Business, for most of us, has come to a screeching halt. Small businesses are hit especially hard; some business owners have to decide whether to reopen at all. We want to, but will it be possible? While we worry, we are at home, in our jammies, out of our normal routines. Many have children at home who need to do their schoolwork. No customers, no money coming in.

​It's hard to focus.

Still, there are things we can do if we plan to get our businesses going again after the pandemic. 

Stay in touch. When things open up again, your best customers will be the ones you already had. Gather (or clean up) your email list, and send out regular emails to your customers. MailChimp lets you send 2,000 emails a month for free, and it's easy to use.

Work on your website. Or, get one if you don't have one. Even a one-page website with information about what you can do for customers, and contact information, is better than no website. Weebly is about as easy as it comes. If your website needs updating, now's a good time to do it. 

Get (more) social. Facebook and Instagram are good places to connect with your customers and prospects. If you're thinking, "I already have a Facebook page and I'm on Instagram," do you post every day? Once a week? Almost never? Revisit your social marketing strategy, and post frequently. Nothing is too much if it's relevant.

Go old-school. Write some notes to long-time customers. They will love it, and you'll stand out from the herd.

Write a blog post. Or start a blog. It's great for search engine optimization, drives people to your website, and raises your profile. Blog posts don't have to be long but they do need to be frequent.

​Before we answer that question, let's make some assumptions:

• You are an artist. 
• You would like to continue being an artist.
• You want to sell your work.

​

​Now, in order to continue being an artist, you might just want to cover the cost of materials and you'd be happy with that. Maybe you'd like to make a little more, pay for a vacation, something extra. Or, you could want to quit your day job altogether. In any case, you need to sell something, so now you have a business. And, as is the case for any sort of business, you don't just need to get the word out about what you do, you need to differentiate yourself from the competition.

How does an artist define competition?
That's easy: the same way any other business does. Competition is anything that can replace what you have to sell. Read that last sentence again. In the case of art, which is mostly a completely optional purchase, just about anything can replace it. People don't have to buy art: they do have to buy food and transportation and housing and health care and a ton of other things. Your competition isn't just other artists.

How does a potential art buyer find you?
They shop, just like they do for shoes or jewelry or just about anything else. Let's assume you have already figured out the best places to sell your art, like galleries, shows, website, social media, licensing, patronage, etc. Are you the only artist in any of these sales venues? No. So why should a potential art buyer purchase your art when there are so many choices? Branding. (And and that means a lot more than just a logo.)

But, isn't branding just for consumer goods? 
To artists, art is sacred, our life's work. When a buyer says "That matches my sofa. I'll take it," we die inside just a little. But we swipe the card and live to create another day. Art isn't a box of cereal, or a pair of sneakers, but companies who make those things have figured out that branding works. They know how to differentiate themselves from the other choices out there. 

Branding doesn't have to be slick.
It just has to promise something. Know the artist Banksy? His (or her) brand is mystery. The art appears, and people want to know who did it. Thomas Kincaide's brand is a sort of pretty idealism. What does your art do for your potential buyer? What does it promise, and how is that different from the artist next to you in the gallery or at the show? Online, how do you stand out in a Google search, if your website is found at all?

Your name alone isn't enough.
Unless your name is Picasso, or you already have a large following (in which case, you stopped reading already), your name alone probably doesn't send enough of a message to potential buyers. And a brand isn't just a logo, it's everything to do with the business. Here are some ways you can differentiate your brand from that of other artists.

1. Your art is truly unique and stands on its own. Myles Maillie developed a style unto itself and has been known for it for decades. If you also create art that is like no other, that's your brand. If you paint beach scenes or make pottery, it may take something a bit more to craft a brand.

2. Your artistic persona is intriguing. Artist Cory Basil could easily fall into the category above, but at least as interesting as his art is his personal style. Dark, brooding, sort of The-American-West-meets-steampunk? Hard to categorize, which is exactly the point.

3. Your art business (or studio) has a cool name. Kristina Young named her art business The Art of Peace. Her brand is all about personal growth and enlightenment and will appeal to people with the same interests.

Once you know what your brand should be, the next move is to nail down a domain name immediately. Even if you aren't quite ready to put up a website, get the name you want before someone else does. 

More about marketing your art online in a future post. Keep creating, and be thinking about your brand.

​CONTACT US

Kim Phillips is an artist, marketer, writer, graphic designer and gardener living in Cowan, Tennessee. She works from her studio, Tiny Creative House.

