When trying to get work or sales, go big. Don’t be tentative or start small. It’s like playing the stock market. If you only put in a few bucks on a questionable stock, you won’t get much back if anything. There’s just no point in doing that. However, if you put a good chunk of money on a few proven stocks, chances are you will get a very decent return. What you put out in both time and money to build your business needs to be similarly worthwhile.

For instance, if you are going to advertise, don’t keep putting up .20 cents a day banners on small sites with low traffic. Instead, spend $200 on a small color ad in a moderately well circulated magazine that people re-read such as technique and visual magazines. People will be seeing that ad for months if not years.

If you peruse the on-line lists and services for clients and projects, don’t bid on just one at a time and then hope it comes in. Write up a few template proposals with fill-in the blank sections to customize the bid with your relevant experience and how you can help them (it’s always ‘how you can help’ not ‘this is why you should pick me’) as well as the bid details, and send out several a day. You might get multiple acceptances at the same time but then you get to pick and choose.

Same thing goes with all your networking. If you have accounts on Twitter, Facebook, and/or MySpace get on there every day and interact with people. That stuff only works if you use it often enough so people know who you are and remember you when they need help with their website or need a cool handmade present for a picky relative. Same goes for blogs—if you have one, contribute several times a week which gives you more for the search engines to find and gives readers a reason to follow you. It’s all top of the mind marketing and promotes word of mouth.

If you have to budget your time and funds (and we all should to some degree), then go as big as you can with what you have. Don’t blog and keep up four or five social networking accounts if you can’t put aside the 2-3 hours every day to attend to them. Pick just a couple online services and work on them well and often. If you can’t put out a few hundred for an ad each quarter, don’t spend money on advertising. Spend what you can on improving your website and SEO or to get a customized Twitter background or new business cards.

It just comes down to, don’t do it unless you can do it well. Otherwise it’s just wasted time and effort.

When you work for yourself, you tend to work a lot. Ok, let’s be real … you tend to work ALL the time. Days, nights and weekends can be, and often are, completely taken up by your business tasks–trying to meet a client’s deadlines, getting work ready for a show, or just trying to keep up on orders (and bills!). Having this happen occasionally is just part of the gig. But if it’s happening all the time your life,and work, will suffer.

I had to learn this lesson the hard way, and I’m still working on it. I’m a workaholic. I really do not like to be idle. I have worked myself sick and have, on several occasions, almost ruined my closest relationship because of it. I thought I was going to need a 12 step program! But the solution was a lot simpler than I expected.

Creating under pressure and just creating something for yourself are two different things. So don’t make the mistake of thinking, it’s not like regular job stress because it’s creative. It’s still stress.  You really need to take time out to do things that are purely to feed your soul (or spirit or imagination, or whatever you want to call it). It may be social, artistic, adventurous, vegetative, or zen. It doesn’t matter what it is. The important thing is to get away from work and live life.

In our society we are often made to feel like we’re in a race. But as someone’s mother used to say (my mother didn’t have sayings … she just had ‘looks’) “Haste makes waste”. Extend that idea to working too much and too hurriedly. You will burn out and kill your creativity as well as your motivation. Get out of the race and refuel. You will be more efficient, more successful, and more energetic if you do this regularly. And you will be happier. So will your family.

Consider taking time out EVERY day to do something for yourself, spend guilt-free time with those closest to you, or just to do nothing much. Set one day aside every week where you are not allowed to do ‘work’ and go kick back with friends or have adventures. Get out of town, even for just a day, at least once a month. And have regular vacations–like 3-4 times a year.

You might be thinking to yourself “I don’t have time for vacation!” but consider when you have gotten away from it all, how the new sights and experiences you had got you so jazzed or how calm you were when you returned. You need that, just like you need food and shelter. And for creatives, time out and new adventures is absolutely imperative to keeping your creativity from going stale.

So, go ahead, take time out right now and go plan a vacation or do some creativity work just for yourself. Then notice how you feel when you get back to work. Thinking of it as feeding your creative being and don’t starve yourself.

Have you ever gone to see a live band you knew nothing about because of some flyer that said ” Best music you will ever hear!” or some such claim? How about when a friend tells you the exact same thing about the same band? Will you consider checking them out now? Quite likely (depending on the friend’s taste in such things, of course!). Why?

