As most of the Red Lemon Club readership are people in the creative industries (though of course every single one of these could be used by anyone), I’ve picked out a handful of strong quotes that always make me feel more creative and undoubtedly better having read them.

Here are 25 quotes from different brains that should set you up for positive thoughts:

I don’t think there’s any artist of any value who doesn’t doubt what they’re doing.

Francis Ford Coppola

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A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.

Ayn Rand

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Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things.

Steve Jobs

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I think an artist’s responsibility is more complex than people realize.

Jodie Foster

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Always do your best. What you plant now, you will harvest later.

Og Mandino

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Imagination is more important than knowledge.

Albert Einstein

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An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail.

Edwin Land

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Clean out a corner of your mind and creativity will instantly fill it.

Dee Hock

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Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.

Oscar Wilde

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Even a true artist does not always produce art.

Carroll O’Connor

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Creativity can be described as letting go of certainties.

Gail Sheehy

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An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one.

Charles Horton Cooley

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The weeds keep multiplying in our garden, which is our mind ruled by fear. Rip them out and call them by name.

Sylvia Browne

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An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision.

James Whistler

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Can you imagine what I would do if I could do all I can?

Sun Tzu

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I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, and that enables you to laugh at life’s realities.

Dr. Seuss

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Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.

Carl Sagan

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The imagination is man’s power over nature.

Wallace Stevens

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Believe in yourself! Have faith in your abilities! Without a humble but reasonable confidence in your own powers you cannot be successful or happy.

Norman Vincent Peale

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Do you want to know who you are? Don’t ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you.

Thomas Jefferson

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If you don’t design your own life plan, chances are you’ll fall into someone else’s plan. And guess what they have planned for you? Not much.

Jim Rohn

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If you’ve got a talent, protect it.

Jim Carrey

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Live out of your imagination, not your history.

Stephen Covey

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It’s always too early to quit.

Norman Vincent Peale

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Small deeds done are better than great deeds planned.

Peter Marshall

–

What favourite quote do you have? Get it in the comments area!

You check your site visits statistics and it’s heartbreakingly low. You decide to send a rushed email to everyone you know with a link to your work. You later regret how desperate you must have sounded, and the cycle goes on, and you continue to get very few portfolio visits.

Let’s not be that person.

Do bear in mind, that the better your portfolio and portfolio site is, the more likely others are to share and promote it for you. Let’s cut straight to the chase and talk about some of the things that are happening that are keeping people away from your site.

1. You don’t update your portfolio enough

An outdated, and un-maintained portfolio gives off the impression that, firstly, you don’t take your work seriously enough, secondly, that you are a bit of an amateur and lack professionalism, and thirdly you don’t get much work.

Putting up personal, self-initiated, or work done for free, is a necessary replacement for periods when you aren’t getting paid work from clients.

2. Not engaging enough with social media

You might not be making full use of the promotional potential of sites like Twitter and Google+. Using Twitter to promote your portfolio is not about constantly bombing links to your portfolio.

You need to be striking a balance between doing that and engaging with, and helping others out. The balance in this case, is skewed heavily towards engaging with others.

3. You don’t have a blog

Blogging consistent interesting content, especially to people (prospects) that could become your clients, and then linking that blog to your portfolio can work wonders.

People get thrown off blogging regularly because they try to create too much too often, at least in their minds, and never commit to it. Commit to posting something short and sweet to a set schedule. Your following, and traffic to your portfolio will begin to grow.

4. You’re not focused enough on your audience

Always be thinking about exactly who your targeted market group is. Who are you creating work for? What kind of people, customers and companies?

If you aren’t clear on this, your work will lack focus, and it will show in your portfolio. ‘Jacks of all trade’ portfolios lose out in this regard. If you have multiple skills, such as vector illustration, as well as page layout design, you need two separate portfolios. One for each skill, linking to each other.

5. You are not an expert in something

Being considered an expert in something that compliments the work you showcase in your portfolio is a very powerful way of drawing views to your work.

