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In this episode of GradBlogger, we interview Dr. Gaius Augustus about how to grow a brand and generate freelance income. We discuss how to use content sharing and social media to attract clients and build a course. We also discuss the different ways that you can actively generate revenue and build a community around your passion.
Disclosure: Some of the links in the podcast show notes and transcripts are affiliate links (indicated with [Affiliate] in front). If you choose to make a purchase through these links, GradBlogger will earn a commission from that purchase at no extra cost to you.
Introduction
Chris Cloney: 00:08
Welcome to Episode #14 of the GradBlogger. This is the podcast for helping academics build online businesses using blogging, podcasting, and video in addition to creating side hustles, creating online research companies, and making their own dent in the world through creating online businesses.
Chris Cloney: 00:25
In today’s episode, we have a very special guest. Dr. Gaius Augustus. Gaius, welcome to the show today.
Gaius Augustus: 00:30
Thank you.
Chris Cloney: 00:33
I appreciate Gaius’s time because this is the second time we’re recording this interview. After recording nearly 50 podcast episodes, I finally forgot to press the record button, so we lost that one and we’re doing it again today. I do appreciate the opportunity to go through it again, Gaius.
Gaius Augustus: 00:50
No problem.
Chris Cloney: 00:53
In today’s episode, we’re talking about how to grow a brand and generate freelance income. Gaius has a Bachelor’s in Integrative Studies, with a focus on chemistry and biology. He trained in fine arts and television prior to getting into his Bachelor’s degree. He’s recently obtained a Ph.D. in cancer biology from the University of Arizona.
Chris Cloney: 01:16
Today, Gaius is a multimedia science communicator. He’s helping students and researchers simplify their science, so he’s my go-to resource on visuals like animations, graphics, and other stuff that looks nice and that I’m not that good at. You can catch him at gaiusjaugustus.com. In this episode, we’ll be talking about building a personal brand and generating freelance income.
Chris Cloney: 01:41
I got a behind the scenes look of this whole process with Gaius, as he was part of the GradBlogger Accelerator program that we had earlier in the year. It was a three-month coaching program where we set goals, held accountability, and went through the process of building everything up, from having an online website to creating a personal brand. We went through the process of building a course and, in the end, Gaius ended up generating quite a bit of freelance income out of the coaching program as well.
Chris Cloney: 02:07
I got to see that whole background and I wanted to use it as a case study today, in order to share the lessons that Gaius learned on this journey. So, Gaius, what is your online business today? Can you share a little bit about your entrepreneurship journey?
Can You Share Your Entrepreneurship Journey, And What Is Your Online Business Today?
Gaius Augustus: 02:22
Sure, sounds good. My online business today, as Chris mentioned, is gaiusjaugustus.com. It’s a multimedia science communication business. On one side, it’s a place where I make art, infographics, illustrations, graphical abstracts, animations, and anything else you could think of. The point is to help make science more visual so that it’s more accessible.
Gaius Augustus: 02:47
The other side of it is that I run workshops and do training to help others make their science more visual. So far, that’s focused on infographics. But I’m hoping to build that out to help people create visuals to make science more accessible for all.
Chris Cloney: 03:06
Awesome. As I mentioned, if you go check out Gaius J. Augustus, (which we’ll put in the show notes at gradblogger.com/14) you’ll see how good the animations and graphics are, and get a feel for how he ties artwork into online communication and into science communication.
Chris Cloney: 03:31
We went through a number of things during the coaching program. We obviously won’t be able to cover them all in this half-hour podcast, but I broke them into three components. The first big chunk was around personal branding. The second big chunk was around billing and selling an online course. Then the one that was a surprise for me, and I don’t know if it was a surprise for Gaius, because he’s so good at art: freelance income generation for his commissioned pieces of work. We’ll get into that towards the end of this episode.
How Do You Create a Personal Brand?
Chris Cloney: 04:09
Can you explain the process that we went through at the start of the coaching program and the topics that we discussed around personal branding?
Gaius Augustus: 04:18
The first thing that we did was try to identify goals that are specific, reasonable, and could be measured. That I think was probably the most important thing. One of the first things that I came in wanting to do was to create a course. I was interested in helping others to create infographics and things like that but I wasn’t sure where to start. One of my other goals that you, Chris, helped me recognize, was the idea of improving name recognition.