© 2018 Kim Phillips | Tiny Creative House

This is one of the weirder useful tools we just discovered: answerthepublic.com   Have you noticed that, when you search for something in Google, like "how to build a beehouse" or some such, you now get helpful snippets that answer that question, right up top? Wouldn't you love it if your website got that much traction? Well, it can.

What is AnswerThePublic.com?
It's something that a public relations consultancy came up with to generate questions on just about anything. It features an impatient-looking old coot who is waiting for you to put a keyword in the box. Go ahead, do it, and come right back. We'll tell you why it matters.

Pretty fancy, no? The graphic made up of questions is hard to look at, so there's a button to download the questions to a CSV file. How does it work? Looks like someone wrote a pretty cool program to scrape questions out of Google. But why?

For You -- Generating engaging content is, to say the least, a job. So is ranking high in a Google search. We'll take all the help we can get. Answering questions is a good way to affect both.
​
For Them -- The folks at coveragebook.com wanted eyeballs on their product, and traffic to their website, so they gave us a brillliant example of content marketing. Not just "Ha! Made you look! marketing but truly useful content, presented in an engaging way.

So, the next time you ask yourself, "How can I rank in Google snippets?" you may start by answering questions on your website, questions generated by answerthepublic.com.

More marketing tools here.

Let's work on it together.

​Kim Phillips is an artist, marketer, writer, graphic designer and gardener living in Cowan, Tennessee. She works from her studio, Tiny Creative House.

© 2018 Kim Phillips | Tiny Creative House

We've all seen it, advertised several times a day: the big corporation telling us how great they are. Or, the mom-and-pop shop with the tagline like "Excellence For Over 20 Years." Or, the full page of photos of realtors who sold over $1 million last year. Who cares?

Make Me a Promise
Branding -- and all the communications that come from the brand -- is a promise. You, the seller, will give me, the buyer, something that matters to me. What matters to me? Something that makes my life just a teeny bit better, makes me feel good about myself, makes me faster, taller, stronger, sexier, richer. Something that brings a tear to my eye or makes me laugh out loud. Something that shows me that you get me.

Make Me Feel Something
Look at the brands below. What feeling does each one give? Happy? Serious? Industrial? Playful? Which one(s) could you imagine doing business with? The answer to that, of course, depends on who you are. Each of these companies has a different audience, with different wants and needs. 

Advertising That Drives Emotion
Chill bumps: this ad for Audi delivers them. Watching it, you think it's going to be just a sweet story about how girls can drive as well as guys. Give it a look.
​

If ever a company wanted to let ladies know that "we get you," Audi did it right.

Your Brand's Promise
Right now, you may be thinking, "Oh, sure, with a marketing budget like Audi's, I can send a great message, too." Guess what? You're already sending a message; the question is, which one?

Look at your logo, your website, your social media. Does it look like it all came from the same place? What does it promise the person you want to reach? What is your relationship to that person? Is it current? More importantly, is it relevant?

Let's work on it together.

What happens when you email someone a file that is huge, like 20MB? Sometimes, nothing bad happens, it just takes a while, depending on your (and the recipient's) connection speed. Other times, the recipient's email system may simply say "nope" and the email won't go through. There's an easy way to avoid this issue altogether.

Say hello to WeTransfer. It is a website where you can upload your large file and send it as a link rather than clogging someone's email pipeline. If you want to send several files at once, just put them in a folder, zip that folder, and WeTransfer will see that as one file.

WeTransfer offers both a free transfer type ~ always plenty for us so far ~ and you don't even need an account for that... just go to the website and send. They also offer WeTransfer Plus, for even bigger file transfers and customization. And, they give Plus away free to art students!

Make a little file transfer magic. Want some other great tools? Click here.

Kim Phillips is an artist, marketer, writer, graphic designer and gardener living in Monteagle, Tennessee. She works from her studio, Tiny Creative House.

© 2017 Kim Phillips | Tiny Creative House

Photo by Ian Schneider on Upsplash
​

I grew up and still live in a region that has the guts to list mac-and-cheese as a vegetable on menus, with a straight face. As a kid, the only "ethnic" food were some meat-and-three joints in parts of town where whites didn't go and a couple of places that had spaghetti. (Any Nashvillians remember Marchetti's?) Seafood was catfish, and that ~ and everything else ~ was fried. Salad, if offered at all, was an uninspired little bowl of iceberg lettuce and a few carrot shavings. Or something congealed; don't get me started.

