If I Was Starting My Business from Zero: Marketing and Sales Q&A
I’m so excited to do something a little bit different today because, as you may know or may not know if you're new here, I teach product sellers like authors and artists and Etsy makers and photographers and all different creatives how to market their work—and I have someone in my life who is new to selling their creative products.
So I thought that I would have them on to ask me any questions they have around getting started and marketing their work. I'm going to bring him in and have him introduce himself.
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It's My Husband!
Simon: Hello!
Shelby: I'll let you tell us concisely—this is your first challenge from me—concisely pitch to us what it is that you're doing.
Simon: My name is Simon. I run a drone photography business called Travel with Simon, where I take panoramic photos of all of my travels to different cities, highlighting a lot of architecture, cityscapes, bodies of water, and stuff like that.
Shelby: And what are you selling?
Simon: I’m selling drone prints of the shots that I take—specifically printed on canvases.
Shelby: Cool! So, really pretty landscapes and panoramas of different cities that we've traveled to together.
Simon: Yes.
Shelby: Okay, so he's new to selling this stuff, not really marketing it yet, getting his website put together and everything. (I don't know anything, by the way, of what he has planned to ask me. This is on the fly.) So, what questions do you have for me?
Simon: So like you said, I'm very new to building my website—I'm in the process of building the website right now. I currently have a lot of photos, probably about 30 or so, that we've taken together over the years. I'm kind of struggling with writing a really good description. What I tend to do is—I mean, you know this about me—I can kind of ramble a little bit.
I'll just talk about different things in the photo. Like New York: the Empire State Building's to the left, and One World Trade Center is to the right, etc. But how can I write a really compelling description? Cuz that's kind of the first part of where I'm at with it.
Shelby: Okay, so there's multiple pieces to this. The first one is including keywords that people are actually searching for. That way, you don't have to guess or fight for SEO. When people are searching on Google, we want your stuff to pop up, so the first thing is keyword research. You can go to websites like Google Trends or Answer the Public—which are free— and just start typing in keywords.
You can type in something like “Columbus, Ohio prints” or “Columbus, Ohio landscape.” Start to see what people are searching for. It will show you exact trends and the number of times people are searching for things like that. Then, incorporate those most commonly searched keywords and phrases into your description, into the title, all of that. So that pulls in the SEO piece of it.
And then the other piece is actually just making it really compelling for your target audience. You can pull in any of the features of the product, like the dimensions and the quality of the canvas, but also the emotions that they're going to feel from looking at it.
I think that one important piece for you will be nostalgia, because people will want images of their hometowns for themselves or as gifts to their hometowns, or an escape for people who love traveling and want to have their favorite beach photo hanging in their home. So, including the emotion that they're going to feel, as well as just making sure that the actual features and everything are really clearly laid out first.
Start with a compelling hook speaking directly to your target audience, the people you think will be buying. And I feel like it'll be a mix of people who are buying as gifts, but also people who are buying for themselves. Speak to both of those groups of people. Include those key words that you're going to do the research on.
Then make sure you list all the benefits, like bullet points of the features of how are they going to feel and where should they hang it. People will also search for phrases like “office decor,” and “living room prints,” and “nursery”—things like that. So, if you can list those out, that also helps add more keywords in your description as well.
Simon: Thank you—that was a really good answer.
Shelby: Well, this is what I do—I talk about marketing all day long! So, we'll see what questions he comes up with here.
Simon: On that similar line of writing a compelling description, I also want to make sure people can find me. Whenever I'm scrolling on Instagram, I see some of the other posts about drone shots can sometimes have 50 hashtags. How important is that? Should I put that many hashtags? And if I do, I don't even know what to put. I wouldn't even know where to start with that.
Shelby: No, hashtags are not as relevant as they used to be, so you really don't even need them anymore. But Instagram's official recommendation is 3-5 specific hashtags. The max you can do is 30, so definitely don't do more than that, but you don’t need even 30 now.
Simon: That's good to know.
Shelby: The nice thing about how social media has changed—though some people don't like the changes—is that it has really become more of a search engine now. So you don't need to include a hashtag in order for the words you put in your post to be read by the algorithms and to be searchable.
Meaning that, even if you just “Columbus photographer” without a hashtag, if someone is searching for a Columbus photographer, your post would still show up. So yeah, focus more on keywords and just including those in the captions of your posts, or if you're making a reel or adding text within Instagram, include those keywords that people are searching for.
