Being creative is both an utter joy and occasionally a burden. Having loads of ideas, creating many of the items, writing for fun, taking beautiful photos, learning how to make a living from your many skills and tackling things like online marketing for photography businesses and design issues.
When it comes to creating your online space, the chances are you either have a blog, website or a portfolio set up somewhere already.
Most creatives have multiple outlets and combining them, or knowing what to group up and where to put it can take some time.
Let’s take a look at some of the steps you can take to create either one space or multiple - cohesive spaces to showcase you and what you do.
Think about what is just a hobby, and think about what you might want to make money from.
If you’re a writer, then aside from a blog, you might like to think about having a website dedicated to showing off your true style of writing. Keeping it free from adverts and clutter, will ensure that it’s your writing that is center stage.
If you hand make things, and you want to sell them, you might like to consider Not On The High Street and Etsy as selling spaces that need minimal effort to get started. If you wish to manage things like design and traffic, then setting up a simple WordPress website with a plugin like Woocommerce will give you that control.
Photography is a really exciting space right now. You can set up portfolios with Adobe and their photography subscriptions. They’re easy to set up and look beautiful.
For videographers Vimeo, YouTube or your own site are great options. The bonus for YouTube is that you can use as much space as you want, and it naturally gets millions of views.
Marketing is going to play an essential role in getting your website, and your products out there. Most people don’t consider themselves a brand, but that typically hinders the process. You can create social media accounts, and opt for them to business accounts. Then spend some time working out how to a) gather followers and likes and b) turn that into sales and engagement.
It might be tempting to start by buying followers and likes, but in the end, this will just not work. It’s frowned upon, but more than that when the initial following spree and engagement dies down, it will look horrible on your analytics.
Spend at least an hour a day interacting personally, and use a scheduling platform like Buffer to help you manage auto-posting and creating content calendars.
It’s a good idea to breakdown what you want people to see you for. Having one website for everything might be challenging to navigate. For example, if you blog about food, but you want to sell landscape photos they don’t necessarily marry well. It will also help your dedicated sites rank higher as all of the content is on one topic.
[Photo by Maya Maceka on Unsplash]