When I first started, I didn’t have a content strategy.

I just posted a lot, sometimes I didn’t post at all. I threw a lot of the proverbial “spaghetti on the wall” sometimes it stuck, and sometimes it didn’t.

But knowing what I know NOW…..I wouldn’t leave so much of that growth to chance.

I made a point to invest in the RIGHT programs, the right mentors and learned how to turn make my audience feel like if they DIDN’T buy from me they were missing out on something!!

I learned this from creators and entrepreneurs who were already doing it.

I wanted to apply their proven methods to my model, because I couldn’t find any artists doing what I wanted to do.

That’s when I learned one of the most important things about building a business online:

My content wasn’t just content. It was the entry point into my business.

So if my goal was to build a $100K art business again, I would start by understanding and implementing a strategy centred around one thing:

Every piece of content needs a purpose.

Not just views, likes and followers.

It needs to MOVE the right person somewhere.

Because getting 100,000 views on a Reel means very little to your business if the people watching have absolutely no interest in your product or offer.

And this is something I understand SO much better now.

Over the last few years, I’ve learned to look at content very differently.

Instead of asking:

“What should I post?”

I ask:

“What do I need THIS piece of content to DO?”

Because if I was building a business from zero again, I wouldn’t just need people to discover me…..I’d need them to discover me, stick around, trust me, become part of my community, become invested in me and my art and buy from me.

Those are very different things and they require DIFFERENT types of content.

This is where a VERY strategic framework comes in when creating your content and that framework is what has TRANSFORMED how my content performs me.

I am going to break down in detail what the framework is and how it took me from 0 to $100k as an emerging artist, it is:

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When I first started, I didn’t have a content strategy.

I just posted a lot, sometimes I didn’t post at all. I threw a lot of the proverbial “spaghetti on the wall” sometimes it stuck, and sometimes it didn’t.

But knowing what I know NOW…..I wouldn’t leave so much of that growth to chance.

I made a point to invest in the RIGHT programs, the right mentors and learned how to turn make my audience feel like if they DIDN’T buy from me they were missing out on something!!

I learned this from creators and entrepreneurs who were already doing it.

I wanted to apply their proven methods to my model, because I couldn’t find any artists doing what I wanted to do.

That’s when I learned one of the most important things about building a business online:

My content wasn’t just content. It was the entry point into my business.

So if my goal was to build a $100K art business again, I would start by understanding and implementing a strategy centred around one thing:

Every piece of content needs a purpose.

Not just views, likes and followers.

It needs to MOVE the right person somewhere.

Because getting 100,000 views on a Reel means very little to your business if the people watching have absolutely no interest in your product or offer.

And this is something I understand SO much better now.

Over the last few years, I’ve learned to look at content very differently.

Instead of asking:

“What should I post?”

I ask:

“What do I need THIS piece of content to DO?”

Because if I was building a business from zero again, I wouldn’t just need people to discover me…..I’d need them to discover me, stick around, trust me, become part of my community, become invested in me and my art and buy from me.

Those are very different things and they require DIFFERENT types of content.

This is where a VERY strategic framework comes in when creating your content and that framework is what has TRANSFORMED how my content performs me.

I am going to break down in detail what the framework is and how it took me from 0 to $100k as an emerging artist, it is:

Read more

Every artist who was already creating. Every one launching collections left right and centre. Every artist that seemed to have their “shit together.” Every artist making content that looked effortless while I was over here fumbling every which way.

All I could think was, who am I? I’m a nobody posting videos of myself when I barely even know what the hell I’m doing.

It didn’t feel right telling anyone what I was “creating.” I barely knew how to create, let alone get online and TALK about it to strangers. Gah!

But here’s the one thing that freed me from that constant, pessimistic voice in my head, it was:

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I say including myself because I also did this when I first started, and to put it bluntly it kept me broke for way longer than it should have!
So I am just going to come out and say it. You are most likely pricing your art according to what YOU can afford. What YOU would personally be comfortable paying. What sounds ‘sensible’ to your very risk averse brain.