You already know the answer. Its because you trust the source is passing on information they think will benefit you, not just because they want to sell you something.  That’s why word of mouth is so valuable. And why networking can be such a goldmine. ‘Can be” being the key phrase.

Networking gives you an amazing reach, helping you get in contact with large portions of your market that would be difficult to contact otherwise. But unless people recommend you or you are seen as a like-able and trusted source, all your networking efforts are not going to get you anywhere.

For example, no one likes spammers. But they infiltrate every networking site on the web. However, it literally takes millions of messages for them to hit upon one newbie that isn’t going to think they are a scam AND wants what they’re selling. But for a business that wants to build a reputation and a loyal market, that is not going to work.

So the first rule of cultivating yourself as a trusted source (and getting those who trust you to spread the word) is “Don’t overwhelm and annoy your market”. No 20 tweets an hour or emails every day. You will get ignored with this approach. Your complete disregard for people’s time will only result in people dropping off your email  and twitter followers lists. It’s a waste of time.

The second rule is simply “Build trust by being real.” so you can be considered a reliable messenger and others will become messengers for you. Building trust takes work but it’s not hard work.

• Reach out personally to people. Personal contact is so rare that most people will decided to check your business out just because of that, regardless of your message or product.
• Be helpful. There is not better way to build trust or gain fans than to offer truly useful assistance.
• Be comical and lighthearted. It doesn’t matter how serious your business is, life is funny and people like to laugh. Laugh at yourself, make quips about your product, and laugh at other people’s funnies. If you can laugh, especially at yourself, people will trust you.
• Interact with people. Pass on recommendations from people in your network and when posting information, make it useful so people want to come to you for information. Answer every message and email  you get. If you just can’t do it personally, pay someone to do it for you–it is that important. Ignoring people is the best way to turn off a potential customer or client and start bad word of mouth.

Yes, all this can be very time consuming, at least initially. I used to spend half or more of my time just chasing work but now, I rarely have to, with work coming to me through repeat business from loyal clients and great word of mouth. I spent a lot of time initially building trust and rapport through my networks and existing clients and now, it’s more just maintenance.

So go ahead, just be real. Be human. Be the kind of person you’d trust to steer you to businesses you want to deal with.

It’s not about you, your company, your product or service, or your reputation. At least not initially. When a potential customer/client first encounters you, it’s never “I wonder what great things this person/company offers?”, it’s “Is there anything here for me?”

When aiming to gain new sources of income from your market, one of the first things you will need to do is put your ego in a tightly sealed container and put it far out of reach. I think this is particularly hard for creatives to do this because what we’re selling is ourselves, our vision, our talent, and sometimes even our personalities. But you won’t reach many people by simply saying, “Hey I’m great and I have great stuff to offer you—come see!”

Draw new clients and customers in by appealing directly to their egos. Make it all about them getting the attention and giving the opportunity to feed their egos. Here are some basic ideas to get you thinking about your customers focused campaign:

Give ‘em something to talk about: People love to laugh, be surprised, and be shocked and they love to share sources of such entertainment. Remember the big, hairy biker dude who modeled the wedding dress on Ebay? That dress sold for 30x what he hoped to get plus all the attention (he got radio and TV time!) and marriage proposals. Why? Because the picture of him in that dress was both hilarious and a little shocking. Stuff like that is the online version of gossip and people like to talk about what they’ve found. So give them something to talk about and whole sections of the market you weren’t directly tied into will come to you.

Get an opinion: You know what they say about opinions and it’s true. Everyone has one and most people love the opportunity to share it. Perhaps you can ASK your Tweeple to tell you what they think about your latest website templates instead of just announcing you posted them in your store. This gets people going to your site as well as giving you valuable input for future work. Or post a blog about an issue that the industry you write for would get fired up about, asking for feedback so you can start a conversation with new people. Having a conversation means you are building a relationship that you can use to directly and personally access your potential new clients.

Get their story: Yep, people do like to talk about themselves, so go ahead and ask them to do so on your site or blog or even your Twitter page as a start. If you’re writing a book about fly fishing, ask for comical fly fishing stories to draw them to the site where you sell your book. Or better yet, ask before you even write it to gain more fodder for the book and an instant street team when the book comes out as people will tell their friends and networks about the book their story is in.