The way to get established as an expert in something like digital painting, apart from being well known in the field itself, is to participate in forums, have a newsletter, run a blog, contribute to tutorials, speak publicly, run a podcast, write an ebook, guest post, and so on.

6. Your work isn’t there yet

For some people, the reason you’re not getting plenty of views on your site, is simply down to the fact that your work has not matured as much as it can to begin to really stand out as something worth being of interest to prospects and fans.

You might still be in the phase that draws heavily from other artists, and you might not have established a style yet.

Don’t give up, now is the time to keep moving. Momentum and a unique feel to your work will follow.

7. Your site is poorly designed

There could be several technical reasons as to why your site is not bringing in visitors, especially if it is hard to use. Your portfolio might be trying to be too complicated and navigation might be difficult. Make it as easy as possible for users to…well… use the site.

You’re better off ignoring how other sites do navigation. Start with a clean slate, and think about what is the most simple.

This means reducing the number of times people need to think about what to do next when it comes to revealing your work. There may also be too many links and distractions that mean your site’s bounce rate (rate at which people leave without continuing) is high.

8. Not being actively engaging or responsive with others online

As well as engaging on social media sites, there are many other online platforms that provide the opportunity for engagement with people. Engagement in one form or another is crucial in this business, when it is ultimately people you are trying to guide to your presented work.

Get engaging on forums, respond to your emails promptly, retweet people, regularly reach out to people. It doesn’t need to be that much, just stick to do it a little, consistently. Remember that reaching out to one person, particularly someone who could be considered a higher profile ‘key influencer’ could lead to exponential visits to your portfolio if they like your work.

9. Not regularly marketing your work and portfolio

I’m not a huge fan of having a strategy when it comes to promotion, because strategy is boring and we lose interest.

What you need to do is make a pact with yourself to take regular action, ideally with a goal in mind, towards getting your work out there. You will get little back if you yourself are not taking action.

10. You aren’t taking advantage of other blogs

Blogs are a major form of currency on the web now in terms of acting as a source of exposure for you (and others), if done in the right way.

This means commenting and guest posting on popular blogs in your niche, as well as having your own, reaching out to bloggers, arranging joint venture agreements with other bloggers so as to raise both your profiles, and so on.

11. You aren’t telling enough people in real life

When you have the opportunity, tell people you meet and know about your work and your service. Telling friends and family about your portfolio and asking for help when you can, can lead to plenty of help being promoted, and some great rewards.

Business cards are not dead, and if they are, then you’ll stand out because you are the only person with some.

12. There are no calls to action, prompting people to help promote for you

You can have an excellent portfolio site with fantastic work, but if you lack some kind of a prompt that pushes fans and other users to actually take the next step in helping to promote the site for you, then you are limiting the amount of further promotion your site can receive.

13. You are too impersonal

Whether it be in the way you sell yourself and your brand online, interact with others, write your bio, email people, and so on, if you are holding back on showing more of you, as a human, in exchange for too much of simply your ‘brand’, you could be limiting yourself and the ability to draw more people to your work.

Even simply adding a photo of your face or describing what interests you in your ‘About’ area on your portfolio site, can garner a much better response from people. People are more willing to rant about your work, if they know who you are.

14. Your message and your site are too complicated

When people land on your portfolio, or personal site, you want to make your portfolio something that is obviously a portfolio. Avoid confusing and distracting the user with things that aren’t anything to do with your showcased work. This also applies to how you promote your work outside of your site, such as through online mailers.

Keep things simple.

15. No testimonials

Always be asking clients for testimonials if a job was done well at the end of projects. With a good selection of strong testimonials about your work and service, your credibility as a professional will go up, and with it, so will your commissions.

16. Being on too many portfolio sites

This extends from having too complicated a site. It’s ok to have a presence wherever possible on the Internet. The problem lies in not committing enough to a single platform from which to showcase your stuff.

You need somewhere that you can direct everyone to, that is your definitive portfolio, instead of giving people a hundred and one options for places to see your work. People simply won’t bother, because the options are too great.