Meanwhile the person you should actually be pricing for, your real buyer, isn’t even in the room…

The $500 buyer versus the $5K buyer

Let’s get specific, because these are two completely different buyers and trying to serve both at once is exactly what kept me stuck.
The $500 buyer wants something nice for the wall. That’s it. They’re not thinking about your process, your story, or the twelve years you spent perfecting your style. They want it to match the couch and they want it to not cost much, they want Ikea art. Nothing wrong with that buyer, they’re just not who built my business.

The $5-10K buyer wants a completely different experience. This is the type of buyer you want, they are looking to INVEST in a piece. They are looking for a piece that hangs in their space and becomes part of how they see themselves. It becomes their identity. That is not a $500 piece of art.

They want the story. They want to know why you made it, what it means, why it took you three weeks instead of three hours. They want to feel seen by the work, not just decorated by it. And they expect you to talk about your art, present it, like it’s worth $5k, because if you don’t believe that, why would they.

So if you’re shrinking your price every time the $500 customer hesitates at spending four figures on your piece, congratulations, you’ve just let a stranger’s discomfort set your whole business strategy AWAY from you $5k collector target market.

The $500 customer comments “too expensive” and suddenly your whole brand does a backflip to accommodate them. You’ve handed the wheel to someone who was never getting in the car in the first place. THAT customer was never going to be dropping $5k on art.

So ask yourself who your actual buyer is and how they see the value in what you create. Because that’s what they’re paying for. The years, the emotion, the story behind the piece. That’s where the value sits, and people pay according to the PERCEIVED value, not the value you’re too scared to charge.

Here’s where a lot of us (including me) get stuck. I tried to position soft enough for the $500 buyer while hoping the $5k buyer showed up anyway. I apologised for my prices in one breath and tried to sound like a serious artist in the next. You can’t do both. Every time I softened my positioning to catch the bargain shopper, I actively repelled the collector, because the collector can smell uncertainty from a mile away. I had to pick who I was actually talking to.

So what happens when you hold your price?

The inquiries change. The framing changes. You stop getting the “would you take $200 less” messages and start getting people who ask questions about the work itself, about YOU.

They want to connect with the meaning, the process, the emotion. Buyers who already believe it’s worth what you’re asking, and just want to know more.

You change too. You stop hedging your words . You stop writing “just a little something I made” about a piece you spent three weeks on. You start talking about your work the way you’d talk about it if you already believed a collector was going to buy it, because eventually one does.

And buyers respect it. Not despite the price, because of it.

A firm price signals you know what you made. A wobbly one signals you’re not sure either, and buyers pick up on that faster than you think.

One thing to sit with.
Next time you feel that urge to knock a price down because someone flinched, pause and ask one question. Is this person my buyer, or am I trying to turn them into one.
If they’re not, let them go.

Begin your strategy asking the question”Who is my ideal buyer?” How do I position my art for THEM. Know your buyer well, know EVERYTHING there is to know about them and all of a sudden you stop trying to appeal to everyone and you connect with someone. The right one.

This is exactly the kind of shift I dig into more in the paid posts here, the pricing psychology, the positioning, the mindset work nobody talks about. If you're ready to stop pricing from fear, you know where to find me.

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Like most creators, I had stretches where growth just stalled. My reach and my following had taken a dive, NOTHING was working for me. I’d spend hours making content, post it to my feed, and hope. If it flopped, that was it. The chance was gone.

Then I discovered Trial Reels.

It changed how I approached content completely. It honestly REVIVED my following. After working out exactly how they worked it took me 12 weeks to gain more than 65,000 followers using them! Jackpot.

Not only did this help me reach wider audiences in turn I was getting so many more inquiries, DM’s my art was selling more, my courses were selling and my overall account started to feel alive again.

I think this is still one of the biggest opportunities creators have right now, if you actually know how to use it!

I still use Trials reels every single day. If you have not started you utilising it you are honestly sleeping on one of the most incredible features Instagram has every rolled out! So if you are unsure about what Trial reels are or how to use them, keep reading.

