Starting a Creative Business from Scratch: The Foundations | Sean Dalton | Skillshare
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Starting a Creative Business from Scratch: The Foundations

teacher avatar Sean Dalton, Travel Photographer

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Course Introduction

      1:31

    • 2.

      Class Project - Creative Moodboard!

      2:30

    • 3.

      The Biggest Barrier Most Creatives Face

      2:02

    • 4.

      Introduction to the Creative Business Model

      4:55

    • 5.

      Defining Your Brand Identity

      2:06

    • 6.

      Establishing Your Artistic Identity

      4:13

    • 7.

      The Age Old Question: Should You Niche Down?

      2:44

    • 8.

      Building the Habit of Daily Creation

      3:22

    • 9.

      Building a Portfolio to Attract Your Dream Clients

      20:25

    • 10.

      Who Can You Expect to Work With?

      6:04

    • 11.

      Scoring Your First Few Clients

      6:18

    • 12.

      A Sustainable Approach to Social Media

      6:42

    • 13.

      Getting Legal: What do you need to do?

      4:31

    • 14.

      Next Steps

      2:06

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About This Class

Are you an artist dreaming of running your own creative business? Join Sean in this 50 minute course as he covers all the most foundational knowledge you need in order to take that first step. 

In this course you will learn: 

  • The Biggest Mistake Creatives Make When Starting a Business
  • The Creative Business Model: The Best Ways to Generate Income
  • How to Build a Portfolio to Attract Your Dream Clients
  • Defining Your Brand Identity
  • Establishing Your Unique Style so you can Stand Out

Plus so much more....

Whether you're a photographer or videographer looking to score more clients, an illustrator looking to monetize their work, or a graphic designer looking to sell their designs online, this course will give you detailed introduction to the world of running a creative business.

Looking forward to seeing you inside, let's get going!

Meet Your Teacher

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Sean Dalton

Travel Photographer

Top Teacher

Hey guys! I'm Sean.

For the last 5 years I've been traveling the world capturing as many photos as I possibly can. I'm drawn to a wide range of photography styles, and constantly striving to improve my art. Emotion and storytelling are two central pillars of my artwork, and I am always looking for new and interesting stories to tell via my camera.

I'm originally from San Francisco, California, but have spent the last few years chasing stories and light throughout Asia.

Most of what I teach relates to my background with travel and lifestyle photography, but I am constantly expanding my focus as I continue to grow as a photographer. I'm pumped that you are here, let's grow together!

I'm active on Instagram, and you can also find me on YouTube.... See full profile

