Casting the Net

Much like a fisherman trying to maximize the surface area when they cast their net into the sea you need to make sure the surface area of your marketing is sufficiently wide. You should be focusing your attention on key platforms that your customers may find you on.

Google: Google has several tools to ensure that you get traffic to your webpage. Google Search Console, Google Merchant Center, and Google Business Profile are all tools at your disposal to make sure you are reaching a wide audience. Check these often if you run your own website as these will give you keen insight into your website’s performance and click-through rates. Also, keep an eye out for validation errors as they may be preventing your site from reaching the maximum number of users. There are usually instructions on how to fix these errors and get your account back in good standing.

Meta Business Suite: Two of the largest Social Media platforms, Instagram and Facebook, are both owned by the same parent company: Meta. Meta has a product that they offer specifically for business to manage their social media called Meta Business Suite. This tool let’s you create posts, schedule them, respond to customers, manage ads, and set target goals. It is a little clunky in some places, especially in the way it handles reels and stories, but it is great for planning out your social media in advance so you don’t have to constantly remember to post every day.

Etsy: A lot of artists use Etsy as their main source of income. For some artists, this works out exceptionally well. The rest of us, who get burned by Etsy’s algorithms and fees, may venture off to create our own websites. That doesn’t mean to write Etsy off completely. Use it as a supplement to your main website. Make sure that your website is optimized so that the Google search results for your business return your personal website above your Etsy, but keep some of your inventory there so that you don’t miss out on that audience altogether. Just make sure to price your products on Etsy such that you cover the cost of the fees.

Of course, there are plenty of other options online for promoting your business. Other search engines, social media platforms, collectives, storefronts, and aggregator sites. The ones above are the largest and the ones you should focus on initially but don’t write off those smaller ones. Again, the wider you cast your net, the more people your product gets in front of, the better your chance of making those sales.

Do you have any tips for getting sales? Tag us with your ideas @bz_furfur and, as always, stay unique.

The post Expanding Your Business Reach Online: Effective Strategies for Growth appeared first on Burning with Purpose.

Starting out

When we started out we had to get the “lay of the land”. Having never been part of a market we had to first understand what was out there. The best way to do this was to go to some local events, talk to the vendors, see what they are selling, and ask them questions. We started by going to some markets at local breweries and getting a feel for the events; Where do people tend to congregate, do we see an overabundance of products similar to ours, are we seeing no vendors similar to us, and, if so, why. Once we had an idea of what was out there we started to dip our toes in and tried a few local markets.  The results were not always favorable with our booth typically breaking even at best. So we had to start casting a wider net.

Spreading out

In year two we decided to start applying for everything and anything we came across. Pop-ups, Farmers Markets, local events, anyone who would take an application. Pretty soon we were booking up two or three weekends out of the month with shows all over the region, sometimes up to two hours away. The exposure was great but, unfortunately, we learned very quickly that quantity does not always equal quality. There were a lot of shows that just weren’t worth the cost because we weren’t making back our booth fees. There were others that were cheap, and easy to make back our money, but it just isn’t worth the time. Not to mention; the less expensive markets require you to lower your costs such that you are barely able to pay yourself for your work.

Tightening up

In year three we started to narrow our focus. We picked fewer markets with a focus on those that we did well at in previous years and sidelined the ones that didn’t prove profitable or worth our time. For new shows we would be very selective, looking at social media for pictures of previous years to get an idea if the turnout is good and if it passes the “smell test” for our target market.  This worked out well in that we greatly reduced our overall time at markets and, for the ones that we did attend, we made a decent profit. 

From craft to art

This year we started out the year by thinking judiciously about the shows that we would take on, further paring down the list of vendors from previous years, and reaching out early to make sure that we are on the list for the shows that we do want to attend, and putting more focus into getting into art shows and juried shows that bring us closer to the target demographics that we want to reach. The goal now is to move from craft vendor to art vendor. This is a tough transition but, with a solid stable of markets, we can ensure that we can still sell products and pick up commissions while we focus on meeting those long-term goals.

Have you started your planning for 2025? What are some of your suggestions for finding the right market? Tag us @bz_furfur and, as always, stay unique.

The post How to Find the Perfect Market for Selling Your Art appeared first on Burning with Purpose.

OK, so I am going to admit, before last week I had never used Premier Pro. Most of my video editing experience is using iMovie and various web-based video editors. So, here are a few things to keep in mind:

1. My observations may appear very basic to anyone who has used Premier Pro
2. The steps I take to do things are undoubtedly suboptimal

With that out of the way let’s see if we can get Premier Pro to help us with one of our biggest pain points: Creating videos for social media.

