hello there and thanks for joining me I'm digital artist Aaron Rutten and in this video
I'm gonna share my advice on when you should start a patreon so what is patreon patreon is
a website that lets your fans support the content that you're creating and in turn you can give them
special members-only rewards you can check out my patreon at patreon.com slash Aaron Rutten if you
want an example of the rewards I offer but for those of you who don't have a patreon I want to
talk a little bit about when you should start a patreon and in fact just recently one of my
artist friends asked my advice on the matter and so here's basically what I said you have to kind
of determine whether you have an audience yet if you don't have an audience then you should
probably wait to start a patreon and build your audience first people have to know who you are
and they have to know what kind of content you're gonna create to get behind supporting that you're
also not going to get a hundred percent of your audience supporting you on patreon it'll be a
very small fraction so you need a much bigger audience in order to be able to make enough
money to make it worth your time so if you don't have an audience yet it's better to build your
brand recognition first and then once you have an audience patreon it'd be worth trying so really
what would be most effective is doing what I did and starting a YouTube channel because you're
gonna expose yourself to a much wider audience and most other social media platforms out there
but it doesn't hurt to have a blog and a website and Facebook and Twitter and use all that stuff
regularly as well the more white of a net you cast the more audience you're going to gather
and as I mentioned earlier the larger audience you have the more success you're going to have
on patreon so if you're scratching your head wondering what would I make a youtube channel
about as an artist I'll just look at what I'm doing for example I'm basically just
showing my creative process and you don't have to necessarily do it the exact same way I do it you
could have your phone just pointed at your screen or something very simple like that it doesn't have
to be super complicated and fancy if you can be in the videos and talk in the videos occasionally
and talk about who you are and what you do that's even better because then people will connect with
you and they'll want to support your work and that would really be the most effective in my opinion
there are consequences to starting a Petri on too early I think it would be better to start
one rather than not start one but if you start one too early what's gonna happen is you're gonna
be sitting there with you know $35 a month and you know three patrons or $1.00 or zero dollars
a month and it's gonna stay that way for a while because your growth on patreon directly relates to
your growth on all of your social media networks that are driving the traffic to patreon people
aren't just gonna magically find you on patreon you have to send them there and so it also comes
down to how much you're promoting patreon are you promoting it everywhere you possibly can
are you talking about it in videos like this guy here because if you're not people aren't going
to go there because they just don't know about it so that's kind of my advice for those of you
who want to know when to start patreon that don't have an audience but what if you already have an
audience well then the best time to start is right now do it right now because a lot of people I know
out there are putting it off and they're really just missing out on a lot of support and a lot
of income that they could be using to improve what they're doing and have more success with
it I wouldn't necessarily rush into it I'd take time to plan it out and start thinking about the
kind of rewards you want to offer start thinking about how you want to describe your goals and
really you probably have a lot of that already up here in your head you already know what you want
to accomplish as an artist you know maybe you want to go full-time maybe you want to travel
to paint maybe you need to buy a specific type of gear or art supplies or something like that
maybe you want to publish a book that audience of subscribers or followers or fans those are
all people who could convert over into patrons and probably would like to help support those
projects that you're working on now another big mistake that I see patreon creators make is not
offering anything they say well I'll just keep on doing what I'm doing and you can give me money and
you're not gonna get anything but you'll get the satisfaction of knowing that you're giving
me money for absolutely no reason at all and in principle that is really the reason why people
support you on patreon they want to support what you're already giving them for free and in my case
I'm putting out free videos on YouTube and a lot of people who are supporting me on patreon are
supporting that they're not there to get whatever rewards I offer they appreciate those rewards
and they enjoy getting them but that isn't the reason why they pledge most of the time but it's
just how it works on patreon that's the ecosystem there you should offer rewards they don't have to
be things like prints or commissions or anything really labor-intensive or complicated or anything
that cost money you can offer intangible rewards those are things like a shout-out or you'll follow
them on their social media or you'll dedicate a painting to your entire audience and you'll
just make up something once a month or do early releases of your videos or longer versions of your
videos there's so many things that you can do that don't really take anything other than a little bit
of time and in some cases you can even repurpose a lot of stuff maybe you have old behind-the-scenes
paintings that you can show them or bloopers from your videos or something like that there's
a lot of stuff that you probably already have that could be rewards that you don't have to spend time
creating and your audience will really enjoy being able to see that stuff if it's behind-the-scenes
content that the general public doesn't get to see so as a quick recap if you don't yet
have an audience work on building that first get people to know who you are and once you have a
little bit of an audience and then start thinking about patreon if you already have a decent-sized
following even if it's a hundred or a thousand people just consider that maybe 1% to let's say
ten percent of those people could be potential patrons so I would recommend if you have that
audience go ahead and set it up now just take your time setting it up and refine it as you go along
to make it work best for you while offering value to your audience that they can't get elsewhere so
there you go that's my advice on when to start a patreon if you found this information helpful to
give it a second to like this video and if you're new to my channel I'd love to have you subscribe
I have a lot more videos for digital artists like you thanks for watching and I'll see you next time