This is everything I’ve learned.

WHAT ARE TRIAL REELS?

Trial Reels let you test a Reel with non-followers, (people who don’t already follow you), before deciding whether to share it to your ACTUAL feed.

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There was a time where I was kind of broke to be honest, and only making $500 to $1000 a month and telling myself that was normal, that was just what being a broke artist looked like.

I’d post whenever I remembered to, whatever felt right that day, no plan, no pattern. I soon realised I couldn’t go on like that any longer, I had no system at all, I was working hard and hoping, and hoping isn’t a strategy!!

So I decided to really lock in and learn the rest, if I wanted to start seeing real numbers and get to $10,000+ months within the first year. I needed to take action, and this is exactly what got me there, with barely any budget or experience at all:

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Then I locked in. It took about 1–3 months of consistency before I saw the change. But one I did I went from $1000 in sales a month to $10–12k every month. It only grew from there.

It looked like this - I’d post on socials whenever I remembered to, whatever felt right that day. No plan, no pattern. I was creating constantly and making almost nothing from it, and I didn’t understand why. I had no system at all, I was working hard and hoping, and hoping isn’t a strategy.

Once I finally realised my art was good, it was resonating with people, and I could see real demand for it, I started to realise the potential.

So I decided to lock in and learn, if I wanted to go from $1,000 months to $10,000+ months within that first year, I needed to take action.

Here’s some of the key things I did, with barely any budget at all, that you can start implementing to your business right now.

🔒 This is where it gets specific. Everything past this point is the actual playbook — paid subscribers only.

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When I first started creating and selling my art, I had no idea what my work was worth or how to price it.

So I guessed low. Really low. Low enough that once you factored in materials and the hours I’d spent, I was basically giving pieces away.

Every artist who’s ever told me they’re scared to charge more, I understand it completely. I lived there first.

But here’s the thing, I actually did have a strategy even though I didn’t realise it at the time. My strategy was different. I wasn’t trying to make money straight out the gate. I was trying to build proof. I was building my portfolio. I wanted to get my name out there. That was all I cared about.

There was one thing I was starting to notice about the successful artists. They were always painting. Always showing up and always painting. I could have just painted for myself and shared my work on social media that way, but for those that don’t know art supplies are hella expensive, so the only way I could keep creating, keep sharing, and afford to buy materials was to make sure I was selling. All I needed to do was make enough to buy more supplies, create and post, I was breaking even.

I didn’t feel like an artist. Not really. Self doubt was loud, and it drowned out any confidence I had in the work itself. So I did the one thing I knew would counter that doubt directly. I made it easy for someone to say yes.

Every sale, even at a price that barely covered my time, was evidence. Not to my bank account. To myself. Evidence that someone out there would actually choose to spend money on something I made.

It also gave me so much material to share, to build my name, so much content. And as I did that, the demand for my pieces grew too.

That’s what pricing low gave me in the beginning. It’s what I needed to prove to myself that I could really do this. It gave me the confidence to keep growing, and it helped me get better at my craft and build my experience.

Once the orders started coming in, that was the shift. It was what I needed. It was proof stacking up, one sale at a time, until I trusted the work enough to start charging what it was actually worth.

If you’re a new artist reading this and you’re paralysed by what number to put on your work, here’s what I’d say. The number matters less than you think right now. What matters is getting the first yes. The pricing conversation gets easier once you believe you deserve to have it. And you won’t believe that from thinking about it. You’ll believe it from proof.

Raise your prices when YOU are ready. Just don’t let picking the “right” number in the beginning stop you from starting at all.

But how do you actually know when you’re ready?

You will know what number feels right to you. I’ve more than quadrupled my pricing since I started five years ago, and I have the knowledge, the experience and the confidence to charge that. If someone had told me to price like I do now, back then, I would never have had the confidence to do it. It didn’t feel right yet. As I grew, I became more and more comfortable with each increase.

