Tuesday’s Business-Assessing Sales Opportunities

As you put together your business plan, you need to consider where you’re going to sell your work. What venues or markets you’ll target. Heck, even without a business plan, I’m sure this is something you’ll consider as you decide to sell your work.
When determining where to show and sell your work, you [...]

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Tuesday’s Business-Know Your Customers/Collectors

Thus far in our discussion on writing a business plan, we’ve talked about several components: writing goals, defining your art, and knowing who your competition is. This week the focus is on describing and knowing who your customers and collectors are.
As you put together your business plan, you need to think about who is [...]

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Tuesday’s Business: Know the Competition

Sometimes, when we enter into a small art business, we think “Hey, I’ve got this great idea.” We create our art, put together a dazzling display, take it to a show, and then, lo and behold, you find someone two booths down is doing the same thing as you!
Maybe the material is different or [...]

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Tuesday’s Business: Define Your Art

Last week we discussed writing goals as part of your business or dream into action plan. This week the focus is on defining your art.
As artists we often find ourselves working in many mediums; we like a little collage, we like wire, we like fabric and fiber, beads, paints, etc, etc. Bruce Baker [...]

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Twitter-bug

I’m not sure what motivated me to do it but I joined Twitter this weekend. Well, part of the motivation was to challenge myself to write short posts. Twitter limits you to 140 characters per post; that includes punctuation and spaces.
I’ve also been reading about using Twitter to promote your business, your web [...]

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Tuesday’s Business: Writing Goals

Last week I introduced what I intend to be a weekly post on different aspects of running a small business. Because I am currently in the process of writing a business plan, I thought that might be a natural place to start.
I am using the weekly topics presented in Alyson Stanfield’s Art Salon program [...]

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Tuesday’s Business

With a second year of blogging now underway, I decided to start a weekly post about business. Specifically, running a small business as a self-employed artist. Perhaps I’ll share some information that is new to you, perhaps I’ll put a different spin on information that may be familiar to you. Either way, [...]

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Mac Attack

Resistance is futile
-The Borg
Star Trek
First Contact (1996)

In late May, assimilation occurred in my house. I switched from a PC to a Mac laptop. Eric has used a Mac in his studio for a while and more recently as his primary computer in his office. I’ve been having some “issues” with my desktop [...]

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Show Economics

Prior to doing a show, we receive lots of well-wishes for a good show, a successful show, a profitable show. After the show, we’re asked how it went, how was attendance, were people buying. In response to these questions, it is important to keep in mind that what may be a fair, [...]

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It’s Showtime Folks

The postcards were sent out a couple weeks ago.  Unfortunately I still haven’t gotten into the habit of sending email announcements to those folks who only leave an email address on my show mailing list.  That is another task to add to the goal list; investigate an email newsletter service or just get better about [...]

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