Gaius Augustus: 04:54
You quoted me on … I don’t know, do you have it in front of you? But you brought it up several times throughout the Accelerator program. Very early on, I said, “Nobody knows who I am. Why would they buy something from me?”
Chris Cloney: 05:05
Yeah, I wrote down that quote. That might have been our first meeting. Quote, “Nobody knows me, so why should they pay for this course?” We started to talk about how to sell a course. We’ll get into some of the things that we did there, that may be contrary to some of the things that you’re hearing in the online digital marketing space.
Chris Cloney: 05:29
The point I made was that being seen as the best resource in the world for your topic, which is where Gaius is heading, opens all those opportunities. Then you can create a course. Then you can do consulting. So we hammered that down during the first month. What are some of the things that we looked at for building a personal brand? If someone told you today that they wanted to be known for something, how would you advise them to start?
Gaius Augustus: 05:59
When you start, you definitely have to have reasonable goals. I came in with the goal of creating a course. I was thinking it would have all these other effects. But I wasn’t thinking of the brand building as part of it.
Gaius Augustus: 06:22
One thing that helped me was the idea that you can work on that stuff first. Some of the things that we worked on were content creation, like building a blog post and videos, and improving brand recognition in general, like social media. We also discussed reach on social media. Something that I didn’t know that we were going to improve, but we definitely did, was sales. That’s all in addition to my first plan, which was, “I’m going to do this course.”
How Did You Build Your Course?
Chris Cloney: 06:58
Yeah. The questions that people ask me when they want to create a course are very similar to the ones you had. “Should I do it on Teachable? What platform do I need? How do I record video?”
Well, you didn’t need to know how to record video because you’re an expert at that. But those are the questions. It’s like, “Wow. We need to take a step back. Who knows you, and what do they know you for?”
If you needed some money today, then maybe you could create this course and launch it. But if you have a little bit of a runway, then you should start by asking yourself, “Okay. How can I make myself the best?”
Chris Cloney: 07:35
I remember that during one of the meetings, I was asking how the content creation was going. We rattled off some ideas and you had this list, but it was a bit of a struggle. I asked you, “Well, what do you have in your repertoire today?” You said, “Well, I have this physical course that I have delivered to universities, to students. I have another course that’s this big thing. Like a multi-day, multi-section, multi-module type course.”
Chris Cloney: 08:08
We talked through it and said, “Well, can we release this as a series of blog posts?” When we did that, we had 50 or 75 different pieces of content with different titles. You’re working towards your course content as you go. Then you took off. You started writing all the time and started sharing.
Chris Cloney: 08:33
Social media was big. I kept challenging you by asking, “How many people can you get back from social media this week?”
Gaius Augustus: 08:42
Definitely. I think that I held back because I didn’t understand that I had a list of content that could be used somewhere else. Once we thought about how to share that same information in blog posts, it’s been great.
Chris Cloney: 09:15
Yeah. I mean, you need the list. I normally tell people to start at what I’m now calling random topic blogging, RTB. We talked about it in Episode #8. You go through textbooks in your field and even go through Amazon, looking at tables of contents and getting ideas for topics that have already been successful. If somebody’s written a textbook about a subject, it’s something that people need to know.
Chris Cloney: 09:40
I’m aiming at writing the story of your life. If you could come up with the table of contents of you, five or 10 years from now and your business is successful, what chapters would it contain? That’s what I’ve started doing for these podcast episodes. Not necessarily the case studies, but with the solo ones, I’m thinking, “Okay. 10 years from now, or a couple of years from now, if I write a book about this, what chapters are in there? What do I know?” Then I start pulling those out. It gives you a more cohesive set than this random topic blogging.
Chris Cloney: 10:14
That’s the same thing you did when you pulled this out from the course that you had already constructed in your mind. Yeah, it’s a powerful way to look at it.
When Did You Know Your Personal Brand Was Working?