You need to get to a point where, if someone tried to barter with you, you’d feel offended and would never go lower than what you’re worth. That’s when you know you’re ready to meet that price, because it aligns with your worth. If you price higher before you’re ready, you’ll crumble at the slightest negotiation and lose your confidence and value in the work.

Deep down, as an artist and a creative, you know exactly the price of your work. Do not second guess it. Believe your instincts and go with what feels right. Do not listen to everyone who gives you advice especially if it doesn’t feel right for you, only you know your art, yourself and your business, and you’re the one who has to run it and sell it, not them.

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I invested in a lot of courses to learn content, reels and strategy. But I also wanted to stand apart from the other artists I was watching.

I noticed a lot of the artists I’d started following were quite introverted. They didn’t communicate much with their community, they often gatekept, and they seemed... scared at the prospect of people knowing them beyond the art. A lot of them barely showed their faces. It was like there was this underlying expectation that artists need some kind of mystery about them. Like it wasn’t “cool” to be open and energetic. Everyone seemed to want to stay mysterious and moody, and that was so far from who I was.

I was never that. I’m an extroverted, Sagittarius-to-the-bone person who loves people, loves meeting new faces, loves talking to anyone and everyone I bump into on the street. My primary school teachers used to say “you could put Tracey next to a wall and she’d talk to it.” I wanted to connect with people so badly on this platform.

For the first 12-18 months I played it safe. I did what everyone else was doing. And it just didn’t feel like me. So I decided I was going to do things my way instead. Once I did that, everything changed.

I started gaining hundreds of followers a day, sometimes thousands. DMs were rolling in faster than I could keep up with, and my art orders were booked out for months in advance.

Here are some of the weird things I did that, looking back now, I think are exactly why people loved it, because no one else was really doing them.

1. I PRICED my art so LOW I was barely breaking even. I didn’t care. Looking back, I was basically paying people to buy my work lol once you factored in time and materials. But I wasn’t trying to make money yet. I was trying to build proof. Every sale, no matter how small the margin, was evidence to myself that people would actually pay for what I made.

I didn’t feel like I was a ‘real’ artist. Self doubt crept in, I needed to prove to myself that people actually wanted my art before I could believe it myself. Once the orders started rolling in, that was the boost I needed to go all in.

2. I stopped focusing on anything except GROWING my Instagram following. No crazy posting plan. No fancy website. No diversifying across five platforms. I made myself one promise: post daily, or every second day at an absolute minimum, until I hit 10k followers. Not because Instagram is magic, but because I only had the bandwidth to get good at one thing, and I chose the one thing that would put me in front of the most people for free.

I didn’t care that some of the reels were lower quality. Looking back, posting every day did a few things I didn’t clock at the time. It taught me how to handle the pressure of constantly creating.

When you post everyday it forced you to build a content bank and film yourself ALL the time. And without realising it, day by day, you are learning consistency, building the habit, understanding the algorithm, editing faster and better. You will get better every single day just from keeping that promise to yourself.

3. I chose 20 people and gave them 10 to 15 minutes of real attention EVERY single DAY. Ten were other artists. Ten weren’t, but they were adjacent, builders, interior designers, photographers, home and lifestyle accounts I actually liked. Every day, without fail, I’d spend that time genuinely engaging with them. Actually commenting, actually caring what they posted. Some of those people are still close friends now. It wasn’t a growth hack. It just happened to also grow my community.

4. I replied to EVERY single comment on every single post. Then I’d go follow that person, comment on their content too. It sounds obvious, but most accounts stop replying once they get a bit of traction. I never did. If someone took the time to say something to me, I took the time to comment something back.

I genuinely couldn’t believe people liked my stuff, and I was so thrilled they did that I wanted to connect with them and thank them for it. When you truly value the people in your community, they feel it, and they support you even more. Which was exactly what I needed at the time!

