David’s book stood out because he not only delivered plenty of useful advice, he also did a superb job of describing the seismic upheavals in the publishing industry, and made a compelling case for the creative and financial benefits of self-publishing.

And he also provided real-life inspiration, in the form of 33 success stories of writers earning a steady living from publishing their own work.

This week sees the publication of Let’s Get Visible: How to Get Noticed and Sell More Books – as the title suggests, it builds on his earlier book with advanced marketing advice for more experienced self-publishers. To give you an idea how good it is, I bought it on Saturday and finished it by Sunday afternoon.

David has been kind enough to answer some questions for Lateral Action readers about the opportunities (and pitfalls) for writers right now.

I’ve benefited enormously from the advice in David’s books – if you’re remotely interested in self-publishing your work, I suggest you pay close attention to what he says.

There are two conflicting versions of what’s happening in publishing right now: according to some people the sky is falling in, and Amazon is the Big Bad Wolf come to destroy the industry; while others are telling us mind-boggling stories of self-publishing success, and trumpeting a new era of opportunity for writers.

What’s your take on the current state of publishing? Do you see any parallels with what’s been happening in the music and movie industries?

I think Big Publishing is in trouble. It seems to have learned little from the disruptions that radically altered other industries, especially the music industry. At least the music industry can make some argument for being blindsided by the speed and power of that change, but publishers had time.

Those publishers had another advantage over the music industry. When digital disruption hit music, there was no killer app – at least not one designed to sell content, Napster was very successful at sharing content but failed as a commercial venture. In the book business, even before there was an e-book market to speak of, the Kindle and the Kindle Store were already in place.

Despite these advantages, publishers still made the same mistakes. They forced through (much-hated) DRM, when it did nothing to prevent piracy and plenty to antagonise customers.

The only way to combat piracy is with convenience and price, yet publishers responded to the rise of e-books with windowing (not releasing the e-book until several months after the hardback) and illegal price-fixing to ensure that digital books remained more expensive than their print counterparts – a futile attempt to hold back the digital tide, and another one which angered their customers.

While large publishers were fighting change, self-publishers embraced e-books and built audiences. By my estimates, self-publishing has captured 25% of the US ebook market – and that’s in the space of a couple of years.

Writers have benefitted immensely from this revolution – mostly because they don’t depend on those large corporations anymore to make a living.

We can write whatever we like, and sell it to whomever we choose. And we can sell very, very cheaply and still make good money. Writers are lucky in that their production costs are extremely low when compared to musicians, and, especially, filmmakers. The only extras we need are conjured from our imaginations.

What do you see as the biggest opportunities and pitfalls for independent-minded writers right now?

The opportunity is immense. The distribution system has been blown wide open by the digital revolution and writers can reach readers all over the world just by uploading to a handful of sites. A few years ago, that would have required a publishing deal and an agent to sell your foreign rights, and then interminable delays in getting the foreign edition out, and then further delays in getting paid – if you got paid.

I received my latest book back from the editor on Tuesday, formatted it on Wednesday, uploaded it on Thursday, and launched it on Friday. It’s already in the charts in America, Canada, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, and the UK and I’ll get the money for those sales in a couple of months.

Those markets are going to grow and grow – they will all see the same spectacular growth we’ve seen in the UK and the US. I think we’re only at the very beginning of a golden era for writers.

It’s not without its challenges, of course. The obvious result of an open distribution system is that the floodgates open. The number of titles being published is rising sharply. There are something like 2,000 books published every day on Amazon. Authors have to be smart in how they carve out visibility for their books in the endless sea of the Kindle Store.

What advice do you have for writers who are just starting out in self-publishing?

The most important thing for those taking their first steps is to put together the most professional package they can: a good book which has been professionally edited, a striking cover that speaks to your genre, a compelling blurb that entices your target audience, a killer opening that will hook any readers who sample, clean formatting that won’t pull the reader out of the narrative, and a price that won’t make them think twice.

Too many authors skimp on those steps, and then waste money on marketing. That money would have been much better spent on putting out the most professional book possible. As Seth Godin says, the best marketing is designed into the product.

In my earlier book Let’s Get Digital, I urged self-publishers to remember that when they release a book, they are competing against the biggest books from the biggest authors. Their book should look the part.

[Note from Mark: Let's Get Digital is currently on sale for just 99c.]

How about more experienced independent writers – people like me who have already self-published a book (or few) – how can we get more books into the hands of the right kind of readers?

Writers waste more time and money on ineffective marketing than anything else. Experienced self-publishers in particular will complain that promotion is pointless, makes them uncomfortable, or eats up too much precious writing time.

The only thing that has ever really sold books is word-of-mouth, but sites like Amazon can act as a trusted source of book recommendations for readers. If you position your book correctly, and adopt marketing strategies which work with the Amazon algorithms rather than against them, Amazon will do much of the heavy lifting for you.

It’s all about making your book discoverable and visible. You need to make sure your metadata is in good shape – particularly that you have chosen the right granular sub-category for your book. And you need to understand how Amazon’s grand recommendation system works, and tweak your marketing accordingly.

This is an area where smart self-publishers can really get ahead because the large publishers haven’t got to grips with it at all. I’ll give you an example.

Last summer there was some controversy when a traditionally published book went free on Amazon. It was taking part in some promotion at Apple, and Amazon price-matched the free price. Readers began downloading it in their droves after it was featured on a couple of popular sites.

Those downloads led to the book landing near the top of the free charts on Amazon, and that visibility in turn drove further downloads. When the publisher realized what happened, they were enraged. They demanded Amazon return the book to the paid listings, but Amazon refused while the book was still free at Apple. Incensed, the publisher removed the book from sale until the Apple promotion was complete.

This was a huge mistake. If that publisher had understood how the algorithms worked they would have realized that as soon as the book had organically returned to the paid listings in a couple of days, it would have seen a huge post-free bounce. Instead, they lost all momentum. It cost them hundreds of sales, maybe a lot more.

Another example happened more recently. Dan Brown’s US publisher set The Da Vinci Code free for a couple of weeks to build buzz in advance of his launch and placed an excerpt of the forthcoming release in the back. But even though the new book had a pre-order page on Amazon, they didn’t link to it! I can’t even imagine how many sales they lost out on.

His publisher didn’t even have a mailing list sign-up to capture addresses from the tens of thousands of readers that downloaded the free book. The only link was to the homepage of Random House imprint that published the book – where there was no mention of Dan Brown or his books! This is basic stuff, and it’s the reason why savvy self-publishers are grabbing so much market share.

Could you share one or two of the biggest mistakes you see writers and publishers making when it comes to presenting their work on Amazon – and how to fix them?

Aside from the basics mentioned regarding a professional product, people need to take more care with the metadata they enter when uploading their book. Keywords are important, being one of the only things that will trigger your book’s appearance in Amazon Search (especially important for non-fiction). But even more important are categories – which are central to almost everything I talk about in Let’s Get Visible. Selecting the correct granular sub-categories is crucial, and changing them at the right time can really help.

Launch strategy is another area where self-publishers have much room for improvement. As soon as the book is proofed and formatted, they often upload it without any real plan. Once you understand how the algorithms work, you will completely change your approach to launching books.

Most of Let’s Get Visible is devoted to getting more visibility on Amazon – is it really the best strategy to focus most of our marketing efforts on one retailer? Will the strategies you outline on Amazon work on other platforms too?

Amazon will always try and recommend customers the book they are most likely to purchase – based on browsing history and purchase history, as well as those of similar customers. Its competitors are more like traditional bookstores, training customer attention on the front tables where a select few books are being pushed.

As with physical bookstores, places on those virtual front tables are bought and sold. Amazon is different because it will give visibility to any book, whoever published it, based on its performance.

It’s somewhat analogous to the battle between Yahoo and Google – which I’m sure Amazon was watching. Where Yahoo went for the quick and easy money of auctioning off the prime real estate at the top of search results, Google played the longer game of making relevancy a key factor in which ads would appear there.

Amazon will recommend to each customer the book they are most likely to purchase, whether it’s published by me, Random House, or one of their own imprints, and whether the book costs 99c or $14.99. Amazon knows that they might make less on this immediate sale, but they will make much more in the long run as trust in the recommendation engine grows. This focus on relevancy is why Google won, and it’s why Amazon is winning.

Because of all this, there are visibility opportunities on Amazon which simply don’t exist elsewhere, or are only available to large publishers. The content of Let’s Get Visible reflects that disparity. Most of the marketing strategies will reap best results on Amazon, but there is a section on other retailers covering the best approaches to making headway there.

David Gaughran is an Irish writer, living in London, who spends most of his time travelling the world, collecting stories. As well as several fiction titles, he is the author of the self-publishing guides Let’s Get Digital and Let’s Get Visible.