Level: Beginner

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Transcripts

1. Course Introduction: Creative business off the ground, I think seems a lot scarier than it actually is. If you have a natural passion to create and share your art with the world, you could just be one step away from building your dream creative business. Hey, guys, my name is Sean Dalton. Over the last nine years, I've built a travel photography business that has sent me to all corners of the globe working on exciting projects with brands like DJI, Anchor, Spotify, and Samson. During this time, I've also helped thousands of other creatives start their creative businesses as well. When I first started my photography business nine years ago, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, but there was one thing that I did have, and that was the courage to start. I knew that if I started, I was going to learn as I went. And that's exactly what happened. Fast forward to today, and I've taken an art form that I truly love that I'm passionate about, and I've turned it into a business that allows me to do what I love most. Travel and take photos. Now, in this course, we're going to be covering an introduction to getting your creative business off the ground as well. From starting your brand and establishing your first few income sources to building a portfolio and scoring your first few clients. We are covering all the most foundational things that you need to know to get your business off the ground. You're a photographer or a videographer looking to score more clients, an illustrator looking to license their work online, or a graphic designer looking to sell physical products. This course will give you the foundation that you need to start monetizing your creative business and the steps that you need to take to get there. I'm super excited about this class guys, and I really hope that you'll join me, and if you do, then I will see you in the very first lesson. Let's get after it. 2. Class Project - Creative Moodboard!: Guys well, welcome to the class. I am so excited that you're here, and we have a lot of content to get into in this class. But before we do so, I want to talk about the class project of this course. And one of the things I love so much about Skillshare is the fact that these classes have class projects. I think it's super important for us to engage creatively with the course content. And the class project for this particular course, is to put together a mood board of 15 to 20 images that massively inspire you as a creative. I think this is important for two different reasons. Number one, I've always said, and you'll hear me say this to at this course is that your creativity as an artist and your ability to create and make work that inspires you is the underlying motor to your business. That is the foundation to your business, and that's what's going to drive business as well. Now, of course, there's a lot of other things that go into running a business, which we're going to discuss in this course. The underlying motor of being creative and engaging with the artistic process is super super important for us. So that's one of the reasons why I want you guys to put together a moodboard. And the other reason is because when we're working with clients, moodboards are a very natural thing. You're always going to be sharing moodboards with clients, or they're going to be sharing them with you. So it's important to be able to learn how to compile a bunch of different images into a moodboard because that's something that we do quite often in the creative industries. Terms of what can go into your moodboard, this can look any way you want to. Now, for me personally, I have something called a vision vault. That's just a fancy name for my mood board. But in my vision vult, I just have a bunch of work that inspires me. There's certain artistic elements in these photos that I just am really drawn to and that I want to incorporate into my work. So when I take a look at this vision vault, maybe before a shoot or before I go out and create something, I have a little bit more of an idea of some of the stylistic elements that I want to combine into my work. This is a super fun activity, and I think it's very important for us as creatives. And once you put together those 15 to 20 images, go ahead and share them here in the class project section of this class. You want to, you can put a bunch of different images together in Canva, and then just share us a photo of all those images on one page. You could share us a link to a Pinterest board that you used. I personally think it looks great when you put it all on one page, so we can see on one page, all of the work that massively inspires you, and that would be my recommendation. But if you don't want to do that, you could just post a link as well. But that is the class project for this class, and I'm really excited to see this because I think the mood boards that people put together says a lot about their personality and their creative direction. So I can't wait to see yours. Now let's move on to the next lesson. 3. The Biggest Barrier Most Creatives Face: Before we jump into the meats of this class, I want to talk about something that I think is the biggest thing that holds creativis back from not only starting a creative business, but also excelling in a creative business as well. And that is impostor syndrome. Now, impostor syndrome is an incredibly natural feeling that many of us encounter when we feel like we might be out of our league a little bit. And I remember when I started my photography business nine years ago, I kept thinking to myself, Why are these people paying me? My photos are not that good. I am way out of my league. And I only gained that confidence. Once I spoke to a friend who said, Sean, your work is absolutely incredible. You shouldn't be feeling this way. You're not out of your league. You're so much better than many other photographers. And even if you aren't the best, you are more than capable enough to charge what you're charging for your work. Once I heard that from a very close friend of mine, I was able to put myself out there more and engage more with my business. But up until that point, I really struggled. And Plus syndrome is one of those things that's not just going to flip overnight. Yes, I felt better after that discussion with my friend, but it still continued to plague me throughout my business. And one of the most important things that I've learned as a creative business owner is that your mind will always play tricks on you, and we'll always try and tell you that you were not good enough to do this or you're not talented enough to do that. But at the end of the day, this is just your mind playing tricks on you. And I think that is super important to remember throughout your creative journey. Think it's also important to remember that impost syndrome is not a rare thing. It is incredibly common amongst all of humanities. Some of the greatest artists and politicians and businessmen have all felt these feelings of impost syndrome. And the first step to overcoming them, is just recognizing that those feelings are there and realizing that those feelings are irrational and that they're only going to hold you back from achieving your goals. But I really do think that this is one of the biggest barriers that a lot of creatives face. I have faced it massively throughout my career, and it's still something that I'm constantly battling, as well as many of the other creatives in my creative community. But with that said, guys, let's move on to the next lesson. We're going to get into a little bit more of the meat of this class. 4. Introduction to the Creative Business Model: Does the creative business model actually work? How do we earn an income as creatives? And this is going to look different depending on the specific creative endeavor that you're engaging in, if you're an illustrator, if you're a photographer, or videographer, a web designer. There are a lot of different creative careers out there that we can pursue. But in general, there are three main buckets that many of us earn an income from. And those three things are client work or commissions and licensing, social media sponsorships and digital products or physical products. The most successful creative businesses are earning an income from all three of these buckets. But when you're just starting out, client work is really going to be the main income generator for you. And the reason why client work is such a great place to start is because there really isn't a huge barrier to entry. As long as you have somewhat of a portfolio that you can show clients that you can do the work, then you can get jobs. You don't need a social media following for this. You don't need to have a robust online store. You just need a simple portfolio to show clients that you can do the work that they need you to do. There's two main categories of client work. The first one is consumer, so we're creating art or we're doing client work for the average person or a consumer. And then the other side of that is businesses. So we're working with actual businesses to create things for their marketing material or their social media, whatever that might look like. And like most creatives, I started on the consumer level. I was selling to the average person. I was shooting portraits, I was shooting weddings, and that was a great way for me to learn how to actually engage with clients and how to deliver and navigate that whole client work process. As you start to grow your creative business, you're going to be able to start working with more businesses. Businesses are fantastic to work with because typically they have much higher budgets than the consumer, and things are a little bit more organized, and the projects are a little bit more fun as well. So like I said, when I first started out, I was shooting a lot of portraits, a lot of weddings, shooting for some small restaurants and cafes. But as I grew my business as a photographer and I got a better portfolio. Then I started to be able to work with brands like DGI and Adobe and anchor and spotify and all of these bigger brands that had much higher budgets and were just a joy to So client work is probably the easiest way for us to get into earning an income as gratives, and we're going to talk a little bit more about how to find specific clients a little bit later on in this course. But before we do so, I want to talk about the other two sources of income that I mentioned as well. And the first one is social media sponsorships. And when you're just starting out, this isn't probably going to be a big driver in your business because you don't have a large social media follow Once you do grow your social media following, there's going to be a lot of brands that approach you and ask you if they can advertise on your social media platforms. So for me, personally, about 30% of my income now comes from social media sponsorships specifically through YouTube. I've been sharing on YouTube for a few years now. And as I've grown, a lot of brands are reaching out and they want to pay me to market their product or market their service on my YouTube channel. Has been great for me, and we are going to talk about social media a little bit later on in this course and kind of how to play the social media game in a healthy way, because