Artistic Goals: March 2016 Edition

We’re a week into March already, but I only had my lightbulb moment yesterday. I blame “parent brain”. The good ideas happen late OR late at night when I’m too exhausted to write them down so they get forgotten.

So I usually break my goals down into the following areas: Etsy, Blog, Sales. This month I’m adding Amazon and Art Fairs because those are happening (I dropped off the deposit check for two art fairs yesterday; they’re both juried so we’ll see what happens).

ETSY

Currently I’m at 53 sales and $0 income for the month of March. My goal is to hit 100 sales and $300-500 income. Last month I had 13 orders and roughly $300 in revenue so I’m aiming a bit high, but it’s theoretically attainable. I also would like to get to 300 listings (I’m sitting at 289).

BLOG

I’m slowly adding all of my inventory to the shop on the website-I need to be done by the summer, because I plan on using shopify’s card reader for the art fairs. I’m also being more intentional about what and how I post: I don’t get tons of traffic, and there’s not a whole lot I can do about that other than advertising (I have no budget for that this year) and writing relevant content (I can totally do that!).

SALES

I have this separate from Etsy because some of my orders come from Facebook and Instagram. I had one custom order in January and another in February so I’d like to have one for March. To attain that I try to post artistic photos of art I’ve done and bring my audience into the creative process by asking for ideas and thoughts.

AMAZON

I have eleven products up on Amazon handmade; I’d like to get somewhere between 25-50 so that I have a slight shot of appearing in searches. I really have no expectations, but I’d like to give it a fair shake since at the moment it’s free for me to list items (until August).

ART FAIRS

I’m only signed up for two (both of which are juried so we’ll see, I’m fairly confident about getting into the bigger one) but there are some small fairs around the holidays that I can sign up for in October. I’m considering this year to be a test run, so this month I’m jotting down display ideas and working on creating more original content. The figures I’ve seen say to estimate 10% sales from what you actually bring; I’d love to make $300-500 so I need to bring at least $3k-5k worth of inventory.

MISC.

I’ll be making the final payment to my editor who’s been working on my coloring book and I hope to have that out soon! It’ll be for sale here, on Amazon and also Etsy. I’m pretty excited.

I’ll post a follow-up at the end of March so you (and I) can see how I did on all of these goals, and then I’ll do another for April and so on. I encourage you to also set goals; you may not attain all of them (I usually don’t) but it can help with long-term perspective and longevity if you can look back and see progress of any kind. If you HAVE set goals let me know in the comments, I’d love to hear from you!

And Art On, my friends.