Running a creative business can be a bit of feast or famine. Sometimes the sales are fantastic and we are celebrating, other times all we hear are crickets and we panic.

No month is ever the same.

So how are you going to get through the famine to a feast again?

How can you bulletproof yourself from a famine in the first place?

Is the ups and downs of running a business even for you or do you find the uncertainty too unsettling?

I have a few ways I get through each month and not starve.

One of the things I do is diversify my revenue streams. I don’t depend on 1 source for all of my income for the year. You need to figure out all the ways you might consider using your skills to make income. That might include: physical merchandise or art you create, print sales, teaching workshops online or in person, having a membership site, working with affiliate partners, etc… There are a ton of ways you could be adding to your income and you’ll want to decide which streams you can add over time. In today’s world, we are so multi-faceted as a creative business. We don’t just do one thing to get by.

Another thing I do is plan for events. There are certain times of the year that people are prone to be shopping and other times of the year when they are on summer vacation and traveling. I plan for those times. I know that Thanksgiving is a great month for sales since everyone is so conditioned for Black Friday sales and often wait for their purchases in the fall til that week. This used to just be a phenomenon in the US – but in past years countries all over the world have been jumping in on the hype and now it is an expected event pretty much everywhere online.

I also plan for some seasonal sales to get people excited about a special deal for spring, summer, fall, etc… If you are thinking that you don’t want to participate in the big sales times of the year – then you are depriving yourself of valuable income for your business. This is not the time to get on your high horse and try to buck the trend. This is the time to make your sales so you can weather the slow times.

I also plan workshop releases between months where I ran some large deal or sale so the promotions I’m running aren’t all the same. People love workshops in the winter but not as much in the summer when they are on vacation – so I have figured out that January-May are great months to release workshops, June-August not so good, and Sept-Oct after school starts back is great. Then I don’t plan releases again til the next year for workshops because of the end of the year activities like Black Friday and Christmas are just too distracting.

It is important in your business to keep track of what you try, what time of year you try it and whether it was successful or not. Now I kind of map out what I might like to offer for the new year in December of the year before. I plan ahead and try to figure out where I want to do a sale and where I might want to have workshops released.

You also want to have a bit put back in savings.

You don’t want to be living paycheck to paycheck when you run a small creative business. Having an emergency fund will cushion you from slow months and allow you the comfort to make it to the next feast of sales.

I used to worry that if I had no sales for a day or two that my business was going to fail. I would then have a few days of great sales and be feeling pretty positive about life. Then I’d go back to a few more days with no sales and start to worry all over again. The truth is you are never going to have huge sales every single day.

Your business will ebb and flow during the week and during the year and you need to be aware of that and plan for it.

If you check out the chart above you’ll see the sales chart for one of the months from my site recently. You’ll notice that there are many days with hardly any sales and then a huge spike for several days. I ran a promotion on those days for some extra special deals. If my main site were my only source of revenue for the month I might be in a bit of a panic each month until I hit a sales spurt. But because I have many revenues to my business – when one isn’t going strong – hopefully one of the other streams if filling in the gaps.

When you are just getting started or even if you have been going for a bit – email marketing will make all the difference in how successful each event you offer will be. I was just like everyone else, thinking I didn’t want to bother people with multiple emails about a sale, so I used to send out an email at the beginning of the sale and then not send another one. I’d have great sales on the first day of the sale and each day would steadily drop til I had no sales before the sale was over. It was just a steady decline every day.

Now I send an email on the first day, then on the 3rd day, the next to last day and the last day at a minimum if I am sending out emails about a sale. You’ll notice in the graph above that every day I sent an email out I had a big spike in sales. It makes a huge difference in the number of sales you’ll get. It also makes a big difference to those days between the emails. Those days the sales are higher also than they were before when I only sent out an email on day one.

People need those reminders. They get busy. They procrastinate. Often times you’ll find that most people wait till the last minute to purchase and the last day or so is when you’ll get your largest amount sales. You want to get comfortable with some email marketing and get over your fear of bothering people. It will potentially mean the success or the failure of your business.

Will you get people who leave your email list every time you send out an email? YES! People unsubscribe and that is OK. That just means that they weren’t right for your email list anyway and you don’t want to be paying for people who don’t want to be on there. You’ll have plenty of other people who do want to be there and over the years it will build up.

I hope seeing a bit about how I plan for my ups and downs for the year helps you figure out how you might make a small business work for yourself. So many people just talk about the good days and act like they are all good days, and don’t really talk about how they get through the lean days. And there are going to be lean days. Just plan for them and you’ll know that the next bundle of sales is just around the corner.