The Interface

Oh God! When I first loaded up Premier Pro I didn’t know what I was in for. The process to create a new project and import a video is pretty seamless. When I opened it up to start editing, however, my eyes started to bleed. This must be how people who have never used Photoshop feel the first time they open it up. There are so many widgets on the screen I didn’t know where to start. Fortunately, I looked for things that I was familiar with.

Under the video, you have some controls for playing, pausing, etc so I could watch the video. Under the video, also, I could see there was a timeline that had two layers. One for video and one for audio. There were additional empty layers for each as well so I could presume that there was some option to add additional audio, video, and possibly other layers. Clicking on either of these layers I could access a properties pane to the right which allowed me to adjust volume, color saturation, and other properties of the video. So far so good.

Editing

This is where I got stuck and I needed to seek out help online. I wanted to cut certain parts of the video out and splice them together. It wasn’t immediately obvious how I could do this. Turns out the razor blade in the toolbar is for cutting your video. Pausing the video at the point I wanted to cut and clicking the razor blade tool on the timeline (it’ll snap to where the video is paused) splits the video. Then I could do the same for the point where I want the segment to end. I could then select the segment and delete it by hitting the delete key. Simple enough.

Once you cut the video it is going to leave gaps. You can select a segment and move them left or right to line them up again so that they transition from one to the other. The transitions are abrupt, though. So if you are just cutting out some uhs and ums this might be fine, but if you want a seamless transition from two different locales you might want to add some effects.

Effects

Once again, stumped, I had to search for how to add transition effects to my video. In the upper right-hand of the interface, we have a window with library, templates, and effects. There are a bunch of different effects available here but the one I was most interested in was video transitions. I played around with a few of them by dragging and dropping them from this window to the timeline where I wanted the transition to take place. Viola. Personally, I liked the Additive Dissolve.

I played around with a few other effects. I do like that you can do picture-in-picture if you want to do a tutorial where you are showing yourself performing the technique while showing yourself to talk about it. There is a lot to experiment with here.

Adding Text

There is a Text Layer you can add to your timeline as well. If you want to caption your videos, add commentary, or just label transitions you can add text using this tool. When it is added to your layers you can set the duration it will show on your video. Honestly, since we are doing a lot of these videos for social media, the tools provided by most of the social media tools do a pretty good job of letting you add text to your videos so I prefer to just use those. As I get more comfortable with the tools, however, my options may change.

Exporting your video

That’s it. once your video is done you can export it and it’ll be saved in a format that can be uploaded to any of the social media platforms. Fair warning: This processing portion is a system hog. I have a fairly old laptop but it handles most tasks pretty well. My computer was all but unusable for the 5-10 minutes it took to export a video. Unless you have a super powerful machine plan something to so while the video processes.

That’s pretty much it for now for Adobe Premier Pro. I may do a follow up post at some point as I learn more about it but I think it has a place in our toolkit for editing videos and creating content for our socials. If you have tips or tricks for Premier Pro let us know @bz_furfur and, as always, stay unique.

The post Creative Cloud Week 2 – Premier Pro appeared first on Burning with Purpose.

Tutorials

If you don’t really know where to start with PhotoShop it can be really daunting. It is nice that it comes with some built-in tutorials that familiarize you with some of the finer details. I will say that, having worked with Photoshop previously, and with Gimp, which both rely heavily on layers it was pretty easy to follow along with the lessons. If you are less familiar I don’t know how comfortable you are going to feel with navigating the interface. It does come with sample images so you can follow along with exactly what the teacher is doing, even if you are just clicking exactly where she is clicking, it will help to start developing some of the core muscle memory you are going to need if you are using it every day.

The Tools

All of the typical tools I expected to be a part of Photoshop were present and accounted for. Having switched to Gimp, however, some tools have been added since the last time I used Photoshop that has some quality-of-life improvements. The Frame tool for adding placeholder images, variations on the lasso tool, and history brushes, but the one that I found the most useful was the Object Selection Tool. I am not sure how long this has been a part of Photoshop but, honestly, this tool alone is worth the switch from trusty ole Gimp. What this basically does is, if you select an object in your picture, it highlights the object’s edges and lets you copy them to another layer. What I found so useful, however, was how accurate it was. For every image I worked with it was able to properly identify the edges of the object so I could move them to different layers and change the background.

