Avsnitt
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When you get control over your marketing, you’ll no longer be subject to the variable winds and waves of a fickel referral networks. Instead you’ll gain the stability that comes from a steady stream of qualified leads. And when you have plenty of leads you get to decide which clients and projects to take on. Those might include the clients with the best creative opportunities, or the best budgets, or both.
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Professional services are not sold in the same way as consumer products. Professionals sell through reputation and trust. And cold, technical digital marketing methods don’t help with that kind of effort—in fact, they’d more likely hurt. So you can ignore 90% of the fast-paced, technology-driven, methods. That said it's still essential that prospective clients find out that you exist, and keep you in mind for projects when the time is right.
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Saknas det avsnitt?
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The time table from the first steps in forming a marketing program to the time you start enjoying its fruits can take up to eighteen months. Now it is possible to shorten this timeframe through fast decision making, and extra exertion in the preparation involved. But other aspects of a new marketing program can’t be rushed. And so the sooner you start the sooner you’ll get to that harvest!
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In the introductory session of my new course, Marketing Mastery for Creative Entrepreneurs, I review the three essential resolutions that are necessary for any successful marketing program. Like a three legged stool, if any one of these resolutions are lacking the other two stop working, and your marketing efforts will fall flat. In fact, as I’ve listened to creative entrepreneurs describe their frustrations with marketing, I can always connect their past failures to missing one or more of these three essential marketing resolutions.
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Welcome to episode 100 of 5 Minutes on Creative Entrepreneurship. To mark this milestone. I’d like to let you know about a new digital course I’ll soon be releasing called Marketing Mastery for Creative Entrepreneurs. And at the end of this episode, I’ll have a special offer to all my podcast listeners.
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Your total compensation is capped by available time, multiplied by your hourly rate, minus overhead. But what happens when you have available time, but no billable work to fill it? Downtime for the creative entrepreneur can be deadly. Every creative practice will experience gaps in their project calendars. The question is, do you have a plan to make the most of your downtime?
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Creatives don’t go into business to make a killing, we still want to be well compensated for the value we deliver to clients. But while making good money from our work is great, that’s not the only reason we’re in this business. We’re drawn to creative entrepreneurship because we love the work, as well as whatever financial rewards it might deliver. But when we combine our love for the creative process with the realities of running a business, that joy can soon turn into sinking grief.
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When creative entrepreneurs launch, they don’t imagine massive cash infusions from investors, or of taking their company public. More often than not creatives pursue creative control, and better creative opportunities. For creatives business is more of a lifestyle choice than as a business investment. But do creatives need to be content with mere income replacement, or can creative entrepreneurship deliver higher returns?
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Managing time is essential for creative entrepreneurs since our services are so often sold by time and materials. Becoming accurate in estimating is a necessary skill in this business. The only way to improve these skills is to build a data source that helps you keep a birds-eye view on project performance. But once you start building all this valuable data, how exactly do you use it? And how can you use past projects to estimate future ones, especially since no two projects are exactly the same?
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Humans have an interesting relationship to time. While the clock ticks by at a perfectly constant rate, our experience of time is highly variable. Vacations seem to fly by. But if you’re laid up with a bad back, time slows to a crawl. There are similar perception-based time distortions in running your creative practice. And when your profits come from the use of your time, these business time warps can seriously distort your performance, and undermine your profits.
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When you run your own business as freelance creative, you might find it difficult to take time off. If you shut off your phone and close your laptop, there’s no one else to take over. And if you charge by the hour, taking a day off means no revenue. But everyone needs to rest. So if you find it hard to take time off, let me make some suggestions to help you free yourself up for a much needed vacation.
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Creative entrepreneurs not only face external struggles, we also face the struggle within. The creative process is marked by struggle. We agonize to find that perfect solution. This angst ridden process is baked into creativity and adds an extra layer of difficulty to our form of entrepreneurship. In order to push through all these challenges, it can be helpful to remember the incredible privileges we have in our creative callings.
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There’s no question that being a creative entrepreneur is not the easiest path. Going into business for yourself demands considerable effort, diligence, determination, and plain hard work. When you’re just starting out you may need to hustle and grind. But that can’t last forever. Eventually you need to get strategic, and find a more sustainable path.
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Does your company’s operating budget adequately anticipate infrequent future expenses? Planning your budget based on our known monthly expenses, doesn't prepared you for when an expensive annual software license comes due. You need to regularly set aside revenue to cover unanticipated future expenses. If not, you might end up facing a budget crunch that can crush your business.
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Last time we explored the topic of creative methodologies, and how they can improve your sales and marketing. A proven methodology that focuses on solving specific problems not only boosts your sales game, but it also leads to efficiencies that enable you to increase the margins you retain from your project fees. A well-oiled methodology will make you more profitable, significantly increase client satisfaction, and improve the impact of your work.
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If you’ve been listening to this podcast for very long you’re probably acquainted with the five motifs that structure 5 Minutes on Creative Entrepreneurship: Money, Minutes, Marketing, Management, and Motivation. Well there is a sixth motif that could be added, and conveniently it also starts with the letter “M.” Your creative Methodology can be a powerful addition to your marketing and radically improve your closing rate on sales opportunities. But only if your methodology is truly unique.
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Throughout history new technologies have always had beneficial, yet disruptive outcomes. The printing press put many scribes out of work. Photographic typography ended the careers of linotype operators, and digital photography has put tons of pressure on professional photographers. Today, the Internet’s enabling of world wide crowdsourcing, is having similar effects on creative freelancers. How are you supposed to do battle with Upwork, and win?
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The creative service business is made up of two main parts. Creativity and service. Obviously. But the path to bringing these two things together professionally is neither obvious nor simple. Providing any kind of professional service is challenging. But if you can learn the skills of excellent client service, you will reap the rewards that come from establishing trust and deepening the value of your professional creative services.
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Very few creatives launch their practices planning to cash out with a big exit down the road. We get into our trade out of love for our craft, not so much for the financial rewards. But if you were planning to sell, like a typical entrepreneur, you would pay much more attention to your bottom line. And so managing your practice, as if you were going to sell it, could help you improve your profits, and would lead to other positive outcomes.
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Back in episode 23 I talked about how marketing is a marathon, not a 100 yard dash. I’ve been thinking about that analogy recently, and I need to revise it slightly. Really marketing is more like training for a marathon than actually running one. If you want to run a marathon you would need to make a plan and stick with it. Marketing, like exercise, demands discipline. It depends on building new habits, and keeping them up for months, and years at a time.
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