I know it can be a struggle for a lot of different types of people, but social media sponsorships can become a pretty big earner for us as creatives in our creative business. Now the last bucket of income is product sales, and these can be absolutely massive for us as creatives. And they're kind of in two different categories, physical products and digital products. A digital product might be something like a light room preset pack. I sell that on my websites. It could be an online course. It could be a brush pack, if you're using P creates, it could be an eBook. There's a lot of different digital assets that we can create and sell online both on our website, as well as other online marketplaces as well. Now, in terms of physical products, this has gotten a lot easier for us to do in this day and age. Back in the day, you'd have to go find a manufacturer and come up with your design and go through that whole process, and there was a big investment up front. Nowadays, we can just license our work through websites like Society six or other print on demand services, and somebody can go in and buy a physical product with our design on it, and we earn a commission from that. So for me as a photographer, I sell photography prints on a website called darkroom.com, and all I have to do is upload my photo, set the price, and then when somebody buys that print, the company will print it and ship it out to them, and I will earn a sweet little commission on top of that. Those are the three main buckets of income that most creative businesses follow. And I know you might be thinking to yourself, Shawn, how am I supposed to know what to do next? You just maybe even more confused because there are so many different options for me to earn an income as a creative. And I know exactly how you're feeling. That's how I felt when I was just starting out. I wanted to introduce some of the ways that we can earn an income as artists. But now I want to kind of take a step back and focus on the things that you can do right now to get your business off the ground. That is what this course is about. It's to get you started on your creative business and give you a path forward for the future. So with that said, let's move on to the next lesson. Talk about a switch that you need to flip in your head right now before you do anything else. 5. Defining Your Brand Identity: This lesson, I want to talk about your identity as an artist and your identity as a business owner. And I think a lot of creatives really struggle with this idea of thinking of themselves as a business or as a business owner. But this is one of the most important switches that you need to flip in your brain is to stop thinking about yourself as a starving artist and start thinking of yourself as a business. If you don't make this switch over, you're going to have a much harder time with the business side of things, but if you embody this idea that you are a business owner and that you can do this, to be setting yourself up for business success as the longest time, I was totally okay with being this starving artist. I thought it was cool, and I thought it kind of fit my persona. But the older I got, the more I grew in my creative business, the more I realized how important it is for me to identify as a business owner and really embody this identity that I am running a business, so I can support myself financially. Also want to talk about the importance of running your business as a personal brand. Now, when you're starting your business, you can decide to create a unique name for your business, or you can run your business as yourself as your personal brand. So for me, I'm a photographer, and my brand name is Sean Dalton, and I am the business. I am the brand. And I think this is super important for artists to do in this day and age for one main reason, and that is AI. AI has really taken off in the last few years and I think a lot of people are scared about it, but at the end of the day, AI cannot replace what it means to be human. And as an artist, you are that human element behind your work. Your stories and your creative process bring your art meaning, and they give it more value. And I think it's never been more important to show the person, the artist, behind the work. Now, we are going to talk about this idea a little bit more when we start talking about social media, but I just wanted to add this in here because I think having a personal brand in this day and age is super super important for your success as an artist, because not only does it allow you to connect better with people around you that are consuming your work. Also gives your work so much meaning as well because your life and your experiences and your stories give that work meaning. 6. Establishing Your Artistic Identity: Earlier on in this class, I said, your creativity and your work is the underlying motor to your business, and I truly truly believe that. And in this lesson, I want to talk a little bit more about your artistic identity or your creative identity, or some people might call this your unique style. So what is artistic identity? I think artistic identity is what defines your work and what makes your work unique. Not just a consistent visual aesthetic in your work, but also and perhaps more importantly, it's the emotions that your work elicits. So, for example, you might use consistent color palette in your work or a certain type of subject matter or composition, or maybe you're using unique techniques to achieve the look that you want in your work. And when you use these specific stylistic elements consistently throughout your work to the point where they start to elicit a very common theme or emotion or vibe or feeling, that ultimately is your artistic identity. And the reason why I want to talk about artistic identity is because this is what's going to help you stand out amongst other artists. And as you grow as an artist, more unique your style can be, the less of a commodity you're going to be as an artist. So, for example, if you're just starting out with photography, and your work isn't all that unique, and a lot of different photographers could probably achieve the same look that you're shooting. Well, at that point, you're just a commodity. Now, that doesn't mean you're not good enough to get paid. You certainly are. But as you grow and establish your own unique artistic identity, well, now, if a business or a consumer wants that specific look, they have to go to you to get it. And when you do get to that point where you have a really solid artistic identity, you can also charge a lot more money as well. Now, for me, personally, my artistic identity is kind of these dark and moodier photos with a very clear subject. My my images have a solemn, moody or isolated vibe to them. And I've gotten to this point by just building the habit of creating and chasing the stylistic elements that appeal to me, pulling inspiration from other photographers, other artists from different mediums and bridging them into Now, another example of an artist with a very solid artistic identity is Charlie Clements, another teacher here on Skillshare. And Charlie uses bright and whimsical colors, and her work is very bold and happy. She's also a master of color harmony and always seems to strike a perfect balance between colors. And we can even look at one of the greats as an example, as well, Vincent Van Gogh, who used these very rough and expressive brush strokes, which expressed of movement and dynamism in his work. And many of his works are dramatic and fleeting, a little bit moody, as well. Might be thinking to yourself, Shawn, I have no idea what my artistic identity is. My work really isn't all that unique, and I don't even know which direction my work is going to go. And that is totally fine. That's a very natural place to be when you first started out. And when it comes to finding your unique artistic identity, this is something that happens very naturally over time through the process of experimentation, curiosity, and just engaging with the creative process on a daily basis. As you're creating and consuming work from other artists that inspire you, you're going to notice that you're naturally starting to use certain stylistic elements across all of your work. That might be a specific color palette, composition, a specific type of subject matter, or even a technique to achieve a specific look. And over time, your work is going to start to develop its own unique visual signature and start to elicit similar emotions as well. Ultimately, that will become your artistic identity, but this isn't something that you can force. I really do think that it happens very organically over time, just through the process of creating and engaging creatively with your work. I think it's important for us as artists to get a little bit obsessed with the creative process and get a little bit creatively drunk as well, if that makes sense. I just to really fall into the process of creating building that habit, staying curious, and experimenting with new techniques. As long as you're doing this, you will start to develop a consistent artistic identity as time goes on. This might not seem like it's all that important from a business perspective. It actually is because having that unique, consistent, artistic identity is what's going to help you stand out from other artists and take you away from being a commodity to offering something unique that businesses can't find anywhere else. 7. The Age Old Question: Should You Niche Down?: Question that I get a lot of time from photographers, as well as other artists looking to start their creative businesses is, Shawn, should I ich down? Should I select a very specific niche and focus on that? And I think this is a fantastic question. And when you're online reading about establishing a creative business, a lot of the time you'll read that one of the first things you need to do is Niche down. For a photographer, that might mean focusing specifically on wedding photography or for an illustrator that might be focusing on portraits or for a graphic designer, that might be focusing on logos. And it is true that when you do have a really solid niche, it's much easier for us to target specific types of clients. However, we are artists, and a lot of the time, it's not easy for us to know exactly what we want to focus on on day one. Now, if you are the type of person where you know exactly what you want to focus on, you're super inspired to pursue a specific niche in your art, that's totally fine. You can get after that. But for most of us, I think a lot of us aren't really sure which niche we want to pursue. The beginning. We just want to create. We want to go out and create stuff that inspires us that's beautiful to us, and we just want to engage with the creative process, and we're really not sure which niche we are supposed to pursue. And I think that is totally fine and natural. And I don't think you should niche down right away. If you aren't 100% sure which niche you want to go down. If you do niche down too early, one of the things that can happen is you start to get bored, and it starts to get state focusing on that specific thing, and then you're not inspired anymore, and you don't want to create work, and you kind of fall off creative wagon, which, like I said before, is the underlying motor to our business. And I have fallen victim to this as well. When I first started out, I niched myself down into shooting food and coffee. And that's pretty much all I shot in the beginning. But then I started to get a little bit bored with it, and I wanted to try something new. And then when I did, well, I had to start all over again. So, in the beginning, I think it's important to be a generalist experiment with a lot of different styles of your medium, of your art form. And as you get a little bit more experience and awareness, then you can dive into a specific niche. Lot of people will hit back at this and say, well, if you're a generalist, it's so hard for you to get clients. But as we're going to talk about in the portfolio section of this course, you can create multiple different portfolios for different niches. And then when you're going out and advertising your work, you just make sure that you're sharing the relevant portfolio to that specific client. We're going to talk about that a little bit more later on in this course. But in this lesson, I just wanted to di spell the myth that you need to niche down right away. I really don't think that's something that you should be doing. I think you should be experimenting and finding what you love first, finding what works for you, and then pursuing that niche. If that's been a burning question in your mind and it's been stressing you out a little bit, I understand how you feel, but it's not all that important in the beginning. 