Digital Hitchhiker

Figuring out your marketing strategy is often a guessing game. You try one thing and see how it goes and then re-tool and try something else. Whatever you’re doing, you need to be pro-active with your marketing. Running a web banner and just letting it sit out there is a waste. Just waiting for the work to come in isn’t the way to get new clients or bring back past clients.

I really don’t have a big marketing strategy since I offer client services. Most of the time I’m working with a lot of new clients and a lot of those come from word of mouth. This is something that’s tricky to invest in and something you don’t really have much control over but I know it’s happening.

One thing that I try to do is to stay in touch with past people I’ve worked with. Whether that’s on one of the hundreds of social networking sites or with just email. Just a quick reminder to past clients that I’m out there and ready to work with them again. They might have a project on the back burner that would be perfect and all they needed was a little push. Or maybe they had a friend email them last week looking for exactly what I offer and they just hadn’t responded back to them. Boom! I’m in and all it took was a quick email saying hi.

I have a number of people who have worked with LooseKeys as freelancers, who have dropped me a line from time to time to just let me know their free. It’s happened a number of times where I book them and get them on a project that day. They just slipped my mind or I hadn’t had time to plan out the job yet and just needed that extra push.

Something I’m planning on for myself and LooseKeys is a simple email newsletter highlighting some of the work I’ve been up to. It’s an easy, effective way to keep folks up to date with what’s happening.

Don’t just sit around and wait for clients to contact you, reach out first. Now, get out there and make it happen. Find yourself some work.

Lately I’ve noticed that a lot of people using social media are being relativity positive. I’m not saying everyone is, some use Twitter and Facebook as an outlet to vent. Sometimes it just feels easier to be negative and complain. But I personally see a lot more positive tweets and updates in my stream. I guess it comes back to the if you don’t have anything good to say, don’t say anything at all. Do you think anyone really wants to follow or be around you if you are always miserable or taking out your problems on the world? Uh, no. I wonder if there is a way to take the positive attitude we all put forward online and move it to our everyday life?

Yesterday when I was riding my bike I hit a pot hole and got a flat tire at the same time someone drove passed me in their car and yelled something about bikers. My day was not off to a great start. I started to tweet something like “Not a fun way to start your day… hit a potholed and got a flat tire. #FML.” Instead I spun it and said “First flat on the new bike. Looks like I’ll be switching these to armadillos when I make it over to the bike shop.” Although I had to walk a few blocks, I decided to take the positive and not have that event mess up my entire day. The day turned out to be a pretty good one and it was very productive. Don’t think it would have been that way if I had complained publicly.

If you handle what life throws at you with a more optimistic and cheery outlook, positive people are going to want to be around you, all the time. Wouldn’t that be a lot more fun to be around then someone complaining all the time and being negative about their lives. If you’re being positive online take it offline and enjoy life that much more.

For the last couple weeks I’ve decided to get out of my home office and work out of a coworking space with some other freelance friends. It’s an entirely different vibe when you’re working around other creative people. At a coworking space there are less distractions; you don’t have the TV tempting you away, the dog looking to go for a walk or those dirty dishes wanting to be washed. And since everyone around you is working hard on their projects, you too will be motivated to push harder. As a result, your productivity level can shoot through the roof. You can’t be slacking off on Facebook or Twitter when everyone around you is plugging away. The energy in a room filled with other passionate, hard working creative people, can’t be beat. Since no one likes to look bad, you can use this “peer pressure” to your advantage to help you to push yourself. I think it helps me to stay motivated and be more creative when I get out of my normal routine or surroundings every once in a while and shake it up a bit. I plan to continue to check out more coworking spaces from time to time and spend a few days away from the home office working with other creative people.

If you’re looking for a coworking space in Chicago check out DeskTime, and find a space that works for you.

The freedom of working for yourself can be great because you can focus all of your time and effort on just creating. It’s a great feeling when you first go at it, you have all these ideas and concepts you want to explore that had been bouncing around for months or even years with other creative people. But every once in awhile you can find yourself stuck in a creative funk and you have no one to help get you out of that. When you’re at an office or even a co-working space you can easily turn to the person next to you and ask for their quick thoughts on the problem. Just this quick outside prospective can add new creative energy to the project that can help you to bring your work to the next level. When you’re a solo entrepreneur finding the opportunities to share and show ideas is sometimes a tough task.

Peter Maxwell Davies said “If you don’t get feedback from your performers and your audience, you’re going to be working in a vacuum.”