Chris Cloney: 10:23
On the personal branding side, you once shared a story that was enlightening. I wanted to make sure it got back to the community. Because sometimes you can feel that this isn’t working, right? You’re sharing on your social media and you’re getting more people back to your website. But what is it doing? The story I’m thinking of is somebody mentioning you at a conference. Do you know which one I’m talking about?
Gaius Augustus: 10:48
Yes, I definitely do.
Chris Cloney: 10:49
Can you walk us through that? It might be interesting for the listeners as well.
Gaius Augustus: 10:53
Yeah. think the question you had asked me, and I’m paraphrasing, was, “When did you feel like you had met your goal?” or “When did you feel like you were doing well and that your branding was doing well?”
I’ve been doing a lot, I went I think from 700 followers to about 2000 now in a rather short period of time. It’s been a couple of months. I’m doing pretty well. I’ve made some good sales. But I’m still growing and I’m still giving myself goals that I haven’t reached yet. But I recently, I started doing this thing where every time someone signs up for my mailing list, I send them a message, thank them for joining, and ask them what they’d like to see more of.
Gaius Augustus: 11:52
One day, somebody who was one of my first two online commissions joined my mailing list. I messaged her and said, “Thank you so much for joining. It’s great to see you again. I would love to hear what you’d like to see more of.”
She emailed me back and said that she was interested in science, art, and hearing the new stuff that’s happening there. But then she said that she had been at a Sci-Com conference that I didn’t attend. She was part of a big group of people who were talking about integrating art into their science communication. She said every single person who was on Twitter knew exactly who I was.
It was one of those emails that I couldn’t answer for a couple of days because I didn’t know how to answer. It floored me. I was like, “I can’t believe that my branding is that recognizable at this point. I’m still feeling like I’m working on that a lot.” I’m still in awe of that email because it’s great. I’m happy, because that’s exactly where I want to be.
Chris Cloney: 13:06
Yeah, personal branding is what people say about you when you’re not in the room. That story highlights it exactly. That’s good, that’s a tipping point, right? You get to the point where other people are now communicating about you and sharing. I’ve got to tell you, it’s probably a lot harder in your field -visualizing science- but for most Ph.D. topics, it doesn’t take much.
My Ph.D. is in dust explosions. I have dustsafetyscience.com, which is my research company. It’s my sole business besides GradBlogger, which is much smaller compared to that. People will use their phones to show me a presentation that they’re attending in Europe, Germany, Western Canada, or wherever. They’ll take a picture, and the presenter will have a picture of me on their slide deck. Or they’ll have my website on their slide deck.
“Hey, they’re mentioning you in Munich this week at the Dust Safety Days,” they might say. It’s like, “Wow.” It’s such a powerful thing. You’ve got to create great material and be willing to press send to ship that into the world. That’s the price of admission.
Chris Cloney: 14:25
I think this is obtainable in a lot of fields. It’s a matter of showing up. You are posting every day. Not selling every day, but posting useful information. You’re not even necessarily posting links back to your website all the time.
You’ve grown quite a bit on the social media side, from watching your last three or four months. You seemed to get people rallied up around this topic of art. How to be an artist and still be a scientist. How to simplify your art. I’m excited to see where that goes.
Gaius Augustus: 14:59
Yeah, me too. I want to mention that I feel like I have these goals. When you hear someone say something like, “Oh yeah. I was at a conference and people knew you,” it also makes you think, “Oh no. I have to get more content up because I’m not where I want to be.”
My goal is to get through this workshop and get all the content up. I’m nowhere close because there’s so much content. Now I’m like, “Oh no. I have to catch up somehow.” It’s good to have all of that, but you never feel like you’re prepared for it.
Chris Cloney: 15:41
That’s imposter syndrome. It doesn’t matter where you get to.
Gaius Augustus: 15:46
Yeah, I know.
Chris Cloney: 15:47
I have people email me saying, “I don’t have a Master’s. Can I start a science blog? I don’t have a Ph.D., can I start a science blog?”
I tell them, “Well, about that feeling you have of not being adequate? Once you get your Master’s, you’re going to feel that same way about not having a Ph.D. Once you get your Ph.D., you’re going to feel that same way about not having five years of industry experience under your belt. Once you get five years of industry experience under your belt, you’re going to have that same feeling because you’re an introvert instead of an extrovert. Or an extrovert instead of an introvert.” You’re going to find that next pressure point, regardless of where you are.