If you’re an independent artist or small creative business, a website is essential for showcasing your work and finding customers. But building and maintaining it is challenging for several reasons:

You don’t have a big budget. Even if you did, you’re averse to spending a lot of money on a website until you’re sure it will bring in customers. (Spot the catch-22.)

You’re a creative, not a web developer. Your eyes glaze hover when you hear expressions such as CMS, CSS, HTML and DNS. When different ‘experts’ recommend different solutions, it’s hard to know which is the best option for you.

You want to be in control. You hate having to wait for someone else to update your website, so you want a system that allows you to change the text yourself and add images, video or sound instantly. But you’re not a web developer, so this level of control feels beyond you.

It’s confusing and hard to know what to do so – so many creators put their website on the backburner, often indefinitely.

But website development has come a long way in the last few years. In fact, the market is exploding with beautifully designed websites that you can use and customise for a fraction of the cost of hiring a developer.

And your creative content can provide the magic ‘ingredient X’ that makes these designs shine. The best thing is, you’re a natural at creating media content, which gives you a competitive advantage when it comes to online marketing.

All you need is a reasonably-priced, and reasonably user-friendly system for building and maintaining your website. Enter the open source solution used by countless professionals and businesses…

What is open source software?

Software code, like other forms of written expression, is subject to copyright law. The traditional way of developing software is for a company to develop proprietary code, forbidding others from copying or building on it. But open source developers licence the software’s source code for anyone to copy, modify and distribute.

Open source software is often developed by the collaboration of developers who work for free. When tens, hundreds or even thousands of experts give their time for free to make a product better because they believe in it then it can lead to cutting edge technology.

The best example of this is the web browser Firefox. Firefox is updated by 10,000 people who work for free. Web browsers are big money because the browser you use (Internet Explorer, Safari, Chrome etc) will dictate your experience on the web – so the big names are fighting for your attention. Google pays Firefox $50 million to have its search bar on the right of the page. By being open source Firefox keeps up with (and some would say ahead of) the giants that are Microsoft, Apple and Google for a fraction of the cost.

‘What has this got to do with my website?’

A content management system (CMS) allows you to edit your website almost as easily as editing a document in Microsoft Word. It’s an interface between you and the actual code – so you can add and edit content without having to learn a programming language. Using a pre-built CMS means you can build a website without having to pay someone to program it.

Around ten years ago there was an explosion in developers making content management systems, because there was a need for people to update their websites and a need to share technology to move forward. Using the open source method lots of systems or platforms have grown and have become the industry standard. A few of these are WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and Concrete5.

These systems or platforms are the engine of your website and are updated continuously by leading industry experts. Best of all, they are available to you for free.

If you’re not sure how good a deal that is, email a web development agency and ask for a quote for a custom-built website. Then take a seat while quotes from $3K to $15K come back at you.

‘Which one should I use?’

In fairness they are are all good, and I’m not going to tell you one system is better than the competition because like everything there are ups and downs with each one.

What I am going to do is focus on one that specifically is good for you, the creative. And the reason why it’s good for you is because you have the great content. All you have to do is add this great content and you can turn a good website into a fantastic one.

A massive shift in the amount of people using WordPress has seen an explosion of additional products to use with WordPress. This includes themes (templates) that are beautifully designed and customisable. It’s the quality of the designs on offer that separates WordPress from the other open source systems. Templates used to be a dirty word. Not any more.

What no one tells you about web design

As a creative, you know structure is fundamental to your process. It’s the same with web design. A good layout or page structure is essential. And that’s one of the most time consuming parts of making a website. Moving elements round a page, this way and that, trying endless combinations.

If you do this the old-fashioned way, building everything from scratch with code, every time you move something, you can knock something else out. It can take forever.

WordPress has a giant market place of beautiful designs that are pleasing to the eye and created by incredible designers. All you have to do is pick one you like and put your creative work in.

Let me explain. This is a the Craft Theme, which I have used on one of my websites.

What a lot of people don’t realise is that what you get with a theme or template is an empty grid. I’ve removed the images and greyed in the images boxes to show you what I mean

With the layout taken care of your job is to get creative with your images, videos or photographs and make it look fabulous in a way only you can.

This is what I did with the theme.

Here is another example of what Mimi Soam, an artist I worked with recently did. We start off with the free Twenty Eleven theme.

These are the areas to add content to.

Mimi is a great artist and made these images.

We added them to her site to quickly create her gallery page.

You can add video, audio files as well. If you’re a writer its the same principle. Use a simple theme with a few great images and add your copy.

If you want to sell your work, either as products or as digital downloads there are a number of options. You can use websites like Big Cartel or Ecwid. You can add a free extension to your website or just simply copy and paste PayPal button code into your website.

The price of creative control

You’ve probably got so much to do already. Twitter, Facebook, search engines etc etc. The list is endless and you still have to find time to do your work. The question is: do you want to showcase your creativity in an environment that gives you maximum creative control?

There will of course be a learning curve, as there is with all technology. It does take a bit of time to get used to WordPress. That’s the price of creative control. But if you’re the kind of person who would rather invest a little time up front, in order to save money and gain creative control of your website, that should be a price worth paying.

If you like the idea of taking control of your website with WordPress, and want to learn how to get started, you can watch my video WordPress Mastery in 7 Easy Steps. It walks you through the process of getting started with your WordPress site, from installation through to customising the look of your site, adding your content, through to keeping it secure and backing it up.

Click here to see the video – it’s completely free, with no need to even give an email address.

Over to you

If you’re struggle with getting your website built, what are the biggest obstacles you face?

What difference would it make to your creative business or career if you had a website that you could update instantly?

WordPress users – any advice for beginners?

About the Author: Simon Oliver is a digital consultant who has been making websites for over eight years. He specialises in design, search engine optimisation and teaching WordPress.

So this article will walk you through the process of getting started on Google+ and using it to build a network that brings you inspiration, connection, conversation, camaraderie, customers and/or career opportunities.

1. Don’t abandon your website or blog!

Every time a new social network comes along, we hear the familiar refrains:

“Blogging is dead!”

“You don’t need a website any more, just a Facebook page/Twitter account/Google+ profile.”

“[Shiny new social network] is the ultimate blogging platform, you should move your blog there.”

Tosh.

Social networks come and go – remember Friendster? MySpace? Friends Reunited? Jaiku? Plurk? – so if you make one of them your online ‘home’, you’re building it on quicksand.

And even if you could look into the future and see that a particular network was here to stay, it would still be a bad idea to make it the centre of your online universe.

Chris Brogan nailed this years ago, with his concept of home bases and outposts:

• Your home base is your own website, which you own and control. Build it right and it will bring you opportunities for the rest of your career. It may never be as big as the social networking empires, but it will endure while they rise and fall.
• Outposts are other people’s websites, where you spend time to connect with the wider world. They can include forums, the comments sections of other blogs, and social networks.

Google+ is an outpost. A very powerful and useful one, that can bring multiple benefits to your homebase (including SEO) – but not a replacement for your home base.

And it looks like Google+ was designed that way. Unlike Facebook, which seems to want to recreate the web inside its own walled garden, right from the beginning Google’s strategy has been about connecting up different parts of the web, mainly via its search engine. Which is probably why they built a social backplane instead of a social network in the conventional sense.

So don’t abandon your website or blog. Instead, use Google+ to amplify its reach, by connecting with new people.

2. Sign up for a Google+ account and fill out your profile

Click here to sign up for a Google+ account. No need to worry about choosing a good username: you need to give your real name, and Google+ profiles are identified by a string of numbers, not words.

When you fill out your profile, remember you’re using Google+ as a professional network, so emphasize your work over personal stuff. But it’s not LinkedIn, and you’re not a stuffed shirt, so don’t fill it out like a c.v./resume. Talk like a human being, and include enough of your personal interests to show there’s more to your life than work.

Here are the most important parts of your profile:

Profile photo

Make this a recognisable photo, preferably with a smile. No cats, dogs, significant others, Stormtrooper masks, weird avatars or cartoon portraits (unless you’re the cartoonist).

Cover image

This is the big image that appears behind your portrait at the top of your profile. For some reason, Google+ recently changed the format of cover images from ‘very large’ to ‘absolutely gigantic’. It’s hard to think of a big benefit of taking up 50% of a social networking screen with an image, but hey, we’re in Google’s house so we need to respect their taste in interior design.

Most people seem to choose either an image that looks nice and sets an emotional tone, or one that communicates what they do. If you’re a visual artist, you can kill two birds with one stone by using one of your own images.

As a writer, coach and speaker, I’ve used a photo of me presenting (which is frankly more interesting than a photo of me writing).

Tagline

Your answer to this question appears in the little thumbnail that pops up whenever someone hovers over your name on Google+. It may be their first impression of you – after reading one of your comments, or a post of yours shared by someone else – so make it count.

