As creatives who bring forth music, film, illustration and photography, we always seek to expand our audience, especially if our livelihood depends on it.
We’ve obviously seen an enormous shift in the ways that people discover, ingest and share these mediums during the past few years, with social media and the web, but despite the ease in which sites like Facebook, Twitter and Google seem to allow for getting our work out there, it’s still a huge challenge to building a big enough following that will sustain an entire career, especially with so much competition.
The fallacy of having a large following is that the average person’s newsfeed goes by so quickly, that your message really has little chance of being seen by, let alone resonating with, very many people. Social media is just a numbers game where garnering more followers only serves to increase the odds.
It’s the same with any kind of marketing. It always has been. From that standpoint, social media is nothing new or special, it’s just the same old horn that you can now blow from cool new devices.
So how do you stand out? How do you get more true followers and increase these odds?
Simple. You give people what they want. You give them the value that they desire.
If you’re a photographer, you give them the most unbelievably cool, awesome, eye catching, jaw dropping, mind blowing, evocative, electrically charged imagery that you can possibly create.
I didn’t say it was easy, I just said it it was simple. It’s not easy to produce the very best imagery that you can make, but it’s simple to devote your life and your energy to being a PHOTOGRAPHER, or whatever type of art you’re driven to do, instead of always trying to drive people to your site.
The whole “build it an they will come” thing applies here. Make AWESOME imagery and they’ll come.
Create amazing work and you will gain a following. Create amazing work and you will find success. Create amazing work and you ultimately be happier with yourself.
The path to being a successful artist is to actually be an artist. Sure, spend some energy blowing your horn, but spend most most of it CREATING.
Good luck.
Excellent advice Dan. It’s so easy to get caught up in all the things you have to do to run a photography business, especially the marketing side of things, that it can leave little time for actually photographing. You have to give yourself enough time to play, experiment, and create.