My wobbly journey through creative business and the online world.
It was a dark and stormy night… actually it was! And cold. And misty… Up the top of a mountain near Brisbane when I saw fire spinning for the first time. I was transfixed. And transformed. There was my future life, spinning before me in a yellow swirl of stinky chemical induced flame.
Fast forward many hippy festivals, fire circles, a few fractured bones, bruises and a bunch of classes later, I put together my first fire show. I promptly decided to move on from my previous decade of running a costume design business and move onto the stage myself. Time for a new business project. Eccentrix, fire and dance.
Now the younger folk out there might not appreciate the gravity of this but it was 2005 and we had no internet. I mean it existed but if you weren’t hooked up via Ethernet cable you had to buy a dongle to plug into your computer which was expensive and not very dependable, so we didn’t bother. Business cards with an inbuilt mini disc were still a thing (actually they never really took off.) Sharing music meant burning an actual CD and handing it to someone in a plastic case. Cassette tapes were still my main source of music listening. I think we even still had yellow pages AND we used them (fun fact: they had phone numbers in them, and addresses). In fact I DID use them. To find twenty entertainment agents in Victoria who might represent us.
My friend and I spent weeks videoing our fire performance on an old Sony camcorder with expensive two hour DV tapes to record on. I was introduced to Adobe Premier. I felt like a Hollywood movie producer. Windows media maker had an authoring tool for creating DVDs. With menus. Animated menus. ANIMATED MENUS! We were totally pro. We burned the discs, printed a bunch of dvd cover sheets for the dvd sleeves, put them in A4 ENVELOPES and POSTED them. Yes. In the post. With stamps. Even. To all our (potential) agents.
It wasn’t a very good video. And the only contact on it was my phone number. But we got one reply. And I still get work from them 13 years later. Learn by doing, right?
Around this time the internet became more accessible and clients were asking for my website, so it became apparent that having an online presence was essential.
My super handy geeky internet friend was a coder and spent weeks and weeks putting a home page together that never quite worked. It cost me about $200 for a static page with nothing but a background on it. It was rad. Well, it was pretty. It landed on the virtual scrap heap.
Then this thing called ‘My Space’ was all the rage. (anyone remember that?) So I put the videos on my YouTube channel. (they’re still here!!) and hooked them up to the My Space page. It looked kind of fun. I never got a job from it. Even when I got all crafty with ‘Pimp my space’ and put glitter and galleries and flashy bits of crap on there, still no hits. A few hit-ons but no hits. (My Space got redesigned some time ago so most of the visual elements have disappeared.)
Then this thing called ‘Dreamweaver‘ came to me and because I am one I thought it would be a cool tool to build with. So in 2008 I spent 6 weeks, 14 hours a day, under the guide of ‘Dreamweaver for idiots – teenagers visual edition’, making this thing called a website. It hasn’t changed. In over 10 years. Yup, I’m rockin’ the interwebs.
Then Facebook burst onto the scene. Yay. Somewhere to post photos for friends. Of friends. More photos. And still more photos. I didn’t take many photos or have many friends so I didn’t use it much. But over the years it changed and developed and become more satanic-I-mean-user-friendly and more addictive-I-mean-useful and more aggressive-I-mean-integrated. So I ended up using it a lot for creating and finding events, and sharing information on various business projects I had going on.
About five years ago I really wanted to rebuild my Eccentrix website, but it was going to be a monster effort, and to be honest my interest in entertainment and costuming was beginning to fade. But I WAS super interested in building an ‘Intentional Business Community.’ called ‘in-Spiral.’ What is that I hear you ask? Ahh, well you’ve have to peep in here to find out. This was my first WordPress site. (actually I started a blog years ago but it died from neglect) I never really decided what the website would be, who it would be for, and what the intention of it was, so it’s ended up being my online scrap book. In-Spiral has a Facebook page which I share projects and links to occasionally, but I haven’t had the jumping beans required to keep it going. For now it naps. And snores, even.
More recently I decided to clean up in-Spiral.org and turn it into an umbrella for various projects, with a central bank of inspiring resources and links. The first step has been to take my own creative work out of it into another WordPress site – tjoni.com. When that is complete I will link tjoni.com back to in-Spiral.org as a directory listing. Supporting that is Facebook, Patreon, and a newly created Twitter account. I am yet to use ANY of these effectively, but I am working at it.