If you’re a brilliantly succinct copywriter, you might want to write an actual tagline that encapsulates what you do. For the rest of us, a simple and effective solution is to list your role(s). Mine says ‘Creative Business Coach. Poet.’

Story

This is a place for you to expand on your job title and explain a bit more about who you are and why people should care.

As the name suggests, it a chance to tell a story that will intrigue the right kind of people, so that they want to get to know you better. But it’s not a good idea to post your life story in minute detail. Try to keep it fairly brief, highlighting the most important things you do, with links to your websites and projects for those who want to learn more.

A couple of small but important profile details many people overlook:

Other profiles

Add links to your other social networking profiles, such as your Twitter account or Facebook page. This helps Google identify you as the same person who is active on these accounts.

Why is this important? Because one of the 4 compelling reasons for using Google+ is to boost your search rankings, by identifying yourself as an authoritative and influential person online. Activity on social networks is one piece of the jigsaw Google uses to rank pages (and now Authors), so if you have a popular Pinterest or Twitter account, you’ll want to associate it with your Google+ profile.

Contributor to

Add links to your own website(s), and any sites where you contribute as a guest author or creator. This is half of what you need to do to let Google identify you as the creator of these pages, and get the SEO benefits we looked at in my previous article.

3. Link your website and guest posts to your Google+ profile

So you’ve linked your Google+ profile to your website, but anyone could do that, and pretend to be you. So you need to close the loop, by linking back to your Google+ profile from the site itself.

There are two ways to do this:

1. Follow these instructions from Google.
2. If like me you use WordPress + the Genesis Framework to run your sites, follow these instructions for a quicker and easier way to do it.

That takes care of your own sites. If you publish guest posts on other sites, ask the owner to update your author profile with a link back to your Google+ profile containing the tag ‘rel=author’. Here are instructions for doing that (option 1).

Now Google knows you are the author of the guest posts as well; in the fullness of time both you and the sites you create content for should benefit from the association.

4. Import your contacts and sort them into circles

Kick-start your social life on Google+ by importing your existing contacts (from Gmail or wherever) – click the ‘Find Friends’ button on this page.

Now the fun begins! One of the best features of Google+ is the ability to sort your contacts in to circles, to make it easier to keep up with them. There’s no ‘one true way to do this’ – here are some of the criteria you might apply:

• How many of their posts you want to read
• Topics
• Industries
• Friends / family / work contacts

For example, here are some of the circles I check most often:

• Following – all my contacts
• Inner circle – I want to read everything these people post
• Writers and publishers – what it says on the tin
• Artists and photographers – ditto

A few points to bear in mind:

• You can add people to more than one circle
• No-one sees your circles or the names you give them(!)
• You can change them later, so don’t worry about getting them right first time

Circles work both ways

As well as helping you keep up with different conversation streams, circles allow you to share your posts with selected groups of people.

On Twitter, everything you share is either totally public or (if you protect your tweets) visible only to your followers. On Facebook, the privacy settings are so complicated, it’s anyone’s guess who will see it.

But on Google+ you can easily decide who sees what, by publishing posts to selected circles only. So if you have a circle devoted to 15th century Scottish poetry, you might decide to share posts on that topic with members of that circle only, rather than the world at large.

5. Fit Google+ into the gaps in your day

Because it’s full of smart people sharing interesting links and gorgeous images, it won’t surprise you to learn that Google+ can be fiendishly addictive – you could lose entire days in there, if you’re not careful.

But with a little planning and self-knowledge, you can make the most of Google+ AND get your most important work done. Here are some tips for doing this:

Work to your own ultradian rhythms. Identify which parts of your day are your ‘creative hotspots’, and beware of frittering them away on Google+ (or any other social network).

Put hard edges in your day. Decide in advance which parts of your day are good times to use Google+, without interfering with your other work.

Be aware of the timezones of the people you want to reach. Make an effort to network when they are awake!

Use mobile apps. When you’re at your desk, you may well have more urgent and important priorities than hanging out on Google+. But if you use the smartphone or tablet app, you can network in ‘downtime’ – while travelling, waiting, or in the evenings and weekends. 10 minutes here and there can make a big difference, without swamping your day.

For example, I’m a ‘morning person’ so before lunch, writing is my priority, and you won’t see me on Google+ so much. I’m in the UK, but I have more readers and network contacts in the US than anywhere else, so afternoons are a good time for me to network.

So I check into Google+ between coaching clients in the afternoons, as well as via mobile in the evenings, and while I’m out and about during the day.

6. You are what you share

The two most important things you will do on Google+ are sharing media content and having conversations. Let’s start with the first one.

In practical terms, the media you share falls into two categories:

• Your own work
• Other people’s work

Your own work

Every time you create and publish something you’re proud of on another site (e.g. your blog, someone else’s blog, your online portfolio, your Vimeo page) its worth posting a link to it on Google+, with a brief note of introduction.

Not only will this help to get it into circulation and in front of new people, it should also help to get your work on Google’s radar. No one knows for sure how Google+ influences search rankings, but if for example, you’re a photographer, it’s a safe bet that if you post a lot of photographs from your website to Google+, and those are frequently shared by influential Google+ users, there will be a ‘trickle down’ SEO benefit to your website.

You can also use Google+ as a kind of ‘mini blog’, by writing up shortish posts about ideas that you wouldn’t necessarily want to publish on your main blog. Or uploading images, video or audio direct to Google+ and sharing it with your network that way.

If you’re very brilliant and/or prolific, you could probably attract a lively following on Google+ by only sharing your own work. But you (and others) might find that a little narcissistic. You’d also be missing out on a lot of the potential of Google+.

Other people’s work

Image by Paul Stickland

Discovering something great and sharing it with your friends is one of life’s great pleasures, and Google+ makes it easy to do this, whether the source is photos, video or text.

It’s worth adding a brief note about what it means to you and/or why you think it will be of interest to your network. For obvious reasons, you can’t do this on Twitter, and it can add a lot of value for your network – especially assuming they are in a hurry and might miss an important aspect of the work you are sharing.

Obviously, the creator benefits each time you share a link to their work. And it can be a great way to meet new people on Google+ – I’ve made several good contacts from either sharing someone’s work and receiving a nice ‘thank you’ comment, or noticing that someone has shared a piece of mine, and checking out their profile.

If you’re stuck for what to share on Google+, here are some questions that may help:

• Who or what inspires you?
• Who or what do you really admire?
• What will your network find interesting/entertaining?
• What will they find useful/helpful?

Media as digital clothing

Steve Rosenbaum, author of Curation Nation, has a delightful metaphor for online sharing (emphasis mine):

Sharing is more than just a pointer or a map: It’s an implicit endorsement. So, by sharing things that matter, you are building your collective digital “story,” a story of what you believe in and what you endorse.

I call it digital clothing. When you wake up in the morning, you look in your closet and say, “Today, I’ll wear the blue shirt with the white collar.” You put on the image you want to share with the world. Increasingly, we live our lives online, so the links we share and the collection of information we curate and endorse becomes a critical part of who we are.

Put another way: We are what we share.

(Steve Rosenbaum, quoted in Google+ for Business by Chris Brogan)

Each time you share a piece of media on a social network, it says something about you – your tastes, your priorities, your interests, and the breadth and depth of your knowledge.

I would say “choose wisely” – but with your impeccable taste, that shouldn’t be difficult.

7. Keep adding interesting people to your circles

Because Google+ makes it easy for users to share each others’ posts, with links to the original author embedded, and threaded comments under each post, if you engage in the network it will keep bringing new people to your attention.

When you see an unfamiliar name attached to an interesting post or comment, you can learn progressively more about them with a few clicks:

1. Hover over their name and view the pop-up thumbnail – See why it pays to have good photos and a good tagline?
2. Click through to their Google+ page to see their latest posts – See why it pays to be sharing interesting things?
3. Click their ‘About’ tab to read their profile – See why it pays to write up a good Story?
4. Click the link to their website – See why it pays to link back to your site (and have a site worth visiting)?

If you see someone with an interesting profile (and website), who’s sharing good stuff in their posts, feel free to add them to your circles.

Overwhelm is less of a problem on Google+ than other networks, since you can filter people by circle (and even ‘mute’ people who are too noisy!).

Unlike Facebook or LinkedIn, following is not reciprocal – the other person doesn’t need to accept the connection (or pretend to be your ‘friend’) for you to follow their public posts. And unlike Twitter, I’ve thankfully not come across anyone throwing hissy fits because “I followed her but she didn’t follow me back!”.

So make the most of Google+ as a place to explore, by meeting new people, and seeing what emerges from the conversation.

