As a Creative Professional, It’s important to understand the nuances of business and networking, because without this, even if you are really good at your art, not knowing how to monetize it or how to grow your creative business can bring a great deal of suffering, Financially. So if you want a Creative career, It’s extremely important to sort this out.
Get your name out there :
As a creative professional, the first thing you should focus on is getting your name out there. You can do this in two ways. One is building a Strong digital persona around whatever you do through Instagram, Youtube and any other social media platform that gives you the necessary traction and constantly growing your audience and interacting with them and building trust.
Offering free work :
And the next is, by providing value to the people and businesses around you. And you can offer your work for free initially to penetrate and get the opportunity and once you provide enough value and when they get a taste of your work, they are not going to go for anyone else. So by offering to work for free, you are not really losing money but building relationships which has a great ROI which is going to help you grow exponentially.
Word of Mouth:
And once you’ve built your network to a certain scale, it’s going to welcome more clients automatically through the work you’re already doing through word of mouth and you can accelerate this process by offering Referral benefits. For example, Let’s say you had a photoshoot with company X, you offer them a 30 percent discount if they can help spread your name through their contacts.
Know your price :
Once you are getting work automatically through the systems and networks you’ve built and you get to a point where you can’t take in anymore clients, that is when you need to learn how to fix your price. And a lot of people struggle how to do this, So here’s my two cents.
First think about the value of work that you’re doing, the niche you’re in, how much this work means to the client, and how much of your effort and time it is going to consume.
Something like a wedding film is extremely valuable because it means the world to the clients and something like an aftermovie of an event that happens every year may not be as significant, so the amount of significance the work has is directly proportional to the price. Next is the amount of time and effort that goes in, fix a monthly value for the work that you’re doing including the expenses as well. If you have a company and you need to pay people, you factor all of that in the monthly value as well. And from that, you derive the price/day or hour.
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