Chris Cloney: 16:15
If you want self-development, and to keep pushing yourself in this online business space, the trick is to take that next action anyway. You are a king at that. This was more on personal branding that I thought we’d cover, but it’s an important topic, and it’s a good starting point, especially for graduate students, because you’re not pushing for sales right away. You don’t have to.
You build this community, build authority in your space. Make connections. Get to know people. If you do that for a year before you launch anything online, or even a month before you launch anything online, you can have great results.
Chris Cloney: 16:50
The second thing we talked about is this course. This was the goal that you brought to the coaching program. You said, “I want to launch a course. What technology do I need? How do I do all this stuff?”
The big thing that I try to point out is that we need to simplify things. I don’t know if I used the quote from [Affiliate] The Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferris, but he says, “What would this look like if it was easy?” What would building a course look like if it was easy?
Chris Cloney: 17:21
The answer to that is: I would probably email some people I know. I’d get them to sign up and I’d teach them what I know today. For us, I think we ended up on a two-day or one and a half hour webinar each day, calling it a workshop. We dialled back. It wasn’t this big thing where it’s multi-module. Within a couple of weeks, we were moving towards it. Can you walk through us that process a little bit, of transitioning from a course to a workshop?
How Did You Transition From a Course to a Workshop?
Gaius Augustus: 17:54
This course that I wanted to build up was based on a course that I did at my university. I was struggling a lot with it because it was very interactive. I was wondering, “How do you do a course online that’s self-guided but has all of the interactive elements that I had put into the workshop?”
Gaius Augustus: 18:20
When you mentioned doing a workshop online, it all fell together. We started with a two-hour workshop, one hour each day. I used Zoom, which has a lot more features than I realized at the time, to do this workshop. We grew a waiting list. Then, once I was ready to choose a date, we started letting people in.
Gaius Augustus: 18:49
I got six people the first time. I’ve done it once more since then and also got another six people. What’s great is that each time you learn a little bit more about the technology. You also learn a little bit more about what you’re doing and what people want out of it. That helps with building future courses.
This wasn’t the entire course that I had done for the university. It was one module of it, so I could build up a few courses online that could all work together. It worked out well as far as letting people help me to understand what they want to see, and what questions they have after they complete the first module.
Gaius Augustus: 19:38
What I loved about doing this online, and doing the workshop instead of the course, is that I got to interact with people. They got to know me. They got to see firsthand how I solve problems that they come up with. I found that powerful.
Gaius Augustus: 19:58
In a lot of ways, it made me not want to do a self-guided course. It made me want to do more of these interactive workshops so that I can take the time to get one on one with people. When I say one on one feedback, I mean people are drawing on their screen and I’m redlining. Or people are interacting with one another through breakout groups and then we come back together and I am giving them input on what they came up with from those breakout groups.
Chris Cloney: 20:37
Yeah, I like that a lot. There are a couple of points I want to highlight and emphasize there. One of the big struggles that you had and that a lot of people have is, “What should the topic of my course be?”
I think we narrowed it down to maybe three areas. By the way, the courses on creating and transitioning your science to infographics- can you give me the name of the workshop so that the listeners have it?
Gaius Augustus: 21:04
Yeah. The workshop is From Science To Infographic. I try to run it once a month. The whole point of it is to be able to take some science, either your science or a paper, condense that text so that it can fit in an infographic, and then design the infographic around that text using visual elements and the principles of design.
Chris Cloney: 21:30
What a great course. That’s much better than ‘Design As An Academic’ or ‘Academic Design 101.’
You mentioned that there were multiple topic ideas though. We had all this but we didn’t have any of the infrastructures to snap together to deliver a big course. You could go and invest money and time to try to figure that out if you wanted. You’re not sure if people are going to buy at the end of the day. You haven’t tested any price points out so you don’t know what those should be.
Chris Cloney: 22:01
There are all these issues around running a big multi-module type course right out of the gate. Do you pre-sell it and then create the course? Do you spend six months and create the course and pre-sell it? What we came down to was the system of prototype, sell, expand. It’s three steps.
