“Until you value yourself, you will not value your time.
Until you value your time, you will not do anything with it.” ~ M. Scott Peck

I did not paint or draw for over seven straight years, even though I longed to express myself.  Suppressing my creativity led me into a spiral of anxiety and depression that lasted over a decade.  A decade were I’m missing large fragments of memory.

Although my art could not save me from a troubled upbringing, I credit art with keeping me out of a good deal of trouble in my adolescence.  This was because I excelled at art.  Art gave me a goal to strive towards and a focus away from mischief because I had big plans.

But five years of art school later, and after a troubled marriage, I abandoned art.  A familiar choice among those creatives who need to “get practical.”

It took a chance meeting with two advanced breast cancer survivors, one my age, to remind me that life is short.  Or in the words of Benjamin Franklin, “You may delay, but time will not.”

One of these women was named Angela.  She was my age.  Angela longed to be an interior designer.  But she and I sat stuck in our cubicles wishing for something else.  I looked at her one day and said, “You’ve dodged death.  Go do it!”  She resisted and gave me a list of reasons why she could not become an interior designer.

What is life for but to become fully self-expressed?  That doesn’t mean that one’s self-expression should be an entrepreneurial endeavor.  But when its possible to earn a good living from one’s self expression, its incredibly satisfying.

I think that the truth of the quote by Peck explains why I procrastinated.  It was a painful lesson but maybe I learned it so that I could encourage others to seize the day and to honor my memory of Angela.

In response to Clint’s reply to my last post, I’m adding another common mistake that I see on artist’s websites.  7.) There is no email sign up box!

Email marketing is a very cost effective way to keep in touch with your existing collectors and to cultivate your prospective collectors.  But you can’t do that without their email addresses.  Since I’ve been in business,  I’ve reviewed and used several email-marketing systems, including Constant Contact, Vertical Response, and Salesforce.com. I now use and recommend iContact.

For a relatively small monthly fee, these email marketing systems will allow you, or your webmaster, to insert code into your website so that viewers can add themselves to your list and manage their preferences.  Why is this important?  Two reasons, you don’t have to do anything to build your list and they have “opted in”, so you clearly have their permission to email them, a SPAM law requirement.

I also have email newsletter signup cards that people I meet at events can fill out to join my list and that I can keep on file.

I’ll give you a recent example of the effectiveness of email marketing.  A collector from Tennessee bought three paintings from me this year.  Honestly, I thought that he was done collecting.  But I added him to my email list, with his permission, and when he received my next email newsletter he acquired another original oil painting from my website, and said “your email marketing is working!”  This link also offers some specific statistics on email marketing benchmarks statistics.

Obviously, email marketing is one of several strategies that are easy to implement.  If you have your collectors or prospects mailing addresses you can also drop the important prospects a note or send them a postcard to your next opening or event.

The key to remember is that the amount of your sales will be in direct proportion to the size and quality of your list of collectors and or prospects.  And an email sign up box is an easy and effective way to build your list and to solidify your promotional platform.

A Facebook fan page, a MySpace page, the list goes on, are also effective ways to build your promotional platform but this deserves it’s own post.