8. Building the Habit of Daily Creation: I want to add this lesson to talk about the importance of creating daily as an artist, right? A lot of the time when we start our creative businesses, we start to get a little bit too involved in the business side of things. And I've seen a lot of creatives start to ignore the creative side of things, which is, like I said before, kind of the underlying motor to our businesses, and it can be really easy to get hung up on the business side of things and earning an income, and it starts to become a job when originally, it was a hobby, and it was a passion. So I think it's really important for us as we start to grow our creative businesses is to always come back to that creative idea. Now, for me, personally, I'm shooting a lot for work. But I also have a separate little camera, a personal camera that I take out with me on a daily basis to shoot projects that inspire me personally. So for work, a lot of the time I am shooting coal projects, but a lot of the time I'm shooting projects that aren't all that interesting to me, and I'm just doing it to pursue a means to an end. But having that personal camera with me and going out and engaging in personal projects keeps me creative and allows me to continue to grow as a creative, and it keeps me sharp as well. And every time I do go out and shoot a personal project, I'm always learning something new as well. The beauty about art or about running a creative business is there is always so much to learn. You're never going to master your medium. There's always a new technique. There's always a new style you can pursue. And as long as you're engaging with the creative process on a daily basis, you're going to continue to learn throughout the course of your life. And I think that's super important for us as creatives. And building off of this, I think it's really important for us to try and remain in a creative state as we go about running our businesses. Part of that is creating, but part of that is just approaching the world like an artist. And there's a few books that I've read recently that I think must read for artists. The first one is the creative act by Rick Rubin. And that book talks about how every aspect of our life and our upbringing and the things around us can influence our work creatively and how they play a massive part in our art. That is a fantastic book that I artist should read because it's super inspiring, and it's really interesting as well. And the other one is stillness is the key by Matt Holiday. And in that book, there's a quote that I think sums up the idea of being an artist perfectly. So in this book, the author goes on to say, we want to learn to see the world like an artist. While other people are oblivious to what surrounds them, the artist really sees. Their mind fully engaged, notices the way a bird flies or the way a stranger holds their fork or a mother looks at her child. They have no thoughts of the morrow. All they are thinking about is how to capture and communicate this experience. An artist is present, and from this stillness comes brilliance. You might interpret this as just a reframing of mindfulness in the context of an artist. And I think that is what it is, but I also think it really just does sum up this idea of every opportunity around us on a daily basis has the opportunity to influence our work. And I just loved this quote so much, and I had to include it in this course because I think it ties directly into this idea of creating on a daily basis and staying engaged with your art form. So stay curious, stay creative. It's super important for us as artists. Otherwise, we're going to go crazy. But that said, let's move on to the next lesson, we're going to start talking about building a portfolio to attract your dream clients. 9. Building a Portfolio to Attract Your Dream Clients: Earlier on in this course, I talked about how our portfolio is really one of the most foundational pieces for our creative business. It's what's going to help us get clients early on. And if you're running a creative business, you want 100% need a portfolio. Now, portfolios can look a lot of different ways. It can be a PDF document. But typically, these days, it is a website. And this might sound scary to you, starting a website and setting it up and organizing it. But trust me when I say, it's really not that difficult to set up a website. And in this video, I'm going to show you exactly how to do that using square space. Before we jump on the computer and do that. I want to talk about a few things that your portfolio should have. Number one, it should have an About Me page that says who you are. This is an opportunity for you to express the person behind your work. Like I said earlier, having that personal brand and having the stories behind your work is really important for helping your work stand out. So take that opportunity to build an About Me page, and I'll show you how to do that and share your life experiences and how those experiences have shaped Now, another thing that a portfolio should have is several different sections for the different types of work that you do. So, for example, for me, I have a section on landscape photography, portrait photography, and commercial photography. Now, when I'm reaching out to clients, I will send them the relevant portfolio to them. I cannot choose one specific style of photography. I love so many of them, and I want to continue to work in those specific styles. So I have multiple styles in my portfolio, and that is totally okay. For example, you're a graphic designer, and you have a little bit of experience working on logos. We can create a section for logos, and then maybe you have a bit of experience in branding, where you can create a sectioning portfolio for that. Maybe there's another area of graphic design that you have experience in, where you can create that page as well. Now for illustrators, this might be portraits, greeting cards and another category as well. You don't need to completely niche down. We can multiple sections in our portfolio. And then when we go on to reaching out to clients, which we're going to talk about in a few lessons here, we can just send them that specific portfolio. And one last thing, guys, this doesn't have to be perfect. We just need to get this off the ground. This is V one. There can always be V two, V three, V four. The most important thing is getting it out there and starting this process. You can always build it and improve it as you go. And if you're anything like me, you are a perfectionist, and you need things to be perfect before you publish or before you put something out into the world, but that is one of the things that's going to hold you back the most. We just need to get V one out, and we can always improve it in the future. Let's jump onto the computer, and I'm going to show you guys how we can build a website portfolio in a very short amount of time. Let's go. What's going on, guys? Welcome to my computer. And in this lesson, I want to show you how we can build a website portfolio using square space. Now, in this example, I'm going to be showing you how I would create a photography portfolio because that is my area of expertise, but the principles in this lesson can be applied to pretty much any creative career. I just want to show you guys how to use square space in and out Square space is absolutely amazing. It's really easy to use. The designs look amazing. And Square space 7.1, the newest release of square space is even more powerful for us with a really great Dragon drop editor that we can basically customize any page that we wanted to look. It works really well on mobile, and also Square space has some really great commerce features, so we can sell our product very easily. I'm just a massive Fania. There's a lot of other websites out there where you can build a visual portfolio and even sell online products. But I find square space to be the best. And it's also the most popular. A lot of travel photographers, a lot of photographers in general are using square space because it's such a great platform for us. But let's just jump into this. When you first open up square space, you know, it's going to ask you to sign up and all that stuff. But eventually, you'll get to a place where it's going to ask you what your site is about. Of course, we can click photography. Then we can click next. What are your top goals? You can go ahead and answer all of these. I'm just going to skip this. What it's trying to do is recommend us a template. What stage are we at? We are currently growing an existing business. Then it's going to ask us how we would like to get started. Do we want to build our own custom? Um site with a square space blueprint, or or do we want to choose a professionally designed website template? I'm going to go with website template because I think the templates are awesome. And then it's just going to recommend a bunch of great templates for us that we can just start building off of. And there's so many good ones here, especially if we just go up here and click portfolio. These are all really great portfolio based websites, and that's all we're trying to do right now is just build a collection of our images that we can easily send out and share with other people. So recommend going through all of these. There's so many good ones on here, honestly. This one looks quite interesting, actually. I don't think I've ever played with this one. So why don't we just go ahead and select, start with Matsuya? I've never seen this temple before, so let's see what we can do. It's going to ask you to name your sites. I'm going to put Sean Dalton, my name there. Continue. It pages. It's basically just going through a little tutorial and it's bugging out pretty hard. I'm just going to go ahead and close that because I kind of know how to use it. Then I'm also going to close the assistant here. Now, it's