9. Explore communities

Communities are a relatively recent addition to Google+. They are a bit like groups on Facebook or LinkedIn – places for people to gather and discuss topics that interest them.

Some communities are private, others are public; some are busy, some are quiet; all the ones I’ve entered have been welcoming. (Come to think of it, the overall tone of Google+ is remarkably positive and constructive.)

Once you have your profile set up, click here to start looking for communities of people who share your interests.

And if you’re feeling really brave, starting your own community could be a great way to build your network…

9. Make an effort!

These days, I find it odd when non-users describe Google+ as a ‘ghost town’ – in my experience it’s one of the liveliest and most stimulating networks on the web.

But then I think back to when I first tried Google+, and I remember feeling a little (ahem) nonplussed.

I had been using Twitter and Facebook for years, so whenever I posted something on those networks, I was used to getting some kind of response – replies, retweets, likes etc. Which made it a little disconcerting to put up posts on Google+ and hear nothing but crickets chirping in response.

It wasn’t until I made a concerted effort to engage with other people’s posts that I started to unlock the real value of Google+. By commenting, resharing, and hitting the +1 button (similar to the ‘like’ button on Facebook) I started to connect with other users, and to receive more comments, shares and +1′s in response to my own posts.

As in so many other areas of life, it pays to make an effort on Google+ by joining conversations and being generous in sharing other people’s work.

The ‘small picture benefit’ of doing this is more exposure for your own work and ideas. But the exciting ‘big picture benefit’ is that the more smart, creative and passionate people are engaging with each other on Google+, the more valuable the network becomes for everyone.

Right now, millions of people are co-creating something extraordinary on Google+. Fancy joining us?

Over to you

Does this give you what you need to get up and running on Google+?

Experienced Google+ users – any tips you would like to add?

About the Author: Mark McGuinness is a creative coach and the author of Resilience: Facing Down Rejection and Criticism on the Road to Success. Having read this article, you won’t be surprised to learn you can circle Mark on Google+.

I know you’re busy, and it probably feels like another social network is the last thing you need. But this isn’t just another social network. It’s bigger than that, and it can have multiple benefits for your creative career or business.

Here are four compelling reasons why you should start using Google+ now.

1. Everyone’s on Facebook

I hear this a lot, as an objection to using Google+. But in fact it’s one of the biggest reasons why you should be using Google+.

How so?

Picture this scene, from Hermann Hesse’s classic novel Steppenwolf: Harry Haller, bored and disillusioned with his meaningless bourgeois life, is wandering the streets when he comes across a sign pinned to a door:

MAGIC THEATRE.
ENTRANCE NOT FOR EVERYONE.
FOR MADMEN ONLY!

Of course Harry goes in, and of course it changes his life.

And of course ‘everyone’ has no interest in the Magic Theatre or what he learns there. And of course, once he has made his discovery, Harry couldn’t care less what ‘everyone’ thinks.

You see, if you aspire to doing something creative and original, you probably shouldn’t follow what ‘everyone’ is doing. You should look for the magic doors that open on new worlds.

If you’re looking for an amazing creative job, you shouldn’t be looking in the same places ‘everyone’ is looking.

And if you’re running a creative business, you probably shouldn’t design products or services for ‘everyone’. You aren’t making washing powder. You’re doing something more interesting than that, and appealing to a more discerning crowd.

So when I hear ‘everyone’ telling me Google+ is a ‘ghost town’, and Facebook or Twitter is where the action is, I take it with a pinch of salt.

And when I hear clever people like Brian Clark, Chris Brogan, Guy Kawasaki, Thomas Power and Penny Power – who have a track record of being right about this kind of thing – telling me Google+ is where the interesting conversations are happening, my ears prick up.

I’ve been here before. In 2007 ‘everyone’ had never heard of Twitter. Meanwhile Brian and Chris were enthusing about it and all my ‘social media friends’ were egging me on to join.

But I was sceptical – it looked pointless and boring. I wondered what they saw in it. Then I tried it for myself, and discovered I had been spectacularly wrong about Twitter.

Once I ‘tuned in’ to Twitter, it felt like being backstage at a gig, hanging out with well-known bloggers, entrepreneurs, authors and thought leaders. People who I’d never dare to email were replying to my tweets.

I made new friends and connections. I found fun and inspiration. Then I got a smartphone and it felt like I had the world in my pocket.

These days I still enjoy Twitter, but it’s not the same. It feels a bit crowded now ‘everyone’ is on it, and it’s harder to have proper conversations. It no longer gives me the magical feeling I’m about to discover something new each time I log on. For that, I go to Google+…

2. Meet people who share your passion

Right now, Google+ feels like Twitter did in 2007. A place where curious, creative, enthusiastic people are congregating, talking, sharing and exploring together.

Not a place for broadcasting to ‘everyone’, or for keeping in touch with the people you’ve known since school. But a place to make connections and have conversations with people who can open doors in your mind and in your career or business.

Guy Kawasaki gives an excellent summary of the differences between Twitter, Facebook and Google+:

Twitter = Perspectives.

Twitter is great for getting or sending immediate perspectives on news and events. In other words, if you want to learn that there was an earthquake in Chile before CNN and you like getting updates from Chileans at ground zero, then Twitter is for you. In short, Twitter is for real-time perspectives.

Facebook= People.

Facebook is the way to learn what’s going on in the lives of people you already know (friends, relatives, and colleagues). It’s great for learning that their cats rolled over, that they went to a great party, or that they had sex, kittens, or children. In short, Facebook is for people.

Google+ = Passions.

Google+ enables you to pursue your passions with people you don’t know. Your fifty friends and family on Facebook likely do not share your passion for photography, but on Google+ you can have a blast with a community of photographers (I’ll explain how shortly). In short, Google+ is for passions.

What the Plus!: Google+ for the Rest of Us by Guy Kawasaki

Whatever your passion, you should be able to find other people on Google+ who share it. And two specific features of Google+ make it easy to make connections and follow conversations by topic:

Circles

Part of the fun of Twitter is that it’s like a firehose of information – people posting on all kinds of topics, streaming past you at the speed of light. But the downside is it’s hard to keep up with your favourite contacts, or to follow the threads of particular conversations or topics.

Google+ solves this problem by allowing you to sort the people you follow into circles, and to view updates from one circle at a time. It’s up to you how you divide the circles, or what names you give them. (Relax, the names aren’t public!).

Here are some of my circles:

• Following – all my contacts
• Inner circle – I want to read everything these people post
• Writers and publishers – what it says on the tin
• Artists and photographers – ditto

If I’m in a hurry, I’ll just check the Inner circle. If I want to follow up a specific topic or industry, I check that circle. And if I want the ‘firehose effect’, I switch to Following.

Communities

Communities are places where groups congregate to discuss and share information about specific topics – a bit like groups on Facebook or LinkedIn. Some topics are served better than others, but if you find a good community around one of your interests, it’s a great source of news, stimulation and like-minded contacts.

Part of the fun of Google+ is the fact that the early adopters are still working out how to get the most out of it. As Chris Brogan, author of Google+ for Business, said when I asked him if he could sum up the benefits of Google+ for creative people:

“Google+ is a place where discovering information is easy (when shared to the public), and where sharing with others is easier still. People are still feeling their way around, but don’t let that bother you. I’m getting feedback on things I posted 3 days after the service launched.”

Chris Brogan

3. A fantastic platform for sharing creative media

The Google+ interface makes Facebook look like MySpace.

Instead of endless clutter, insipid blue and grey design, and crappy ads at every turn, you get clean white space framing the images, videos and text posted by your contacts. And circles make it easy to focus on the topics you’re interested in at any given moment.

The iPhone Google+ app is a thing of beauty – and the Android app must be at least as good (being made by Google).

If you want to discover interesting creative content, scrolling through your Google+ stream is a pleasurable and beguiling experiencing – imagine the gorgeousness of Pinterest combined with the quality of conversation you find in blog comments or a good forum.

If you’re a visual or video artist, Google+ is an ideal platform to showcase your work. No wonder photographers are one of the groups of people who seem to be doing best on Google+. (Check out photographer Trey Ratcliff as an example of a Google+ power user – with over 4.5 million followers, I doubt he thinks Google+ is a ‘ghost town’.)

And I won’t pretend to understand the technical detail, but apparently Google+ treats your image metadata better than most social networks.

If you’re a writer, Google+ gives you more room to breathe than Twitter. I love Twitter’s brevity, but sometimes you need more than 140 characters. So as well as sharing a link, you can add a few words about why you’re recommending it and how to make the most of it.

Or you can write a longer post. Google+ a great place to road-test new ideas, and write about topics that wouldn’t necessarily make it onto your blog. Like my post about 20 Inspiring Objects from the ‘David Bowie Is’ Exhibition at the V&A.

