You're posting it online but you get very little response.
If you are wondering how to share what you made, then this podcast is for you!
Welcome to the Practice Drawing This podcast designed to listen to while drawing. On screen in the video version, you see me draw using my free art flashcards app. A link to that can be found in the description of this podcast.
First off, don’t be turned off by the word ‘content’. I know your art is not some low-quality commodity. Your art is not content! It is not similar to the crap content farms churn out. It’s not equal to the barrage of meaningless ... things ... AI churns out.
Your art has meaning. Your art communicates, both with you and with other people. It conveys a life experience, gives people, human beings, an experience.
Content is not that.
Content, as I see it, is the stuff you can share to show people why they would want what you made in their lives, why they would need what you made in their lives.
So to start off with that: make your art the way you want it to be. Make it what it wants to be. And only then think about how you can show it to people in such a way that you can show how it would enrich their lives. That latter is content, not to be confused with your art or the thing you make.
Content is just about showing how cool your art is. It isn’t your art. And your art isn’t content.
I am going to discuss how to make seven types of content and posts that show people why they should be interested in your work. Each type of content requires a different approach, and I will go into that for each type.
I have been posting online for a few years now, trying to understand what works and what doesn’t, and I have come to realize that there are seven distinctly different types of content you, as an artist, can share, and each of these needs to be treated differently.
The seven distinctly different things, or ‘content,’ that you can share, which I will go into further here, are Resources, Evergreen Content, Human Interest Content, Cross Posts, Curated Content, Response Posts, and Pure Promotion Content.
So let’s dive in.
For the sake of argument, let’s say that you are a portrait artist: I will discuss these seven types of ‘content’ from that point of view, the point of view of a portrait artist.
I start with Resources because it is so crucial. It is why you want to create and share Content in the first place, and yet many people online neglect that.
Resources are at the basis. The assumption is that you want to gain attention, and want to use content for that, because you think you have something interesting for other people. You think you have something they want, that will help them lead the life they want to lead. You have something you can help them with.
Here’s a real-world metaphor for what happens online a lot: imagine you are in a crowded town square, lots of people walking around you, and you start yelling, “hey! Hello! I am here! I would like some attention! Look at me!” You do funny dances. You do it loud enough, and everyone stops in their tracks, falls silent, and looks at you doing silly dances. And you say, “Hey! Hello!” Nothing else. It was just to gain attention to stroke your ego.
That is what many social media accounts are like. People create social media accounts to get attention, to get likes, subscribes, and follows, and only that. There is no game after that.
Now imagine that you are a portraitist or caricaturist, and you are on that same crowded town square. But now you are loudly announcing that you will do portraits and caricatures for people. You have banners up showing your work, reminding people that they will have a memento to remember the wonderful day by if they go home with a fun caricature of themselves and their loved ones.
Now you have a reason to gain attention. You have something for them that might be useful to them: a caricature as a memento to remember the day by.
Your portraits or your caricatures are your Art, the fact that you can be commissioned to make a memento in the form of a caricature for them is your Resource, and you announcing it loudly with your voice and with your banners that show off your work is your Content.
Resources are the things you have to offer, and they should be the reason you want to share your ‘content’ in the first place.
Frankly, if you don’t have Resources, what are you trying to attract attention for? The vanity metrics of social media?
The Resources you may be offering are, for example, to do commissioned portrait paintings. Or you may provide portrait painting courses. Or you may have written a book about portrait painting which people can buy from you so that they can become better at portrait painting themselves.
It can be anything from books to online video courses to events to mentoring to them hiring you to do something for them. The stuff people usually pay for because it helps them in some way.
The point is that the Resources are the things you have to offer.
But the thing is that you can’t keep sharing over and over and over and over again.
After you pitch your offering for the umpteenth time, people will tune out to what you tell them.
You need to put resources in one specific place where people can find them through search engines. They can bookmark them and return to them. Or share it with friends. So give your Resources a good home online somewhere, a fixed place where both people and search engines can find it.
It is a place you can direct your audience to at the end of your other ‘content.’ This is the ‘call to action’ at the end of the other things you share.
When readers read your newsletter, you need to tell them what you want them to do after they read it. You typically do that at the end of the newsletter, web page, blog post, Instagram slide, YouTube video, et cetera. This is the so-called ‘call to action.’ It might sound strange, but it really helps if you tell them what you want them to do next at the end of a newsletter or YouTube video. Which is why it is named a call to action.