Layer Effects

A majority of the time I spent exploring Photoshop was spent working with various layer effects. Adding drop shadow to pieces, saturating/desaturating foreground objects to match the background, and adding hue/saturation layers. Now this is not something I worked extensively with in the past so I relied heavily on the tutorials to show me how to use these features, but I was able to get some excellent results after just editing a handful of pictures. By moving the foreground objects to another layer I was able to increase the vibrancy of certain colors while desaturating the background on that same image creating a picture that highlights Zona’s pieces without having to completely remove them from the natural environment that we took the pictures in.

Generative AI

This was a part that I was really interested in because, it’s a big selling point of the latest version of Photoshop, and it is unique to their product. The idea is you can add a layer to your image by describing what you want the layer to be and it will create that for you, giving you a couple of variations to select from. Personally, I found it to be a little hit or miss depending on what I asked for. Granted, some of this might be because I am not an expert at writing prompts. A prompt such as “Modern office with natural lighting” yielded some pretty good results whereas “mancave with rustic look and blank wall” looked more like the hull of a Viking ship than a family’s basement. That being said, I was able to get some nice background to contrast Zona’s pieces and was overall happy with the results.

In Conclusion

Photoshop’s pros outweigh it’s cons. I didn’t run into a lot of the bugs that people warned me about, performance was good, even on my clunky old Macbook Pro, and most of the features worked as expected. I think the generative AI will get better with time and as I spend more time familiarizing myself with the tools and tutorials I’ll surely feel as confident with it as I did with my previous tools. At this point I am confident this will become a part of our workflow. Stay tuned as I am going to start practicing with Illustrator next and I’ll have another update for you next week. Until then stay unique.

The post Creative Cloud Week 1 – Photoshop appeared first on Burning with Purpose.

The Tools

• Adobe Photoshop Week one we’ll be looking at what the latest version of Photoshop has to offer. I haven’t uses Photoshop since version 5.5 and, over the past decade or so, I have primarily used Gimp for my image editing. What I am particularly excited about is it’s generative AI and how that can be used to enhance some of her pieces when preparing them for social media and product shots. We’ll see how the features fare against the free alternatives and other web-based programs like Canva. 
• Adobe Illustrator Week two we’ll be familiarizing ourselves with Illustrator. A big part of what we do is working with vector graphics and we have adopted a wide range of tools for this workflow. Hopefully, Illustrator offers us the ability to streamline this workflow and reduce some of the other tools we have rigged together with rubber bands and paperclips. In the past we’ve used Inkscape for a lot of our vector work and, hopefully, this is a more intuitive / stable tool.
• Adobe Premier Pro This one I am excited about. We don’t really have a great free / cheap video editing tool that we can use for our social media videos. We’ve used iMovie but that isn’t very flexible. Most of the online tools don’t have enough robust options. Fortunately we have a friend who specializes in video editing so we’ll probably be phoning a friend if we get stuck. 

The Extras

• Adobe Stock The membership came with a 30 day trial of Adobe Stock. We’ll definitely be taking a look at what assets are available and how they compare to some of the other asset libraries that we are using. Since this doesn’t come as part of CC we don’t expect we’ll be paying the added monthly fee unless it is head and shoulders over some of the cheaper options available.
• iPhone / iPad apps We’ll definitely take a look at these. I primarily use the computer for any of my editing but I am sure Zona will be giving some pros/cons on the mobile companion apps.

We’re really excited to share the experience of learning these tools with you. Do you have something specific you would like us to focus on while we are learning these tools. Tag us @bz_furfur and, as always, stay unique.

The post Mastering Adobe Creative Cloud appeared first on Burning with Purpose.

