Although I was aware of the importance of defining purpose in what you do to keep you motivated, Simon Sinek revealed the importance of the need to define a belief or purpose as a key element of attracting a following in highly successful businesses, companies, projects and even movements.

For a company or a leader to truly inspire action in people, they need to clearly define a purpose or a belief behind whatever it is they do. People will support, buy from and follow a leader or organisation that has a belief in something that they too believe in.

From that point on, it’s no longer the quality of the leader per se that inspires the participation of his followers, but the shared belief delivered by that leader that people want to be a part of.

What does this mean for a freelancer, where inspiring a following is central to one’s success as a brand?

Think about how you can transmit a sense of purpose or a belief to those around you. This will set you apart.

See the talk here.

Comments are encouraged!

’9 Steps to Being Your Most Powerful Creative Self’

The book has received a great deal of praise from major players in the creative industries and elsewhere.

“Alex’s book gives vital focus to those that create in the blur between chaos and creativity. An important guide for those looking to take risks and dream big.”

Fabien Riggall, Founder & Creative Director, Future Shorts, Future Cinema

“I admire Alex for making it a priority to organize his creative insights in long form. It’s an uncommon practice these days, to make time for writing, and I’m better because he shared his with me.”

Zach Klein, Founder and CEO, Vimeo

I’m sharing the book with you at a specially 30% reduced launch price until the end of Friday this week, September 9th only, so you need to be quick to take advantage of this.

Go here to read more about, and purchase the book, along with some hugely valuable free bonuses.

Enjoy it and best of luck!

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Want to earn some money from helping me promote the book?

If you’d like to become an affiliate and make earnings of 50% on each book you can sell, have a look here.

This is not something that just applies to physical products, but is essential in its application to your own business as a creative professional.

In marketing jargon, a unique selling point/proposition is what a product or service possesses that states clearly that it will provide a certain specific and unique benefit to the customer.

It is a very good idea to know what makes you unique and what people will remember you for, before going about promoting yourself.

As creatives, one of the biggest challenges we face is in standing out from the crowd of others all trying to make a name for themselves. Many will be using the same tools as you do, and this increases the potential for you to miss out on your ideal projects.

What is it about your work that will turn the heads of potential clients or head-hunters?

It’s not enough to simply state that you provide a great service and that you are highly skilled. People need to see what you do and they need to be sold on your work.

This means having work that stands out in such a way that your prospect would not consider looking anywhere else for other talent and professionalism.

The way to hook prospects in this way (not to mention fans, friends and people who will talk about you and promote you) is to create work that people won’t find elsewhere.

For repeat clients, they will be able to recognize what is yours straight away. This doesn’t mean that you are stuck with the same materials or tools forever. You should exhibit your own style in all that you do. This will apply more to certain professions than others, but the principle still stands.

To go a step further, you not only need to be expressive in the work you create, but you need to express yourself and the way you are through your work.

Steps to Developing a USP

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1. Identify your main strength and milk it.

Coupled with active self promotion, success in the creative world comes with communicating your strengths effectively. Making others aware of what you are good at should be at the forefront of how you showcase your work as well as your engagement with prospects and others, but in crafting a unique selling point, you need to go a step further.

Focus on one single element that you know you are good or skilled at, or what can be honed to make you stand out more, whether this be in your ability to create beautiful minimal design, drawing people as an artist, writing descriptive fiction, or producing black and white photography. Work on it and get even better at it.

2. Improve your skills in one or two areas.

Identify the skills you need to support your main strength.

This could be in improving your vector illustration skills with Adobe Illustrator, improving your vocal or copywriting skills or learning more about using automation within Logic for music production, for example.

3. Find what makes you truly unique as a person.

This might sound cheesy, but it is an awareness of your quirks that will add depth and personality to your work and the way you go about doing business with people, including promoting it.

Ask yourself these questions to get you going:

1. What are the three things that make you memorable?

2. What do people always compliment you on?

3. What are you passionate about that you never get tired talking about?

4. What unique experiences have you had?

Once you have found what makes you unique, work on incorporating it into your work, and ultimately your brand.

This includes through the writing you do, in the way you describe yourself, in the way you communicate with others, and, ultimately through your own work.

It is this expression of character in all that you do that will set you apart from the rest and cement your success.

