Or, at least you will have built it, have something to show for it, and a place to show it off.
Like a home builder pouring a foundation and setting up a frame, I spent the past 7 days putting together my website, setting up my social media accounts and organizing notes of goals, how-to, reminders, ideas.
This post will be of interest to you if you are someone trying to get set up for an organized creative business life. I will document some of the steps I have taken so I can help others who are overwhelmed with the beginning, like I was. I have a great friend who had been through all this herself and has shared her experience with me. I had no idea how to get started and I was spinning my wheels and procrastinating. I would like to help others as my friend helped me. Pay it forward. Community, people!
Here is what I have done, so far:
- I signed up with WordPress.com for a website. I drew out sort of an “org chart” of how I want to lay out my site. Next, I picked a template and started dropping in images of my artwork, music performance photos, videos of me playing music (I embedded these from YouTube.) I, then, added an “About” page, some of my original lyrics sheets, a list of cover songs I play and some events where people can come see me perform – either art or music -and show support.
- I signed up for new Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter accounts, all called CarsonArtMusic, like my website. I still have some work to do on these to maximize their usefulness, like “tags”, “hashtags”, and links, but I will work on that next week.
- I ordered business cards.
- I got a DropBox account to make it easier to share photos, videos and other files with friends and between all my devices.
- Note: be careful and diligent about how you name your files. Be consistent and descriptive.
- I installed Chrome and Evernote on my computer and iPad to make it easy to capture notes and ideas. I have a file for “Third Party Providers” where I have stashed information like “how to bulk resize photos”, “how to transfer lots of big files to someone for free”, “where did I order my business cards”, etc.
- These are:
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- bulkresizephotos.com
- wetransfer.com
- moo.com
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- These are:
In addition to all of this, I have now written 2 blog posts, and I have completed 2 paintings this week! It feels good to get this much done in one week. Many thanks to my friend, Kathy, at kathymuir.com for all the support and help.
“In a creative, life there is no difference between work and play.” -James Michener