Announcing The Creative's Guide to Launching Your Career
Over the past few weeks, I have been quiet on the blogging front. It hasn't been due to a lack of writing or effort, but instead it has been due to a shift of direction of my blog and planning for something big.
Today I am excited to announce The Creative's Guide to Launching Your Career: Do what you love, work for yourself and grow your income
This guide has been in the works for a few months now and I am excited about finally announcing it to the world.
My goal with this post is to share who this guide is for, the purpose of the guide and how it can help you in your life.
The Creative's Guide to Launching Your Career
Do what you love
Work for yourself
Grow your income
In this guide you will learn strategies for launching your creative career from landing your first client, to building a marketing strategy that provides you with a continual flow of income.
The guide is full of expert knowledge, as well as interviews, videos and resources from thriving creatives professionals.
You will walk away from this guide with actionable methods to launch or grow your creative career.
Sign up to be notified when the guide launches
About the Guide
Who this guide is for
This guide is specifically focused on creative professionals diving in and launching their career. (Photo courtesy of Derek Gavey under Creative Commons)
This guide is for aspiring and established creative professionals who want to build a career that allows them to do what they love and make good money from it.
By the nature of my personality I enjoy spending time with creative professionals such as artists, designers, videographers, musicians, animators, photographers, writers, audio engineers and a whole other gambit of creatives.
Yet time and time again, I find myself pained when I see them struggling to get by with their skill sets. I see them waiting tables or rolling sushi at night in order to fund their life so that they can continue to pursue their creative career as a side hobby.
Other creative professionals that I see make the jump to pursuing the creative passion full time seem to get stuck at this level of just getting by. While they may be doing creative work full time, they can struggle to make ends meet or find themselves working around the clock for what is not nearly enough income.
Often creatives have a mental barrier that prevents them from becoming truly successful in their careers. Often this barrier is a simple result of not knowing the proper techniques and mindsets to build a successful creative business.
If you are a creative and desire to not only pursue your creative calling full time, but also make a good income from it as the same time, then this guide is for you.
Your creative career does not have to be a struggle.
In fact it can be a joy ride and provide a significant amount of income for you if you simply know the techniques, mindsets and strategies for how to launch a successful creative career.
The goal of this guide
Goal 1: To teach you the techniques, mindsets and strategies necessary for pursuing your creative career full time
Goal 2: To teach you how to not just get by with your creative career, but to make a good living from it as well
When you finish reading this guide, you should have actionable methods on how to launch your creative career or take your existing career to the next level.
How this guide is being written
This guide is a mixture of two primary components, personal experiences and lessons learned from my own creative endeavors and the experiences of other creative professionals.
My experiences:
Over the course of my career, I have launched two successful creative ventures.
The first was the video production company that I launched during college which went on to work with A-List celebrities and Fortune 500 clients.
The second is my current freelancing Squarespace web design and marketing consultancy. This freelance business allows me to work remotely and travel the world while making a very good income income at the same time.
This guide is full of some of the most valuable lessons and real world experiences that I have learned from building these two successful creative ventures.
Other Creative Professionals Experiences:
The guide will contain video interviews with established creative professionals
In addition to my experiences, I will be interviewing a large number of successful creative professionals over the coming months about their experience getting started and launching their career from the beginning stages all the way up to wild success in their creative career.
This guide will also include audio & video interviews with countless industry recognized creative professionals from all over the world who speak on many of the struggles and challenges that creatives face in their work.
The purpose of this is to ensure that this guide is not a one sided approach and instead is jam packed with different viewpoints and techniques from creative's all over the world.
Outline of the Guide
While the full content of the guide is still a work in progress, here is a rough outline.
Do what you love
You really can do what you love and make a money doing it
Stop wasting your talent
Work for yourself
Why all creatives should be freelancing
Pay down your debt
Increase your income
Build future career opportunities
How to make good money freelancing and have fun doing it
Building a strategy for your creative career
Learn Skills
You have no excuse for not learning
What kind of skills you should be learning
Resources for learning new skills
Commit yourself to consistent learning
Working remotely
How to work remotely and travel the world
The simple mindset shifts you need to make in order to build a remote working career
The types of skill sets you will need for working remotely
Why now is the time to do it
Getting started
Getting your first client
Building a portfolio
Gathering customer testimonials
3 questions to ask before taking on any client
How to use yourself as a case study
Building your brand
Business plans are crap
How job listing sites can provide you with a never-ending flow of work
Branding & Positioning
Choosing a name
Logo
Building a website
What platforms are best for creatives
5 elements of a good creative website
Positioning
Vertical vs Horizontal Specialization
Don't niche yourself too early
The single most important question to ask when choosing a niche
What is LEAN Marketing and why you should get in this mindset
How to describe yourself: Perfecting the elevator pitch
Marketing
Overall strategy and mindset for marketing creative work
Do a small bit everyday
Why you must promote yourself
Marketing can be fun
How to not wast time and actually benefit from Social media
How to build effective case studies
How to ask for referrals
The basics of Content Marketing
Overview
Blogging
Guest Posting
Side Projects
Building Authority
E-mail marketing
Tools
Why most people waste their time networking and how to do it right
How to properly qualify incoming leads
Marketing tactics
Making Money (Sales)
Why creatives must learn to sell
10 tips on how to instantly become better at sales
Pricing: What to charge
Start charging!
How to discuss budget
How setting sales goals helps you focus
How to be effective with cold e-mails
Recurring revenue: The holy grail of the creative professional
How to get started and make good money on oDesk
Grow your income
How to handle growth
Building a team vs flying solo
Revenue vs profit
Raising rates
Why you should constantly be firing your bottom 15% of clients
Pursuing your passion
Bonus Content
Audio & Video Interviews with industry leading creative professionals diving into how they built their creative careers
Templates for creative proposals
Templates for cold e-mail scripts
90 day action plan to launch your creative career
Launch date
This guide will be launching in Q1 of 2015, yet in September I will be holding a soft launch of this guide exclusively for individuals on my e-mail list.
