Optimize Yourself First

The best marketing improvements don’t begin with your marketing.

If you’ve been reading Art Marketing News for a while, you may have noticed a shift. In addition to the latest tactics, I’m writing about relationships, self-awareness, and building an art career that fits the person living it. It’s not by design — it matches where my thinking has landed after years spent with a more exclusive focus on teaching artists how to market their work.

I haven’t abandoned art marketing. I still believe artists deserve practical advice that helps them connect with collectors and sell more art. But looking back, I realized that most of what I taught came from the middle of the story rather than from the beginning.

A good deal of my attention focused on what many in the tech world call plumbing. That term describes the infrastructure that helps your work reach other people. Your website. Your newsletter. Your social media, online store, AI tools, payment processors, CRM — every piece of technology you use to run your business. It’s also known as the tech stack.

Plumbing matters because it makes your life easier. But the wrong plumbing creates unnecessary friction. It wastes precious resources of time, money, and energy. If you’ve ever fought a website that refused to cooperate, or fiddled endlessly with something that seems like it should just work and won’t, you know what I mean.

The mistake isn’t having plumbing. The mistake is believing better plumbing automatically creates a better career. Technology, when it meets its potential, improves your marketing capabilities. But it’s only as good as the plan to use it, and it doesn’t create anything.

Before switching a tech service or platform, or adding another component to your tech stack, there are more important questions worth asking.

What kind of creative life do you want?
How much income do you truly need for your life to feel successful?
How much of your week are you willing to devote to marketing?
Which parts of promoting your work energize you, and which ones drain you?
What are your circumstances today — not the circumstances you hope to have someday?

Those questions don’t usually appear in marketing books, yet they determine almost every marketing decision you’ll eventually make.

It is easy to convince yourself you know where you’re going. But do you really? And if you know where you’re going, is it the place you really want to go? The harder question is whether you’re pursuing goals you’ve consciously chosen or goals you’ve inherited. It’s easy to absorb the assumptions of the marketplace without ever questioning them — get more followers, boost your exposure, produce more content. Theoretically, it’s great if you can make it happen and keep it going. Practically, it’s more like a hamster wheel.

Everybody’s different, and you’re different at every stage of your life and career. A simple online portfolio may be all one artist needs. Another may eventually run a website, an online store, a Substack publication, an email marketing service, and more. Neither approach is inherently better. The right plumbing depends on the kind of creative life you’re trying to build, not on what everyone else says an artist should have.

If you’re honest with yourself, you might find what you’re doing isn’t congruent with what you’d actually choose. Maybe it is, and if so, that’s great. But if you find conflict, it’s time to optimize yourself first.

Lewis Carroll is often credited with the observation, “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.” Whether that’s the exact wording or not, the principle has stayed with me for years.

Here’s an experiment worth considering, if your circumstances allow it. If you have some breathing room, even for a couple of months, ease off the pressure to make every marketing decision produce an immediate sale. This doesn’t mean to stop marketing; I’m suggesting you stop measuring everything by transactions. Instead, take some time to invest in yourself.

Clarify what you’re truly passionate about building. Pay attention to the collectors and conversations that energize you rather than drain you. Put more effort into meaningful relationships and less into chasing what the algorithm seems to favor right now. Permit yourself to do work that genuinely matters to you, rather than work you hope will perform well online.

While you’re at it, take a friendly peek at your plumbing — your tools and subscriptions. Are you still paying for software you hardly use? Maybe you’ve signed up for several because each expert seemed to recommend just one more tool to solve everything. The goal is to find the right tool — not necessarily the cheapest or the most expensive — that helps you get your work done smoothly, without draining your resources.

Visual artists have an advantage over many other creative professions. You simply don’t need tens of thousands of followers or even thousands of customers. Compared with other arts fields, you need only a relatively small group of loyal collectors who genuinely appreciate your work to sustain a satisfying career for decades. That insight can shift your thinking and actions into solving relationship problems more than marketing problems.

I’ve always found that artists pursue their craft because they truly love creating art, not because they dreamed of joining the business world. Managing a business comes along with the passion — it’s never been the reason for choosing this life.

Somewhere along the way, many of us began serving the marketing instead of letting marketing serve the art. I think it’s time to reverse that order.

Optimize yourself first. Become clearer about the life you’re trying to build. Start cultivating relationships with people who genuinely care about your work. Life’s too short to chase random prospects hoping you connect with the right ones.

That’s the real plumbing job — not building something bigger but building something that fits.