17. You don’t have a unique selling point

As someone who provides a service in something creative, be that writing, film-making, painting or photography, each should be viewed as a form of business. And in business, having a unique selling point is the key to understanding how you market yourself, as someone who stands out from the rest.

What is different about the service you provide from everyone else out there?

This could range from your unique style, your location, your specialist skill, your ability to speak several languages as part of your service, and even your attitude (though this should be secondary).

18. You aren’t testing and tweaking

Monitoring as much as you can of your output, including all the feedback you get related to you and your brand is really important for ongoing improvement and ultimately drawing people to you.

You need to always be tweaking and editing how, where and why you share your work in the way that you do, based on how well you are doing (through looking at stats and analytics for example). It doesn’t hurt to ask others about what they think either.

19. You have little credibility

A lot of the reason people admire, share and hopefully hire you in the first place is down to them recognising that you possess a certain level of credibility. This means people trust in you as a professional, skilled respectable person.

There are many things that contribute to your credibility as a creative, which will in turn benefit your success in displaying your stuff online. This includes getting featured on- and writing for other popular blogs, having a growing Twitter network, having an interesting/strong client list, good testimonials and so on.

It really is up to you how many of these points you really take into consideration and act on.

Maintaining visits on your website does take interest and commitment.

Best of luck!

Comments please!

Do follow the Red Lemon Club tips newsletter for regular ideas like these for fruitful creatives.

As such, getting paid properly is one of the most important things to get right as you navigate your way through the sometimes stormy seas of creative independence. Sometimes, if not fairly frequently, people do come across some snags, even nightmares, that revolve around clients taking a long time to pay up, or in some cases not paying at all.

Once you’ve completed a project for someone, it would seem that whether you get paid or not is completely down to your client. There are, however, several things that could be down to what you do that would have a significant bearing on this.

Here are 12 things you could be doing that resist the flow of money coming your way from your clients:

1. Forgetting to create your own contract, or ask to sign one made by the client

It’s best to create your own terms in your own contract, to be signed by both parties (even on top of a contract that might be provided by the client). Not using one will tempt less worthy clients to pay late, or not at all.

So make sure you build a contract into your policy with all projects, no matter how small.

2. Being indirect about getting paid

Many of us tend to get coy when it comes to discussing issues surrounding getting paid. If you’re doing a job for someone, this should be a mutual agreement in which a service is exchanged for money. This means money should be discussed openly as part of the deal.

Be clear early on exactly how much you intend to get paid, within what time-period, in how many intervals and payment method used.

3. Not including your terms on late payment

You should have a strict policy on late payments, included in your contract, or mentioned to the client early on, with a certain percentage of the project cost, to be paid by the late payer per day/week/month of payment received after an agreed grace period.

4. Offering too many payment options

Offering a large range of payment choices could be having an effect on your client’s ability to make a decision on how to pay you, thus leading to a delay in payment. Keep your options to a minimum, using the most popular methods.

5. Being impersonal surrounding payment

What I mean here is that you need to adopt a certain degree of grace, and politeness when it comes to asking to be paid, and sending out your invoice.

Even though it is your right to get paid after having done the work, being polite about it, will give a better, more grateful impression, leading to a better, and hopefully quicker response from the client.

6. Being too slow to send your invoice

The longer you leave sending over your invoice, the longer it will take for you to get paid, obviously. Secondly, if you leave it late, your client will be under the impression that you are not rushed to get paid, and maybe take a while on their side too, using your slowness as an excuse.

7. Being unclear about what you are charging for

It can be easy to write a quick, yet vague description of the project you worked on in your invoice and when asking for payment. The client needs to be totally clear on exactly what you worked on to know they are getting a fair deal and to know what they are paying for.

You wouldn’t pay for something you didn’t really understand at the mall would you?

8. Not dealing with the person in charge of payment

Be clear on who exactly in your client’s company is supposed to deal with payment and make sure your invoice gets to them, to avoid constant passing around and further confusion.

The larger the organisation, the more important this is.

