5 months in; starting a creative business

5 months, we are almost halfway. I never thought I would make it this far! I thought I would give up somewhere after the first week or something (and with me probably everybody who I told about this plan to start a creative business)

Instead, this month I actually made my first income! (Okay, and last month but there wasn’t a report then so it counts for this month) This to me shows that starting a creative business is at least in some sense a success.

I could not have been more excited. This month I did my first guest post, installed AdSense and sold not 1 but 2 works!

I actually have an income report this month. But first all the things I did do and changed.

Blog

After moving I had a break for  two weeks and it was great!

If you are feeling a little overwhelmed by blogging taking a break is a great idea. I would highly recommend it.

I have no idea what the views did this month but they didn’t drop that dramatically. However google analytics and jetpack don’t line up at all.

Google said I had 1091 views this month, which is incredible.

Jetpack said 450 which is still amazing in my opinion since I missed two days and moved the blog.

Did I say I moved blog already! I moved the blog. We are in a whole new place all self-hosted.

For this month, I wanted to make sure I had income sources. Like I said I installed Adsense and it is working great! I made a grand total of 14 cents in the past two days already!

However, making freebies ad writing e-books might be slightly harder than I thought it would be. But I did make some freebies and I even created a separate page for this that will be available to anyone who subscribed to the email list.

Last month goals;

• move the blog DONE

• update about page (it is  not finished) nope should have done that but I do have some very excite and ambitious ideas!

• create at least one freebie! This I did do!

Social media

I am still not that good at social media but I did seem to have some kind of breakthrough with Pinterest. I was seriously giving up on that one and then suddenly the ball got rolling. I am not sure how to keep it going or what did it but I did write an entire article about it.

Facebook turns out to be much better than I thought. I was really scared of people from real life finding out (mostly old classmates) & while I know this is very silly I am very happy that this didn’t happen.

I even asked a question in one of the groups which were a lot less terrifying than I thought it would be.

My most successful account is still twittered with almost 300 followers. I still can’t believe how much fun twitter is and how easy it was.

So overall I think social media is doing well!

Apparently I had no goals last month but this month;

• I really should make an Instagram.
• Create a new twitter cover

Art

In the past two months, I sold two works from my Etsy store which was all very exciting and I am still very happy about it. Both the packages arrived totally fine and got two 5 star reviews which are so lovely.

My new goal is to fill up the shop with more art. I would love to have a minimum of 20 works for my creative business so it doesn’t look so empty.

And like always better photography (for both my blog and my Etsy). I also would really like for my shop to have a more consistent look but I have not yet found a way to achieve that. 

I really want to focus on promoting my art more this month. Both for my shop but also across DeviantArt, Tumblr, and Instagram.

Therefore, I probably should also draw more & paint more. I really want to create some fan art this month to practice different styles and to grow my reach!

I am also thinking about Youtube but for fear of it being too much, I think I should wait for a little with that.

I also really look forward to trying a challenge somewhere this month!

What didn’t happen is more art related posts but I did plan some for next month. I want to talk about process and some different kind of mediums. Since this was originally meant to be an art blog/creative business blog I think there should be more space for that. That is also why I am thinking up some projects for the future with that theme.

If there are any topics you would like to see do let me know below! I would love to hear from you!

Total income from my creative business

• Etsy 24.68 euro 
• Advertisements & such 0,14 euro 

total=  24,82 euro

Overall I think I had a great month for my creative business.  I did a lot of things that I wanted to get done. I kept growing through it all and I even felt a little bit more rested.

I have a lot of topic ideas and projects. Finding the time to do them all can be hard but hopefully, February gives me that time

If you want to check out the guest post I did on Grammarly, it is here.

I love any kind of input especially on topics you would want to hear more about.