putting me straight into the editor, but I'm going to go back and just kind of quickly walk you through kind of how this works. So on the left here, we have pages, design commerce. This is kind of what we're going to do, all of our editing. These are kind of like the folders for our editing. So under pages, you can see this is our main navigation here, overview people, things contact. Anything we put up here is going to show up here on the top bar, nice and simple. And then anything that is not linked is not going to show up here, but the web page is still going to be active. We can go ahead and just drag that down there, for example. Um, now, when you open up the template, it's going to have a page, pretty much already done for you. And if you click on it, then you can go ahead and edit that page by clicking edit up here in the top left hand corner. As you can see, we can edit our site hitter here if we want. And then this is a gallery block. So what's cool about that is, there's a bunch of photos already in here. And this says overview. Now, I would change this to maybe commercial. I love the fact that the first page when you visit this website is just a bunch of awesome photos. You know? Like, it's like, right away. This person's a photographer, and these are the images. So it's really easy to get into their portfolio, and I love that. And that's one of the things that I recommend when first starting out is You can have a page where you have a bunch of called actions, especially if you're selling digital products. Maybe later down the line, when your digital product business is a little bit more robust, you can do that. But I think in the beginning, having just a straight up portfolio right off the bat is the best thing you can do for your business. Here in this section, like I said it's a gallery, we can just go right here and click Edit Gallery. Now there's a bunch of images in here already, and none of these are mine. What we can do is just go ahead and delete all of these. I actually really like these images, but we're going to just to delete them. And then what we can do is just click on this little plus sign and upload images, and that will bring us to our own images. So I just have a collection of photos here that I can add. And when you're building your portfolio, one of the things that I recommend is to keep a specific place on your computer or on Google Drive or on Dropbox with all those photos in your portfolio. So all your best photos are easily accessed, and then you can easily just upload them onto a gallery instead of just going through all of your exports over the years and adding them there. We want to make sure we have a place where all of our portfolio images are collected in one place. So let's just let this load in. Now that it's all loaded in. What we can do is drag around the photos to change the order, if we want to, which is awesome. I love this feature. Then we can just go ahead and close this and boom. All of our images are already in there nice and clean. But I don't like that this says overview. What I'm going to do is click Exit here. It's already saved, and then I'm going to click this little icon next to Oview, and then I can change the page title to Commercial because this is my commercial portfolio. This is the portfolio that I want people to see right away when they enter my website, and then boom, click Save, and then that will change that up there. Boom Commercial. We could do the same thing for people. Let's click on this page and check out people here. It's the same type of thing. It's just portraits. What we can go ahead and do is sometimes when you click it, it moves it down into not Linked. I'm not sure why. We can just drag that back up there. Let's go ahead and edit this, change this to landscape, landscape, and landscape there. Click Save there. Then we'll do the same thing with the gallery here. We can just go ahead and click Edit up here. We can edit our gallery, and then we can change out all those photos to include landscape photos. Let's just do that real quick. And we can also include a description here, a collection of landscape photos, photographed by Sean Dalton, something like that. I think that might show up on the top. I'm not sure. Now I'm not sure where that shows up. I think it just shows up in the page description. So now we have all of our photos here that's awesome. We can also edit this section, and we can change the spacing if you want to if we want to make the spacing a little bit less. If we want it to just be two columns, we can do that here. I think three columns looks good. Maybe a little bit. Less of spacing. I really like how big the images are on this template. It just looks really good. So I think that looks pretty nice. We can even change the animation here and the lightbox. So if we click that, then we can zoom in on each photo, which is pretty cool. Might as well just save that. Okay, so there we have two pages done. One thing I wanted to edit on this P page, which I'm not sure what happened. Oh, it's landscape. But one more thing I wanted to edit on this P page actually is the fact that it says P right there. So this is a good opportunity to show you kind of how the Dragon drop editor works. To add a section or to remove a section, all you have to do is hover over it and then click remove. And then that will remove that whole section there. But then you can click Add section, and then we have a bunch of awesome templates that we can add in that just look really great, you know? Now, I think, like I said, it's just nice to jump into the photos, but for like an about me page, for a product page, all of these things are really, really awesome. We even have different portfolios portfolio templates that we can add in here. Some of them are pretty cool. Think some of them are just a bit limiting like this one has quite small images. Yet it's got a great design, but I'm not a huge fan. We could add something like this. We could put one photo here and leave the left side blank and then just name this landscape, and that looks like nice and clean. However, like I said, I think it's best if you just jump into the photos, show people what it's about. Instead, I'm just going to remove that. Once we delete that, now our photos are just boom right there front and center, which I think looks really great. I'm just going to go ahead and save that, and you can do the same thing for commercial and you can build multiple of these pages. It's really easy to do, you can also just duplicate the pages. You can just click here, and then you can scroll down to the bottom and click duplicate page and then that will duplicate that page, and then you can change that to portraits, and then you can just plug your portraits in there. But now let's talk about site styles. Now, this is really easy to edit. Let's go back to our commercial page here. Click edit here. And then on the top right hand corner, you can see site styles here, and this is a great way to customize your specific websites. You can go to Fonts, and then you can just choose a font pack, which I think is great. There's so many to choose from. It'll pop up right away and display what it looks like. Let's just click through a few here. I think look kind of cool. Adonis looks nice. It's nice and clean, it's modern, it's professional. Abel looks good. I think that's the one that came on the site. Let's see. Poppins. This is actually what I'm using on my website. Not with this sub font, but Poppins as the main font, Orpheus Pro, ITC Avent Guard. I think that one looks pretty cool. So let's just leave it at that. I think you guys get the idea there. And you can choose between San Sera Sera or mixed. So Let's go back. One thing I don't like is how big these are, like these navigation buttons here, so I can just click that, and that will move me straight into the site navigation styling tools. Then I can choose how much the site style that I want. If I go to custom, that will allow me to change the size there. That looks a little bit better. I can go back, and then we can also do that with the site title. We can change the size there. And this is basically our kind of master style editor here, but you could also just hover over elements, and then it'll select that certain part of the style editor there. So you can go through and play around with this. I think there's a way to edit colors as well. So that is site styles. You can go ahead and play around with this as well. You can change image blocks. You can do a lot with this, and you can really customize things to your liking, which is one of the reasons why I really like square space. Then you can also go ahead and edit your intersection. You can add a logo in there. You can add elements like social links, so you can see I have that enabled. And with social links, you can edit social icons. Boom Instagram will show up, and then you can just change that to yours. So let's change that to Sean Dalt. We can add one for YouTube. If you have a YouTube account, and it'll automatically give you that little icon there. And then we can also add our e mail. And when you add your email, then Boom, that just shows up right there. So I think our site design looks pretty good, but the other thing we need to do is get rid of things because we're not using things. Maybe you want to make a portrait page for that, but we're just going to go ahead and delete that page there. But then of course, we need to create a contact page. So I'm going to go to contact here, and that is going to have this preset thing here. But you know what? I don't like this template, so I'm just going to leave that under not Linked. And I'm going to create a new page here by clicking this little plus sign. I'm going to say use page layout, and then I'm going to go down to A. And now we have a bunch of awesome things templates that we can use for our About page. I like this one. It's clean. It's simple. I'm just going to make that about. And now we have a page that we can easily edit into something our own. So we can go ahead and just select this and say, Hey, I'm Shan. You can write something here. I'm a professional travel photographer based in Bali, Indonesia, et cetera, write what you want, and then you can go here to the image. You can click edit, delete this one. And then you can go ahead and upload your own, and I recommend that you choose one that shows your face. Just like we're going to be talking about with Instagram, how we want to have our face as our profile photo. We want to show our face on our about M page as well. So Boom, that is pretty much good to go. That looks great. We can edit this. We can add sections here, say we wanted to add a contact section. We can click section, we can click contact here, and then you can have a form, if you want. Maybe just a simple form. You could also just put your links in there. So maybe something like this, a contact me form. Then you can just delete contact us and say, interested in working with me, and then something like that, and then people can fill out this form here. You can customize this if you want, give them a little bit more instructions, and then you are pretty much good to go. So we have our about me page, we have our portfolio here. So let's save that, Exit out, make sure commercials at the top. And now we have pretty much all of our pages here. We have our social