In school, from elementary through high school, each grade had maybe three or four black kids, one guy from India, and the random Asian kid who stayed until his parents pulled him out for private school. The advent of busing changed some of that, but mostly it added a few dozen Jewish kids from an area near the synagogues in town. My best friend was Italian, which improved my dining prospects a great deal. But mostly, my hometown was exceedingly white and Christian. You would have also assumed it was straight, but the AIDS disaster proved that to be inaccurate.

Now, of course, you can get some really interesting salads in my hometown, both human and culinary. People of different racial make-ups can marry, and so can gays. People from every country on earth moved over and folks tired of being cold moved south. People tired of over-paying for houses moved from California. Nashville now has the largest population of native Kurds outside of Kurdistan. And, entire streets in town have more signs in Spanish than in English. Fewer new acquaintances ask you first thing which church you attend. There are mosques and temples and atheists, believers and hypocrites. 

In high school civics class, America was described as a melting pot but, looking around the room, the stew was light pink. And it wasn't only our palates that were suffering from a lack of variety; we were stuck in the mindset of white bread with baloney and mayonnaise. We didn't know there were any other points of view, any other ways to live, or what sort of reality we might create for ourselves. It was unappetizing. 

A melting pot fetches up imagery of everyone being blended into a smooth, consistent puree of humanity. Who wants that? Not me, and not the ethnic purists. If you are suspicious of people from other places, people who practice a religion different from yours, or people with a different level of income or education, ask yourself why. Search your soul and discover what you might be missing. Why not appreciate all the unique, multi-colored, delicious pieces of our world, right here and right now?

​Enjoy your salad.

THINGS I'VE LEARNED SINCE MOVING TO THE MOUNTAIN

To say that Monteagle Mountain is a bit, um, quirky would be a huge understatement. It has some traditions that are unique but unsurprising to a born Southerner.

Whose House Is That?
For example, "Sam Jenson's House" is called that no matter how many people have lived there since he built it 75 years ago.

I Just Moved Here
Like many Southerners, people on the Mountain give directions based on where stuff used to be. "Turn by the church that burned down in 1942, the one that had the big oak tree that Sam Jensen made all his furniture out of." Street signs seem to be a recent innovation and entirely optional.

Always a Stranger
If you move here when you are two years old, you won't live long enough to be considered a local. That takes many generations. The assumption by the long-timers is that everyone knows what they know, because they've been here just as long. And if they don't know it, that's a clear sign that they don't much matter in the grand scheme of things.

Impatience Gets You Nowhere
Come here from a bustling city and you'll need to adjust your idle speed. People take their time and, once you start taking yours, it's very liberating. If a supplier isn't moving quickly enough for you, pushiness resets the delivery date to "never."

Driving Times Vary
Allow five extra minutes per mile to get where you're going if it's foggy. (Hint: It's foggy a LOT.)

If the fog is real bad, you drive "by ear." 
The fog can be as thick as cotton up here. To drive from St. Andrews-Sewanee to the University, someone told me you just roll down your window and listen for traffic before you pull out on the highway. This must be why Sewanesians have guardian angels.

The fog isn't always weather. It's a state in which newcomers often find themselves... groping, feeling around, trying to figure things out.

Still, the mountain is seductive and has a strong pull. When I come home to it now, I feel the stress just melt away. The sunny days more than make up for the foggy ones.

"I wasn't born on Monteagle Mountain, but I got here as quick as I could."

Kim Phillips is an artist, marketer, writer, graphic designer and gardener living in Monteagle, Tennessee. She works from her studio, Tiny Creative House.

© 2017 Kim Phillips | Tiny Creative House

Okay, step back from the easel. Or the sketch pad. Or the wheel, the blowtorch, the lathe, the loom, or whatever you use to create your art. Think about the last time you told a fellow artist, "I love your stuff." What is that artist doing right now? Same thing you're doing, probably. Creating for part of the day, marketing for part, paying bills and taxes, emptying the trash, and dealing with a dozen more distractions. 

Hardly anyone gets rich doing art. Probably the best that most of us can do is to make a decent living, and even that's a stretch. 

So, it's build-some-good-karma time. Buy some art. Now. Show a fellow artist that you really mean it when you say, "I love your stuff." Put your money where...well, you know. It doesn't have to be a big piece, or an expensive one. Buy a print, even a greeting card. Swap for something you made. And, when another artist buys something from you, give a shout-out. Better yet, put a link to the other artist on your website or social media page.

