I've been selling art for years but never built an email list or marketed consistently. Do I really have to start from scratch like a beginner?

Yes, you essentially do have to start from scratch when it comes to marketing, even if you’ve been selling art for years. This is hard to accept because you feel established and don’t want to do the early-stage startup moves. But if you’ve never marketed consistently, never built an email list, never cultivated collector relationships, then you have a zero-to-one problem—you’re just getting the marketing side of your business spun up. It’s wonderful that you’ve already validated your art, which will help you greatly, but there’s no shortcut through building your marketing foundation. You need to focus on marketing and treat it like you’re starting new, because in this area, you are.

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Asked by synthesized from teaching · Answered by Patrick Shanahan · art-marketing-podcast · 2022-01-22