1. Price point: The biggest driver of how your product will be seen is how much it costs. You want to set a price point that will cover your costs and ensure you are compensated adequately. At the same time, you need to make sure that your prices are palatable to your customers. Do some recon; go to markets in the area before your market and see what comparable work is selling for. If similar works are selling for less than what you are charging you need to consider a few things.  Can you afford to lower your price? Are there less expensive pieces that you can make that would better suit this clientele? If neither then maybe this isn’t the right market for you.  Listen to what people say as they browse your booth. If they are commenting on the price (too high / too low) take note of that and see if you can adjust your prices accordingly in the future
2. Display: How you present your work is going to play a major role in how it is perceived to your customer. How do you want people to see your work? Are you going for a craft show, small business, or fine art? If you are trying to appeal to the craft show crowd think of lots of simple, cute, low-price pieces. Display is important but not as important as matching the price point of your customers. Small businesses you should appeal to customers who are looking for quality and value. Having a good variety of products along with some high-ticket items is a good balance. Offer “deals” such as two for one or buy one get one half off. Cross-promote your products and try to upsell.  If you are going to fine art think about fewer, expensive pieces.  Leave the low and medium prices back at the studio and present only your big-ticket items. Invest in good quality displays (pedestals, acroterion). This crowd is looking for quality and isn’t generally thinking about price. So your display should reflect that.
3. Style: When you start out you may have a very specific style of your own. This could be subject matter, technique, color palettes, or detail. It is good to stick to your style as that is what will eventually set you apart from other artists. At the same time think carefully about what customers ask for. Are a lot of your customers asking for pet portraits? Try your hand at them. It may not be your passion but being able to give people what they want can pay the bills while you spend the bulk of your time working on the things you want to work on. As you work on these pieces you may gain new skills as well that you can then incorporate into your pieces. Try not to be too stubborn in what you are willing to create if it means that you are alienating yourself from your customers.
4. Marketing: this is something that is going to change constantly throughout the life of your business.  You may find that your social media posts aren’t getting much traction.  Look at what other people are doing, read up on what the people are saying is trending, and adapt your strategy accordingly.  Maybe Facebook is prioritizing lives or Instagram is promoting reels. Use this to your advantage. If you have money to invest in marketing spend some money on a campaign. Run a contest or a giveaway to increase engagement and gain followers.  The important thing is to try new things until you find something that works. Then, when that thing doesn’t work anymore, try other things until you find something new that works.  Rinse and repeat.

Learn to adapt your business to best suit your customer and you are on your way to being a successful small business. Remember, this doesn’t mean you change your style every time someone suggests something to you. You don’t need to chase trends or try to make everyone happy to be successful. But look for indicators of what is selling, what is working of others, and what you read online, and make adaptations as you go along to better meet people’s needs and wants. Have your own tips? Tag us @bz_furfur and, as always, stay unique.

The post Building a Flexible Art Business: 4 Key Strategies for Success appeared first on Burning with Purpose.

1. Think about transportation: When heading off to a market you have a lot of valuable cargo. You must protect your work.  Think about how you are going to wrap/store your items. We use cardboard for some items, and moving blankets for others. Also, think about how it’ll fit in your vehicle. Do you have a minivan that you can load up with merchandise or a sedan where you’ll need to pick and choose carefully what to bring? Make sure, whatever vehicle you choose, you pack carefully. You don’t want things so cramped that they end up breaking due to pressure but you also don’t want them so spaced out that accelerating and breaking causes items to jolt and jostle around the back of your car.
2. Ask about themes: Some themes are obvious (for example, the holidays) while others may not be so obvious. Many organizers do, however, like to theme their markets. They will sometimes go as far as to invite special guests that align with the theme. Think about this before you decide what product to bring. Try to bring items that will cater to the individual market and convert those into sales.
3. Presentation is key: Make sure you have packed displays to properly showcase your items. These can be stands, grids with hooks, easels, shelves, or any combination. Try to be consistent. If you can pack some decorations to accent your tent. Think about the theme or bring seasonal decorations to create a more welcoming environment. Make sure you have signage, price tags, QR codes for customers to scan, and anything else that may help draw customers into your booth.
4. Resting your weary head: Is the show you are doing a good deal further than you usually travel? Is it going to be two or more days? If so you may want to consider lodging. Doing a market can be exhausting and a long trip there and back can make an already tiring ordeal all that much more so. Think about booking a hotel stay if you don’t think you’ll be up to the return trip. Book early so you can get a good rate and consider how much the hotel is going to cost when you are thinking about how much you’ll need to sell and still make a profit.
5. Self-care: We spend so much time thinking about our product, but we can’t forget to think about ourselves. Get yourself a cooler and pack some water, some snacks (maybe some fruits and veggies), some caffeinated beverages, and more water. Make sure you have essentials like sunscreen, a first-aid kit, medicines you take (even if you think you’ll be home in time to take them, it’s good to have them on hand), and backup chargers. The last thing you want to do while you’re at a market is stressing about your well-being and personal care so make sure you have everything you need with you.
6. Keep it clean: If you are doing markets every weekend things are bound to show a little wear and tear. Remember that your booth is a reflection of your business.  If your tablecloths are dirty or your tent canvas is ripped that will be reflected in how people perceive your business. Repair or replace things when they break, regularly wash any of your linens, and bring cleaning supplies with you to clean up messes when they happen.

