A person stood in front of a bar chart

This is BARELY marketing

Start somewhere. Start here. Please I beg you.

Why

I just wanted to commission someone to create some dumb art on Twitter — the upshot is I had to wade through a load of bots (as expected), but also some really shitly marketed legit accounts. That's maaaaad!

Don't worry, I'm the furthest you can possibly be from a "marketing sort" of person, but from my own experience of running a small business I can appreciate the need to grasp every opportunity to get work.

Getting in front of people is only the start — once you're there, you need to sell yourself preferably without selling your soul like those marketing executives.

So here's some really simple pointers — so simple, it's barely marketing.

Have a damn website

Bruh, it's 2022, everyone has a fucking website — if you don't, you're telling me you're either brand new or out to scam people (and thus don't want to be tied to anything).

How?

Maybe you're put off because you're not a nerd who knows HTML? Like, I barely know this shit, I promise you'll learn it easily, but if you're pressed for time just set up a wix.com site or something... there are so many free website hosts with easy to use page builders, so you really don't 👏 have 👏 an 👏 excuse 👏 okay?

I'd also suggest setting up a linktr.ee (or similar) so you can centralise all your profile links and stuff. Clever shit.

What do I put on my website?

Depends on what you do, innit? I'd expect an artist to primarily have a portfolio of their art, a composer to have demos of their music etc. — you're showing off what you can do, and the quality of your work.

Once you've finished bragging about your furry art skills, make sure you have a way to contact you prominently displayed — the average attention span does not lend itself to looking for an email address three pages deep.

Be authentic

The example I'm thinking of here is the extreme sketchiness of a Twitter artist with 4000 followers but 7 tweets (and they're all retweets of similar accounts...) — don't do that, you sketchy fuck.

How?

If you're into your social media, interact with people! I know, I know... I hate people too, but its good for business. I want to know I'm not talking to a bot or a scammer with 100 accounts, so tweet about your day, or about that new graphics tablet you bought.

And yes, retweet all that horrific furry art.

Make it easy

You've got wares, and they have coin — so for everyone's sake, make it really really feckin' easy for people to buy your shit.

How?

I mentioned it above, but I'll do so again — I can't buy that awesome fursona if I can't contact you, and fuck knows I've got better things to be doing than looking for an email address, so make that very prominent.

Are you using a platform which has built-in e-commerce? Based — so use it, and make sure all your orders go through that. If you're not, maybe consider setting up a shop on ko-fi.com? Being able to pay for things using PayPal or whatnot speeds up the process for everyone (and gives buyers a sense of security).