Yes, it’s called running a business. Spending money on advertising is a requirement if you want to start one.
It doesn’t take much money if your work is good, though. My wife is a tattoo artist and she built up her following in just 1 year to the point where she’s booked out 2 months, and she only promoted posts for $20 or so here and there.
Self promotion isn’t an easy thing to do, so I’d suggest reading some how-to articles about how to grow your Instagram following. It requires a lot of work, to the point where managing your social media is a very large part of the job.
At the beginning my wife spent about 75% of her time on social media, while the other apprentice didn’t. Now the other apprentice struggles to have more than a few appointments a week.
scytale@lemm.ee 1 year ago
It’s pay-to-play unfortunately. Most moderated communities have regular weekly threads for self-promotion to avoid spamming the main feed. As an independent musician, I follow those rules and post only where appropriate. The other way is create your own social media artist pages, try to get as much visibility as you can, and promote from there.
small44@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Can you tell me some communities that allow promotion in lemmy? You get the same problem with creating artist page, you need to promote it somewhere
scytale@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Most of the art/music communities on lemmy are still small so there aren’t any strict rules against self promotion yet. It’s mostly just “self promotion is allowed but no spamming”. The communities on reddit have stricter policies and it’s usually one day a week where you can self-promote. Artist pages in social media is a little easier because of algorithms. For example, I followed a bunch of pages that focus on music in my city, and a lot of them followed back. Now I get a random follow a couple of times a month because my page gets seen somehow.