For a while I used Buffer to post creative writing to various sites, but I’ve found it a bit dry to use. Hootesuite used to be better, and used to be free, but it’s over my budget now.
The biggest challenge at the moment is prioritising projects, getting decent traction on one to the point I can employ or collaborate with others to upkeep its momentum, and scale up projects from there. In the past I’ve tried pushing everything uphill at once, and it works for a little while but I quickly run out of puff when there is no return on the effort.
So now, I’m back to the learning and development stage, including re-learning social media at Deakin (auto-correct keeps trying to make that Eaton’s), and looking to remedy this over-abundance of projects and refine it into an abundance of return so I can ‘work smarter not harder.’
So, what are some of my takeaways from all of this?
#1 Grow your projects and ideas like a tree – one sprout at a time.
Get one project working and supporting you BEFORE you move onto the next. Otherwise you will end up juggling way too many balls at once and if none of them are supporting you in return you will run out of steam. I thought I had to make lots of projects to appeal to a few clients, but it would have been better to make a few projects for a lot of clients, i.e. generate a better marketing strategy rather than too many offerings.
#2 You DON’T have to make ‘all the things’.
Great ideas are endless and bountiful and you DON’T have to bring every single one to fruition. Elizabeth Gilbert is the first person who gave me permission to ‘let go’ of having to follow and manifest every single idea in her video “Your elusive creative genius“. This is the first Ted Talk I ever watched and still my favourite to date. You are not responsible for every single good idea that comes to mind. If something really wants to be created it will find the right person to come through at the right time.
#3 PLAN your marketing.
Be realistic about how much time you can spend on social media based marketing and create a plan around that. It is far better to post every single week, without fail, rather than to put up 5 posts a day for 10 days and then run out of steam and give up entirely.
If you have a social media management platform you can use your inspired moments of marketing mania to create and automate posts days or weeks ahead of time. Obviously this won’t work for everything such as responding to other posts, or re-tweeting on twitter, but you can certainly plan your own generated content in this way.
#4 Make social media work for you, don’t become its slave.
Decide how much time you want to invest interacting with other people and their content for work, and stick to that so it doesn’t eat up all your time. Remember, unless your JOB involves being a social media manager, it is just a TOOL to generate networks and relationships for your work, it is NOT the end goal.
#5 Who are you even?
If you have different profiles for work and play, remember which profile or account you are currently signed into so you keep your interactions relevant. And ensure your work / business persona is similar on all websites and social media platforms to help build your brand. This includes images, colours, tag lines, names, biography, music, video, all the things.
#6 Security on websites is super important.
There are many free websites out there but the lack of security can be a major issue. If you are going to be building a decent size website, get someone who knows what they’re doing to ensure your security settings are in place. I have no idea about this so I employed a friend to set up the security on both WordPress sites and now I can just focus on making them pretty! But I know people who have been caught out and had to re-create their entire website again. From scratch.
#7 Keep discovering!
The rate of change is accelerating constantly and if you don’t run with it you’ll get snowballed by it. That doesn’t mean sign up to every single online platform that exists – you won’t have time to do what you actually do. But be aware of what exists and which platforms are going to support you.
For instance I just found out about Quora, which is kind of like social media based on asking and answering questions about life the universe and everything. Or Reddit which is similarly based on people’s interests. Or Meet Up which has been around for ever and still houses many interest groups which meet up in the real world. And for connecting with potential bosses, collaborators and employees, Linked In is pretty activated also.
Pick and choose what works for you, and don’t feel you have to maintain every single platform. Except for Twitter. While we’re at Deakin (not Eakin’s auto-correct grrr). We must tweet… We mu-u-ust tweet. Word.
#8 Fail Upwards
I wasn’t going to do a ‘#8’, because all the tips about publishing tips say we should post articles with odd numbers of tips as they are more popular. But this one is really important. REALLY important. And that is… Don’t listen to me! I don’t know what the hell i’m doing! I’m still flying blind! But DO try. Have a go. And as a bloody legend called Seth Godin says, ‘Success is failing upwards.’
So, Happy failing!
If you are working on various projects I’d love to know what tools you use and what project and time management tricks you use to keep everything sailing along smoothly.
Written by Tjoni Johansen
Copyright 2020 all rights reserved
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If you are interested in having Tjoni write a personal dreamscape or myth for your self or a project please get in touch by email at tjonij @ outlook.com . Many thanks.