If you want to have a proper conversation, Google+ makes it easy, with threaded comments and no character limit. And there’s an elegant way to draw particular users into the conversation – mention them with the ‘+’ symbol in front of their name (e.g. +Mark McGuinness) and Google+ will alert them to your post or comment.

If you’d rather talk to people face to face, Google+ Hangouts allow you to video-chat live with other users – not just one-to-one, but in groups. And Hangouts on Air allow you to live-stream the conversation to an audience of thousands.

All of which makes Google+ a lot of fun to use and explore – whatever your favourite medium or style of communication, it gives you the tools to express yourself.

4. Get credit for your work (and higher rankings) on Google Search

If I stopped writing now, I’d probably leave you with the impression that Google+ is merely a very good social network. But Google+ is not just another social network, and the benefits of using it go far beyond networking and sharing content.

Here’s another objection I hear a lot:

“But my customers don’t use Google Plus”

Maybe not, but I bet they use Google Search.

I’ve been hearing the same objection for years, about blogging:

“But my customers don’t read blogs, why should I write one?”

These are the same people who ask me:

“How do you manage to rank so highly on search engines?”

The answer to both questions is the same: good blogs naturally attract quality links from other blogs and websites. The more quality links you attract, the higher you will rank in search results.

Like blogging, building your Google+ network is a powerful indirect strategy for boosting your search engine rankings. It takes time, persistence and patience, but the long-term payoff is worth it.

Chris Brogan has described Google+ as a social backplane rather than a social network – because it integrates with Google Search, YouTube, Gmail and other Google products, it ties together all these services, giving you a consistent identity and making it easier for you to be found.

That’s right: because Google+ is owned by Google, having a powerful network on the former can boost your search rankings and conversion rates on the latter.

So even if ‘everyone’ really is on Facebook, using Google+ can help you reach them, because ‘everyone’ definitely uses Google Search.

So how exactly does this work?

Let’s suppose you’re a creative person publishing media online – articles on your blog, guest posts on other blogs, videos on youtube, and/or images on Pinterest/Instagram/Flickr etc.

Until recently, Google had no way of recognising that all these different works were by the same person – and therefore no way of crediting you as the creator in search results. While there were sophisticated algorithms for ranking websites and web pages, the content of those pages was faceless in Google’s eyes.

Until recently – with the introduction of Google Authorship, a way of recognising authorship of works spread across the web on different sites, tying it all back to you as the Author/creator – and giving you credit and extra visibility in search results.

Here’s how it works:

1. Link your Google+ Profile to your website

You take a few minutes to link your website to your Google+ profile. Then do the same with any guest posts or other content you create for other people’s websites.

2. Your photo appears in search results

Next search for a specific piece of content from your site – when it appears in the search results, it should include your photo and a link to your Google+ profile.

For example, here’s how my article Why Artists and Creatives Have an Unfair Advantage at Internet Marketing appears in Google search results:

Notice how my photo makes the article stand out from the others? Because you can instantly see who wrote it, the other results look impersonal by comparison.

Just having your photo pop up like this can give you a significant benefit – people are more likely to click on a link if it stands out and promises a connection with a real human being. Since I’ve implemented Google Authorship I’ve seen a noticeable increase in new business enquiries from search results.

Right now, you can gain this little edge over the competition by spending a few minutes creating a Google+ profile and linking it to your content. Most website owners haven’t done this, so it’s an easy way to stand out from the crowd.

Of course this early-adopter advantage will be eroded when ‘everyone’ realises what’s happening and starts using Google+ in this way. But the SEO benefits of Google+ don’t end with happy smiling photos…

3. Your content ranks higher in search results for your Google+ contacts

Any time one of your Google+ contacts performs a search on Google (while logged in to their Google account), the personalised search experience means they are likely to see your content ranked higher than content from people outside their Google+ circles.

So the more people you are connected to on Google+, the more search results you will be influencing, and the more clicks you are likely to receive, which in turn should help your overall rankings on Google. And of course, when they see your familiar face pop up in search results, they are more likely to click on your link.

4. Your Author Rank will influence your search rankings in all search results

In future it’s likely that the Author Rank of your Google+ profile will influence the search results served to everyone – not just your Google+ contacts. The higher your Author Rank, the more positive effect it will have on the Page Rank of the web pages and sites you create.

In other words, your reputation as a creator (Author) of outstanding creative content is becoming a valuable SEO asset, just as authoritative websites have been for years.

So if you really want to reach ‘everyone’ via search engines, then having an authoritative Google+ account will help you do it – even if ‘everyone’ never cottons on and starts using Google+ themselves.

One really great thing about the emergence of Authorship as a factor in SEO means you don’t have to be the kind of person who can understand the maths and technology of search engine algorithms in order to rank highly. Fundamentally you need to focus on doing two things:

1. Creating and publishing outstanding media content that will appeal to your target audience, both on your own websites and on other sites that are popular with the audience you want to reach.
2. Attracting an engaged network on Google+, based on shared passions, stimulating conversations and sharing your own and others’ media content.

For some of the ‘SEO scientists’ this will be a major shift of mindset. But for a creative pro like you, this mix of creative and social skills shouldn’t be rocket science.

For more in-depth information on this topic, read Mark Traphagen’s article about Google+ and SEO, and Demian Farnworth’s series on Author Rank, Authorship and Google+.

“OK, you’ve convinced me. Where do I start?”

The first thing to do is sign up for a Google+ account and start filling out your profile.

In my next article, coming very soon, I’ll be sharing tips on how to make the most of Google+ for your creative career or business – make sure you’re subscribed to Lateral Action to get it.

And if you’d like to connect with me on Google+ and receive bite-sized inspiration throughout the week (inspiring articles, videos, images; and short posts that supplement the articles I write on this blog) you can add me to your circles here.

Are you on Google+ (yet)?

Are you using Google+?

Why / why not?

If you haven’t tried it yet, have I whetted your curiosity?

About the Author: Mark McGuinness is a creative coach and the author of Resilience: Facing Down Rejection and Criticism on the Road to Success. Having read this article, you won’t be surprised to learn you can circle Mark on Google+.

Painting by Natasha Wescoat licensed to Murals Your Way

When I began as an artist, I was really enjoying the experience of selling my work directly to people. It was so much more exciting than hanging it on a wall in a gallery.

I had more control over my work, when it was available and where I could place it for sale. There was no middle man involved and I preferred it that way.

But something was missing.

I wanted to find other avenues of making money from my work, but I wasn’t sure how. I saw artists launching clothing lines, doing book signings and licensing their art on collectables with well known brands.

I wondered how they were doing that. Did the company find them? Or did the approach come from the artist? It appeared a daunting and impossible achievement.

“Those artists must be veterans by now,” I figured. “They have thousands of fans and their art has to be in galleries everywhere.”

I had no idea how licensing worked or what was expected. Interestingly enough, it was simpler than it appeared to be, thought not without some work.

Extra income, extra exposure

When I began licensing, it was through the well known site, Art.com. Back in 2005, I used their Print-on-Demand program for artists, which means they print orders as they are taken. They offered a decent typical market royalty to artists for every print sold and even later, a small percentage on their framing, which they do in-house. It was a great option, because I didn’t have the equipment or funds to offering prints directly from my studio.

I then discovered other Print on Demand sites like Imagekind.com and FineArtAmerica.com. It would turn out to be a great option for extra income as well as exposure to future collectors. For a time, because of Art.com’s program, I was exposed to a broader audience than I could’ve encountered through my site alone. This was invaluable to my business and helped me grow as an artist and a business person. I even acquired several custom commissions from clients who wanted something ‘larger’ than what the print sites were offering.

This was ironically a great way to also acquire new licensee clients. They found my art through sites like Art.com and emailed me to ask how they could put my work on their products. Because of sites like Art.com and Imagekind.com, I have signed on with product companies that now feature my work in stores like Bed Bath & Beyond, Target and art shops across the US.

It was wild when just one day, opening up my email to find requests on a regular basis. I built a larger following and soon had regular paychecks coming in the mail!

Residual income builder and gap filler

What’s great about licensing is that you are able to fill in the gaps when art sales are at a low or in a seasonal slump. This helps immensely when you need to get the bills paid! If you want to do this full-time, then you have to expand your multiple streams of income. Licensing is a continual, residual income builder.

Painting by Natasha Wescoat licensed to Olivia Olive Oil Company

Licensing 101

So how does licensing work? What do companies look for? How can you pitch to clients? How do clients find you?

First, licensing is a big business. Not only can you offer prints, but you have the potential to create a BRAND. Everything from collectables to home decor to car decals. There are endless possibilities.

Companies work with manufacturing companies that deal with artists and designers to create products. You have to know how it works in order to not only expand your art brand, but to protect it as well.

