Find parallel audiences to grow a mailing list of fans for your art

There are literally hundreds of tactics out there about how to drive more traffic to your site. Obvious ways like using paid ads, which work, but many of us don’t have marketing budgets to even consider this route.

There’s another way — the snowball effect

Ideally, to double or triple the size of your audience you need every one of your current fans to introduce your art to one or two of their friends — who will also take the same action. The larger the number of new fans who introduces your art to someone else, the quicker your art newsletter will grow.

It’s hard getting your first 100 art newsletter subscribers. But once you have your first 100 it’s easier to get your first 1,000 — then 10,000 and on and on.

But we still need fans to start with.

We all start with zero subscribers

I wish email lists grew on trees, but they don’t. You don’t just “get” a list. (You should never buy a list either.)

The bottom line is this, everyone starts with ZERO subscribers.

It’s easy for us to look at other successful artists who have followings of 10,000+ people… and think, “If only I had that many followers I would be making a great living as an artist too!”.

Artists aren’t successful because one day they were given a large audience. They have large audiences because they identified who their target audience was and engaged with them using interesting content, consistently.

To start growing your email list you need to know who your target audience is

One of the biggest problems I hear from artists is getting their art seen by the masses.

This is one of the most common misconceptions when it comes to marketing art. Trying to market to everyone.

You make the art you make because of your story, background, and interests. Your collectors will buy your art because your work is related to their specific interests.

There are ways to tap into your unique market and offer them interesting content about you and your art because it speaks to their interests, values, and tastes.

But who are you marketing your art to?

Who is your audience?

This really depends on your art. Really take a close look at your art. Ask yourself, “Is your art based around a specific subject? Genre? Industry?”.

Leveraging other audiences

You can leverage the audiences of others. Such as other more established artists, brands, bloggers, and businesses to build your fan base.

Exposing your art to related audiences of other subjects is the ideal way to have your art introduced to the new audiences fans.

Think: Could your art possibly piggyback or relate to:

If your art relates to any of the above or anything not listed, then start finding where this audience lives online.

Once you do this, start sharing your blog posts with them.

You’d be surprised what you can find online communities based on out there. Just cruise and search through Reddit.com (the front page of the internet) and you can find an online community based on ANYTHING.

If you currently have zero email subscribers, ask yourself how you can feature or collaborate with other audiences to get 1,000, 5,000, 10,000+ more email subscribers.

I’m in no way suggesting you change your existing art just to meet the demands of a particular audience.

Still having trouble determining who your audience is? How have people described your work to you in the past? “Urban”, “graffiti-like”, “lots of horses”, “would be great on skateboards”, “very art deco”, “reminds me of a comic”, and so on.

Find your related audiences and put your work in from of them. This is how you grow your audience.

Multiple audiences

I’ve done fan art from my favorite movies and shared it with related online communities, collaborated with wildlife nonprofits with my animal drawings, and have even working on the same canvas with other artists.

Each collaboration has resulted in exposure to a new audience and an increase in email subscribers who, otherwise, would have never been exposed.

Get in front of related audiences and funnel them to your site. Remember you goal is to ultimately get email subscribers who’ve raised their hands and said they want to hear more about your art.

If you want to double your email subscribers in X months, it’s possible. Be clear with your goal and work backwards from there.

ACTION STEPS:

As always feel free to email me if you have any questions or you’re having trouble determining who your audience is. An extra set of eyes can sometimes help clear things up.

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