Social media is another great place to look at what people are searching for because you can type in a keyword on Instagram search, and it will show you all the other searches that people are doing and what's popular. So that's another place to see what people are searching for and then make posts based off of that.
Simon: Good segue into my next question! When it comes to posting on social media, how do you stay motivated? If I don't get good engagement or because I'm just starting out—I maybe have a hundred followers on Instagram—how do you stay motivated and keep that momentum when it comes to posting about your business?
Shelby: Yeah, that's a good question. I think motivation is something that's hard to teach or give tips for, but I think the actual answer is discipline over motivation. We're not always going to feel motivated. Every creative listening has gone through writer's block or some sort of creative block. So, it's actually about discipline and making yourself do it anyway, despite not being motivated.
There's going to be lulls. There's going to be ups and downs in business, in social media, in your engagement, in the number of people seeing your posts. I've been doing it for almost 10 years and have experienced the highs and lows. During the lows, I just keep going anyway, cuz I know that if I stop and lose that consistency, that I could potentially not come back to it or I could really have a hard time getting back to it. That's not to say to never take breaks for your mental health and everything, but you have to sometimes just put discipline over motivation, right?
Simon: Okay, that's good advice. I appreciate that. Now, going back to my website in the process that I'm in right now, I'm still adding products through a print-on-demand service that syncs up with the website provider that I'm using. But that's just one page of my website. Where would you recommend me to start in terms of building a really successful, simple website where I can display these prints, but also not confuse my buyer with the 30 different options I have?
Shelby: So, there's a few things I'd have on your website, but I do think since you're starting with a lot of different products, that I would definitely organize them by category so that when someone comes to your website, the first thing they're seeing isn’t 30 different products to choose from. I think on your homepage, I would have a few different sections, one of them being about you.
People really want to see a personal brand in 2025 and beyond with creative businesses. So, you know, if people are going to choose between two different prints they find from two different photographers, the one that they connect with—through a photo, some history, and seeing who’s really passionate about what they do—is who they’re going to purchase from over the one where they don't know who the heck the person is.
I would also have different sections, whether that’s divided by state or country that you're doing or the type of landscape—like if it's beach or mountains. I think letting people search is important, too, cuz I can imagine people are coming to this type of website looking for a very specific city or landscape. So, letting them be able to search for whatever city or landscape and easily find all of the prints you have that fit that will really help too.
The other thing you could try—which you've probably seen on websites before—is where they'll have a really small menu at the top to organize the products. You could do that for the states or countries that you currently offer and let people just see a small menu and select which one they want to navigate. That way they can filter and not see all 30 at one time.
Simon: Nice! Do you think that's too much to start off with a business? Do you think I should only offer, maybe, 5 or 10 to start off with and then gradually grow it and put the rest of them up later? Or do you think it's okay that I'm starting off with so many?
Shelby: I think it's okay since it's print-on-demand and you're not ordering a bunch of inventory. Start with a proven concept first, start with what you think will be your top product, and stick with that before you have so many different SKUs. But with you having a print-on-demand and it being the type of product where they're going to want to see all the different options you have and find the one that they would like the best, then I would say that it's okay to start with all 30.
Simon: Awesome.
Shelby: All right, these are pretty good questions. I wasn't sure what to expect. So, I have one last question for you. Bit of a challenge, maybe—we'll see how well he's been listening. Just kidding! Okay, so I have a membership. Can you tell everyone about the membership and what they'll get in your own words if they join?
Simon: The Creator’s Content Club is an amazing community. I love observing it and seeing and hearing all the success stories that you have from the membership. It's basically curated content and community where people thrive and can be themselves and get engagement with other creatives that are running their own businesses. I think you do an amazing job doing consistent live streams where you audit their content. It's an amazing value for what you get. I see other memberships charge quite a bit, and yours is very, very affordable. I hope I did an okay job.
Shelby: Yeah, I think that was pretty good describing a little bit of what it is from your perspective. Good pitch! Thank you for joining me. I'm very excited for you to get this off the ground to get going with it.
You heard it from him, so I don't have to do it again, but you can head to marketingbyshelby.com/club if you'd like to check that out. We'd love to have you inside!
And if you resonated with any of this—you're just starting out or you're on the journey and you're feeling the lulls and lack of motivation, or you’re looking at the numbers and aren’t super happy—keep going! Truly, the dedication, consistency, and discipline is what really gets you to the other side of that.
Thanks so much for reading, and if you want to check out our Q&A with even more questions and a few bloopers, check out my YouTube video or podcast (linked in the buttons below the image at the top of this page.
I'll see you in the next one!