Are You Building Doors to Nowhere?
Some actions lead to few results…some to no results or worse, to alienating those who’ve spent time with us, encouraged us or supported our art.
Actions to be avoided include:
- Developing your presence where you know or suspect no one is paying attention
- Not researching good venues to post comments related to the subject of your work
As a creative individual expressing yourself for your living you must have your own web site.
My advice is to have more than one. This gives you a bigger foot print from the point of view of search engines.
You should always have your own domain registered as your own name or some variant of your name. People who recognize you professionally by your name or some stage name should be able to just use www.yourname.com and find you. Always go for the .com domain first. You can add other suffixes, but the .com is expected.
Keep different kinds of niche or specific content separated and on its own domain. It helps not to confuse readers.
In my case, I talk about creativity and marketing here, charmfx.com, and include mentions that are more related to my own work or personal experiences on wilhaslup.com.
The wilhaslup.com domain actually incorporates that blog within the Tumblr community. I’ve detailed how I did this here – “Crossing boundaries with your web site” which encourages browsing by a large community of users who have blogs there.
Every domain you own should have a method of contact and links to your various other social network accounts. It isn’t necessary that each domain have links to every social account you have, but twitter, facebook & YouTube are necessities. The facebook destination you use for your work should be a public profile page, not your personal profile. Facebook changed their terms last year and no longer allow you to do business for profit on your personal profile.
Each domain you’re running should have it’s own social accounts also. Sometimes domains can have crossover content, but mostly you’re trying to build followings around specific subjects and allow readers to discover your other sites via links or doing web searches on their own. You may include links to your various sites in a general way on each one which provides a way for readers to find them.
You must give people a single site to find you via all the content you may be posting on social sites or in storefront sites. You should have control over both the domain names you register for these sites and the server they run on. You never know when storefront services, portfolio sites or journaling sites may change their terms. Etsy, ArtFire & Flickr are great, but things can change and you don’t want to have to reinvent your web universe if they do.
You don’t want to cultivate an audience to a web destination and then have to rebuild it. Get your own.
Goals – Say it out loud!
People who are unable to motivate themselves must be content with mediocrity, no matter how impressive their other talents.
Andrew Carnegie
It doesn’t matter what you want, what you’re trying to do or where you want to go. If you’ve focused your intentions and settled on a goal you have to form actionable steps to get there and take action. The single most effective technique I know of to motivate myself to do this is to “say it out loud”!
When you speak or write your goals in some sort of public way you put yourself out there. You’ve invited consequences, both good and bad and it’s like putting your ante on the table. It’s not terrible to fail, but if you’re seen to not attempt once you say something out loud, that’s going to sting.
From the quote above, Andrew Carnegie obviously understood that information, analysis, creativity, even a good actionable plan are not enough to achieve a goal, but that it is a necessity to be able to motivate yourself. I can’t think of anything more motivating than the prospect of public and personal awareness that I didn’t at least attempt the things I set out to accomplish. It’s the kind of open ended consequence that serves to remind you that sitting still will guarantee the mediocrity Carnegie mentions.
I’m not going to tell you everyone’s response to your expression of a goal will be supportive, helpful or even that there will be any responses. Some will minimize you and/or your goal for any number of reasons usually having nothing to do with you or your goal. By speaking your intended goal out loud you become familiar with this and learn to deal with it…my suggestion is mostly to ignore any non-specific, emotionally driven negative assessment of your goals. If someone has specific, actionable advice it may be worth considering.
What I will say is that saying your goals out loud and reminding yourself of them regularly increases your expectation of yourself to rise to meet them. The steps you take to do that can encourage others to do the same and help you. It’s the first and simplest way to begin believing in the outcome you want to see.
If you have a list of goals I encourage you to make a blog post or twitter tweet or to do something that makes it clear that you’re on a road to make something happen.
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