The Exhausting Art of Marketing

I've heard many artists say that they hate marketing. They say it cuts into their creative time and drains their creative energies.
   Sometimes -like right now- this is exactly how I feel. I usually approach marketing a with a creative, open attitude. I treat it as an extension of my art. But lately I've felt exhausted, busy and rushed. I don't feel I have the time to make the art AND market the art. One is no good to me without the other, so I haven't done much of  either.
  I've scaled back my marketing activity because life in general has gotten busy and expensive. I have several commissions to get done for Christmas, so I'm going to spend more time on those and less time on advertising. Keeping satisfied customers is a huge part of my marketing!
   I quit running my Google Ads linking to ArtofJohnFrench.com because they're getting too costly right now without enough return on investment. So I'm concentrating more on search engine optimization, or SEO. SEO is simply the many strategies one can use to get good indexing on search engines.
   I love a new venture and a chance to learn new things and see new results. But the problems with SEO is that you don't see immediate results,  nothing is guaranteed, and often what I do today will work tomorrow but not the next day. Over the long haul, I think the SEO will pay off.

   I've also made a postcard that I think is kind of neat, but I want to change a couple of things on it. When I sit down to work on it, something comes up to distract me. So I haven't gotten around to printing it, much less sending it!

Tell me what you think!

   Right now I'm satisfied with backing off the marketing and ramping up the creating. Life must be balanced, and by creating more now I will have more to market later!