9. Forgetting to chase up

Chasing up a late-paying client is perfectly reasonable if it’s been a while and need only be an email, at least to start. Consider calling up clients during work hours, to really amp up the pressure. If these don’t work, consider moving to formal letters, even the small claims court over it.

A useful article on how to chase up late payments in more depth is on the journalism.co.uk site here.

10. Being hesitant about what you charge

Changing your rates mid-project or being vague about what you charge can encourage some clients (often subconsciously) to feel they have the upper hand in terms of your professional relationship. With this, could come delayed payment.

11. Forgetting to ask for a deposit payment at the start

Particularly for larger projects, with larger fees, it’s a good idea to ask for a percentage fee of the overall charge, such as 30% paid, before starting.

If a client doesn’t agree to doing this, you’re probably better off without them, and would avoid payment issues with them after you’ve completed the work.

12. Not accepting payment when it is offered

You can really be missing an opportunity when someone asks whether it would be ok to pay there and then. They might say something like ‘can I pay you by bank transfer right now?’ and you say ‘no, no that’s fine, we can leave it till the work is done!’

Accept payment whenever the opportunity arises.

Any nightmare stories or further ideas are welcome in the comments section below!

Don’t forget to add yourself to our newsletter for regular tips for creatives and a free ebook that you can’t find on the blog.

These are the people you are not only creating your finished product or service for, but the people you base your entire brand around. Your existence as a creative professional who earns good money from what you do depends on them.

It’s something I talk about in my free ebook that you can download, a must have set of core elements for people who want decent, regular clients.

Are you designing websites for creative industry businesses? Who are you painting pictures of bored-looking cartoon cats for?

Once you know what your target demographic/market is, you can go a step further and laser focus your business in the process by doing the following…

Think about your absolutely ideal, dream client within your target audience. What company do they work for? What’s the project they’ve hired you for? How much are they paying you? Where do they go on holiday? Where do they live?

Write it down, in good detail and read it and update it whenever you like.

I’m being this specific on purpose! The more of a clear vision you have of this person and remind yourself of them, the more you will do, consciously or sub-consciously over time, in bringing this client, this project, and others like it, to you.

Being clear on this will guide you more than you think, and you might find your ideal job on your doorstep tomorrow, if you build this into your creative plan.

Good luck to you!

Thoughts are welcome, please comment and I will be happy to respond.

Cheers!

If not, why not? Every day serves as an opportunity to add prospects and clients and others who have expressed an interest in you and your service, or simply followers of your expertise, to your mailing list.

Once they are on there, you are able to send these highly targeted people news, tidbits, and interesting information that effectively serves to remind them you exist. These contacts are now on your database (having opted in), and you have the right to send material to them, which is hugely valuable.

Email is still the most effective form of direct online communication amongst human beings. People do check most of their emails, especially if you have nurtured some trust and are liked (which you are/will be). The denser your mailing list, the more benign exposure you will get. And you need to get good ongoing exposure, right?

I wanted to share the main steps involved in setting up a mailing list and newsletter. It starts with working out what you’ll put in it…

Content

First of all you need to decide on what content you will be providing via your newsletter. Will it be interesting updates to your work, what you have been working on? Or will you be providing tips or advice or articles based around your knowledge, perhaps in association with a blog you write that is aimed at your target client?

© 45Royale Inc 2011

Depending on the main reason behind setting up your newsletter, which could be to keep prospects and clients reminded of you, or for the purpose of sharing expertise on something, make sure you are creating content aimed strictly at your particular target group.

This could be your potential clients, or people who express an interest in your chosen topic of expertise.

Set Up

You need to sign up to an autoresponder like Aweber or Mailchimp. Having an online service like these performing the hard-work of running and maintaining a newsletter is a must. These providers will enable automated initial messages, building forms, automated broadcasts, statistics provision, database compilation and more.

Aweber is my personal favourite here, although it will attract a small monthly fee, which is definitely worth it.

