Whew! I've been furiously taking notes for the last two days...
What a whirlwind. You see, I just got back from How Magazine's Creative Freelancer Conference. True to my first attendance in 2008, I have returned inspired and motivated to work on my business as well as equipped with lots of great ideas to help my clients market their businesses. Oh boy!
Now that I'm home I have sat myself down to make a plan. First stop - culling all my pages of notes down to the most important things I learned and can apply to my business right away.
My three favorite speakers of the conference were Luke Mysse of Crossgrain Creative Studios, Allen Murabayashi of Photoshelter and Von Glitschka of Glitschka Studios. Following are the top five tips from each speaker that I plan to put into action as soon as possible.
Favorite presentation 1:
“To Plan or not to Plan?” Luke Mysse
- Schedule marketing your own business into every week or it won't happen
- Automate everything you can to allow more time for creativity to blossom
- Create juicy goals - don't settle for the mundane - shoot for something big and amazing
- Instigate a monthly review of your company finances, marketing plans, sales strategies, successes and failures
- Start using a tracking system for sales leads and progress
Favorite presentation 2:
“How to Fail at Marketing,” Allen Murabayashi
- Identify your market and publish daily to blogs and social media - focus on things that will be interesting or entertaining - show your personality
- Klout.com - a useful site for ranking tweeters' reach - helps determine who are the influencers in your field. Follow those influencers and make contact with them. You never know where the next big idea or lead will come from.
- TEST, TEST, TEST - make use of Google's "website optimizer" to test out effectiveness of different messages/layouts in websites
- Shoot for contacting your email list 1x per month (weekly is too much, quarterly is too few)
- Use MajesticSEO.com for monitoring backlinks
Favorite presentation 3:
“Becoming a Hired Gun,” by Von Glitschka
- Don't suck
- Always be working on improving your portfolio and enhancing your services - don't be afraid to try new things
- Develop an inner circle of advisors who will hold you accountable to your goals and dreams
- Supersize your clients
- Follow your passion and share your progress - it could lead to big things
Holy moly - a lot to do! For now, I'm going to start sorting through all the business cards I collected - I have quite a pile up. But I'm very excited to start putting some of these great new ideas into practice. Go Andiamo, go!
