Diversifying income streams is critical for freelancers and creatives. The Guemmah Freelance Hub teaches you how to leverage your creative work into additional income streams.
Being your own marketer and salesperson is an important part of working on your business as a solopreneur. Given the limited number of hours in a day, it’s a lot for a single person to accomplish.
You should now understand that marketing encompasses everything you do, from drafting an email to attending a networking event. However, not every creative person likes to talk about their work. It’s possible that you want to spend as much time as possible creating, therefore it’s critical to find strategies to promote your creative business while you’re working on new projects.
Getting into the habit of creating out loud, in my opinion, is the simplest approach to promoting a creative business. That is, you must come up with ways to leave digital breadcrumbs throughout the internet that direct visitors to your website and email address so that they can easily contact you.
Not everyone is comfortable with social media, and many people are unsure about how they should use it to create scalable income streams. Sharing your work on platforms that are relevant to your freelance business is the greatest approach to promoting it. If you want to develop passive income streams as a visual creative, it may be Instagram, Behance, Pinterest, Shutterstock, EyeEm, or another stock database. If your business is based on your viewpoint, you might wish to post your articles on YouTube, Twitter, or Contently. It’s critical to find a platform on which you feel most at ease. You don’t have to be present all the time. However, the more breadcrumbs you leave, the more likely it is that someone finds you.
While certain networks are better for sharing your progress, such as Instagram or Twitter, others, such as Behance, Contently, or Creative Market, are wonderful for helping you promote your final work.
As a freelancer, you must have a website, but you must also publish your work on platforms where people search for specialized material. Of course, you’ve got to make your work discoverable when you share it. You may either use relevant hashtags to direct people to your creations, display your workflow, style, and more.
Some of your digital breadcrumbs can help you promote your business, while others will turn into monetizable items. Some creatives, like Maaike Boot, upload all the surplus work that their clients don’t buy to Shutterstock and generate extra money from it. They essentially make money off of their web portfolios! Smart, right?
To offer you some more examples of how this might work for you, consider the following:
Searching “picture” on Behance led me to Ewelina Dymek. Because she hashtagged her drawings, I was able to locate her amid other illustrators whose style didn’t appeal to me as much as hers. Sara was approached to commission her illustrations after she took part in #The100DayProject and shared her work with her Instagram audience. Someone was impressed with her work and requested if they may use it for their own products. People find Maaike’s work on Shutterstock and enjoy her style, but they want something unique for their business, thus she gets client requests on a daily basis.
Consider where other people in your field display their work when deciding where to promote it because that’s where potential clients will look. If you know other illustrators, designers, or writers that use certain hashtags, use them as well. If you have a distinct personal style, that style will influence your final decision.
Personally, I use my phone to snap a lot of images during the day. I share some on Instagram, but there are a lot of photos I take that aren’t too personal to me and could be just what someone else is looking for. In 2016, I began uploading photos to EyeEm and gave them permission to sell them as stock. Why not monetize the photos that I already take as a scalable income stream strategy?
Consider how you can make the most of your creative output. Of course, you may buy hard drives and save your work on them, or you can simply upload it somewhere and make money from it. If you have a distinct personal style, your portfolio will be a moneymaker on top of everything else.