5. I blocked people I admired. This one sounds negative, I know. But hear me out, if another artist was doing something I wished I’d thought of, or their work pulled at me in a way that felt like it was creeping into my own style, I blocked them. Not out of spite. Out of self preservation. I didn’t want to be influenced by someone else’s style or ideas before I’d fully found mine, which was a common theme I saw and still see on social media a lot. I always wanted to maintain my originality.

6. I kept every PROMISE I made to myself, or I’d call myself a loser. This is the honest truth. If I said I was going to post every day, I did it. If I said I was going to film my process and post it, I did it. If I told myself I was creating 3 pieces that day, I did it, even if they sucked and I had no ideas left, I still did it.

That practice of following through built a discipline I never expected. To this day, if I promise myself I’m going to the gym, I go, otherwise the voice in my head says “now you’re a loser,” and even though I know that’s not true lol , it always gets my procrastinating, borderline ADHD butt, up off the couch and into action. It’s paid me back in ways I could never have imagined.

7. I visited CLIENT’S HOMES even though I had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t know anything about styling, scale, how a piece should sit on a wall, nothing! I used to feel sick before I arrived at a client’s home, that’s how nervous would get. But I went anyway, because I knew the visit wasn’t really about my expertise. It was about making the client feel like they mattered more than the sale did.

That feeling is what people remembered, not whether I nailed the styling advice. I grew to love it, as much as it intimidated me, because I could see how positively people responded to it and that’s where I shined, meeting them and connecting with them.

8. I talked clients out of buying BIGGER pieces. In the beginning, this one cost me real money, and I did it anyway. Bigger pieces intimidated me. I was so scared of getting the scale or the impact wrong that I’d steer people toward something smaller, safer, cheaper. (If you haven’t noticed a lot of things scared me back then haha)

It should have looked like bad business. Instead it built trust fast, because clients could see I wasn’t just chasing the biggest sale. I was actually looking out for them, and looking for a chance to keep creating and building my portfolio. I wasn’t looking at those early opportunities as transactional, I was looking at them as a chance.

9. I never did markets. I still don’t, and I don’t plan to. I could never make the math work in my head. The fees, the setup and pack down, the transport, the very real chance you sell nothing and drive home with a car full of unsold work. I knew I could reach more people, more reliably, from my own platform with my own branding than I ever could from a stall. My time is worth more than that risk, and that hasn’t changed.

I believe in protecting your time, it’s our currency as artists. Why would I spend a whole day on something that doesn’t guarantee sales, doesn’t build my brand, and doesn’t grow my following, when I could spend that same time building something that compounds instead? Once you realise what social media can actually do for you and how to scale it, you get a lot more selective with where your time goes.

10. I gave myself a one hour content limit, then left my phone in the car every day! One hour of consuming content a day, that’s it. After that, phone goes in the car, not just another room, the actual car, so I couldn’t talk myself into checking it. It sounds extreme, but it’s the reason I could actually get into a flow state and make things, instead of half creating while half scrolling.

Whatever’s on that phone will pull you far away from the creative state you need to actually make something meaningful. If you can get your hands on an old spare phone, just to film yourself while you create, do it. That’s what I did, and it helped settle my ADHD, wandering mind more than I expected.

11. I ONLY ever invested in BUSINESS COURSES. I invested a lot into business programs, mentorships and courses from the very beginning and I still do to this day. I believe that is what got me to where I am so quickly. I NEVER invested in any art courses or classes. I wanted to teach myself and come up with my own original methods, which I did. But I only ever invested in programs from actual business people, entrepreneurs I knew that was the edge I needed to take my art as a business to the next level, something very few artists had or have! But the tide is turning and now we understand we need to be the artist and the marketer.

None of these things were strategic when I did them. They weren’t a formula, they were just me refusing to do it the way everyone else was doing it. Looking back, that’s the actual thread through all ten. I didn’t get here by following the rules. I got here by finally deciding I didn’t have to.

Next week I want to get into the part I’ve never really ever spoken about, the actual PRICING and CLIENT CONVERSATION behind all this growth and how I turned followers and inquiries into actual sales. If you’ve ever frozen up trying to figure out what to charge, that one’s for you.

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