4. Hone your style.

This is where a bit of hard work and practice comes in. Once you have achieved a style that people can associate as yours, your promotional efforts will be made much easier.

5. Make your speciality obvious.

Through the work you produce, and when you display your work on a website or elsewhere, make sure that your skills and specialties, as well as the main things that make you unique, are made clear to those looking at it.

Most of what makes you unique will speak for itself through the work you do, but you can emphasise your strengths and unique selling point in your bio, ‘about me’ section, or site tagline as well.

Make sure you share past projects that you felt demonstrated your strengths and showcase and search for testimonials from clients that highlight your skills.

If you’re on a team, make sure you volunteer for work that allows you to utilize your strengths too, so they don’t go unnoticed and unused.

A USP is an important element of your own brand. Once you have this set, you need to go about living up to your personal brand, adding strength to it and transmitting its message in everything you do.

This is achieved through the design of your personal site, the way you communicate with people, the content you share with your network, the enthusiasm you put into your work, the professionalism you display, and the originality you bring to new projects.

The importance of your recognisable personal brand can’t be overlooked.

As Tom Peters puts it:

“In today’s wild wired world, you’re distinct…or extinct. Survive, thrive, triumph, by becoming Brand You!”

I would recommend reading his book: ‘Re-inventing work. The Brand You 50’ for more information on transforming yourself into your own brand.

Demonstrating the right attitude and acknowledging internet etiquette is a key part of your personal brand, and is something that will benefit your online self promotional effort as a whole.

Your thoughts below would be really interesting!

Paul Thegard at the University of Waterloo’s Department of Psychology holds that creative thinking involves combining neural patterns into new ones that are simultaneously useful and novel.

He does admit, though, that the scientific community has little understanding of the mechanisms that allow people to be creative. This mystery adds to the enjoyment found in discovering one’s own creative potential.

Any human mind could be harboring a musical genius, a beautiful writing style, a charismatic magnet, or a brilliant artist and not even know it. Exploratory techniques must be employed to bring these talents to the surface.

Narrowing It Down

Chances are that if a person possesses hidden creative potential, it has made itself known from time to time in little ways.

Something as simple as an eloquently written letter to a business that surprised even the writer or an elaborate doodle drawn during a long wait in the doctor’s office that brought forth compliments could have caused the person to wonder if, just maybe, they had hidden talent.

Educating the Genius

Though a talent is defined as “a marked innate ability,” a bit of education can go a long way towards helping this talent reach its full potential. With just a few simple art classes, a person who drew quite well before could suddenly become a painter of great portraits or landscapes.

Education gives an artist the tools necessary for a great career or hobby. The amateur photographer whose photos always garnered recognition could, with a few classes, become a professional whose services are in great demand and whose career is set.

The writer who could craft eloquent letters could take creative writing courses and grow into a great novelist. Education is the food on which infant creative potential feeds and the transforming agent by which it matures into fully developed ability.

Invisible Talent

Innate abilities or intuition must be developed and used in order for the creative potential of an individual to be realized. The details of why an individual possesses certain abilities do not have to be understood in order to be appreciated.

Unlike Paul Thegard’s combined scientific neural patterns, the necessity of education and action for creative development is no mystery.

This guest article was contributed by Jennifer Bell from Health Training Guide. Check out her site to learn more about medical billing and coding training and other exciting health careers.

A big and growing trend has emerged for creatives to expand their reach (and income) through product-creation in the form of placing designs on t-shirts, selling prints, making knitted products, posters, toys and other merchandise.

Sites like Etsy, Threadless and CafePress are making this a viable and easy option for more and more creatives, whether this be in providing the means to sell products or actually help create them.

This provides for great extra income potential, as well as a chance to further market your own brand and work.

Steve Harrington’s collaboration with InCase.

This is all good stuff. However, there can be a noticeable difference in terms of earnings and self promotional power through actually collaborating with a brand (established or otherwise) to produce your own line of products or have your design as part of a series.

You could work with companies such as a clothing line, toy manufacturers, iphone skin-makers, gift brands, stationers and others.

So, to take uploading your work to websites a step further, make the move to contacting a brand, creative group or company you like and get a conversation going on potential collaborations you could contribute to. Get on the phone and arrange a meeting with them if you can.