It’s worth registering the copyright of your work whenever you come up with a new design or collection. Here in the US, as in many countries, copyright is automatically granted to you as soon as you create a piece of art, but registering the copyright means that your ownership is a matter of public record, and makes it easier to defend your rights. For instance, if you want to bring a lawsuit for copyright infringement, you will need to register your copyright. (More information at the US Copyright Office FAQ.)

I remember one day, while on vacation in Florida, I spotted an artist friend’s signature fairies on a t-shirt in Hot Topic. I then contacted her to find out it was a copycat ripping off her work! Because she had her work protected under law, she was able to take that copycat’s products down. You have to protect your work and make sure it’s copyrighted with the Copyright office, not only to claim what’s yours but to protect it in the future.

What companies want

Companies are looking for themes that they can use across a range of products, with complementary images.

So whether you are a fine artist, illustrator or graphic designer, it’s important that you create your work in sets. I know it may seem unappealing if you are a fine artist to be a little commercial in your efforts, but if you can offer sets of 4, 5 or 10 in a collection of themes, they are able to make more products or sets with it.

Another attractive thing to offer is patterns. If you are a designer or can work in design, you could make patterns and designs that would work great to complement your original art images, or to license to fabric companies.

Typical licensing terms

1. Royalties

Companies will offer artists anything from 4% to 30% royalties on the price of their products. It depends on the market and type of product. There are different types of royalty rates depending on the product. For example, typical royalty rates for prints and posters are around 10-15% whereas licensed gadget cases or similar can be around 4-7%. You can negotiate these as well, remember! Try to get the most you can for what you’re worth.

2. Contract length

Most licensing deals last from 1 to 3 years and will be renewed or canceled depending on how well the deal is working out for you and them.

3. Ownership of the work

Never ever let the company claim ownership of your art, take your ownership or give them exclusivity.

Unless you are creating an exclusive collection for that company that is separate from your other art, do not ever allow a company to force you into a corner. You don’t want them to take your right to license the same art somewhere else. Make sure it’s in the contract that they are not expecting you to only license to them for that particular product.

I’ve found many artists don’t realize just how much control they have over their own work, when it comes to art licensing. You not only have the power to create opportunities but you can make the deals happen.

You don’t need an agent. You don’t need a manager. You just need to learn how to license your work, and make it happen for yourself.

How to begin licensing your art

1. Do the research

Read books, websites and blogs such as MariaBrophy.com, Theabundantartist.com and ArtsyShark.com on how artists can license their art. There is valuable information on the steps to follow, but more importantly – HOW to negotiate deals and also HOW to PROTECT your rights.

Know what the typical licensing rates are for fine art or whatever your craft is and also know what you need to protect. With this basic knowledge, you’ll be ready to negotiate on your own.

2. Know your market

Before you pitch to any companies or brands, you should already know what your goals are and who you are selling to.

Are you a cartoonist? An opera songwriter? A fashion designer? A fine artist? A book illustrator? Your genre of work and your market will determine the best people to contact, because you’ll know exactly what products you want to launch or companies you will want to work with. E.g. You shouldn’t pitch to a company that only licenses fantasy art if you are a floral artist or to a children’s book art company if you are a fine artist painting landscapes.

Also – see what other artists in your genre are doing. How are they creating licensing deals? Did they use a certain site or do certain things that led to that? Who do they work with? Take note of these things.

3. Make the pitch

You can create your own opportunities. Make yourself known to companies you want to work with. Research their sites, their brand and then write a thoughtful letter describing your interest and make a brief introduction of yourself.

Offer links to your work, as sometimes attachments are marked spam or they won’t open. Show them how THEY can benefit. Not just that you want to work with them. Show how you two fit. Link to the best examples of your work that complement what they already license.

4. Create a plan

You should make it a regular plan to pitch to companies either monthly or every few months. Create a list of companies you’ve contacted and ones you want to contact.

5. Mock-up a catalog

If you have the skills, create a portfolio of products that your art would be great on. If you want to do toys, create some with your work. If you want to sell yourself as a voiceover, create pretend commercials or jingles that you’d do.

The idea is to help them envision your work already on their products. This can take a few months to create and put together, but it’s an important part of your ‘sell’.

Most people keep these offline or available as a downloadable file, or you can make this a public portfolio on your site – even better!

6. Follow up

Give it two weeks to a month before you contact again, asking if they have gone over your email. This is good to show that you are serious about your proposal and also to remind them, considering they might be too busy to keep up.

7. Use social media

If you really want to make a business opportunity happen, connect to the people who can make it happen – and social media is a great way to do this. Right from the start of my carreer, I’ve found it important to really connect with people and be a genuine source of friendship and value.

Follow them on Twitter. Talk to them on Facebook. I’ve found huge opportunities because of MySpace and eBay, two places you’d NEVER expect to make a connection. People are people. We are all normal. We are all using the internet these days, and not just for business.

Connect on a personal level and befriend others! Don’t expect that your opportunity to happen overnight. You have to provide them with something of value too. It’s a give and take space.

8. License the work yourself

There are lots of websites that will help you explore and develop your offerings, such as Imagekind.com, Artistrising.com, Zazzle.com, Glossi.com, iStockphoto.com and Blurb.com.

Some of my friends who are now famous authors got publishing deals BECAUSE of their success in self-publishing. Another very famous example is Justin Bieber, whose fame began on YouTube when he was just a little boy performing on instruments and singing! The potential options are ENDLESS!

If you want to license your work, search the web for your particular craft. There is bound to be a site and software available for you to start making the product happen today.

Over to you

So what do you think about licensing?

Do you plan to license your work or produce your own products?

About the author: Natasha Wescoat has been a full-time artist since 2004, living and working in Michigan with her two children and extended family. Her art is seen in publications and licensed products across the US and at WescoatFineArt.com

You’re busy.

You receive too many emails.

You’ve got people coming at you every day, asking for things, urgently.

You’ve got a head full of great ideas, but there’s never enough time to work on them properly.

Every time you go near the internet, you find even more demands and diversions.

Even in your free time, you find it hard to stop thinking about work.

You’re feeling overloaded.

If I’m anywhere close in my guesses, don’t despair: you are not alone.

I’m finding more and more coaching clients asking for help with an overloaded schedule and the feelings of overwhelm that go with it.

And to be frank, with projects and clients coming thicker and faster each year, there have been times in recent months when I’ve felt pretty overloaded myself.

Now, if you’re pursuing a stimulating creative career, it’s normal to feel overloaded from time to time, but it’s not a good to feel chronically overwhelmed by work. Because if we’re not careful, overload can turn into creative burnout.

On the other hand there’s a big difference between feeling like you’re ‘always’ overloaded and actually having too much to do.

Time for a reality check

If you’re feeling overloaded, the first step is to do a reality check:

Exactly how busy are you right now?

Is this a temporary state, or is it likely to continue (or get worse)?

Can you manage it, or do you need to do something about it?

To answer these questions, I find it helps to divide your activities into 4 categories:

1. Ongoing work – stuff you have to do every day, every week or every month.
2. Backlogs – things you ‘should’ have done by now, and need to catch up on.
3. Events – work related to one-off events, or events that happen at longer intervals than a month, e.g. an annual conference.
4. Asset building – investing time in creating something that will generate ongoing value in the future.

Let’s look at each of these in a little more detail.

1. Ongoing work

These tasks are not going away – they are essential elements of your daily, weekly and monthly routines.

Here are some of my core ongoing tasks:

• Delivering coaching sessions
• Email
• Blogging
• Writing exclusive content for the Creative Pathfinders
• Doing accounts
• Maintaining my websites
• Keeping my office (relatively) tidy

Depending on your line of work, your ongoing tasks might include some of the following:

• A weekly show
• Writing a column
• Band practice
• Weekly meetings
• Monthly reports

Things to bear in mind about Ongoing work:

• It must be manageable.
• If you have nothing else on your plate and you’re struggling to deal with Ongoing work, you are definitely overloaded and you need to do something about it.

2. Backlogs

These are things that you wish you had done earlier, but didn’t get round to. Common backlogs include:

• Email
• Accounts
• Admin of various kinds

The main causes of backlogs:

• Disorganisation
• Unrealistic workload
• Illness
• Holidays
• Events (see 3 below)
• Building assets (see 4 below)

The end of 2012 was pretty intense for me: having spent several months writing a book (asset building), followed by the book launch (event) and running my annual Creative Entrepreneur Roadmap course (event), I ended up with a backlog of email, accounts and guest articles I’d promised various website owners.

This wasn’t ideal, but it also wasn’t a big problem as I knew what my priorities were, and had a system in place for catching up on the backlogs. Without that, the backlogs could have got out of hand.

