How To Start a Patreon | As an Artist or As a Content Creator
Do you know how to start a Patreon as an artist?
In this article, I will discuss this topic.
If you don’t already know, Patreon is a membership platform where you can offer your audience exclusive benefits each month they can pay for access. It is a really good way to make money.
So here is how Patreon works:
First, you need an audience. It doesn’t have to be huge. You can always start small and grow over time. But you do need to refer people to your Patreon. Then you need to decide what benefits and tiers to offer for their money and figure out how to price them. After that, you can set up your Patreon page to be beautiful and enticing and start uploading your benefits. Then you can market to your audience that you have a Patreon. Tell them what you’re offering on Patreon and encourage them to join your membership. That is how Patreon works.
So let’s dive a little deeper into each of those:
How big does your audience need to be to start a Patreon?
Obviously, there’s no right answer to this question. But basically, you need quite a lot of people seeing your content or a small but really engaged community.
In my opinion, you need to have a really engaged community, whether it is small or large. Because most of the time, creators on Patreon see a 0.1% conversion rate from their social media platform audience to Patreon. Meaning that for every 1,000 people you have in your audience on your social media platforms, roughly one of those converts to a Patreon supporter. This is, of course, a super general rule.
A big factor in that conversion rate is what benefits you offer on Patreon and how much value those benefits have the potential to bring people.
So how do you know what benefits to offer on Patreon?
To have a successful Patreon, you need to understand what your audience would be willing to pay for access to your Patreon. This would be different for every audience. They might want to learn from you, see exclusive behind-the-scenes content, or have access to live streams. Think about what would be really valuable to your audience. Also, if you’re not sure what would be valuable to them, you can always ask them.
My advice would be to write down a list of all the things you think your audience would really like to access from you.
Then go through that list and remove all of the things you aren’t comfortable committing to making each month. From what you have left, you can decide whether to offer all of those things or just some of them. Also, you can offer as many different tiers as you want.
In my opinion, you can offer them three different tiers, like a normal tier, premium tier, and business tier. Keep in mind that you can always start simple and add tiers later on.
But then how do you decide on a price for those tiers?
Pricing tiers totally depends on you. You can start with one tier that has a medium and affordable price. After that, you can see how it goes and improve your pricing and your quality.
In my opinion, you can start with three tiers: one at a low price point of just a few dollars, one at a medium price point of between five and ten dollars, and one at a slightly higher price point of around ten to twenty dollars.
The important thing is to make sure the benefits are value for money.
How do you build an enticing Patreon page?
You have to build an enticing Patreon page because people will decide to spend money on your Patreon based on your offering and on your Patreon page. If your Patreon page is not well organized, people will hesitate to spend money on it. You can get ideas by looking at other creators’ Patreon pages and build your own Patreon page with your own creativity. The about section is your opportunity to introduce yourself to the people. Make sure you introduce yourself properly.
How do you actually get Patreon members?
Well, quite simply, you need to tell your audience about it. You can use whatever platform you most often engage with your audience on to let them know that you have a Patreon now, how Patreon works, and what value they can get out of it. You might not get many people joining straight away, and that’s okay. Keep letting your audience know that you have a Patreon. Share on your social media stories, share some behind-the-scenes content of you making benefits, and mention that you have a Patreon at the bottom of your captions. Do whatever feels right to you and your audience.
If you find that your audience isn’t joining your Patreon at all, then it might be time to reassess what benefits you’re offering. Don’t have high hopes at the start.
Patreon payment methods:
Depending on your payout country, you can choose direct deposit via Stripe (US payout country), PayPal, or Payoneer (outside of the US only).
[Note]: Patreon is a long game. You have to keep growing your audience, and your Patreon will grow over time.
If you find this article helpful make sure to leave a comment.
Have a great day and stay positive