navigation, Now, if you wanted to have people land on your landscape page instead of your commercial page as when they type in your website name, go ahead and click landscape and then go ahead and set as home page, confirm, and now whenever people enter your website, whatever your domain is, they will land on the landscape site. So you has a little home icon there, so that's how you know that's your home page. So, those are pretty much the only things that we need to have in place when we're first starting out. Look at this. We already have a beautiful portfolio with several pages that looks great. By the way, I apologize if you can hear the construction, there's construction next door going on nonstop and it is driving me crazy, but I had to record this today. So it is what it is. Other thing I wanted to talk about in this tutorial is choosing a domain. Now, sometimes you can choose a domain right when you first start out on square space, but you can also purchase them later. So to do that, all you have to do is go to settings, go to domains, get a domain, and then you can go ahead and purchase a new domain. Now, shed.com is unavailable. I think it's like $10,000, so I'm not going to be getting that anytime soon. Wouldn't recommend anything like.net or.org. I would definitely recommend.com. If your name is taken, I always recommend going for your name first, but if it's a popular name, you could try shortening it, or you could try adding photo at the end. You could add photography, but I think that just creates a really long domain. So I think it's best if we keep things nice and short. So play around with it, see if you can come up with a unique name for your domain, nothing too long, but it also should at least have your name in it, at least your first name, but I'd definitely recommend both of your names. And ideally, it also matches your Instagram handle as well. So Those are my tips for getting a domain. Once you've done that, I recommend also just exploring this a little bit. There's so many cool things on square space. One of the other things I recommend checking out is all extensions. Square space has a bunch of great extensions that we can use. Now, these are things for finance and shipping and stuff, sales and marketing. Some of these we can definitely use later on, like mail chimp, and that's a great one for building an e mail list. There's some cool ones in here. There's things like print on demand, and I recommend just looking through and seeing if there's anything that's useful for you. Eventually, they probably will be as you build your product business, but maybe not right in the beginning. But basically, we just developed a portfolio website very quickly using square space. And this is just one of the templates. Like I said, there's so many awesome templates, and I love how customizable all of them are. Now, with square space 7.0 of the old version, you can easily switch your template to a new one. With square space 7.1, you cannot do that. However, square space 7.1 Dragon drop editor is really great, and we can basically customize anything however we choose. So I do recommend choosing the right template right off the bat, make sure it's a style that you vibe with, preview with it, check it out. But if you choose one and you want to change it later, it's okay. You can easily customize these square space pages to your liking. So's the site, guys. I hope that was helpful for you. I'm really looking forward to seeing some of your portfolios. But just to recap, we want something that's really easy to understand, really easy to follow, clear, big images, beautiful, easy to navigate, and just a clear expression of who we are and our value. So this is great. I can't wait to see your portfolios, and I will chat with you guys again very soon. 10. Who Can You Expect to Work With?: Now that we have a portfolio in place. Now it's time to get down to business and start talking about the different types of clients that can hire you when you're just starting out. So earlier on in the course, I mentioned that when you're just starting out, a lot of the time, working with consumers is going to be a lot easier than working with businesses. However, if you do have a pretty robust portfolio to begin with, you can start going out and reaching out to bigger brands or bigger businesses already regardless of the social media following that you have. But in this lesson, I want to talk about how we start that process of finding clients that we can work with, creating a list, and then in the next lesson, we're going to talk about how to outreach to them and score those first few clients. Types of businesses and consumers that you're going to work with is going to be largely dependent on your specific creative business. So for me as a photographer, like I said, when I started out, it was weddings and portraits and cafes and restaurants. But if you're an illustrator, that might be creating portraits of people's pets. That's always in high demand. People always want to get memories of their pets or their animals. And if you're a graphic designer, you're going to be more in demand typically by businesses as opposed to a consumer because businesses are much more in need of graphic designing than the average consumer is. But I do want to list some of the potential clients that we can work with in our creative businesses. For example, we can work with small businesses and startups. These clients often seek creative services like logo design, branding, website development and marketing materials to establish their brand identity and their presence. And this is a big one for us. There are millions of different small businesses around the planet that we can work for, and this is something that I do quite a bit is creating marketing material for small and medium sized businesses that need photos, need visuals for their social media or their marketing campaign. Can also get hired by entrepreneurs or other fellow creatives. There's a lot of people that are starting their own businesses or their personal brands, and they require services like local design, web development, content creation, social media branding. They need portraits of themselves. There's a lot that goes into running a business, and that is where we come in as creatives. Marketing and advertising agencies is also an option for us. Agencies often hire freelancers for specialized creative work such as graphic design, copywriting, photography, videography, and digital marketing campaigns to serve their clients. Profits are also an option. I worked for non profits when I was first starting out, and non profits are often looking for creative services for fundraising campaigns, event promotions, branding, web design, and social media content. There's also been a massive influx of e commerce businesses over the last ten years, and there's a lot of opportunity there for us. A lot of these business are in need of product photography, graphic design for their marketing materials. They need work done on their website, and they need content creation as well. And that's one of the things that you'll find throughout this list is content is massive for a lot of businesses these days, and they turn to creatives like us to get that job done. So I've created a lot of advertising and marketing content for social media for different businesses, both early on and now as well. It's still a big part of my business, and this goes for pretty much all of the creative arts as well. Now, these are just broad examples of some of the potential clients that we can work for, but your specific situation is going to depend on number one, what your creative business focuses on and where you are along in your journey. First things I recommend doing is creating a Google Sheet with a bunch of potential clients. Now, I have two of these. I have one for clients that I could realistically work with now, and then I have one for dream clients as well. And these are all the big brands that I want to shoot for. Patagonia, Apple Vans, the North Face. I have a bunch of dream clients that I really want to shoot with at some point in my career. And on the other list, I have clients that I can realistically work with. Some of them I already have, and I reference that list when I'm going out and searching for new jobs. Now, there's many different ways that we can find these potential clients. And the first one is community. I think it's really important for us as artists to have a creative community other artists that are doing similar things, running similar businesses. We can look at the type of clients that they're working with, we can reference those clients, and then we can find new clients that are similar to those. If those clients have already shown that they like to work with creatives like you, well, then they're probably going to be open to working with you as well. So when I first started out, I would go on Instagram, and I would find other photographers shooting something similar to me, and I would look at some of the jobs that they've done. I'd look at their portfolio, I'd look at their Instagram page and check out who is tagged in their posts. And then I would add those clients to my list. Another great tool for us to find and create a list of potential clients is actually Chat GPT. Now, Cat GPT has become an incredible tool for us in any business, but especially in creative businesses, it helps us come up with ideas. It helps us write responses to e mails, and it helps us navigate complex problems that happen when you're running a business. Makes Chat GPT so good is you can ask it a ton of questions. So say you're an illustrator and you're just not really sure what types of clients that you can work with. Well you can ask Chat GPT. I will give you a lot more insight into your specific situation, especially if you explain to it the situation that you're in and what you specialize in. Now, you can take this one step further as well and you could say something like I'm a photographer based in San Jose, California, and I want to work with different coffee shops in the city. Can you please create a list of 50 different coffee shops in the city and ignore all chains? And Chat GPT will spit out a list of 50 different coffee shops that you could potentially work with. You can add those into your list. Really is an incredible tool for us, and it can give us a lot more clarity into the types of clients that we can work with and specific clients based on location as well. So, I'm a massive massive fan of Chat EPT. And if you aren't using this, I highly recommend checking it out, playing around with it, and if you're just getting into this, start asking it some questions as well, because it does have a lot of great answers and insights for us as creatives. But now that we have a list of potential clients that we can realistically work with, let's move on to the next lesson and talk about how we can actually score those clients. 