This month I’m doing something a little different for Artist Strong. I want to give you a bit of the behind the scenes running and building this community. Hi, my name is Carrie and I help artists like you refine your skill and develop your unique artist voice.

I’ve realized some of you are curious about I’m doing and why. Each week has a different topic and today I’m going to break it all down for you.

I’m going to start by breaking down all of the things I invested in to build Artist Strong. We will talk about the legal decisions I’ve made, the tools I’ve used to set up my online systems and then finally, how I’d do it all differently. And there is A LOT!

After we break down how I set things up, I’m going to talk about the evolution of program offerings on Artist Strong. What do I see and how do I aim to make money? I go through the many incarnations of online classes I’ve created, coloring books, and crowdsourcing with Patreon.

Once we’ve talked about foundations and systems, we will discuss another important ingredient in all of this: GRIT.

I share pretty openly with you about my life, and I want you to see having doubts, making mistakes, and rejection is all a natural part of the process.

We will end this series talking about what I see in Artist Strong’s future as I look at my current business model, (party of one) and consider what sustainable and successful means for all of us. Think paring down, and e-courses, and podcasts, oh my!

About a month ago, I offered up my new program, Better Drawing Bootcamp. And while I got several enthusiastic sales, part of me still felt like I failed because “not enough” people signed up. Each time I run an offer for the community I seem to come back feeling disappointed. For the first time in 6-7 years of starting my blog, and the 3 more recent years of starting this as a business, I seriously wondered: should I quit?

It scared me to hear what’s always been a directed and focused inner voice start to question the very thing I feel called to do.

And it makes me realize I need to create some changes in how I run Artist Strong if I’m going to keep going and ultimately succeed in creating a profitable, service based business.

I also had a mentor tell me I create A LOT of free content. I always want to offer free valuable content to this space, but I also wonder if the scale of my content creation is why I’m feeling burned out?

In a day and age when so much social media predisposes us to make everything look pretty, I want you to feel empowered and maybe even a little bit relieved to hear everyone else is also just trying to “figure it all out.”

Be Creatively Courageous: Do you have a question you’ve always wanted to ask me? Share it in the comments below. I’m here, listening.