🤓 Creator Club

October 11th

Hi friend,

Welcome to the first-ever edition of the Creator Club! 🥳

Real talk: I’m sending this newsletter out a month later than I’d originally planned. But that's OK. I spent the last month on vacation - traveling through Europe, visiting old friends, and spending quality time with my family... and though I missed my goal, at least my batteries are now on full!

Spending time with my nomad friends always inspires me, and today I hope to pass some of that inspiration on to you! 👇

🤓 What I’ve Been Working On:

When I first got back, I felt READY to dive head-first into my newest project: an Accelerator for artists ready to grow their online audience. Me and my business partner Charly have been working on it for some time now, and I am feeling pumped about it! 🔥

Working on new projects always lights me up. Creating something from nothing… it’s exciting!

But after taking a day to reflect on priorities, I realized something... Although this program was the most exciting thing to work on, it wasn’t the most urgent.

You see - throughout this whole month, my business partner Charly is running her Facetober challenge.​

Hundreds of artists take part every year, creating tens of thousands of stunning portraits ✨

And while many of these artists will be interested in growing their audience, we already have two products that are even MORE relevant to this challenge: a brush-pack and a course specifically on portraiture.

Working on a new project felt far more exciting. But we knew that it made more sense to use this opportunity to promote the products we already have. So we put on our blinkers, hit pause on our shiny new object, and got to work promoting our course and brushes.

👇 Here's What We Did:

1. We built this custom sales page for Charly's Portrait Powerpack brushes. It's a step up from the Gumroad page we were using before, and does a better job explaining the brushes to potential customers
   ​
2. To attract more newsletter subscribers, we also decided to give away a handful of brushes from the Powerpack for free, along with the prompts for this year's Facetober challenge
   ​
3. When visitors download the free brushes and prompts, we give them a little bonus to encourage them to take action. We use the Thank You page to promote the full brush-pack at a discount. If you'd like to see this in action, visit this page and enter your details
   ​
4. When people download our brushes, they also join our newsletter list - where we then promote our Out of This World Portraits class.

​

So far, the effort we invested has been paying off.

Our sales are up considerably:

As is our newsletter growth:

🎓 Lesson Learnt: Don’t just create new stuff. Also take time to promote the things you already have

Many of us creative types love to focus on building new things.

But taking time to actually promote those things once they're ready? Ehhh, boring!

The result?

We end up with a graveyard full of half-finished products.

We pour so much time and energy into our creative projects. We perfect every little detail. And then, once it's all finally ready… we just abandon it and move onto creating the next project!

If you want to build a sustainable creative business, you can't just spend all your time making new things. You also need to put energy into promoting what you already have.

This applies to all your creations:

• Digital products like courses or brushes
• Your prints & POD products
• Your social media content
• Your illustrations, designs, photographs, and other creative work

Otherwise, we risk ending up like the character in this cliche web-comic - abandoning our projects before they have a chance to really pay off:

🫵 Action Step: What existing product can you promote this week?

This week, I challenge you to take 2 days to focus exclusively on promoting existing products you already have.

Here are a few suggestions. If you have:

1️⃣ Digital products like a course or brush-pack → Send out a newsletter or publish some Instagram stories to promote it! Try to come up with an angle you’ve never used before. Tell a story about the "making of" these products. Highlight a testimonial, or showcase some customer results. Explain some of the less obvious reasons why someone should buy it.

2️⃣ Prints, Etsy Products, or POD Products → Create a Reel showcasing your product. It doesn't have to be long or complicated - here's a great example from my coaching client Nick Cocozza that didn't take long but got over 23k+ views

3️⃣ Social media posts → Have you created great content in the past? Repurpose it into different formats! Write up an amazing caption? Turn it into a text-carousel, like this. Or summarize it, grab some footage from your phone, and turn it into a text Reel like this. Only a small percentage of your audience will see each of your posts, so don't let your message get lost - do everyone a favor and turn it into several different formats!

4️⃣ Illustrations, designs, or other creative work → Experiment with ways to turn one single final design into multiple pieces of content. Post a "making-of" clip. Post some detail shots. Create a carousel with multiple similar pieces of art. Create multiple color variations and ask your audience which they prefer. You put so much work into that design - make sure people actually see it!

​

Now Over To You

I hope you enjoyed this first edition!

If you'd like a little accountability, hit REPLY and let me know what you'd like to promote this week, and I'll check in with you to make sure you get it done 🙂

Now get promoting 🙌

Happy creating,
Fabe