Being a creative is not all sunshine and rainbows. Many creatives rely on one stream of income if they are pursuing their business full time. This could be brand deals, portrait work, weddings etc.. For those of us who are not jam-packed with client work every day, having one stream of income can make life quite stressful very quickly.
If you feel the above accurately describes your situation, read on and you might find some tips you can apply to your business. Each of these steps below builds off of one another in order to help you develop new ideas or avenues for you to grow your business with.
Content
The first step to growing your business or brand is creating educational content or entertaining content. For this article, we will focus on educational content. We can make any sort of situation or scenario but all of them follow a pretty similar path. Start focusing on what you are amazing at and help others get better at that skill. This could be a workflow of your photo editing or how you developed your personal brand.
Teaching others will do nothing but good things for you, building your following while helping others, what more could you want. Content building is a huge part of growing your business and getting your name out there. Provide as much valuable content for people as you can and continue to do Q & A sessions or live streams to answer questions online.
Diversify
This one is a challenge but worth it in so many ways. Some Photographers, models or Influencers stick to one platform, they don't encourage their followers to go anywhere else because they don't see a point in doing so.
What if tomorrow Instagram was gone? 90% of all influencers and their careers would be gone and many new photographers wouldn't know how to get clients or showcase their work, models wouldn't be able to be found on the platform anymore, all because they left all their eggs in one app.
This is where diversifying comes in. Break out of the mentality of relying on one app or platform and diversify, produce video content, push more people to view your website, start an email list, Pin your work, make a podcast. There are so many ways to jump from one platform to many with little work. Just remember as long as your followers are in your email list or on your website they are yours forever, you can't lose them.
Product
Developing a product that matches your brand is the easiest out of them all. Find something people keep asking for or something that you want and find a way to launch it once you have positioned yourself as an educator and helpful personality. Perhaps you are a photographer and people want to have images like yours and you decide to create your own preset, or you decide to teach in-person workshops and mentoring sessions. Maybe you are an influencer and you decide to launch your own line of apparel, you always wanted to be a designer right?
These three pillars have helped me and many other creatives grow their businesses into multiple streams from influencers to photographers. Having the ability to create a routine income every month and not worrying about getting enough brand deal or the next client helps not only mentally but physically as well. The goal of this is to Push you to select just the jobs you want to do rather than selecting every job because you have to.