Let’s do the smaller workshop first. It was really the workshop where you learned the hard stuff. It’s easy to create a course if you don’t ever sell it, right? It’s easy to sit down and outline some modules and stick content together. The hard part is putting it out in the world and getting people in. Enticing them. Building a personal brand. Then, at the end of the day getting a sale and delivering on that.
Chris Cloney: 22:41
If you take six months and create your course, you’re never going to do the hard part. You may never come back and do it anyway. You may get too frustrated. But if you do this short workshop type approach, you did the hard stuff. You created a waiting list. Then you made an offer to that waiting list. You got people onboard. Then you fulfilled, got great feedback, and now you’re improving. You can run, as you said.
Now you can run one of those a month on that topic. You also test out any other topics you have now that you have the toolkit. Maybe you can start working towards a bigger multi-module course. But it can be one at a time. You’re making money along the way. I assume the course wasn’t free?
How Did You Generate Freelance Income?
Gaius Augustus: 23:29
Correct. The first time I ran the course it was $30. The second time I ran the course it was $35.
Chris Cloney: 23:36
That’s about $200 a pop for running the course. You can run one of these a month and use it to test your business ideas out. What a great skill to learn! Maybe that will be the next course I create: a one day workshop on creating a one day workshop.
Gaius Augustus: 23:56
Oh my gosh, that’s a great idea.
Chris Cloney: 23:59
You heard it here first. I’m sure they’ll start popping up here pretty shortly. But that’s the point. If you prototype, you make it small and don’t need to sign up for Teachable. You can deliver it on Zoom or you can deliver it on Skype or something else that’s low cost. You get to the hard problem, which is selling the thing and then delivering on it at the end of the day.
Chris Cloney: 24:21
I couldn’t be happier with how the course portion of the accelerated program came out because that was your big goal. I think it was 10 people at $20 per head. You ended up now with six people at $30, which ends up being the same monetary number but you’ve also run it twice successfully now. You have this tool that you can deploy whenever you have the time to do it.
Gaius Augustus: 24:43
Exactly. You know, sometimes I think that one of the reasons that we get caught up with, and I know one of the reasons I got caught up with the platform was that these platforms make it seem like they help generate people. They’ll say, “We have this many people taking courses on our website.” It makes you think, “Oh. I can get access to those people.” But at the end of the day, most websites are not actively generating people for your content. For most of them, it’s about the platform and making it easy to create the course.
I’m happy with the way that I went. People aren’t leaving my website to connect with me and there’s something to be said for keeping the branding consistent, and not expecting that if you pay for something, it means that they’re going to bring you customers.
Chris Cloney: 26:02
The way you describe that is perfect. I learned that from a mentor, James Schramko at Super Fast Business. He ran a course from many years ago and now it’s a staple topic in his work. It’s called ‘own the racecourse’. You don’t want to be creating these things on other people’s platforms. You want to be creating assets for yourself and running the course off your own website. You have full control. Nobody’s taking a percentage cut and I think Teachable’s is probably pretty big.
Chris Cloney: 26:30
Maybe they have an audience but it’s probably the wrong audience. It’s probably not the right audience for your course. It could be people who are needier in certain areas and you want to control the whole pipeline. The whole workflow the way you did it.
Gaius Augustus: 26:48
Many of these platforms are so oversaturated that you’re still not going to find people. Or the other way around- people aren’t going to find you.
Chris Cloney: 27:10
How much better is it to build this audience off of your own personal brand and the people who are talking about you at a conference when you’re not there? It’s a no-brainer but you’ve got to do the hard work first, which is reaching out to people and selling it.
Chris Cloney: 27:28
I did want to turn to the last part of this process, which is the big bang. I want to talk about freelance income generation. You originally explained it to me as commission work and I had to ask you, “What the heck is commission?” I think that comes from the artwork background.
Chris Cloney: 27:47
When we were about halfway through working on this course and your personal branding, every week you’d come to me on the weekly call and say, “Oh, we’ve got another project onboard for this type of art. Science art.” Can you walk us through that process a bit?