You can think of that website your designing or your logo animation the same way, as a performance. Somedays it feels like you’re in this vacuum or bubble and have no idea if what you’re working on is relavent or even good any more. You can lose touch with what other people are working on and what boundaries they might be pushing with their own projects. Great work doesn’t happen in a vacuum. You need to get real feedback from your colleagues and customers. I’m lucky enough to have a very talented fiancée who has no problem telling me when something sucks. It might hurt my feelings or ego for a moment, but it helps me make something better. I also make sure to post samples of what work I’m doing online. Social media is a powerful tool for criticism; good and bad. You’ll find me sharing a sample on Dribble, putting up a photo on Twitter or Instagram and every now and then I’ll toss a video of a work in progress on my Tumblr. I know that you can only get better at your craft by working hard and getting constructive criticism; bringing in an outside perspective on things is always valuable.

So the next time you’re working on something, grab lunch with a friend and get their thoughts. Or toss it up on-line and get some outside opinions on it before you release the final product. You may just find that what you’re working on gets better once you reach for ideas outside your bubble.

It’s said that you are the sum of the five people you spend the most time with. I know I’ve experienced this first hand, especially with the people I work with. They have influenced me and I have influenced them, hopefully for the better. We can’t always pick who we work with but we can choose who we spend our time with. So, why not make sure the people you associate with on a regular basis are interesting, talented and successful, because the chances are you will be too. If they’re not, chances are you won’t be either. So be sure to seek out great minds in the field of your passion. You want to find people who demand excellence of themselves and each other. People who will challenge your mind, stimulate good conversation, and get you thinking in realms you don’t normally think in. This will help you rise to the occasion and do the best work you are possible of doing. It might be hard but I recommend finding people that are more knowledgeable and talented than yourself. Many of us struggle in this area because it can be satisfying to hear praise from people and tend to avoid healthy conflict with people that might actually know more than we do. Exceptional people are not threatened by other strong people; they surround themselves with the best and most talented people they can find. If we don’t ask for advice from those who know more we will never learn from from one another, which is a shame.

Word of mouth works and social media is playing a huge roll in spreading that word. There was a recent poll on Freelance Switch that showed just that! The last numbers I saw on the poll showed about 60% of people get their clients from word of mouth. It’s said that good work leads to more good work and it’s likely that some of that new work coming in is from happy clients spreading your praise to their friends. Think about it, when you need something like a photographer, programmer, designer, or editor you either open up your web browser and do a google search or you ask people you know. Either friends in person or your friends & followers on Facebook or Twitter. Most people are more likely to take that recommendation from someone familiar and trust-worthy to them then that blind google search. Even if those “friends” may just be avatars on Twitter that you hardly know. Why? Because recommendations are generally perceived as incentive-free, the person making the recommendations has nothing to gain except being a kind person. Unlike what you may find on google or in a sponsored ad, you don’t know if they can be trusted.

Word of mouth marketing doesn’t exist in a vacuum and it can certainly develop and spread without any efforts on your part especially with the number of people who are creating connections on the internet. If your work is seen as creative, interesting, unique or valuable by others then word will spread. When you are looking for work of course you can’t rely solely on word of mouth to get new business. No one source can drive growth in your business, word of mouth is just one of the strategies to help you on your way.

Everyone tells us we have to network to get ahead in our careers. You need to be involved, no one is going to knock on your door or email you while you sit at your computer and push pixels around in Photoshop. You have to meet people in order for them to know who you are and in turn hire you to do work in the future. Of course, just because you are networking doesn’t mean that all you need to be doing is building your contact list. Networking is about more than just getting emails and phone numbers. Don’t be the person at the networking event just walking around handing out cards. I can’t tell you the amount of cards I have from people that just handed me a card without really talking with me and the next day I have no idea who they are or why I have their business card. When you have the opportunity to meet someone face to face and get an idea of who they are don’t just talk about work in the hopes of future employment, instead think of it as a chance to build real true genuine connections. You’d be surprised to find out that you will have a much more meaningful conversation with someone if you’re not thinking the whole time how can this person help my career.

There are a number of people in the community that I got to know over the years who have now become people I enjoy hanging out with outside of work. Since becoming friends with them they are the first people I look to when I need someone to help with a project and I would hope I’m on their list as well. Someone you call a friend is more than likely to hire you or pass your name on for a job then a random person you meet at last weeks meetup. You should open yourself up to not just meeting potential coworkers or clients at meetups and events but also long-lasting relationships or at least meaningful acquaintances. In ten or more years are those business contacts you made going to make a difference? Are they the people you invite to your 50th birthday celebration? So don’t just think of networking as a way to add more followers on twitter or connections on LinkedIn. You never know who you’re going to meet, it could be new friends, new business contacts, or life long friends who are also business contacts.