I've been pretty busy building a tiny house in my back yard (with my own 2 hands!), so my creative business has taken a bit of a back seat. The tiny house is nearly done and I need to really buckle down and show my business a bit of TLC.
As a creative business owner I thought that I'd be interested in posts like this, so I'm putting it out there for your reading enjoyment, as well as trying to keep myself accountable.
This week I am focusing on:
- Getting all my products looking good in my Instagram feed, and as a byproduct my Facebook feed. So people know what I actually sell when they look at it.
- Cleaning up my bios on Tiktok and Instagram
- Make a plan for my Pinterest marketing
At the moment I have a logo which looks like this
It was from a Canva template originally. I can't really remember exactly how I came to decide on the colour scheme, but all my products are pretty basic colours and I wanted a pop of colour.
I actually really love rich colours, despite the fact the majority of my products are either blue denim or inner tube black. That's also a work on in the back of my mind too. Thinking about my Instagram feed I do want colour. My products would look silly on a bright background, but I think sticking with the light grey and neutral wood colours work with pops of other colour.
After a bit of a Google search for palates with orange in them, I came across this:
Combined with my existing colours I've come to decide on this palate
Cleaning up my Social Media Bios
I changed my name on my social accounts to include SEO rich words.
Did you know that your name is the only SEO relevant part of your bio? If someone is looking for recycled sewing inspiration they won't be searching for Made Up Shop (yet), but they might type in sewing projects, or sewing diy. Depending on which platform it was, the name for each is a bit different because they have different character lengths. My user name is still @madeupshop.textileartist but instead of having my user name and actual name the same, people can now find me when they use the platform as a search engine.
Interestingly enough, the very next day I had a new Tiktok follower despite not posting any new content. Her bio said something along the lines of "just looking for creative inspiration". Success!
Username: Madeupshop.textileartist
Name: Recycled crafts, sewing & patterns.
Bio Pic: I changed from a product pic to a photo of my (trustworthy, wink, wink) face on a coloured background to make me pop. This was advice from Chalene Johnson that I thought I'd give a try. People buy from people, and they want to know who they're dealing with. The background remover was in Canva, it's a not perfect, my hair looks a bit wobbly but I'm just taking messy action rather than agonizing over something I don't really have the skills to do much about at this moment.
Description: what you'll get from me then a link to connect.
Also noting how few posts and followers I have, but changing that is part of the plan.
Pinterest Planning
It wasn't on my original plan for the week, but I do know the power of Pinterest and the fact it can keep generating leads long after a pin has been posted, unlike the other platforms I use.
I've used Pinterest in the past for other businesses, but staying consistent has always been a problem, there always seems to be so much more to do. I was listening to a webinar by Jasmine Star about Pinterest this week. Her course was $297 USD I think. I've paid for Pinterest courses before, but like I said, it's my ability to consistently post that's a problem. She was talking about it taking about an hour each week which got me to thinking maybe I could get someone else to do it. $297 USD is about $500 NZD. After a quick look on Fiverr a Pinterest account manager is around $68 NZD per month. $500 divided by $68 gives me 7 and a bit months worth of someone else creating and pinning from the content I'll be focusing on instead.
I'm going to start trying out having a Pinterest Virtual Assistant and see how it goes. I'll keep you posted.