In your other content, you direct your audience to your Resources at the end of your regular posts. You don’t share the Resources themselves. You share a link to your Resources after you pique the interest of your audience and then lead them to what you think you can offer that is of benefit and interest to them.
You must make your Resources something that your audience will find helpful.
For a Resource, the title that works best is an accurate description of what an audience member will encounter when they peruse the Resource you provide. This way, they will know if they want to check it out and will not feel cheated when the actual ‘content’ does not meet their expectations. Getting them to open your Resources is nothing when you lose them forever after that.
My main Resource, at this moment of writing, is my free Art Flashcards system that helps you become a better artist. My newsletters, social media posts, and YouTube videos are all designed to lead you to that. You can see me use the free Art Flashcards APP in the YouTube video version of this podcast right now.
As an exercise, try to think this part through. What are the Resources you have on offer? And who could benefit from your Resources? I know you want to make art and perhaps sell it, but try being in the other’s shoes and try to imagine how it would enrich their lives.
Evergreen content is about sharing timeless information that may be useful to your audience.
You, as, say, a portrait painter, may share tips and tricks when painting portraits. This shows off your expertise in that area and might get people to commission a portrait or participate in one of your portrait painting courses.
The evergreen content can be created from snippets from the Resources. You could, for example, share snippets of the course. But the evergreen content can stand alone and be information separate from the resources.
You may share how to negotiate price, how to take good reference photos for portraits, how to get a person to pose the way they want to for the portrait, how to market yourself, and what to consider when setting up an exposition. Et cetera. Each of these can be a separate post. When people pay you, though, it is probably a good idea if all that information is bundled into one thing: a course, a book, or a pdf. But the bits of information can also be shared as separate pieces of evergreen content.
It establishes your authority in this area and might get people to commission you or to take your course.
At the end of Evergreen content, you can share links to your resources. For example, as a portrait painter, you can share a link to your commission landing page or your course there.
For Evergreen content, it can be advantageous to do search engine optimization. The idea behind search engine optimization is to use the same words people would search for when looking for your content. You use these words in the titles and descriptions.
This is because Evergreen content is information they may be looking for. This also means that Evergreen content should be short. An artist might search for information on setting up portraiture lighting, and after a quick search, they find your post that explains lighting for portraiture. They want it to be short and informative so they can continue with what they are doing.
So Evergreen content should be relatively short.
Clickbait is when you use popular words or names of celebrities to trick people into checking out your content. It can be tempting. Don't do it; they will feel cheated, and you lose that person forever.
Find keywords that relate to what you have to offer. The trick is to find keywords that are searched a lot but for which there is very little competition, so your content will bubble up.
I won’t go into more detail on search engine optimization here because there are already many places where you can learn more about this. There are far better sources of information, to be honest. I am not a search engine optimization expert, and the field keeps changing as search engines try to fight this.
But it is important to consider that when people search for the thing you have to offer, they can find it because you used the right keywords.
There is also the case that some Evergreen content might be tough to do search engine optimization for because people are not searching for it.
Portrait artists might not be searching for “seven types of content,” which is what this podcast is about. I also try to get people enthusiastic about drawing from memory, but no one is searching for it.
In that case, Human Interest ‘content’, which the next section will discuss, is better.
As an exercise, try to figure out, what type of Evergreen could you share for your intended audience? And where would you share it? Where is your intended audience searching for this information? How would they be searching for it?
An audience wants to feel a connection to an artist and know more about the person behind the artist. This is why sharing more about yourself can be a good idea.
On a side note, be careful about sharing too much, and decide beforehand what you will and will not share. There are bad actors out there who will try to use information about you against you.
In the case of you, the portrait painter, you may share photos of portraits you made this week—after asking the model for permission! You may describe how the posing sessions went. You may give a tour of your studio. You may zoom in on the drawings or paintings and show techniques you use, and refer to a bit of Evergreen ‘content’ you shared earlier where you explained that technique.
It’s important for you to be genuinely yourself. I know that the word ‘authentic’ is flung around a lot, especially by people who then proceed to be inauthentically authentic. But it is a good idea to try to be yourself, an actual human being they can connect to. This type of content is largely a matter of an audience member connecting emotionally with you, the artist.
And at the end of the Human Interest article, there should be a call to action directing the audience to the resources you wanted to lead them to in the first place. The Human Interest and Evergreen content will reach the audience interested in the Resources.
