Getting started on the right foot: part IV

Before you start

As in every­thing we have cov­ered so far, revisit your busi­ness goals because the extent of those goals will deter­mine what you do at this stage. Be hon­est and don’t expect your self to reach rock star lev­els with out the invest­ment of time and skill build­ing. Also, don’t con­sider your­self a fail­ure if you decide to limit your growth to your own pace, there’s not­ing wrong know­ing and prac­tic­ing what you know works best for you.

Remem­ber two things:

• Wait­ing for per­fec­tion will just keep you waiting;
• The best strat­egy as set forth by Seth Godin is to “fire, aim, aim” or more pre­cisely don’t expect to hit a bulls eye  your first time around actu­ally, it may take sev­eral times mak­ing adjust­ments before you hit your mark.

These next steps rely heav­ily on your hav­ing some idea of where you want to be and the strate­gies that will get your there. The first two are impor­tant regard­less of your skill set or inter­est for the the third, they are both impor­tant to your success.

Start invest­ing in good photography

As a per­son who sat on more than a few juries, one of the first things that would cause me elim­i­nate an artist has been related to the way they dis­play their work. Pre-digital days made this short­com­ing glar­ingly obvi­ous through dirty,faded slides, or obvi­ously old slides. Dig­i­tal images that are obvi­ously taken with lit­tle knowl­edge of even the basics of pho­tog­ra­phy, along with poor com­po­si­tion, light­ing and yes even dirt on the image,(caused by specks on the sen­sor) will also get an imme­di­ate “no”.

The issue is not your pho­tog­ra­phy skills, but rather your will­ing­ness or abil­ity to rec­og­nize the story those images tell. If you know and rec­og­nize that your pub­lic image is your brand and that brand is the way buy­ers are attracted to you, then you’ll do what­ever it takes to ensure you have images of your work that rein­force you and your brand. Your images should reflect the same pride and pas­sion you put into your work, if they don’t then it is likely you don’t under­stand the other con­nec­tions that all add up to the mes­sage your poten­tial buy­ers take in.

If you feel you have the skill set to pho­to­graph your work the go for it, if not hire a pro­fes­sional and direct that pro­fes­sional so she can cap­ture your work as best as possible.

I’ll be cov­er­ing this entire process later in much more detail in future posts.

Start focus­ing on your Inter­net presence

Before you start

Fig­ure out your goals, what do you want your web pres­ence to say about you and your busi­ness. The inter­net allows you to spread your mes­sage wher­ever you want,  but more impor­tantly it gives you the tools to find the right buy­ers and con­nect with them.

Ask your­self the fol­low­ing questions:

• Do I want to use the Inter­net to sell my work?
• Do I want to use it to direct poten­tial buy­ers to phys­i­cal sales venues
• Do I want to use it as a way to inform poten­tial buy­ers, if so what do I want them to learn
• Is my mar­ket Inter­net savvy?
• Do I want to use the inter­net both as a sell­ing venue and as a way to build a net­work of poten­tial buy­ers to feed my phys­i­cal venues?

Hon­estly asses your skills and preferences

If your com­puter and Inter­net skills are rudi­men­tary and you can’t imag­ine ever improv­ing them, then on line sell­ing is not going to be for you.

If your skills are even slightly bet­ter than know­ing what a key­board and mouse are, you should have no trou­ble get­ting started. How­ever, the depth to which you’ll be able to use  the tools to help your busi­ness will be lim­ited by your desire to learn and your pri­or­ity to change. You notice I said pri­or­ity, wher­ever improv­ing your tech­ni­cal skills fits is where it fits, if some­thing else is a higher pri­or­ity then accept that you won’t real­ize the same ben­e­fits as some­one who has dif­fer­ent priorities.

At this point, it is very impor­tant to be bru­tally hon­est with your­self about your growth, because any level of growth beyond know­ing where the power but­ton is, will require patience and time. To really use the Inter­net and a com­puter as tools for your busi­ness you have to:

• know or be will­ing to learn what is possible;
• deter­mine the level of your involve­ment e.g. Learn­ing the skills vs. Know­ing the con­cepts and hav­ing some­one else execute;
• be will­ing to accept the lim­i­ta­tions of your skills and not expect to achieve the same results as a you would if your skills were much better;
• not worry about being judged we all had to start somewhere.

Assess what your strat­egy requires

The extent and tim­ing of your busi­ness growth strat­egy will ulti­mately effect the scale and tim­ing of your Inter­net pres­ence. You’ll need to know:

• how you feel about pay­ment options;
• how involved you want to be in how your sales por­tal looks and works;
• how much time and money you want to invest both early on and in the long haul;
• what your mar­ket­ing strat­egy is and how you will design the buy­ing expe­ri­ence for on-line shoppers;
• how does social media fit into your strat­egy and to what extent do you want to learn and use it.

This list is by no means all inclu­sive because your strat­egy will be dif­fer­ent than mine or some­one else’s, the impor­tant thing is to ask the ques­tions and to with hold judg­ment because often it is the seem­ingly crazy idea, the one you mom or best friend might roll their eyes at, that turns out to be the best.

If you take noth­ing away from this REMEMBER:

You can’t break the Inter­net all by your­self and you will always be improv­ing your skills each time you log on.

There is not right or wrong way there is only the way you choose.

What ever you choose will have con­se­quences, and they are just the out come that results from an action…that’s all and noth­ing more. The only inter­pre­ta­tion that can result from con­se­quences is whether or not your actions pro­duced the results you want. If not adjust some­thing, if so pat your­self on the back and move on to the next thing.