How Creatives Can Shamelessly (And Tastefully) Self-promote | With Peggy Dean

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, Episode 201

Welcome to the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, where our mission is to help you turn your creative passions into a stable, reliable income. If you're in audio, video, design, photography, or really any other creative field, and you just want to learn from other successful creatives, you're in the right place.

Welcome back to another episode of the 6 Figure Creative Podcast. I am your host, Brian Hood, and today we have a very special guest by the name of Peggy Dean on the podcast.

She is an artist who has been featured in or she's worked with, kind of a combination of the two, with Google, USA Today, Martha Stewart, Vogue Magazine, Disney, Wall Street Journal, and a bunch of other things like that. She is a best-selling author, and she is what I'd call one of the more influential artists online today. And on this episode, we're going to cover some topics that I think are really valuable to anyone listening right now. Things like setting up structure as a creative, especially as creatives who, a lot of us, frankly, don't really gravitate towards being structured.

Self-promotion as creatives. Again, creatives, we suck at self-promotion. This is an area that most of our audience struggles with. We under-promote instead of over-promote. Building email lists and lead magnets. Peggy actually has an email list of like 75, 78,000 people on it, so I think she's a very good person to listen to when it comes to actually building a mailing list. And even if this is something that you've been hesitant against, I promise you this is something you want to listen to, because this is just such a vital part of marketing in today's age. And this is just as important for creatives as it is for everyone else on earth. And we also talk about the balance between passion and money. As creatives, how do we find that balance between pursuing things we're passionate about while also keeping mind the money element? How do we keep that balance in a way that keeps us both grounded, but also making sure we're going the right direction, not going just towards money. It's a very hard balance, and I think Peggy does a great job of talking us through that. So without further delay, here's my interview with Peggy Dean. Peggy, how are you doing today?

Peggy Dean (1:57)

Oh gosh, so good. How are you doing today, Brian Hood?

Brian Hood (2:00)

I'm doing awesome. I know you call me Brian Hood. We were discussing beforehand, Peggy Dean is such a southern name, and growing up in Alabama, Peggy Dean, that's how they would say in the South.

But I will try my best not to use a southern accent and to just call you Peggy. How about that?

Peggy Dean (2:14)

My dad's from Mississippi, my grandma's from Missouri. It wouldn't be the strangest thing.

Brian Hood (2:18)

Okay, that's cool, that's cool. So Peggy, we're gonna bring Peggy on the show because she's a, I don't know what to call you because you seem to be a bunch of different things. You go by artist, author, educator on your website. But in your own words, can you tell our audience, like, what do you do?

Peggy Dean (2:35)

I can confidently say that I have the absolute worst elevator pitch of what I do.

So I've landed on artist, author, educator, and then I emphasize educator because it's my favorite, favorite thing in the whole world. But I think that more than anything at this point, I really am passionate about facilitating resources for creative entrepreneurs. That has kind of organically stemmed in the last year as a way of summarizing what I enjoy doing because I put my feet into so many little puddle buckets, whatever you want to call it. I don't know what the phrases are for anything, but I don't know, everybody has strengths, and I love researching, and I love failing so that I can do better, and then going through all of the thick muck that nobody else likes doing, I love it. I'm a sponge to it. So I started off as a hobbyist, and then moved into an artist, and then moved into an educator and author, and I find that I do much prefer offering value to other creatives.

Brian Hood (3:36)

That's great. So your background is, from what I saw in my research, is you did like hand lettering. That's like the thing that you've kind of found your name for, your education around, that sort of stuff.

Can you talk about like, when we are creatives in a hobby, which is a lot of our listeners right now, they are pursuing a hobby that they love, they're wholeheartedly pursuing it with everything they have, but they are just not making it work from a business standpoint. And we were just laughing about this before the interview, that your website, you says, We believe in passion above everything else. And then I literally have a sign behind me on my wall in neon that says, It takes more than passion. How do you approach that sort of, head-butting reality of like, I'm passionate about this thing for you as hand-lettering, and there's other things around your creativity that you've monetized at this point. But how do you approach that conversation where it's like, I want to monetize something because I want to do this for the rest of my life and make a living from it versus like, I am in it for just creativity, it's just passion. Like, what is your thought process behind approaching that dichotomy almost?