Jeanne Oliver is a teaching artist based in Colorado. She offers hundreds of art, business, and lifestyle workshops on her website. Some classes are by her, and some are by over 75 other artists. She advises them on how to film and edit their classes, but to also make it in their personal style. She’s found that online classes are doing very well right now, because people are wanting to get an escape and take a fun art class in the comfort of their home. With all that she does, she’s found a way to integrate her loves of art, travel, home, and family.
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Jeanne Oliver
Where You Can Find Jeanne Oliver
This is Jeanne’s website: jeanneoliver.com
Instagram: @jeanneoliver
Click on this link to go to her Facebook community: Jeanne Oliver Creative Community
To search for courses on her website click here.
Here are some great takeaways from our conversation:
- Don’t limit yourself to one kind of art or one thing in your business. If art and homemaking and fashion appeal to you, then include all of those in your business offerings.
- If you offer online classes, and your students are asking for another specific class that isn’t necessarily in your expertise, then consider inviting other artists to host classes on your website with a class that your students want.
- When you want to work with other artists, start out with asking your friends first. You already have a relationship, and they’ll definitely want to see you succeed.
- When offering an online class, it’s a good idea to offer to your students a period of time when they can interact with the instructor. It can just be for a month, and after that the students can work at their own pace. If you offer the class a second time, like maybe a year from now, you can decide then if you want to offer access to the instructor or make it entirely self-paced.
- Many artists offer their classes as life-time access now. That means the student can go back and look at the class any time after they’ve purchased it.
- Jeanne offers the classes on her website individually, meaning you just pay for whatever class you’d like to take. Other websites offer a membership to their site and you get access to all of the classes. You’ll have to look at the merits of each if you want to set up online classes.
- I’ve said this before about online classes: It’s a great idea to offer a Facebook group to go with your class so that the students can interact with you, but also so they can interact with each other and share what they’ve made in the class.
- Jeanne offers some free classes on her website for many reasons. One is that she knows that people want to see what you’re like and what your quality is like. You can also show people what you’re like during Facebook Live sessions.
- When deciding how to do your first class, of course you can look at others for ideas on how to film it. But make sure you keep it your own style: If you paint on a table rather than an easel, then do your class that way. If you’re more comfortable with the camera on your hands rather than your face, then film it that way.
- When launching your first course, ask your artist friends to tell people about it too. Take advantage of the goodwill that you have with each other from previous collaborations and ask them to help you with your launch.
- Collaborations with other artists can help to bring energy and passion back into your business. A collaboration could be working with someone to do a portion of your business that you’re not skilled in, or that you just don’t want to do, like video editing or taking photos of your art.
- Jeanne mentioned that she tries to share on her social media more than just what’s for sale. She wants to show them more about herself and her home and her life, so that they are interested in her, and later they’ll get interested in what she sells.
- Jeanne was able to do a small in person workshop recently with some key changes. She had less participants, they were spread out and stayed in their own spaces, and she sanitized all the areas.
Wonderful episode! Thank you so much??
You’re welcome. I’m glad you liked it!