Gaius Augustus: 28:03
Sure. What I had wanted to do was one of these rotation curation, or Ro-Cur, accounts where you take over for a week and tweet from an account that already has a following. There was a big one called I Am Sci-Com that I had been wanting to do but I was like, “I don’t know what to talk about. I don’t know when to do it.” You were like, “Go sign up.”
Chris Cloney: 28:33
“How about tomorrow?”
Gaius Augustus: 28:34
So I did. I signed up. That catapulted a lot of things. First, during and after that Ro-Cur, several people contacted me about doing commissions. My first commission was to do six emoji icons. That was a $100 commission, which at the time I thought was a lot. It’s not.
Gaius Augustus: 29:05
About a week later I got another commission from someone who had a budget of $250. It was for a graphical abstract for her upcoming paper. She already had the sketch. It was pretty much taking that sketch and turning it into something bigger. That was $250. I was like, “Okay. Well, I guess that’s a reasonable amount of money,” which it isn’t.
Gaius Augustus: 29:33
For the six emojis, I think I ended up doing 24 emojis. Then for the graphical abstract, I animated a part of it. They got a lot for what they paid for, but because I was starting to get this interest, I started getting some confidence, which was good. I decided to go to some local places and see if anyone might be interested in what I did. I started going on websites and noticing that a lot of people didn’t have multimedia on their website. Then I would email them and say, “I noticed that you don’t have this. Let’s talk.”
Gaius Augustus: 30:26
One of those people emailed me back and said, “That’s great. Let’s talk.” When I talked to him, he gave me a lot of resources for the local area. A week later, he said, “Can you make an animated video?” I was like, “Sure.” He asked me for a quote and I had an idea of how much to charge. I did some research online to come up with a number.
Gaius Augustus: 30:52
I ended up charging a little less than $1000 a minute. It turned into a $2500 commission, which is a great deal for him because that’s still rather low on the scale of how much a project like this should cost. Still, over the course of a few weeks, I went from my first $100 commission to a $2500 commission doing an animation.
Chris Cloney: 31:22
Yeah, that’s amazing. The first time I had heard it in that sequence, I had a gigantic smile on my face. But we forgot to record that one. On this one, I have a slightly smaller smile, because I knew it was coming. But it’s an amazing feeling to start to gain that confidence.
It’s okay to want to over-deliver. But I’m thinking that you may have over over-delivered to overcompensate for some of the feelings that we all have when we’re starting out in this space. But getting contracts that are worth $2500 shows the power. This was over a three-month period. This is only a couple of weeks from the first commission to the third big one. It’s amazing to see.
Chris Cloney: 32:11
You mentioned something that I didn’t pick up on until right now. That strategy of going and looking at people’s websites and offering to help them is a good one. Thinking back now, this is how a guy signed up to the Accelerator program.
He sent me an email and said, “Gradblogger.com looks great. There are a couple of things on a development side that could be improved. I can do these for you if you’d be interested.” It’s a no-brainer because I’m busy and the team’s busy working on stuff. I’m like, “Oh yeah, that would be great to have that fixed.”
Chris Cloney: 32:45
That led to our relationship: you reaching out and helping. Then when I started the Accelerator program I was like, “Well who should I ask? I know somebody who’s gung ho at getting out there, and putting themselves out there.” Plus, your work is amazing.
That’s a little hidden tip for those of you: if you’re looking to find people, do something for them first. I think that’s along the same lines as the commission, where you’re reaching out and saying, “There’s something here that could improve your work.”
Gaius Augustus: 33:16
I picked that up from the graphic design community. I watch a lot of graphic design videos to keep up with the skills and to learn new things when I can. I was watching one recently. I can’t remember the name of it right now, and I feel horrible.
Erin Gipford is her name. She’s a graphic designer. She does tutorials on YouTube. One day, she was saying, “How do I get jobs?” She said that if she was going to get a job, she would go around looking.
If she had a pamphlet from a company, she would mock up the exact same pamphlet but improve it with her graphic design skills. Then she would send it to them and say, “Hey, look. Here’s proof of something I could do that would improve a product that you’re already printing. We should work together.”