In the spirit of sharing, snag the image "Artists Buy Art" above and put it on your website, Facebook page and/or group. It's yours. If you need a PNG of it, contact me.
​

​Kim Phillips | Striver-in-Chief
​Tiny Creative House
©2016 Kim Phillips | Tiny Creative House

Amongst the bounteous offerings of the mountain is a never-ending supply of wine corks, both from the excellent inns* and restaurants and from the residents. This week's "tiny project" is making plant markers from wine corks. Here's what you'll need:

• Wine corks (natural or rubber)
• Acrylic paint
• Wire plant stems
• Paint marker in a contrasting color to the paint on the cork

That's all, unless you want to add bling, as I did here. I had some old beads with a larger hole and secured them with Weldbond glue (it dries clear).

1. Make a hole in the cork. Use a nail or a screw, and try to get it in the center.
2. Insert the wire. Some of the wire stems are very long; I cut them in half and am not particular about the length of each piece of wire.
3. Paint the corks. If you want them to stand out, paint them different colors. It may take two coats for the paint to be solid. Let them dry completely.
4. Add any bling. I just slid beads up the wire and put a little Weldbond glue around the wire to hold them in place. Let dry for a few hours.
5. Write plant names on the corks. I used a paint marker. The Marvy DecoColor was more solid than the Sharpie paint marker.

Tiny Tip: A block of styrofoam makes a great place to park the markers while they dry.

Did you miss the last Tiny Project? It's here.

EDITOR'S NOTE: I originally published this post a few years ago on a site called 12Most.com and it was very popular. It seemed to make sense to revisit it now in my new venture, Tiny Creative House. Enjoy...

​Ever wonder what makes those wacky, creative types tick? How is it that some people seem to come up with all kinds of interesting, original work while the rest of us trudge along in our daily routines? Creative people are different because they operate a little differently. They:

​1. Are easily bored
A short attention span isn’t always a good thing, but it can indicate that the creative person has grasped one concept and is ready to go on to the next one.
2. Are willing to take risks
Fearlessness is absolutely necessary for creating original work, because of the possibility of rejection. Anything new requires a bit of change, and most of us don’t care for change that much.
3. Don’t like rules
Rules, to the creative person, are indeed made to be broken. They are created for us by other people, generally to control a process; the creative person needs freedom in order to work.
4. Ask “what if…”
Seeing new possibilities is a little risky, because it means that something will change and some sort of action will have to be taken. Curiosity is probably the single most important trait of creative people.
5. Make lots of mistakes
A photographer doesn’t just take one shot, and a composer doesn’t just write down a fully realized symphony. Creation is a long process, involving lots of boo-boos along the way. A lot goes in the trash.
6. Collaborate
The hermit artist, alone in his garret, is a romantic notion but not always an accurate one. Comedians, musicians, painters, chefs all get a little better by sharing with others in their fields.
7. Are generous
Truly creative people aren’t afraid to give away their hard-earned knowledge. The chef can give you the recipe because she knows you won’t make it like she does anyway.
8. Are independent
Stepping off the beaten path may be scary, but creative people do it. Children actually do this very well but are eventually trained to follow the crowd.
9. Experiment
Combining things that don’t normally go together can result in brilliance or a giant mess. Trial and error are necessary to the creative process.
10. Motivate themselves
There does seem to be a spark that creative people share, an urgent need to make things. They are willing to run the inherent risks of doing something new in order to get a new result.
11. Work hard
This is probably the most overlooked trait of creative people. People who don’t consider themselves to be creative assume that people who are creative are magical, that ideas just pop into their heads effortlessly. Experienced creative people have developed processes and discipline that make it look easy.
12. Aren’t alone
The good news is that it’s possible for everyone to be creative. There are creative accountants, creative cooks, creative janitors, creative babysitters. Any profession or any hobby can be made into a creative pursuit by embracing and using creative traits.

Do you consider yourself creative? (Say yes.) Finding something you’re really passionate about will help you take a chance and might just result in something wildly creative.

Kim Phillips | Striver-in-Chief
​Tiny Creative House

This post was originally written for the 12 Most blog. Republished with permission, courtesy of 12Most. It made AllTop’s “Holy Kaw” list.

Photo by Aaron Burden | Unsplash