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!