There are other free providers that will provide similar functions like Aardvark and Bravenet, although I would advise against free providers as they may send out ads with your mail outs, and you could risk losing subscribers.

You will need to create a welcome message as part of setting up a newsletter with an autoresponder like Aweber. Make sure you remind new subscribers here what they should expect from the newsletter, how often they will receive it, as well as letting them know if you intend on promoting any products through it.

Don’t send out emails explicitly for selling anything directly, keep it on the low and make such messages indirect.

Opt-in area

The right people need to be able to sign up or ‘opt-in’ to your mailing list through a landing page, or a small area on your blog or site, for example. An example on Red Lemon Club is here.

Giving something away like a free ebook aimed at those you want on your list with the opt-in is highly recommended. An ebook, for example, can be attached with the welcome email subscribers receive, which you can set up via your autoresponder dashboard. You’ll need to take the code from your autoresponder and place it in your site in order for this to work, and this might take some professional help.

Now all you have to do is design your newsletter and attract subscribers to your opt-in page before sending out regular updates. Be sure to take care of your subscribers, responding to queries and so on. You want your subscribers to stay on your list!

Call to action

Include some kind of call to action that prompts your subscribers to take additional steps that lead to them hiring you for a project or buying a product of yours. This could be in the form of a brief line at the end of your actual newsletter.

Now it’s down to you to maintain a level of discipline, and send out newsletters according to your planned schedule. Something like once every two months if you are updating people of your work is fine.

Go out there and get known!

It’s taken a fair amount of hard work to attracting and maintaining followers to a growing network, but it’s all for good reasons. Twitter is my number one source of traffic by far, but the benefits don’t stop there.

On top of benefiting any blogs you might have, a large and growing network on Twitter should be in your best interest, as it is for me as a creative professional. I’m surprised when I see so many people miss the value in a large and growing network of people relevant to your industry. Perhaps you don’t know how to grow your Twitter followers effectively, or don’t yet see the huge value that doing so could present.

Twitter is one of the few places where quality as well as quantity count.

Because of the way content is restricted (to 140 characters) and the way people are able to interact with anyone, without the need to be accepted as a friend (as with Facebook), it is the best place to make yourself known to large numbers of people who could be interested in you and your brand.

Here are 15 reasons why you need to get started building and growing a significant and relevant network on Twitter:

1. To have access to a group of people that you can refer to for advice 24/7.

2. To generate targeted traffic to your sites and portfolio. The larger your network, the more people will visit your site (if the site is of interest and of relevance to them).

3. To develop friendships and relations with people you otherwise might never have met.

4. To add credibility to your brand, your business and your website.

5. To expand your pool of potential collaborators.

6. As a means to introduce your work to large numbers of people who are already interested in you, without disturbing those that are not.

7. To build your online presence as an industry leader.

8. To widen the net of potential new clients who pick up on your work.

9. As a means to gather feedback on your projects from around the world almost instantly.

10. As a way for your updates to easily be shared, and even go viral within the Twitter system.

11. To let people who are interested keep up to date with you wherever you are in the world, for free, in real time without the need to write long posts.

12. For people to see your human side beyond your more regimented portfolio updates.

13. To refer or be referred by others easily and efficiently.

14. To help your own creativity and spark new ideas from updates that you see.

15. To boost and grow your social interaction for those who tend to work independently.

Of course all this needs to be done in a legitimate, organic manner that is congruent with the people you are interacting with. It’s not about spamming, aggressive following, being manipulative or being destructive.

Growing your network should be a gradual process, that introduces you and what you stand for to the people who want to know about you in the first place.

For more help on exactly how to do this, read the guide I wrote recently called: ‘5 Steps to a Solid Twitter Network’ that you can get here. It’s currently at an extra low price, so I would go for it now before I reset the price. It’s a steal!

Good luck with it all!

See you on Twitter!

Alex

The trouble is, with this adolescent pressure to fit in, we began to fear what other people thought of us. On top of this, most school systems reinforce this fear, through providing an environment in which conforming is good and deviation is bad. Taking risks and standing out as being a bad thing was drummed into us, day in day out.

