For any new business, pricing work can be a total guessing game. On the one hand, you want to undercut the competition, beucase you know everyone wants a bargain and you want to get your product out there. On the other hand, you want to eat. How to solve this quandary?

The pricing problem becomes further compounded with creative businesses, because the product you’re selling isn’t something people can easily place value on. Artwork doesn’t immediately solve a pressing problem, or offer some kind of stable market for which you can compare models and prices. The price a person pays for artwork is whatever they feel it is worth. If they don’t feel it’s worth the price asked, they won’t pay for it.

Read On…

When it comes to online conversion rates, email still dominates. Email is the vampire of the online marketing world – old-school, eerily seductive, and packs one hell of a bite.

The recent numbers from the DMA show email’s conversion rate is still the highest, bringing in $40.56 for every dollar spent on it this year. Although this is down on previous years, it’s still miles ahead of the next highest converter – search-based marketing, at $22.24 per dollar spent.

Email marketing is a powerful thing. When customers give you their email addresses, they’re giving you permission to send your message into their home. Emailing a customer is a bit like walking into their home and glueing your business card onto their cat’s forehead.

NB: I don’t advocate glueing business cards to felines as a viable marketing tactic.

But you can’t just go emailing people willy nilly – you have to get their permission first, much like a vampire can’t enter a home without permission. Vampires are gentlemen – they only go where they’re wanted. Your business is like a vampire …

Read On…

Do you read magazines? Most of us do. We read magazines to learn more about our hobbies and interests, for entertainment, and to keep up-to-date with news and events in our industry. Even with blogs, podcasts and online media becoming increasingly influential, magazines still play a vital role in the publishing industry.

Print magazines are at the top of the heap when it comes to quality. Every print magazine is backed by an editorial team that ensure the quality is maintained across every article and layout. Most industries have at least one magazine that is considered highly influential – businesses featured within it’s pages have definitely “made it”.

So if you’re reading these magazines in your industry, why aren’t you writing for them?

Read On…

This is a guest post by Emily Helms, an incredibly talented, intelligent and compassionate writer, bookworm and creative copywriter (she’s humble too, but trust me, this girl has the “brain smarts”.)

If you’re a creative biz owner who is just starting out, I’m willing to bet that the money isn’t rolling in the door yet. In that case, teaching may be a great way to earn some extra cash while honing your skills.

I’ve taught for almost two years in three different settings: out of my home, out of a community arts school, and most recently, out of a teaching studio at my local music store.

In this post, I’ll go over some advantages and disadvantages of teaching to help you decide whether it’d be a good addition to your artist’s bag of tools. I’ll also go over some of the things you’ll need to consider before taking on your first victim…er, student.

Read On…

There’s no Epic Interrogation this week. Instead, I’ve got an announcement. A lot of people write to me saying they’d love to hire someone like me to work on their site, but they don’t think they’ve got the budget. I don’t like advertising my rates, but I’ve been thinking of creating some special writing packages especially for creative wonders like you, just to show you how affordable it is.

The four packages, with graphics designed by the amazing Vail of FutureNoir, are the Tentacle, the Epic Etsy, the Blog-Shoggoth and The Great Cthulhu. You’ll find them all under the Copywriting Packages tab of the Grymm & Epic shop.

Custom packages are available and, if you want to get started but can’t afford right now, I do offer payment plans. Just email me at steff AT steffmetal DOT com and we’ll suss something out.

Be prepared for an onslaught of lovecraftian, multi-tentacled writing packages of DOOM!

Love, lust and puddling crust
Steff

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