Gaius Augustus: 34:32
I had never thought of that before because a lot of the discourse in the art community is, “Don’t do anything for free,” which I definitely agree with. But this isn’t about giving away something for free. This is about showing people your value. In general, when you show someone your value, you’re showing them a portfolio.
Gaius Augustus: 34:52
A lot of people can’t or don’t want to take the time to look through your portfolio and find something that they like. Or they don’t know how to extrapolate from your portfolio to see what you can do for them. So I took what Erin said, thought about it from my scientific standpoint and said, “Oh, okay. This makes a lot of sense. Because we’re talking about showing someone something they already have, but better.” You’re showing immediate value to that person by being able to show them not your skill, but the value that you’re going to give to their business.
Gaius Augustus: 35:34
I thought that was a great tip from Erin Gipford. I wanted to share that I did not come up with this myself.
What Tips Do You Have For Someone Looking to Create and Sell Artist Services Online?
Chris Cloney: 35:41
What other tips do you have for people looking to sell their art or sell their artist services online as a freelancer?
Gaius Augustus: 35:50
One of the things that I think that we all need to do as freelancers is be willing to promote ourselves. I know it’s hard. It was very hard for me to start posting on Twitter with links to my website. But no one else is promoting you. You have to promote yourself. That being said, you have to do it strategically. You can’t spam Twitter with posts and only post about your product. People don’t want to see that all day, every day.
Gaius Augustus: 36:23
I tweet seven to 10 times a day about my work. I tend to balance that with lots of posts that are me communicating and engaging with other people. I’ve heard that anything from 10% to 30% of what you put out there should be marketing. I tweet a lot and have a lot of conversations. I feel like seven to 10 is reasonable. But figure out what works for you.
Gaius Augustus: 36:54
I also think that a lot of artists should understand that they need to take constructive criticism. The absolute best way to learn is to practice and then get feedback. I think that it would be great for anyone to find a mentor so that you can do your work, send it out there, and get feedback.
Gaius Augustus: 37:23
That was helpful in the Accelerator program. I was able to get some ideas and talk to Chris about them. Chris would always expand on everything. Then I would come back with, “Okay. Here’s what I did.”
Chris Cloney: 37:37
Sometimes we’d delete stuff too.
Gaius Augustus: 37:39
Yeah, sometimes we’d delete stuff too. Which is fine, right? That’s constructive criticism. That says, “This matters more than this,” and sometimes you need that perspective. But you do need that in order to grow. Both as an artist and a business person.
Gaius Augustus: 37:52
The last thing that I think is important is that a lot of people I’ve met on social media are afraid to share other artists’ work. To me, the science art community is a community of people who all are trying to do similar things. We’re all trying to communicate science better through art, and of course we’re all trying to find some way to make money doing it.
Gaius Augustus: 38:18
It doesn’t help you to make it seem like you’re the only science artist in the world. People know that you’re not the only science artist in the world. It’s much better to share your work, go on the science art stream, and share everyone else’s work too.
As much as I tweet my work, I probably tweet other people’s work three times as much because first of all, people are doing some awesome work. But it also makes you look good. People think, “Okay. This is the different types of work that people do.” They see you as an expert in the field because they’re seeing a curated list of science artists. Then, when they’re looking for a science artist, they’re thinking, “Who do I see a lot? Oh, I see this person. They retweet great artists. They must know what they’re talking about.”
Gaius Augustus: 39:24
Several of the jobs that I have gotten over time have been from other artists who say, “I’m too busy for this. Do you want to take this job on?” I think that’s important because if you don’t like science art enough to tweet other people doing science art, then maybe you’re doing the wrong thing.
Gaius Augustus: 39:57
If other people aren’t tweeting your work and you start tweeting theirs, they might retweet your work as well. We need more community and we definitely need artists retweeting each other and understanding that there’s enough science out there for all of us to have plenty of work. It’s about us getting our stuff out there, promoting our work, and promoting each other, so that we can all be able to make a living doing this.
Chris Cloney: 40:33
Yeah, I couldn’t have said it better myself. In Episode #3 of the podcast, Causing A Ruckus and Creating the Change You Want In the World, I shared a story from an individual here in Halifax who owns a company called Art Pays Me. We had a chat at a conference, and he convinced me that I am indeed an artist, because I run podcasts and create content and stuff.