So most of the lack of risk-taking in our adult lives stems from those high-school years. It’s possible, and necessary, to break out of those habits instilled into us at school. It’s time to drop those negative habits and return to being the creative dreamers we were before.

Care about creating and not about conforming. Leave school!

But is grouping your online contacts into circles worth it and what’s the point? I talk a little more about them and their uses here:

How they work

When you add someone to a circle, you will see their stream of updates in your ‘Home’ tab, by default.

As with on Facebook, there is a main stream containing the updates from everyone, but you can also specify here what streams you want to see from certain circles by highlighting/clicking the circles you want to see streams from on the left under your Home page.

For example, you may decide to only want to see updates from ‘Family’ and not ‘Friends’ in one instance, which you can activate by clicking ‘Family’.

Relationships on G+ are more similar to Twitter than they are on Facebook. You can follow people without them following you and see their updates, provided they are intended for you (their post is intended for ‘public’ or you are in one of their circles). This is an excellent gateway to being able to engage with the updates of people you might not otherwise be able to connect with on Facebook.

Bear in mind that you can only share content on other people’s streams who have actually added you to one of their circles. Many other G+ sources are saying otherwise, which is not true.

Uses for circles

Ok, so circles sound interesting, but what use can they be for you as a freelancer?

One use for circles is for freelancers looking to connect with certain prospects. An illustrator, for example, could create a circle entitled ‘Art Directors’ and add these people to this circle (as well as other circles if you choose to do so). This allows you to share certain content with only them, as long as they follow you.

This also allows you to be able to see only their content in your ‘Home’ tab stream, which you can then read and engage with, drawing in their attention.

As well as being able to use circles to simply categorize groups of contacts, they can be used creatively for keeping track of things by combining the use of a circle with G+’s sharing options. For example, you can create a ‘Things to Read’ circle. When you see an interesting post but don’t have time to read it, you can share the post itself to your ‘Things to Read’ circle. Later you can refer back to this circle in your main stream and read through collected posts.

Another great use of circles for creative freelancers is to have a circle that you only share work to that you want people to critique, before sharing it to the wider public.

To buy the eCourse on using Google+ to win more clients, as a freelancer, head over here to read more details.

I’d love to hear your experiences or questions you have with using Google+ circles as creative freelancers, by adding a note to our comments section below.

This means being someone who sticks to their own defined values, needs and policies and presents them to those they engage with (without coming across as aggressive).

Part of establishing boundaries includes defining your values, which might sound cheesy, but it’s worth clarifying what your core values are as a business entity and a brand. Values reflect your personal sense of right and wrong, and include things like:

• Being passionate
• Respecting others
• Making others feel good about themselves
• Embracing learning
• The importance of being adventurous
• Creating a fun environment

Values are important in a professional sense, because they will determine your own approach, attitude and ultimately your brand and how you consistently come across to people online and offline.

Knowing what your own values are and sticking to them will define you, garner respect from others, and enable you to develop deeper, more positive relationships with people and fans, which is vital for business success.

Being aware of your own needs as a freelancing professional, not just those of your prospects, is also important, and this will inform which clients you take on, the prices you set, the time you spend, and ultimately, the ‘policies’ you set both personally and publicly so that people know what they are dealing with when dealing with you.

One example of establishing boundaries based on your needs is in turning down projects that require too much of your time and resources for too little pay.

In setting this boundary, you now have time to focus on landing projects with better clients. This also has the bonus of focusing your product or service so that it fits in with what top clients actually want.

Saying no to crappy projects is an important part of this course too, because it will allow you to focus on the top quality clients, especially if job requests are coming in thick and fast.

Another example might be to choose only to work with clients that inspire and energise you, as opposed to draining you of energy and wasting your time and talents. Having this kind of boundary means you are more inclined to ‘screen’ clients that approach you for work.

When clients almost have to prove themselves in order to pay you, you are in a real position of power, and one that will appeal to great prospects willing to work with you.