Even if a collaboration doesn’t go ahead initially, taking action in this way will have a positive impact on your self promotion efforts and image.

You will be regarded as enthusiastic, action-prone, innovative and confident in your own work by those you contact and may be called upon in the future.

Above: Droplets from Jam Factory, and Tokyo Plastic’s collaboration with Terratag.

As Tahir says, this is hugely beneficial from a business side too, because it will get you thinking about how it all works within all the different industries and products you work with.

Here are some ideas on collaborating with companies that could get your work really noticed and boost your income:

1. Making toys with a designer toy company. For example, the ‘Droplets‘ toys through Jam Factory and Crazy Label.

2. Work with a T-shirt brand who you think could work with your style. Tokyo Plastic and Terratag are a good example of a collaboration as their styles appeal to a similar market.

3. Accessories for various gadgets like the iPad are a big industry at the moment. InCase’s collaborations with artists like Steve Harrington is a good example of a successful convergence of company and talent.

So have a brainstorm on what types of products or collaborations with other companies you could come up with and give appropriate companies a call.

Thanks Tahir for your ideas and work on this.

Your thoughts are welcome in the comments section below this post!

Ideally, as a creative professional, even if you work on a variety of roles, you have one skill that you are particularly focused on and are developing to be known for. The long term success of being known for a particular skill, whether it be website coding, illustration or music production, requires true passion for it.

If you have a focus in your work life on something you are passionate for, that’s excellent. Sometimes we can lose our way over time, and passion for what we do diminishes, or we simply get caught up in other areas of life and just forget about what we were passionate about in the first place.

Since having passion is so important, this post is about re-igniting and cultivating the passion that is already there inside you, so that you can continue to focus on your area with dedication and with great results. This can also be used for those of you who are looking to find their area of focus, which they are passionate about, but haven’t yet.

Here’s how to do this:

1. Write down ten things that are exciting or interesting about your area of work or a potential area of work.

2. Now write down three things that are interesting about each of the points you noted previously. Just keep what you have found in mind.

3. Spend half an hour looking through some good blogs or books that relate to your area of focus, and just drink it all in. Look for things that excite you and get you passionate. Consider printing out some images to inspire you that you can throw into your diary, a scrapbook, or on your wall.

4. Know your role-models. Think about who in the world you really admire and inspire you, perhaps even writing them down. Ideally what they do would relate to your work area, but simply being inspired by people who have achieved can really help boost the passion you have for your own path in life.

5. Read the biography of someone who has experienced success in the area of work you want to boost your passion in.

6. Do a training course in your area of focus or get out a book that will get you to expand on what you know about your skill. Either learn about the foundations of what you do, so that you feel generally more confident, or gain new knowledge to add to what you already know. This will add to your confidence, which will undoubtedly boost the passion you have for what you do.

7. Find somewhere comfortable to sit and get relaxed. Now spend a few minutes visualizing experiencing success in your area of work or achieving a goal related to your work. Think with no limits. Really turn up the vividness of this image, add sound and touch and colour in your mind.

The key thing is to effectively ‘burn’ the thought into your mind, so that you have a strong, positive picture in your mind that will help guide you towards success with passion in your work.

8. Set aside a day or more completely dedicated to creating something amazing for your portfolio. Take some time to plan something that will really add value to your portfolio or your work showcase. This will also give you some practice, stretch your skills, improve your confidence in your work, and allow to work on something that you really enjoy.

9. Talk to people in your industry. This can be through a reach out on Twitter, or in the real world. Go out and meet fellow creatives at social events and gatherings or organize your own. Hearing from others and sharing ideas and feedback is a great way to regain and boost passion.

10. Drop the baggage. Often it is in trying to accomplish too much that we lose passion for one particular area. Make it easier for yourself by committing to working on and developing one single area of your work-life, get good at it, work at it, learn about it and passion and drive will grow.

In response to this, more and more of us are making use of the web’s resources to win clients, making the internet a very crowded and competitive place. The advantage of securing work that once came with proximity to clients, is being lost to the global nature of the internet.

The winning element in successful online self promotion amongst all this is the human element of your brand, as you go about broadcasting it across the web.

By this, I mean giving others a chance to get familiar with who you are in the way you express yourself and reveal your positive human qualities. Keep in mind that you should work to highlight the positive elements of your personality, but there is no harm in revealing some of your flaws, if they don’t directly harm your ability to develop.