Chris Cloney: 40:52
The big point is that he’s a fine art expert. His talk at this conference was about how we don’t need more starving artists in the world. The problem is that if you’re never paid for your work, then you won’t be able to expand and do more and better work.
Chris Cloney: 41:18
I enjoyed that presentation. You can check out Episode #3, where I tell that story. Check out artpaysme.com. That’s this individual’s website and it’s great work, as well.
I think that’s what Gaius is talking about there. You need to be confident enough to go out there and put your art into the world. Then you need to have an abundance mindset and be able to accept the rewards from the hard work that you’re putting in.
What Are Your Plans For Your Online Business Moving Forward?
Chris Cloney: 41:47
Gaius, what are your plans for your online business moving forward? What can people expect from gaiusjaugustus.com?
Gaius Augustus: 41:58
I definitely want to keep building my portfolio. I love working with scientists. I love working with creatives to create awesome science communication. But I also want to continue helping others do the same. I’m going to continue doing my workshops, building out new workshops, and helping others to create better visuals, whether they are artists or scientists, or citizen scientists, or whatever.
Gaius Augustus: 42:25
I’ve also recently gotten this drive to build this community that I’m talking about. This is a community where scientists, artists, and communicators all would be able to come together, find projects, and get funding. The mission for this initiative, which is so new that I don’t even have a name for it yet, is to improve the value of art to science and science communication. We know that there are some problems right now as far as people valuing science.
In my mind, art is everywhere. Art is free, and freely available everywhere: landscaping, murals, all the art that you see on the street. Every ad that you see is done by an artist who gets paid. Those people get paid because they make those things accessible to more people. If we can bring that type of accessibility and value of science to the world through that, then that would be great.
Gaius Augustus: 43:57
I have three main goals for this initiative:
- Connect scientists and artists so that they can collaborate and do collaborative projects.
- Help those scientist-artist teams find funding for their projects.
- Advocate for science art in the science community and the science communication community.
Gaius Augustus: 44:21
Really, what I want to be doing a year, three years from now, is work with all of these communities to build up a community of people who all have a similar goal: getting science out there to the world. Making it accessible. Making it beautiful. Helping this community flourish. Hopefully that’s where gaiusjaugustus.com is headed.
Conclusion
Chris Cloney: 44:47
I know if you put your mind to it and you keep taking the massive action that you took during the Accelerator program, that goal will develop even faster than you could possibly imagine. I know you’ll be successful.
I’d encourage anyone to go check out gaiusjaugustus.com. Sign up for Gaius’s newsletter there. I’m on the list because I like to see what a well-designed newsletter looks like. If you sign up, you can also follow along as this community, which is something that’s needed in the world, keeps on developing.
You can check out Gaius @gaiusdivifilius on Twitter and Instagram. You can find him on LinkedIn under Gaius Augustus. If you’re looking for commission work, check out gaiusjaugustus.com to stay up to date on what’s going on in the science and artwork world. Gaius, I appreciate you taking part in the program, and I appreciate you coming on the podcast to share your experience.
Gaius Augustus: 45:52
Thank you so much. I had a lot of fun.
Chris Cloney: 45:55 ,
Awesome. So you’ve been listening to myself, Dr. Chris Cloney, and recently titled Dr. Gaius Augustus, talk about how to grow a brand and generate freelance income. This was the case study part of the GradBlogger Accelerator program. We had a great conversation and covered a lot of topics. If you want the transcripts for the show, you can get them from the show notes at gradblogger.com/14. We’re going to put together a cheat sheet with these tips for being a freelance artist and selling your art online. You can get that there, as well.
Chris Cloney: 46:35
The GradBlogger Accelerator program is currently closed at the moment. We’re restructuring the coaching practice but by the time this comes out, you can find out where we’re at with it at gradblogger.com/coaching. I look forward to seeing you there.
Until next week, I appreciate you listening to the GradBlogger podcast. I’m excited to share more stories like Gaius’s moving forward, to continue to help academics create their dent in the universe through online business.
