Creating content is difficult. As a musician, you’re probably rehearsing endless hours. As a comedian, you’d need funny stories. As a gamer, you’re playing (and streaming) a lot. As you can see, I’m using creator in a very broad sense, but what all creators have in common is that they need time to create. And even more difficult is to gather an audience – online and offline.
The lucky ones get a following on one of the known social media platforms (IG, FB, YT, Twitch, etc). Having a following however, doesn’t translate into making money from your art. Of course, you can turn on ads on your Youtube channel or get fan funding through services such as Patreon. But the group of content creators is a diverse group. And as diverse as the people, so are also the ways how you can build a career around your art.
This is where Jemi comes. Jemi is a website builder specially designed for creators. It wants to help you sell your unique online experiences and merchandise to your audience. You can liken it to Shopify, but you can sell both physical goods and online experiences.
You want to focus on creating your art and not lose time creating your website and building your brand. That’s the reason why Jemi is a no-code and easy to use website builder. It allows you to create your online presence along with an online store and membership management tools. To show your portfolio, you can use Youtube, Spotify, Soundcloud, Vimeo, Twitter, etc. For merchandise, you can connect to Printful.
Jemi is a quite a young contender in the website builder space, launched only in 2020. As such, you can expect more features coming and you can give your input to help shape it in the future.
Pros and cons of Jemi
Jemi is a freemium service. That means, it’s free to use, but if you want special features such as a custom domain, you need to sign up for a paid account (Pro or Business).
It gives you the traditional ways of monetising such as membership site or a classic online store. And then, it also lets you build a gallery for your NFTs. You can even consolidate your assets, no matter what wallet or blockchain they were originally issued on.
Pros
- Forever free plan
- Easy to use interface that lets you launch your website in matter of minutes
- Budget-friendly pricing (although a transaction fee is levied on the free and Pro plan)
- You can sell anything you can dream up from tickets, memberships, and digital products to tangible goods
Cons
- Limited integrations
- Basic blogging feature
- Basic online store
- Not for artists with a large selection of products and experiences
- Can be buggy at times with Javascript or server errors
Who is Jemi for?
If you’re a creator in the widest sense of the word – be it actor, musician, gamer, writer, photographer, etc, and want to build a career around your art, you need to be found. This means you need to build your online presence and your brand.
So, if you want to grow your audience and build a meaningful relationship with them, you need the tools, such as your website and maybe an online store or membership site.
You may not want to only sell traditional goods such as physical merchandise (a T-shirt) or a downloadable file of your art. You may want to create your special unique offerings, all the while having an intuitive service that helps you get your ideas out there as smooth and in as little time as possible. This is the sweet spot for Jemi.
How easy is Jemi to use?
Creating your account is fairly simple, you can use the one-click method provided by Google and others, or use your email address.
For Jemi, there are 6 types of websites and before you can start, you first need to decide what you want to build.
For this review, I chose to build an online store. Then you have to answer some questions that help Jemi build the website for you. Along the way, you also choose a template.
Jemi may take a moment to put together your website. Once done, you’re onboarded with a guided tour. The guided tour is helpful, even with such an easy to use tool.
Everything is built from the ground-up for you to easily add your content, especially adding your art. You really see how a lot of energy went into creating an intuitive user interface so that you can launch your website in as short a time as possible.
Design and templates
You can filter the templates by type or category. Interesting is that you can change the template even after you’ve started working on your site. Note though that the changes you already made are lost.
How to manage your ecommerce store in Jemi?
All you need to run a store can be found in the left side menu under the tap Commerce. Jemi has lumped a membership site together with the online store.
Adding new products is simple, but as you can see finding one is not. You need to scroll through all your products and there’s no search function (yet).
Integrations
You can connect your account with Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel to gather data on what’s going on. You can use Mailchimp to grow your following. Connect your account with Printful so that you can sell merchandise. For all the other things that you want to automate, connect your account with Zapier.
What marketing tools does Jemi provide?
To grow your audience, you can make use of the inbuilt integration with Mailchimp. Like this, you can stay in touch with your audience.
SEO
If you want to optimise your site for search engines, you need to subscribe to a paid account. Then you can use a custom domain and metatags.
Blog
You can write and manage your blog posts under the tab Blog in the left side menu. The blog feature is quite simple which makes it really easy to use. Jemi gives you an interesting option: Whenever you want to publish a new post, you can notify your following via email.
Payment options
The easiest way is to connect your account with Stripe. If you prefer Paypal, you need to email Jemi.
Security
Jemi is a hosted service, so you don’t need to download or install anything. It also means, it takes care of maintenance and security. All sites built with Jemi are secured with SSL.
Customer support
You can contact support through email, although it’s not said when the business hours are. If you’re impatient, you can trawl Jemi’s well-organised help centre.
Pricing
Although the pricing is reasonable, Jemi slaps on a transaction fee on the free and Pro plan. But compared to Shopify, it’s still affordable.
Higher plans unlock features such as unlimited pages or Mailchimp integration.
Is Jemi the right solution for you?
Sometimes, you don’t need to go with the known tools and build “yet another website with online store”. Sometimes, you need something a little bit different that helps you realise your ideas: Be it how you want to build the relationship with or create experiences for your audience.
Jemi is flexible and doesn’t limit how you create your website or make money of your art. As it’s still in its early stages, the team listens to what their users (you) say.
Original post here: Jemi review – website builder for creators
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