Let’s do this. How are you? How is the marketing of your beautiful, creative endeavours doing? Relax, I got you…

As per my blog, digitalmarketingforcreatives.blog, this newsletter aims to help you market your creativite output so you don’t have to spend too long marketing and can invest that time in your creativity.

Let’s dive in.

Streaming services are great for the streaming service companies, but they aren’t great for artists and record companies. We know this. In an interesting article, Jonny Iovine predicted that streaming services are effectively over. Jonny knows a thing or two about bridging the gap between music and the tech industry, so his opinion is important here. As streaming services (Spotify etc) aren’t a great deal for musicians and record companies, Jonny is predictign a shift.

Now bands, singers, musicians and record companies want to regain direct access to the market because it will make them more money and not have them scrabbling around for the crumbs that fall off Spotify’s table. This is particularly true of smaller artists. Why is this important to you? Well if you are relying on a Instagram, Facebook, Etsy etc to sell your work or interact with your target audience, then you’re on rented ground. You don’t own that digital house. That means an algortihm change, a change in terms and conditions, hiked seller fees, all could really impact your business and there is little you can do about it. Whereas if you are talking to your audience via an email newsletter, then all those email addresses can keep you interacting with your loyal fans irrespective of what is happening with the wider social media landscape.

Here’s a link from my blog that further details the benefits of this approach, plus a lot of useful tips. Enjoy!

There are so many tools to help with your digital marketing, and most of them are frankly useless. A tool is only beneficial if it gets the job done without too much upfront input. Every week on the blog, I’ll post about a really useful tool that will be useful for creatives.

The tool that ties in with the above story is Beehiiv. I’m using Beehiiv for this newsletter. Remember, I never get any benefit for promoting these tools, I just promote them if I find them useful. I have been pondering building a newsletter for quite a while, and I couldn’t really findthe platform that clicked with me, but Beehiiv fits what I need really well.

The free tier is generous in its features, it is really straightforward to build your platform, and the interface is really intuitive. Like i said, no kickback for me, but if you fancy building your own email list and email newsletter, I would consider trying Beehiiv.

The one thing not to get carried away with, seeing as we’re talking all things email newsletters, is the amount of subscribers you have. Obviously that’s important to a certain extent, but what is more powerful is having a small number of subscribers who are superfans. What I mean by that is people who are so into your creative thing, they will purchase everything you make. Better to have 1000 superfans, than 10,000 barely engaged subscribers.

Here is a blog post that explains the full process.

So I did the thing. The scary thing. The 'what if nobody cares' thing. I wrote a book. And against every instinct in my body, I'm going to tell you about it. Not because I'm great at sales, I'm not, which is highly ironic for someone who has spent so long training others in digital marketing as well as writing about it for so long. But because I know so many creatives who just either freeze like rabbits in the headlights when it comes to marketing, or they just lose so much time with overly complicated marketing systems and pointless tech tools.

And in a world that's on fire and running out of time, you don't hide the thing that might actually help someone. So here it is: Digital marketing for Creatives. It's real. It's raw. It's me. You can buy it via Amazon. Or don't. But thanks for listening either way.