Life is busy and time can easily escape you when you are preparing for a market. Just remember that having a tight, clean, welcoming environment for your customers is going to encourage them to come inside, stay longer, and buy things. What do you think is the most important part of prepping for your markets? Tag us with your ideas @bz_furfur and, as always, stay unique.

The post 6 Essential Tips to Prepare for Your Next Market: Maximize Success & Minimize Stress appeared first on Burning with Purpose.

The Tools

• Table Saw: More often than not when I get a slab from a lumber mill it can be upwards of 12 feet long. Generally, the mill will be happy to cut it down to size for you but, if you don’t know immediately what you are going to be using the piece for you may not know how long you are going to need it to be.  Getting familiar with a table saw is going to be key to cutting these larger pieces down to size. Table saws use large circular blades to cut through wood and can be raised and lowered to cut through multiple depths. They can also be tilted to cut at angles. Warning: These are some of the more dangerous tools in the workshop and you should take a safety class before operating one. In the MakerSpace they have a SawStop which can detect skin contact and come to an immediate halt. This will destroy the saw, but will also likely save your skin.
• Jointer: One thing that you’ll notice about unprocessed wood is that you aren’t going to have those smooth edges that you get from a piece of processed wood. They’ll usually be rigid and uneven. The jointer is a great tool for smoothing out those edges. You can run the edge of your wood over the jointer and it will create a flat, square, smooth edge to your lumber. Remember: When you are using a jointer you are shaving the edge off the wood so, if you are trying to conform to a particular length/width make sure you don’t have the planer set to a huge depth (should be 1/8” at most) and make sure you mark your desired measurements so you don’t shave off too much.
• Planer: These are one of the most important tools for a pyro. You want to be working on a smooth, level piece of wood. Often times wood is cut unevenly at the mill, or it warps over time. You can pass your wood through a planer, however, and get yourself a nice smooth, even slab. A neat trick to making sure your wood is level, after it comes out of the planer, is to scribble pencil markings on the wood. When it comes out the other end, if it is level, you should see no pencil markings.  Another useful trick: If you have a smaller piece you can use a sled to compensate for the length and make sure it passes through completely. Make sure that when you are doing multiple passes through the planer you adjust it lower in small increments so that the wood doesn’t get wedged in, especially on the first several passes.
• Drum Sander: A planner will level your wood but it won’t give you that smooth finish. In order to get that you need to sand your wood down. At home, I use an orbital sander for my wood, but that can be exhausting (not to mention hard on your arms, and waste supplies) so, whenever possible, I like to use a drum sander.  A drum sander will let you pass a piece of wood through and sand it uniformly.  This is great for larger pieces of wood that would take hours to sand with an orbital. Just make sure you know how to properly clean it and that you are running your wood through evenly so that you don’t completely wear the sandpaper down on one side and not the other.

Where to go from here

There are plenty of other tools you should be familiar with as well but these four will get you through most of the basics. You should also be familiar with T-squares, tape measure, levels, and the other standard woodshop tools. Do you have some tips on how to process your own wood? We’d love to hear them. Tag us @bz_furfur and, as always, stay unique.

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This month we took a a look at our website, bzfurfur.com, with a critical eye and had to make some decisions about what works and what doesn’t.   Two years ago, when we moved off Etsy and decided to launch our own website, we made a lot of decisions about the organization of the site. Not all of those decisions played out the way we had hoped. So we decided it was time for a tune-up. Just like you take your car to the mechanic to make sure everything is operating efficiently and you go to the doctors to get an annual checkup: if you don’t spend the necessary time to keep your website well maintained it is going, at best, be an inconvenience to your customers and, at worst, drive customers away from your products.  So here are the top five things that we recommend you do to keep your website healthy:

Spruce up your site with these five tips

1. Performance: A poor-performing site is going to be a strain on any user. Hi-res pictures are a wonderful way to showcase your products but they tend to be large. Remember that there are still a lot of potential customers who don’t have high-speed internet connections or who might be accessing your website on a mobile device. Are you using plugins on your site? Take a look at how those might be impacting performance. Go one by one and disable plugins from your site to determine if certain ones are consuming more memory/bandwidth and slowing down your site. Use tools like Google Lighthouse (https://developer.chrome.com/docs/lighthouse/overview) to get metrics around how quickly your site renders and try to boost those stats.
2. Inventory: If you have been running your site for a long time it is very likely that your inventory is out of date. Whether that is old products that you no longer have in stock, incorrect amounts, or incomplete details. Often times we are heading to a market and we put a product up “just to get it in the POS system” without a decent quality product photo or limited product details.  Now is a good time to go through your inventory and make sure everything is as up-to-date and accurate as possible.
3. Search Engine Optimization: You want your site to show up on all the major search engines.  Even if you took the time to optimize your site for search engines when you initially stood it up, the requirements for search engines change all the time.  Make sure you have key words in the titles of all your pages, add meta descriptions, make sure you follow the guidelines for getting your pages indexed for google, getting your products listed on social platforms, and you are that you are reviewing best practices such as Google’s SEO Starter Guide https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/seo-starter-guide
4. Information Architecture: A website is only as good as the people who are using it. If your menus are cluttered, if items don’t show up in your search, or if the layout makes it difficult to navigate users are going to take one look at the site and head off elsewhere. Take the time to use your site: pretend you are a customer and search for something.  Go through the checkout process. Ask friends/family to do the same and provide you with candid feedback. Take the feedback from your own experience as well as that of others and put together a strategy for how to improve the overall user experience to optimize it for connecting your customers and your product.
5. Branding: If your site has undergone many changes your overall branding strategy may have gotten muddied over the years. Fonts, color schemes, logos, and styles could vary wildly across your site. Take this time to determine what those styles are and apply them consistently across all your pages. Make sure that font sizes for paragraphs, headings, navigation, etc are cohesive across all your pages. Think about this in terms of your verbiage as well. Does one page sound fun and quirky whereas another page sounds like something out of a corporate brochure. Use this time to give your website a consistent voice.

What’s next?

These are just a few tips. Maintaining your website is an ongoing process and you are never really done so come back to it frequently and make sure you are giving your users the best experience possible. Have your own suggestions for how to make your site great? Tag us @bz_furfur and, as always, stay unique.

The post Website Tune-up appeared first on Burning with Purpose.

The beauty of grants

The art community thrives, not just because people love art, but because our local governments and business want to see artists thrive as well. That is why many companies issue grants to local artists to help them create beautiful pieces that will be shared by the community. These can range from a few hundred dollars to thousands of dollars. The question is: how can you and your business benefit from these grants.  First things first, you need to seek them out. Depending on where you are the number of grants available to you may vary.  Cities, especially cities that are epicenters for art and culture, are going to have more of these opportunities than rural communities. That doesn’t mean that rural communities don’t have grants available to them, and, since the pool of artists in rural communities is lower there is less competition for being accepted.

You can search for grants through a number of different sources. Art councils for your area will likely have a running list of current and future grants that are available.  Pay attention to what district they are available in. Often times these grants will be available to multiple counties or regions so you may be eligible for a grant in a neighboring area if you are within the applicable district. Check your city’s website as well as they will often list the government funded grants that are available to you. Put in for as many as you can but read the rules: sometimes there are limitations to when, and how frequently, you can apply for them.

Sell yourself

Be prepared: when you submit a proposal for a grant they are going to want to know about you, your art, and how you are going to use the grant money. Think about this and be prepared to answer in a way that shows you are community focused. Remember, the purpose of these grants aren’t necessarily for you to grow your business, but are so that you can help grow the community as a whole. Think about how you would use the money to offset the costs of your project: pay for materials, cover registration fees, travel expenses, and, of course, you need to pay yourself for your time.

There are some grants that are offered as “no strings attached” where they will tell you you can do whatever you want with the money but most, especially those that are offering larger sums of money, want to make sure that the money is going to good use. Be honest with your costs, think about what is a fair rate to pay yourself for your time, and plan to use the money to fund projects that are reflective of the money you are being offered. This doesn’t just mean not to oversell your work, but also not to undersell the work. If the grant is for $1,000 don’t use that to fund a month long endeavor that is going to cost a thousand dollars in materials alone.

Learn how to market yourself. If you are part of an underrepresented community make sure to highlight that. Speak to your experience, you passion, and your efforts to work with the community.  Think about the organizations you are a part of, fundraisers or non-profit organizations you have done work for, and people in the community you have helped or supported.  The organizations that are sponsoring these programs aren’t just investing in your artwork, they are investing in you.

Your destiny awaits

Good luck in applying for grants. This is a great way to supplement the income of your small business and to get your name out there.  Do you have a success story of applying for grants? Share it with us and tag us @bz_furfur and, as always, stay unique.

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