11. Scoring Your First Few Clients: Want to talk about how we can actually score our first few clients. And I want to start this lesson off with a story. So when I was 24-years-old, I was living in Chang Mai, Tailand, I was working as a photographer. I started a travel photography business abroad, and I was completely broke. And at that time, I really wanted to go home and visit my family, but it's a very far trip flying from Thailand to the US, and I didn't have the money to pay for that trip, especially not a return ticket. So I scrounged up enough money from doing a few shoots locally, and I flew back to the US. But while I was there, I knew I needed to get some work to not only sustain my travels, while I was in America. Also to get my return ticket to come back to Thailand. So what I did was, I hired a virtual assistant on work.com to find and create a list of all the different coffee shops in New York, San Francisco, and Portland. Those are the three cities that I was going to be visiting. And then I had that VA also find e mail addresses for all of those businesses that I created a super simple portfolio, and I just threw in a bunch of coffee shop images that I had shot here in Chang Mai Thailand. And then I created an e mail template that I could send to all of these different businesses in mass. And that's exactly what I did. I sent probably two or 300 e mails to all of these different coffee shops, and in each e mail, I just changed the name of the coffee shop and I tried to personalize it a little bit for each specific coffee shop. But after I sent out all those e mails e mail started coming back to me. And a lot of these businesses were not interested in working with me. They didn't need photos for their social media or for their marketing campaigns. But a lot of them did. And I ended up walking away with $5,000 in that one month trip that I went back to the states, and this really showed me the power of outreach and how this can bring us clients, especially when we're just starting out, and even with a small social media following. I didn't rely on social media whatsoever to get these jobs. It was the portfolio, and it was putting my work in front of somebody that could potentially hire me. This is one thing that I highly recommend doing when you're just starting out is reaching out directly to potential clients, getting your name and getting your work in front of that potential client. Because there are so many different businesses out there that are in need of content creators or artists to come in and help improve their businesses, but they don't have the time to go out and look for them. So if you show up in their inbox, you're right there, You're convenience, you are much more likely to get hired if you reach out to them directly In the last lesson, we talked about creating that list of potential clients, we now you already have that list, and it's just a matter of finding e mail addresses for those different clients that you want to work with. We've already talked about building a portfolio as well. So the last step is just putting together that e mail template that you can send out to all of these different businesses. And I will put a sample for you guys. You can download that. You can change it out, personalize it, and send that out to potential clients as well. You can download that below this video. You're doing this, don't reach out to five or ten different clients. Reach out to at least 100. I promise if you do this, there are going to be people that come back to you and they're going to be interested in working with you. And you might not nail this right away. You e mail might not be that good. Portfolio might not be that good, and you might be massively undercharging for your work, but this is all a learning experience, right? Like I said earlier, nothing has to be perfect. We're going to start with V one, and we can always improve later on. There are millions of different businesses that we can work with around the world. And if you fail on the first 100, that's only 100. There are still so many more potential clients So digital outreach works really well, especially when we apply it in mass, and we e mail hundreds of different businesses out there. But we can also do this in person as well. And when I was first starting out as a photographer, I printed out a bunch of different business cards, and I would go to events, free events in my city, and I would shoot the event for free. So I'd participate, would contact the event host and say, Hey, can I come and shoot some free pictures for you guys? And if it's okay, I just want to pass out some business cards just to market my services. And that's exactly what I did. I would show up, I would shoot the event for free, and I would hand out my business cards after introducing myself, networking, letting people know who I was, and letting them know that I was in the community, and I was available for hire for work. And I scored so many jobs early on doing that, portrait jobs, wedding jobs. I shot menus for restaurants. This was a really great way for me to get involved in my community, get my name out there and start that process of finding clients. If you can do both of these things, I promise you that you're going to start scoring clients sooner rather than later. And this is a really great way to get your business off the ground and gain some experience as well. I'd be thinking to yourself, Sean, that all sounds great, but I have no idea what to charge for my work. And I totally understand that. Pricing is a very complicated thing, especially when you're just starting out, and you're always going to be learning more about pricing and how to charge and things like that. Now, pricing is something that is a little bit difficult to talk about in this course, because we're talking about many different types of creative businesses in this course. Do have a resource that can give you a better idea of how to price your work as a creative. And that is the graphic artists Guild handbook. It has pricing and ethical guidelines for the modern creative business. And this is a really great resource to start out with so you can have an idea of pricing, and it has a bunch of other resources in there as well. But pricing is always one of those things that can be very difficult to wrap your head around at the beginning. When I first started out, I was massively undercharging for my work. I think I was charging We're $150-250 for each shot, which really wasn't a lot. But as I've grown as a photographer, now I won't take a shot for less than $2,000. I have several different income streams to support me, and it's not worth my time or my energy to work with smaller clients. And I'm very grateful to be at this point in my business, but it has certainly been a learning experience. And a lot of that learning has just come through working with different types of clients and getting a gauged for how much time I actually have to put into these projects and just learning more about running a creative business. Really do think that these are some of the most effective strategies that you can employ when you're just starting out and scoring your first few clients, as well as later on in your career, when you're more established artist, outreach and networking works. It still works for me now just as much as it did in the beginning, and I credit a lot of my businesses success to these strategies. 12. A Sustainable Approach to Social Media: L et's talk about social media. And I think many of us know that social media can be incredibly important for our businesses in this day and age, especially our creative businesses. One reason for that is because we can get sponsors that can pay us to advertise on our social media channels, but social media is worth a lot more than that to us as well. While you certainly don't need a large social media following to start scoring clients and to get your business off the ground, having a larger social media following can really bring all of our income buckets in drastic ways. So, for example, the more social media followers you have, the better you're going to get paid for sponsors, it's going to be easier for you to find and attract different clients that want to work with you. And also, it's going to make it much easier for you to sell your digital or your physical products as well, because you can use those social media platforms to market your products. I really want to come back to this idea that you do not need a large social media following to start out your creative business, but it is something that you should be working on and growing as you go forward. Now, I'm not going to sit here and tell you that you need to post five times a week, four times a day. I think that is a strategy that probably works, but most importantly, I think it's important that you develop a good relationship with social media going forward that will allow you to consistently share your work in a very organic and authentic way. You just go gung ho into social media, you can get burned out very quickly. I know, for me, personally, I have a hard time sharing five days a week. That's not something that I can personally do. I love to create. I love to take photos. I love to share my journey, but it's difficult for me to just be sharing all the time I do like my private life. And maybe you feel the same way. And that is totally okay. I think it's important for us to find balance that works for us when it comes to social media. So for me personally, I try to share a few times a week, but I don't put too much pressure on myself to do that. There are periods of time seasons in my life where I am really motivated to share on social media. I want to create content. I want to create posts to share on Instagram or create videos for YouTube. And during those seasons, I really dive into it, and I get after it. But then there's going to be other seasons in my life where I'm just really not drawn to it. It's not part of my creative journey at that particular moment in time. And in those situations, I take time off and I take a break, and I think that's really important for us to understand as artists. But learning how to play the social media game is incredibly important for us as creatives, because like I said before, it can really bring up all aspects of our business. And I think the most important thing is to treat it as a creative outlet. If you're treating it like a creative outlet, you're going to be much more inclined to share authentically and more consistently as well. And if you're sitting there thinking, San, I have no idea what to share on my social media. There's only so many posts that I can do showing my artwork, but I want to go deeper than that. Well, the best tip I can give you is to share your journey. So every time you go and post, talk about your experience, creating that artwork. Like I said earlier on in this class, the artist behind the work gives the work meeting, your stories, your life experiences all tie into the meaning of that art. So I think it's really important for us to share our ideas, share our thoughts, share our process for creating and just share our life experiences in general. Use that caption space, share your thoughts and your emotions and your experiences on your stories and create reals that are interesting and inspiring for you to create. I think it's really important for us to treat our social media as a personal authentic space. Because if we do so, not only are we going to give much more meaning to our work that we're sharing there, but also, it's going to open up the door to create more connections with other artists other creatives that are out there as well. And that's never a bad thing for us in this industry because our co workers in this industry, our other creatives. It's