Things to bear in mind about backlogs:

• In an ideal world, they wouldn’t exist, but this isn’t an ideal world, so you probably need a way to deal with backlogs.
• They clog up your system – just think of that overflowing inbox – so the quicker you separate them from the rest of your system, the better. Treat them as separate projects (e.g. an email ‘backlog’ folder) and tackle them in dedicated time.
• Backlogs due to disorganisation and unrealistic workload are avoidable and should be tackled ASAP.
• Backlogs due to illness and holidays are unavoidable, so budget for them.
• Backlogs due to events and building assets are manageable and even desirable (see below).

3. Events

Events take place on specific dates, leading to deadlines and deadline magic/stress (delete as appropriate). They are exciting to be involved in, and have a tendency to swamp your schedule.

Here are some of the events in my business:

• Launching my book Resilience
• Running the Creative Entrepreneur Roadmap course
• Speaking at a conference
• Running a live training for a corporate client
• The public training I’ll be running in London later this year

And here are some types of event that may feature in your working life:

• Showing your work in an exhibition
• Performing in a live show
• Pitching for new business
• Attending/speaking at a conference
• Launching a new product or service
• Running a webinar
• Running a seasonal or occasional sale
• Applying for a job
• Applying for funding

Things to bear in mind about events:

• They consume a lot of time and energy, so the payoff needs to be worth it, whether in money, PR, fulfilment, impact or some other measure.
• Because they swamp your schedule, they tend to create backlogs; but if the payoff is big enough, a backlog is a small price to pay.
• Because they consume a lot of energy, you need to allow time to prepare before and recuperate afterwards – one event after another is a recipe for burnout

4. Creating assets

This is where you invest time in creating something intended to generate ongoing value for relatively little future effort.

Here are some of the asset-building tasks in my business:

• Writing a book or creating a new product to sell
• Writing free ebooks to spread my ideas and raise my profile
• Creating my free 26-week Creative Pathfinder course
• Building / rebuilding a website
• Search engine optimisation (SEO)
• Writing sales pages
• Learning a new skill

All of these things take a lot of time and effort, but once done, they add value to my business for little ongoing effort, often while I’m busy doing other things.

Here are some asset-building opportunities that may be relevant to your business or career:

• Creating artworks or products
• Building a website
• Compiling a portfolio of your best work
• SEO
• Writing a series of autoresponder emails to grow your mailing list
• Studying and practising to acquire knowledge and skills
• Gaining a qualification that will open doors for you
• Growing your network

Things to bear in mind about asset building:

• There’s always a risk – your product might fail, your qualification become redundant, your search engine rankings plummet, and so on.
• It’s hard to carve out time for it – it feels easier to respond to email and other incoming demands, which keep you ‘busy’ and give you external validation.
• If you do it right, the payoff can be massive. E.g. Having a website or portfolio that wows potential clients and employers; a search ranking that helps the right people find you; a product that earns money for you while you sleep; a free report that people enthusiastically share with their contacts.
• As with events, if the payoff is big enough, a backlog is a small price to pay.
• The more assets you have, the easier life gets. If it feels good having one best-selling product or high-ranking website, how much better will it be when you have three or four? If you’re seeing good results with a basic proficiency at a new task, how much better will it be when you’ve mastered the skill?
• Different types of asset can combine to produce outsize results. If you’re an artist, producing art is your foundation. If you then learn how to present your work effectively in person, and to raise your profile online, those same artworks can reach a bigger audience and have more of an impact.

How to tell if you’re really overloaded

So those are the four types of activity you could be engaged in. Now we get to the first critical question:

Exactly how busy are you right now?

To answer this:

1. Get a sheet of paper, turn it ‘landscape’ and write the four headings along the top, to form four columns.
2. List everything you currently have to do, placing each task under the relevant heading.

So what does this tell you?

If you’re feeling overloaded and most of your tasks are in the ‘Ongoing’ column, an alarm bell should be ringing – this is a clear sign you’ve got too many commitments! So you need to rethink (and if necessary renegotiate) how you spend your working life. Urgently.

But if you find your tasks are scattered more evenly across the different columns, it’s a good sign, because it’s telling you that a high proportion of your work is temporary, so things can (potentially) ease up in future.

If you’re in this situation, and you don’t have an urgent deadline looming, here’s an experiment worth trying:

Spend a week or two doing nothing except Ongoing tasks. This will give you a ‘baseline’ sense of how much work you have to do to keep the show on the road.

Whenever I’ve given this task to coaching clients, they almost always cheer up: they feel lighter and more energised, and find themselves getting far more done than usual.

And they often feel so motivated that they confess to having done ‘a few extra things’ once they had completed the day’s work, either to reduce a backlog or to prepare for an upcoming event.

How to reduce overload and build a better future

Now that you’ve got a sense of how busy you really are right now, here’s the second critical question:

How can you reduce your current sense of overload, and ensure you achieve more with less effort as time goes by?

To answer it, I’m going to give you a rule of thumb:

Sustainable workload = Ongoing tasks + ONE Backlog, Event OR Asset-building project at a time

So if you have a big event coming up, forget about clearing a backlog or creating a new asset; until you meet the deadline, just focus on the event + doing your minimum ongoing tasks.

Or if you have a big backlog to clear and a big new project you’re eager to start, don’t try to do both at once. Pick one, and do that + ongoing tasks, until it’s done.

No, it’s not easy to stick to this rule, but if you do, you should notice the following benefits:

1. Your workload looks more manageable, so you feel less overwhelmed and more motivated.
2. Because of 1, you apply focused effort to the tasks in hand, and achieve more in less time.
3. Each task or project you complete boosts your motivation further.
4. As time goes by, you have fewer and smaller backlogs, unclogging your system and making you more efficient (cycling back to 1).
5. As time goes by, you have more assets that make your life easier in different ways, so that you achieve more with less effort (cycling back to 1 again).

And so on… reversing the vicious cycle of overload, so that you become more efficient, motivated, effective and creative as time goes by.

When you’re preparing for an event, clearing a backlog, or building an asset, you may feel under pressure and work longer hours than usual – but that’s very different to crippling sense of ‘always’ being overloaded. When you know the pressure is temporary, it’s a lot easier to handle.

Over to you

How helpful is it to divide your workload into Ongoing, Backlogs, Events and Creating Assets?

How do you deal with overload?

About the Author: Mark McGuinness is a creative coach and the author of Resilience: Facing Down Rejection and Criticism on the Road to Success.

In this video Joanna Penn interviews me about dealing with rejection and criticism when you’re pursuing your creative dreams, drawing on insights from my book Resilience.

(If you’re reading via email you may need to click through to the website to watch the video.)

Jo is a novelist and publishing expert, so parts of the interview focus on the specific challenges facing writers – but as you’ll see, most of the ideas are applicable whatever creative field you are working in.

Questions I answer include:

• Is it possible to succeed as a creative professional without having to deal with rejection and criticism?
• Is it normal to be afraid of being judged by others? If you experience this fear, how can you deal with it?
• How can you tell whether criticism is valid or not?
• What’s the best way to handle criticism?
• How can you build resilience and bounce back from multiple rejections and biting criticism?

Thanks to Jo for a fun and stimulating conversation.

If you’re remotely interested in writing and publishing, you should subscribe to Jo’s blog – it’s one of a very small number of blogs I keep up with every week.

And there’s lots more advice on dealing with rejection and criticism as a creative person in my book Resilience, available in various formats here.

About the Author: Mark McGuinness is a creative coach and the author of Resilience: Facing Down Rejection and Criticism on the Road to Success.

Image by Oleg latsun via BigStock

Did you set a ‘Big Hairy Audacious Goal’ this morning?

No, me neither.

What about your ‘Great Work Project’?

No?

OK, what about deciding ‘How will you measure your life’?

No?

This article is for all of you who did not wake this morning consumed with desire to reach for the sky, fulfil your potential or leave an outstanding legacy.

That’s not to say there aren’t things you want to do. Of course there are. You just haven’t found the right thing yet. Listen, if there is something not done in your life or career it’s because you have one of two problems:

1. You know what you want but need a tool, technique, mindset or new approach to make it happen.
2. Or you don’t know what you want.

If you have the first problem then you might well belong to that tiny group who urge each other to go for it. You know what you want, so your narrative is all about getting and keeping going…

I call it Knowing and Going. You’ll read the wisdom of the masters of motivation, you’ll pin up pictures of what you want and maybe practise writing yourself dummy cheques to get used to the money coming your way (Yes, really, I’m not making this up). If this is you then I apologise for wasting your time. You may wish to look away at this point for it’s the second group I want to talk to.

Still here?

If you haven’t got the first problem then you might well have the second problem – you can’t ‘go’ because you don’t ‘know’.

