become proactive and execute every day, you may not leave it
to chance if you become successful or not – but I think you’ve already
learned that by seeing how many opportunities there are, instead of just
hoping that the algorithm will make you viral somehow.

With that being said, show the world who you are!

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Vocabularies:

CTA: Call to action – a piece of text which induces readers to perform a

certain action. E.g., questions in your captions to increase comments, or
writing “Buy this” if you promote your products in your stories. Leverage:
Use (something) to maximum advantage. Leveraged attention: Create
win-win situations with bigger pages to use their reach for your
advantage.

Persona: Personas are fictional profiles that represent groups of similar

people in a target audience. They can help you figure out how to reach
people on a more personal level, while delivering the right messages,
content, and products at the right time.

Engagement rate: A metric that tracks how much of your audience

interacts with your content. How to calculate: average likes + comments on
your posts / your followers * 100 = engagement rate in %. The average
engagement rate is 1-4% on Insta, everything above is considered good.

Conversion rate (CVR): The conversion rate is the percentage of users who
take a desired action. For example: How much of your profile visitors
convert to followers or how many people who clicked on the link to your
products end up buying it.

Watch time: Is often referring to TikTok and IG Reels: Metrics which tracks
for how long people are watching your video on the average. Sadly, this
metric can´t be seen on IG Reels (but on normal videos and TikToks) – but
you know if a video of yours went viral it must have a good watch time
(probably >100% - people even rewatched it).

Impression: Impressions are the number of times your content has been
shown to social media users. A viewer doesn’t need to engage with a post
for it to be counted as an impression. A user can also look at your content
multiple times resulting in more impressions

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Traffic: Traffic refers to all user visits to a website or mobile application.
For example, if you have an own shop you need to get traffic on it (through
social media marketing) to generate sales.

B2C: Business to Consumer – A B2C business deals directly with

consumers. For example, if you sell your art to normal people you´re in the
B2C – business.

B2B: Business to Business – A B2B business deals with other businesses or

entrepreneurs. For example, if you sell a logo to a company you´re in the
B2B – business. Normally you can here charger higher prices, since other
businesses see a lot more monetary value in your work.

Cost per mille (CPM): It refers to how much you pay per 1,000 impressions.
For example, if you buy a story shoutout which reaches 10k people and pay
10$ - the CPM is 1$. On the other hand: If you have built your audience as
an artist, reach 20k people on average with a post and charge a CPM of
4$ - a company who wants to promote their products through your page
would have to pay 80$ for a post.

Marketing angle: One marketing angle is showing one benefit of your

product. If you want to sell a product or service, you have to promote it
through different marketing angles.

Here a few marketing angles - examples for digital brushes:

- Easier to use than standard brushes
- Saves your time (e.g., brushes which draw hairs)
- Many artists already bought it and are more than satisfied (social proof)
- Many professional artists use it (expert proof) - Etc.

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