For Human Interest content, search engine optimization isn’t as much of a good idea. Human interest content is about sharing stories, as it is about a human connection between you and the audience. For human interest content, titles that pique the interest of a potential audience member work well. You put a question in the head of the person, and they might want to know the answer and start consuming your content out of curiosity. A title could be This Amazing Thing Happened When I Visited An Art Gallery! No one would search for that, but if an audience feels connected to you, they might start reading the blog post or listening to the YouTube video because they want to hear your story.
For that reason, in contrast to Evergreen content, Human Interest content can be longer. Human Interest content is about people enjoying hanging out with you. You see these endless online streams that go on for hours and hours. Those are Human Interest content; they are about an audience enjoying hanging out with a creator.
At the same time, as mentioned before, that means Human Interest content can be about surprising, delightful things, and it can be entertaining. And it can be about showing why the Evergreen content that you offer that no one is searching for, what it can mean to them, and what it can do for them. What using that information looks like in real life.
With Human Interest content, your audience can connect to you, and they may become interested in your work. It works like that for me; when I hear a podcast where an interesting person is being interviewed, I become curious about what they make and look them up online.
It’s amazing how well it works. I have seen people watch YouTube videos where a creator is talking; they were hanging out with that creator! These people had access to all sorts of commercial streaming services with films and series created by professionals, with tens of billions thrown at these productions, and yet, these people watched a YouTuber who was filming themselves in their own home as they showed what happened if you added beads to slime, or some such. These YouTubers out-competed commercial streaming services with billions behind them! And you can harness that power by showing yourself, too.
Books often have a photo of the author on the book cover. It shouldn’t strictly be necessary, but for some reason, that lets the reader audience relate to the writer and makes them want to read the book more.
We crave connection.
Stan and Marshall were seemingly shooting the breeze with the Draftsmen YouTube channel. You could draw while listening to them talking about, for example, how when you paint outside, all your senses: sounds, smells, temperature, et cetera, and how the experiences of all those senses also end up in your drawings and paintings, which is why Stan loves it so much, he says.
That makes you want to draw, too! Human Interest can naturally make your audience enthusiastic about your views on things as they get to know and trust you.
And the same way, Human Interest posts can also serve to get your audience interested in your Evergreen and Resources content. If they think you are interesting, they might decide to check out your work for themselves.
It works like that for me! When I listen to a podcast where an artist is being interviewed and that artist says interesting things, I go check them out online. I feel that this pull style -- the audience pulling the information when they are interested -- is way more powerful than advertisement-like pushing of your wares.
I know we are introverts. We like to crawl into our sketchbooks. But is there a way you could find yourself hanging out with people who are into your work? There are many options, from real-time streaming to online videos, podcasts, blogs, online forums, et cetera.
This is where you design posts to be shared on other platforms, and it can frankly be the most powerful way to promote your work. Think being interviewed on podcasts, swapping posts with another newsletter.
It’s so powerful because you get a chance to present yourself to a potentially huge and relevant audience of another platform.
You should not work for exposure, but your work shown in the right places can be really, really helpful. The Practice Drawing This account blew up on Instagram when a huge account randomly shared two of my posts.
When a huge platform presents you to their huge and relevant audience, that is huge.
You don’t control it, because that other platform decides whether they want to showcase your work.
I mention it as a separate category of content because you will likely need to approach it differently. You will need to custom design the content to fit in with the other content on that platform, and you’ll have to pitch your idea to that platform.
I will now discuss three types of Content: Curated Content, Response Posts, and Pure Promotion. I debated them last because, although I see them often, I do not think they are the best choices.
Curated Content is when you share other articles, podcasts, or videos you found online. This can also be a section of a newsletter.
The pitfall is that you have to be narrow in your focus; otherwise, people will like some of what you share more than other things. You have to narrow it down to what your post is about.
I have seen newsletters where people share what books they read or the music they listen to. Chances are that most of your audience has different tastes.
But if you narrow it down to the topic you generally discuss, it can work.
A milder variant can be to report on the week’s industry news. Such Content has a short shelf life as it is about news that will be old news next week, but it can do well. And you should only do this if you are staying on top of that news anyway, otherwise it’s a lot of extra work just to create that content.
Curated Content can work through. I have seen examples. James Clear has a newsletter with more than a million subscribers. Each week, he shares three quotes from his book on creative habits—talk about narrow focus! and a great example of Evergreen—and a few quotes from others.
This is also dismissively known as Rage Bait.
You can share what you find online by using it as inspiration, by responding to it. You can do your take on the subject. This can be a valid way to find subjects to discuss.