Obviously your talent, unique work and various skills will be the driving force behind a great deal of your success, but when it comes to promoting yourself on the net amongst all the rest and making a powerful connection with people, it is your human qualities that will make a big difference. If you can provide a potential client with a window to who you are as a human being, and not just an invisible entity behind a computer screen, you are a lot closer to sealing the deal.

The flip-side to having a crowded and competitive marketplace on the web, is that the internet has opened up many means to express this human element of your brand.

Here are some ways to do so, that will work to your favour in appealing to clients, prospects, colleagues and fans:

Social Networking

Use Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and more to show a little of who you are. Don’t be afraid to make new friends and invite others to your networks. Use tweets and status updates to express yourself and interact with people. Be careful however with revealing too much information, and hold back from sharing things you wouldn’t want colleagues or potential clients to see. You need to accept the internet’s transparency, and reputations can be lost in an instant, so keep things you wouldn’t want people to see off the web.

Blogging

Starting a blog or contributing to someone else’s is an excellent way to share your passions and interests and opinions. Dedication to a particular topic by writing regularly for a blog really demonstrates commitment and passion. Contributing to blog discussions through blog comments on yours and other blogs is a means to build rapport with other readers and establish yourself as a personality within the community.

Forums

Join in the discussions taking place on online forums, especially as these are places where prospects look to hire new people. The more of a human presence you build on certain forums or message boards, the more support you will receive, not to mention increased exposure.

Video and podcast sharing

Getting your face on a video or speaking regularly for a podcast series that can be shared online is an extremely effective way of delivering some personality to an audience.

Article Writing

Not only is contributing articles to various sites a great means to drive traffic to your work, it can be a handy way of sharing your opinion, your personality and your expertise with targeted readers.

So, give a thought to transmitting your human side as you go about promoting your brand on the internet.

Positive human self-expression will get you noticed and remembered.

What do you think?

One of my favourite speakers on marketing, Seth Godin, stresses that for a product to now be a success, it needs to be remarkable in itself, instead of relying on the old ways of broadcast advertising an average product (or a product with little competition).

Being remarkable means that your promotion is taken care of by your loyal fans who spread the word of the quality and excellence of your product or service, aided especially well by the possibility of online interaction.

This applies to services provided by creatives, just as it does for products.

Being unremarkable is also no longer an option if you want to succeed as a fully booked creative in the long run. It really is important to be producing work that is remarkable enough to catch people’s attention amongst everything else out there.

How do you, as a creative worker, become truly remarkable, and push your self promotion power to the next level?

These are the key elements to remarkability that you can build into your work. They do not need to be incorporated in equal measures, but it is important to focus on the first element at the very least:

A Unique Style

At the basic level, you need a style that is recognized immediately as yours. This could be in the way you apply paint to a canvas, the kinds of shapes you use as a digital illustrator, how you apply light to your photograph’s subjects, or the way you apply bass to an electronic music composition.

Make sure you think about your style and how it adds to the individuality of your work (or if working in a collective or collaborative context, how you are contributing to the style of the group) before you embark on any piece of creative work.

Unique Content

Often, artists are set apart from others by the content they incorporate into their work, particularly if it is consistent throughout several of their projects. An example of this is the use of human forms in the sculptural work of artist Antony Gormley.

Make your work remarkable by using content that is ideally unique, or presented in a different way than what is ‘normal’. Consistency in the content you use is not vital for being remarkable, but will add to your style and unique signature if you choose to go down this route.

Your Signature

By signature I’m referring to the essence of the work you produce; something that is less tangible and obvious than the materials you use and the style you do things in. I suppose it can be seen as a combination of several elements of your style, content etc that you become known for through lots of practice.

I see a creative signature as taking your style to the next level, through hard work, persistence and time. Having a signature is required if you are to retain remarkability and still be able to evolve as an artist.

Think of what makes the signature sound of Sting or Madonna (whose output is constantly evolving, but still stands out and remains recognizable, for the most part) or the paintings of Picasso and the films of Ridley Scott.

Overall, make sure you stick to the very basis of being remarkable, which is having a unique style. Once you have a body of work that demonstrates your unique style, self promotion will become easier, less time consuming and make big steps for you.

Comments and ideas are welcome!