How you will appeal to potential clients/customers will differ greatly depending on your market. Just consider what gets the riled up, how they like to be entertained, what they talk about most, and where they congregate both on and off line. And then get creative. It’s what you do best. And just keep chanting the mantra “It’s all about them.”

We all have at least one critic, that voice in your head that constantly gripes about your work not being good enough, not being marketable, not professional looking, not original enough, and blah, blah, blah. Critical voices have their uses: They can help keep you on task, remind you of the client/market’s needs, and keep you looking for ways to improve your work. But most of the time, these jerks in your head  just distract you, stress you out, and force you to play it safe instead of following your instincts, seriously hampering your creativity and stopping you from growing your skills and talent.

With the critic is in your head, it seems nearly impossible to get away from it. But you can. It takes a little effort and on some days, it will take a little time, but you will work smoother, more creatively, and faster if you can muzzle it for a while.

Here are some things you can try that can quiet down the critic–

• Practice your craft first thing in the morning, before coffee or news or email or even getting out of bed if you can. When your brain is still groggy, you are less likely to be self-critical due to your brain not producing much in the way of beta waves (present with critical and anxious thinking). And that state of mind tends to stay with you during the day–it’s like setting a default state of mind by making it your first experience of the day.

• If your critic is really mouthing off and you can’t get anything done, do something different, something either energy releasing or calming. I like to dance, sing or sketch. For some people, a jog helps, or playing a purely reactive (not problem solving) video game, or cooking. Do whatever switches you to a calmer, more open state of mind.

• Displace the critic in your head with a live voice. Share your project with someone you trust and ask for them to give you their impression (not their critique). Another person’s feedback will help you see your work in a new light. The process of having to explain  your work in answer to a question or to explain your reasoning will force you to spell out what you are doing–something that doesn’t usually occur when it’s just you and the voices in your head. You should be able to see more clearly after this, but just be careful not to let that one person’s opinion become a new critic in your head. It’s just one person’s opinion.

• Take nap. This will reset your brain. And when you wake, stay laying down with your eyes closed and let your mind wander over the issues with your project, let if free transfrom the images or the storyline and see what comes up. I’ve solved more design problems this way than with anything else.

You don’t need to shut up your critic permanently but, especially at the beginning of a project when you should just be focused on getting forms, colors, words and ideas down, being too self-critical can really cut you off from all the possibilities. Invite your critic back when it’s time for final editing and touch ups. That’s when its useful.

Client’s love to have things bolded … in advertisements, in their books, in brochures, their logos, in blog posts … it doesn’t matter what, they just want their words to have force. They can never trust that the words will do it on their own. THEY HAVE TO MAKE THEM SHOUT. See how annoying that is?

Even at art fairs and conventions, people love hanging those big vinyl banners out. Or they have somebody loudly coercing people to come into their booth. It’s obnoxious and does not make people want to buy, much less listen. What gets a person to come to you, to listen to your client’s message, or buy your artwork is just showing them the solution to their problem is with in reach or that you have an object they desire (even if they didn’t know it).

My favorite example of this kind of thing is the Google home page. Google is about searching for something. Their page is about searching for something. Their page is mostly white space. It does not presume to tell you what you want to know. It leads you directly to its primary product and the thing that you desire to find most on this page, the search box. They don’t shout about all the things the service can find for you or make it so pretty and slick you forgot why you came. The page says, here, search and below the box, a few links, humbly offered like little gifts to help you search further. And as we all know, Google is the most widely used search engine in the world. That page is a huge part of their success.

So, no shouting. Show your customers (or your client’s) what they want to see, not what you (or your client) wants them to see and they will stick around long enough to hear what you have to say next.

Sounds like it could be a bad horror movie, but fear of the blank page (metaphorical in the case of computer graphics and 3-d work of course)  is a real affliction. There shold be 12 step programs and weekend long retreats where the afflicted are surrounded by unaltered materials and computers with not a word on them. There is just something about a virgin sheet of paper, the perfectness of a block of clay not yet cut, a empty square on the computer screen that can just freezes a person. I know. I use to be one of them.