A variant of this is the so-called hot take: something happened today: some celeb did something, and you respond to it. These can do really well and can be highly entertaining.
I love listening to drama on YouTube while crosshatching, and it’s fun to listen to and take your mind off what you’re doing.
But it is very cheap content in all possible ways. I'm not sure it is useful that much, other than gaining attention. Drama, content that angers does well, for some reason, but it probably doesn't attract the right attention for your Resources, and if you're not doing it to get attention on your Resources, then what are you doing it for? You are not trying to promote your work, just trying to get attention.
But they can definitely be entertaining, and they can be enormously effective at attracting attention.
One thing you see often: people set up a newsletter to have a platform to announce new products they want to sell and only send those announcements.
There are several problems with that.
For starters, it’s boring! If you get promotional material every time, you learn to stop opening the posts.
It’s not how you get people interested in what you made. They need to get to know you first, and then they might become interested in what you produce and look you up online.
One thing you should especially not do is not post for a long time and then send a Pure Promotion post. Your audience feels betrayed as you ghosted them, and they no longer feel a connection to you. And if you then send them an ad, it will not be received well.
You’ve probably been on these newsletters, too, where you only get an email from them every so many months, and it is only because they want to sell you something new.
I sometimes don’t even remember them!
Don’t be that person. Try to connect with your audience, or else buy ad space. Don’t abuse their trust.
Don’t selfishly only think of what you want to get out of it.
Of course, you can drop a line and mention that you have something new your audience could be interested in. But don’t overdo it.
See it like this: that thing you want to sell, that is what you want. Try to be in your audience’s shoes. What do they want?
Since we’re going down this dark alley of commerce, Pure Promotion can also be about promoting others for money. Also known as advertising, and it is the thing people buy blockers for. It is best not to add this to your pieces too much. People don’t like ads.
The key is not to think about what you want to get out of it, but to think about what the other side gets out of reading your newsletter, watching your YouTube video, buying your product. How does it help them lead the life they want to lead?
In the case of you again being a portrait artist, perhaps you are a caricaturist and work at events where people want a caricature of themselves as a memento of the event. Or maybe want to commission you to do a portrait of their house pet because they love it so much. All of these are things they want, things that help them lead the life they want to lead.
Pure Promotion is about what you want, not what they want, and that is not a good thing. You apparently want to sell something. You want their money. Focus on the value you provide them instead. It is fine to make money, but you should be focusing on the value you provide.
I found out that one form of Pure Promotion does seem to work, and it is based on the age-old adage “show, don’t tell”. In fiction writing, it means that you should not tell the audience how to feel, but make them experience what is happening so that they will experience the feeling themselves.
I see it in good editorial cartoons a lot, too. If you TELL, say that you think a certain president is stupid, the audience of your cartoon might think, “well, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.” But if you use the space in the editorial cartoon to show something that president actually did, you might get millions of people who see the editorial cartoon to reach that conclusion, that that president is not very smart.
Show, don’t tell. Show why your offering is cool, instead of telling people.
In the case of you, humble portraitist; when you are doing caricatures at events, you have this huge board behind you with example caricatures you drew. Instead of telling people your caricatures are great fun, show them!
There are really two categories of content: on the one hand, you have your timeless Resources, the thing you have to offer. Then you have the content you create to raise awareness of your Resources; the Evergreen and Human Interest content serve as marketing material, and it can be posted on social media so that people your Resources are meant for can find it. And with a bit of luck, and the help of a huge platform, a Cross-Post might make your account explode.
This division can give you peace of mind. You have your Resources, and they are the important thing. The marketing efforts are secondary, meant to raise awareness of the Resources you have on offer, and you can dial down your marketing activities when you start to burn out. The market will still be there when you have rested and are full of energy! Take good care of yourself. Rest.
Social media content posts are disposable and temporary. Chances are that social media platforms will be either gone or unrecognizably different ten years from now. It’s just temporary stuff. Your timeless pieces are in the Resources sections on the website you own. Taking time off from creating things that won’t last forever is okay.
In truth, there can be an overlap between the seven types of content.
Content can be informative, Evergreen, while also being stuffed with story and personality an audience can connect with and simultaneously be a part of a course. Or it can be mixed into one too.
A great example of this is Watts Atelier. Jeffrey Watts’ videos are so fun to listen to! He is quite the personality and pleasing to listen to. He seems like a fun guy to hang out with. And that is part of what Human Interest content is! You hang out with your audience for a bit. Or so it can feel to an audience. Jeffrey Watts has tons of stories to tell and also tons of drawing tips to share. But these interviews are also about sharing knowledge, drawing tips and so they are also Evergreen. He's sometimes interviewed by others, which is a Cross-Post. All of that to lead students to his Resources, his online art academy.
