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

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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 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

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. 

Sign up to be notified when the guide launches 

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