It really isn’t a fear of the nothingness before me that would keep me from starting a project. I have never been bereft of ideas. But rather I was afraid that the perfect picture in my mind would not come out whole, would morph into some mutilated twin who rise up to chase off the beautiful one forever from my mind. I knew that as soon as I put pencil to paper or start hitting the computer keys that empty space would be permanently transformed and the birth of a new creation had begun. There is no stopping it then. Even if I did stop what I was doing, whatever was before me would be my creation, my child of sorts. And for years, I put way too much value on each and every thing I transformed.

I am still this way to an extent. I do hold a great reverence for ‘what could be’ and sometimes will take a moment to savor the possibilities before getting to work. But I have learned to be more excited about seeing what will come of my attempts than worried about failing my vision. As a matter of fact, I have found that letting the vision guide me rather than trying to bring it to life wholesale results in most remarkable final creations.

And I get a lot more done too.

I have this annoying and unconscious impulse to speak like the people around me in their accent and choice of words. While traveling in Ireland, I acquired a rather strong Irish accent. When I go to the southern states, I get me all kinds of southern drawling going on. My other half was raised in the ‘hood and so I often find my well-honed English coming out in the convoluted sentence structure similar to his casual conversation voice. I can’t help it without conscious effort. I am not alone in this. However, most people afflicted with this kind of style adoption find the mimicking in areas that are not something practiced since the age of two, like creating original writing or art.

Our source for language and visuals is most commonly, and sadly, from advertising and popular entertainment. Unless you want your work to sound like stilted sit-coms, or your visuals to look like billboards and website sales pages, you have to consciously and continuously expose yourself to work that is in the vein of your own aspirations. As a creative, you probably already know this.

But that, at the end of the day, just keeps you from mimicking the junk you are constantly exposed to. How about your own voice? Where does it come from? How can you be sure you are creating with your own original style?

This, of course, assumes you want to be original. But why would you want to recreate someone else’s work? You need to express you. And that is not so very easy these days.

So how do you find and cultivate your own original voice and vision?

Because you will necessarily create based on what you are exposed to, you cannot excise every instance of work that looks remotely like someone else’s work. But what you can do is practice your craft at the one time of day when you have been exposed to nothing but yourself for hours on end—first thing in the morning.

I left my very well paying, fly me all over and keep me at plush hotels, corporate job to become an artist. Really. And that’s exactly what I told my six bosses and everyone else that asked. I don’t think they quite believed me. Well, not a first.

Then as my last day approached, people started coming up to me with these tentative but strangely admiring looks, and they would eventually reveal to me their own creative proclivities. One woman in quality control revealed that on occasion she wrote short stories, the IT manager manager used to write poetry, one of the vice-presidents revealed he’d bought his last home with space for a furniture making studio he had yet to set up, and even the multi-media guy, who had the most creative job in the place, brought around sketches of these 3-D moving wooden scenes and toys that ran by wooden gears he used to make. Used to. There was a lot of  ‘used to’ and ‘I would like to someday’ comments.

These revelations confirmed for me one of the reasons for my leaving a regular job. The competition and all consuming drive that is perpetuated in large companies stiffles and leaves no room, energy, or time for personal creative expression. I was feeling it myself. With a degree in both fine art and creative writing, it was intolerable to spend weeks, sometimes months without writing even a poem or sculpting a pendant. I can’t not create. But I don’t think I am unique there. Everyone has something inside them they need to get out and put into a tangible form, even if they rarely share it. Food, shelter, companionship and creativity. I believe those are the bare necessities we need to feel whole and to live.

I have never known an wholly  unhappy creative person who was working on their craft. Tortured, yes. Angry yes. But desperately unhappy and frustrated by their life? Only when they couldn’t work.

Perhaps I’m wrong but I have a feeling that if every child in school was required to take a creative class each semester and every person on earth was expected to spend at least a few hours every week creating something new to share with the world, we’d have a much happier, more content world. Yeah, I know. Idealistic nonesense that is.  But I believe it to be true and will live by it. Create, write, sing, dance, sculpt, paint, cook, garden, craft … just do something good for your soul every week if not every day. And see if it doesn’t make a difference.