relationships that we make with other artists online or in person. But if I had to give you some concrete advice for social media, I would say, try and share at least three or four times a week and use each one of those opportunities to share your journey as an artist, your experiences, the process of you going about creating your work, And also try and post on your stories as well. And when you do so, try and show your face, because, like I mentioned earlier, having a personal brand is what's going to help set you apart from AI and all of these content turns that are going on right now where there's just so much content being put out into the Internet, authenticity is what's really going to shine. And if you can show your face and be real and be authentic, that is what's going to help you stand out on social media. In terms of the specific social media platforms that you should be using, Instagram is king for us as creatives. It's still very, very important and we can reach a lot of eyes and we can communicate ideas and share very freely on there. So I'm a big proponent of Instagram. And with that, if you're creating reels, which I highly recommend you doing, and if you do want to learn more about how to create reels that can go viral, then I would recommend checking out my reels class here on SkillShare. I'll put a link down below this video. You guys can check that out. And that will give you much more concrete examples as to how to create reels that can go viral. And it's crazy how one viral reel can completely transform your business, so I highly recommend checking out that class. But what's so great about creating reels, or short form videos is you can post those on Instagram Reels. You can also share those on TikTok, and you can also share those on YouTube shorts. So you create one piece of content, you share it across all three platforms. If that's too much for you, you don't have to do that. I would recommend focusing on one or two social media platforms. So for me, personally, I do Instagram, and I do YouTube. YouTube is massive. I recently reached my 100,000 subscribers. You can see the plaque back there. And while YouTube is a lot of work, it's also probably the best creative outlet for me because it expands my creative mediums. I can now create videos and tell stories and show my photos and my process and my journey at the same time. So I'm a big fan of YouTube, and if that is something that you want to get into, I would highly recommend it. It is a lot of work, but it has a ton of potential for us as business owners. Like I said before, you do not have to nail the social media game right away. As I've said throughout this course, everything here is a learning experience. The more you're sharing, the more you're engaging, the more you're going to learn what works for you, with your specific business, with your specific life and your goals as well. So I would definitely recommend being on social media, start an account, and share something if you don't have anything out there. If you have a personal account now, and you're thinking, Shawn, do I need to rebrand my account? Do I need to create a new one? Just stick with one and start sharing your artwork from there, I wouldn't even delete your old posts, because ultimately, those posts show you who you are, as a human being. And like I said before, that's super important for us as artists. 13. Getting Legal: What do you need to do?: Of course, we have to talk about the legal side of things as well. Now, this is a little bit difficult to talk about in a course because we have people watching from all around the world in this course right now, but there are a few basic principles that I think are important for us to follow when we're starting our creative business. Now, the first thing I want to say is a lot of people, a lot of students that I work with who say, I'm not ready to start charging for my work because I haven't established a business yet. I'm not official. I don't have all of these things set up and in place. I don't have contract templates. And my answer to that is a lot of that stuff you do not need in place. You're going to do that as you go, and I'm a big proponent of starting lien, starting with as little as possible and then building your business as you go. Now, for some of you, that might mean not even registering a business and operating as a sole proprietor. For me, as an American, I didn't have to legally register a business in order to start operating as a business. Now, in some other countries, you might have to do that. In Germany, for example, I know that you do have to register a business in order to start charging money. But in a lot of other countries, you aren't required to do that, and you can operate as a sole proprietor for the time being. And then as you start to get more clients and you start to become more of an official business, you can go about registering your business and doing all the legal stuff on top of that. So that is something that you may or may not need to do depending on your location and your specific legal situation, depending on your country. Incredibly important for us when running a creative business. A contract is going to stipulate all the conditions for the job that you're doing. So for a photographer, that would be how many photos are being delivered? When is the shot happening, how much the client owes you for the shots, if the raw photos are going to be delivered or not. It's basically going to lay out all the terms for that project. No, I think a lot of people get really hung up on this, and I think they need to hire a lawyer to write these really fancy bulletproof contracts when you're first starting out. And trust me when I say that you do not need to do this. Even a really simple contract that you write yourself can be enough to make sure that you're communicating properly with the client on their needs and their wants and their expectations for that particular project. Chat EBT is another really awesome tool that we can use to write these contracts early on. Now, of course, when you're working on much bigger projects later down the line, you might look at hiring a lawyer and paying Amino 500 or $100 to write you a really concrete bulletproof contract. But when you're first starting out, trust me, when I say that you do not need to do this, you just need to make sure that you're using that contract to just lay out the terms and communicate properly with that. A lot of situations, this is going to come from the client's side anyways, and make sure when the client does send you that contract that you're reading over it, and you're making sure that it's in your best interest as well. Always take a close look at that contract if they send it to you, and if you have any questions, you can run that by a lawyer to get a little bit more clarity. But if you're just working with smaller clients and it's nothing too crazy, you can easily write your own contract, and that will be more than enough for the job. Thing you should be aware of is invoicing, a lot of the time when you're working with clients, they're going to ask you for an invoice for that project. Very easily create these on CMVa. There's a bunch of different templates that you can use. So if you're stressed out about invoicing, it's really easy to do. You just fill in the description for the job. Put the total there, as well as provide your banking information or your pay pal information so you can get paid for that last thing I want to mention here is banking and accounting. Now, when you're running a business, all of the expenses that you have for that business are now tax deductible. So if I go out and I buy a camera, well, that's a tax deductible expense for my business. So at the end of the year, if I owe $10,000 in taxes, camera cost $3,000. Well, now I only owe $7,000 in taxes. So always make sure that you're keeping track of all of the expenses that you have for your business. And ideally, you open up a separate business bank account, so you can keep those expenses separately, and then you pay yourself from that business bank account. Now, you might need to register a business to do this. But like I said before, if you're just starting out and you haven't worked with any clients yet, I wouldn't even worry about doing this. You can do this later down the line. For me, it took me about a year and a half to finally open up a separate business bank account and start operating as an actual business instead of a sole proprietor. This is really just going to depend, like I said, on your situation, how far along you are in your business and where you're located as well. But I'm a big proponent of starting lean, starting small, and getting everything else into place as you go. 14. Next Steps: Have made it to the end of this course guys, and we've discussed a lot up until this point. But before you go, I want to leave you with just a few key principles moving forward. Now, running a creative business is super exciting. It's really fun, but there are going to be periods of time where you're a little bit stressed out. Maybe you don't have clients coming in, or you have that impostor syndrome sneaking up on you, attacking you from behind, and you're not sure how to deal with it. Those periods are going to come. It's not all roses and daisies, but I can tell you that starting a creative business nine years ago was one of the best decisions that I've ever made in my life. It's been incredibly exciting and rewarding. Being able to engage creatively with my artwork and build a business around that that gives me freedom to travel is the best thing I've ever done in my life. So I highly recommend pursuing this. And I know this course was kind of a rough overview of how to get going, but that's the purpose of the course. It's just to get going. Like I said before, you're going to continue to learn and build your business as you go. This is not a comprehensive course on how to scale a business from zero all the way to $1 million. That is going to come through individual experiences scoring clients, learning about pricing, learning about how to level up your business and scale your business. And it's going to be dependent on many different factors, and there's no one size fits all for how to get this done. So if you're inspired to create a business and you love what you're doing from a creative standpoint, and you do think you can build a business around this, please just get the ball rolling. You're gonna figure this out as you go. The first step is the hardest step, and that's to get started in the first place. Want to say thank you so much for making it to the end of this class. If you guys want to learn more from me, I have a bunch of other classes here on SkillShare. I also have a YouTube channel. If you're specifically interested in photography. That's what that channel is about. I talk about the business side of photography. I talk about the creative side of photography, and I just share my creative journey on that platform, so you can check me out there. You can also check me out on Instagram as well. But thank you guys so much for watching. I wish you all the best going forward in your creative businesses. If you're here watching to the end of this course, then I know you have it in you, and I'm excited to see where you go with it. So thanks again, and I will catch you again very soon.