What works best depends on you, the artist; it depends on who you want to reach, what Resource you wish to bring to their attention, your personality, and your experience. But it is helpful to know that there are seven types of things, or types of ‘content,’ that you can share.
The separation into these seven categories is entirely independent of any platform. They hold equally for newsletters, blogs, podcasts, YouTube videos, Instagram posts, Pinterest posts, published books, courses, conferences, documentaries, et cetera et cetera, and they hold for any subject or topic.
Considering these seven types of content categories is helpful because you need to treat each of them differently for them to do well.
Resources are the meat; it is what you have to offer your audience. The other types of content are designed to get people to discover and love and trust your Resources.
The Resources part is the first thing you need to figure out. What are you making, and for whom, and how will it help them in any way?
Just posting Evergreen or Human Interest content for the sake of it is pointless. It is like getting lots of people into a theater and then not putting up a show.
It is ultimately also not going to be rewarding to you. When you put out a Resource, you can feel proud of helping even just one person. When you put out Evergreen or Human Interest just for the sake of it, all you can do is look at the follow, like, and subscribe numbers, and they WILL disappoint because platforms change, the numbers go down, other accounts have larger numbers, et cetera.
But with a Resource, you feel proud of helping even one person. So figure that out first. Figure out who would need or want what you have on offer and why. How does it help them lead the life they want to lead?
I say this because I see many social media accounts online where you see the creators trying to grow their accounts, and I am wondering why. They captured an audience. Now what? Where are they leading their audience? If you have Resources and something you might help other people with, then it is useful to have something that guides them to that. Otherwise, your social media account growth is just vanity metrics.
Having said that, don’t wait until your Resource is perfect, finished, and polished. You can start with creating and sharing Evergreen and Human Interest content while building and developing your resources. This is especially useful because you also get to discover what resonates. You may find that you change your Resources based on that.
You should start sharing early because you get into the right habit and practice creating these posts. You get better over time, so it is a good idea to start doing that early. In addition, you get to see the statistics that tell you how the larger audience out there responds to your work. If you make your Evergreen and Human Interest content about the same topic as your Resources, you can find out who would be interested and also find out what resonates with them.
It is a good idea to experiment with many things at this stage. After all, you are a small account, so you don’t lose a huge audience if you change things up. When people get to know you for one thing, they tend not to like it if you change, and they love you for that one thing. You can experiment and find out what works when you’re still small.
And you get to find out what resonates with people.
You can not predict what will work in advance. The only way to find out if people are interested in something is to try it out. To throw it out there and to see how people respond. If you are making something new, they will only be able to tell whether they like it once they see it. You can not predict what will work beforehand. Otherwise, book publishers would only publish bestsellers, and venture capitalists would only fund unicorns. That doesn’t happen. No one can predict beforehand what will work. Not even the pros who make it their living can do that.
Evergreen and Human Interest content allow you to test the waters quickly and cheaply. To dip a toe in the water, find out if your offer resonates with people, and adjust your Resources accordingly.
But do make sure you use what you are learning to build a helpful Resource! Otherwise, it’s just vanity, and you’re better off not wasting time creating Evergreen or Human Interest content. Just keep making art instead!
There will be other platforms ten years from now, ready for you when you have Resources to share. All you need to do then is jump onto those platforms and create Evergreen and Human Interest content that leads the right people, the people you can help with it, to your Resources.
That is also why people always say you need your own website, by the way. The website is the thing you own and control, where you put your Resources.
Social media, and platforms owned and controlled by other companies, are terrible places to put your Resources. The platforms may change, and you may lose that location. Furthermore, the search engines learn about your Resources and who is interested over time. If you are forced to move your Resources, not only do you lose that, but search engines still remember that your Resources were up somewhere else, and they may penalize your new location for being “duplicate content.”
In contrast, the files for Evergreen and Human Interest content can be large if you make YouTube videos, for example. Let those platforms store that content and consider it temporary. You will make better content in the future. And you will make different content in the future as the platforms change.
If you start putting out Evergreen and Human Interest content early, you get that practice under your belt and get better at it. You get to find out what resonates with people earlier, and you can adjust the Resources you offer accordingly.
Thank you for listening to this podcast, and hope you’ll check out my other podcasts, too.