You don’t have a narrative about going for it because you are not sure what ‘it’ is. The battle metaphors and exhortations to go for gold leave you cold because you aren’t sure what race you should be in. In fact you may well have the impressive list of symptoms we looked at last time. You’re not alone, if the comments last time are any guide it’s a widespread problem.

All the evidence shows that people who know what they want are more likely to get what they want. After all, if you don’t know what you want, you will end up working for someone who does. Without your own agenda you will spend the best part of your youth and energy delivering someone else’s agenda.

What also seems true is people who do manage to know what they want possess a kind of ‘inner compass’ allowing them to make decisions and change their circumstances to move nearer to it.

But what if yours is broken or you’ve mislaid it?

Welcome. I’m going to help you look for it. Here’s a suggestion:

Start navigating by desire

Sometimes the barrier to knowing what you want is very simple. Perhaps you have a feeling that you’re not allowed to do what you want and have what you want. It might sound like this:

“If I did what I wanted all the time I’d never work or get anything done or achieve anything that needed some effort.

“And what about all those boring but necessary things that I don’t really want to do but have to do, like emptying the washing machine or doing my budget report, which I hate? If I carried on doing what I wanted, I’m worried that I’d stay in bed all day.”

The solution to this dilemma is to start navigating by our true desire instead of letting our moods lead us around by the nose.

Your moods and your desires

When we navigate by our moods we are primarily concerned with how we feel so we ask internal questions like, “What do I feel like doing?” or when faced with a choice, “Which one feels right?” or we might avoid some regular chore if we do not feel like doing it.

Hands up if you can spot a problem with this approach.

I don’t know about you but my moods change so much, even what I eat changes how I feel. This makes me a bit wary of using them as a guide and is why you might be worried about how your life would work if you only did what you felt like all the time.

It could be said that the opposite to mood is desire. Desire is about things that you want rather than things you feel like doing.

A lot of the time your mood and your desire are aligned. Lets say it’s 10am, you feel like a coffee and you want a coffee so you act to get one. Here your mood and desire are one so it’s easy to confuse them.

But what if there is a real difference? It’s 10pm. You get that lip smacking, mouth tingling feel for one last coffee but you know it will spoil your sleep. Your feelings are shouting “Drink coffee, go on!” but what you really want is a good sleep and to wake fresh for tomorrow. Now you have a clear choice – follow your moods and risk losing sleep, or choose what you desire instead.

Here’s a more personal example…

Choosing desire on a cold, wet morning

Imagine a cold, dark Saturday morning. It’s 5.30am and raining. My alarm rings. I surface with a groan in my warm, snuggly bed and realise, yet again, it’s time to take my daughter to her 6am swimming practice. I do not feel like getting up, I feel like staying in bed. My mood says “Don’t do it, it’s not right for you, it doesn’t feel right.”

So I’m lying there and I ask myself, “What do you want?” and I know that even though I do not feel like it, I do want to get up. In fact, I like the quiet time while she is swimming – it’s a little oasis in my week. I’ve enjoyed it before and I picture myself enjoying it again. I also want to get up because she loves swimming and I want to support her.

I still don’t feel like it, although, as I begin to think about what I want, my mood begins to change, coming round to supporting my desire. Fighting off my feelings, I get up to follow my desire.

Learn to follow your true desire

If you can identify your true desire, your mood will fall into line behind it, or in plain English: If there is something you don’t feel like doing then maybe you’re asking the wrong question.

Our feelings change so much, affected by the weather, what we eat, the amount of sleep we’ve had, what just went past our eyes or who we are with. All these affect our mood from moment to moment.

This makes your feelings an unreliable guide to what to do next. Your desires, on the other hand, tend to be deeper and less susceptible to moment by moment changes. Any time you find yourself in conflict about a simple choice – perhaps you think you should be doing something but don’t feel up to it, then have a think about what questions you are asking yourself.

If you are navigating primarily by mood you’ll be asking, “What do I feel like doing?”

If you are navigating by desire you’ll be asking, “What do I really want?”

As you choose to follow your desires rather than your moods, a couple of things will happen:

1. Your desires and what you want will become much clearer to you.
2. Your moods will fall into line behind your desires so that your feelings quickly come to support what you want.

And when you feel like doing what you want, it becomes much easier to start getting what you want. You find your inner compass by locating your true desire and following it. Practice following desire and over time you will be able to work harder at what you love, sort priorities quickly and make faster decisions.

One more thing

So here we are, back where we started:

“If I only did what I wanted, nothing in my life would get done”

That’s not true though is it? Even if you don’t feel like emptying the washing machine, you do want to wear clean clothes. Although you may hate doing budget reports you do want to show how well your team has done. In fact, when you stop focussing on how horrible it feels and start thinking about what you desire, you often find other ideas spring to mind about how to get it done.

“I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp.”

~ W. Somerset Maugham

What else do you want to know about goal-setting?

How do you stay creative when your feelings lead you astray? Tell us what works for you.

If you have discovered what you really wanted, what was the secret, the trigger point for you? Please share.

If you are yet to find your inner compass, let me know whether you found this tip helpful.

About the Author: Andrew Halfacre is a coach with years of experience helping people discover what they really want. Visit FirstKnowWhatYouWant.com to download your free ‘First Know Journal’, a 40-page PDF of all the exercises from the book. And get the book as well on Amazon: First, Know What You Want.

After a terrorist attack destroyed New York’s World Trade Center and left lower Manhattan a shambles on September 11, 2001, utility company Con Edison faced a herculean task: rebuilding the utility infrastructure of this densely-packed urban area.

As part of this effort, Lisa Frigand of the utility’s economic development department was serving on a committee that was trying to coordinate multiple groups of stakeholders. But the team was having a lot of trouble keeping track of all the individuals and organizations involved – everything from civic, government and 9/11 memorial organizations to property owners and other providers of infrastructure in Manhattan – a monumental number of stakeholders.

When colleague David Hill heard about the team’s challenge, he suggested creating a mind map to represent all of these groups and their complex inter-relationships. Frigand provided the information and Hill created the mind map. He also interviewed some of the people involved to ensure that the information it contained was accurate.

This mind map – which you can see on the Idea Mapping blog – was instrumental in assisting ConEd in rebuilding lower Manhattan. It had such an impact that it was subsequently acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City as a work of ‘historical significance’.

The mind map was powerful because it took something that was very complex and made it very clear – not unlike the complex, often ambiguous challenges you may face in today’s uncertain times.

Visual thinking is quickly gaining popularity as a set of tools to help solve large, complex problems and uncover innovative solutions. Adding visually-oriented thinking techniques – like mind mapping, diagramming, sketching and infographics – to your skill set is one of the most powerful ways you can add value to your creative work.

Key areas where visual thinking can help you:

Accurate problem definition

As the problems you face in business and life become more complex, you need better tools to help you clearly and accurately describe problems, challenge your existing assumptions, identify areas where you need more information and gather and organize your research.

Albert Einstein once said if he had one hour to save the world, he would spend 55 minutes defining the problem and only five minutes finding the solution. Using techniques like root cause analysis and fishboning, you can ensure that you’ve identified the right problem to solve, rather than picking away at symptoms.

In addition, tools like mind maps can help you deconstruct your challenges and can enable you to simultaneously see the forest and the trees (a high level overview and a more detailed perspective) – all within the same visual framework.

Developing future scenarios

In a world of increasing complexity and ambiguity, simply getting out of your malaise and being able to envision new potential futures and opportunities is becoming a challenge for many creatives.

This becomes even harder because future scenarios are hard to express in writing in a meaningful way; such narratives become so verbose that it’s hard to understand the impact of the future they describe. In other words, the meaning gets lost in the message.

In contrast, visual thinking offers a rich palette upon which to express what’s possible in compelling, colorful formats, and empowers you to share your insights with others in memorable and inspiring ways.

Brainstorming and idea evaluation

Many tried-and-true approaches seem to be less effective today. That’s why you need tools that can help you brainstorm new ideas to help solve your challenges, and evaluate them based on specific criteria. For many creatives, the challenge is not creating enough ideas, but developing effective processes for sorting through them to identify the best ones.

Arraying your ideas in visual form can help you to group ideas in meaningful ways and evaluate them faster. It can also help you to ‘chunk up’ – to see where relationships exist between ideas – so you can combine them and build upon them to create stronger, more valuable solutions.

Taking productive action

In addition, you need to formulate plans and take action to bring to fruition the best ideas you’ve developed. Capturing all of the details of a new project in an actionable form can often be daunting. Visualizing them in a diagram or mind map can help you see:

• what you need to do
• what resources will be required to accomplish those tasks
• who should be responsible for them

In short, these tools can help you reach clarity faster, make better informed decisions and get things done!

A more powerful perspective

Visual thinking expert and author Dave Gray, in his excellent book Gamestorming, explains how making your thoughts tangible can free you from mental clutter and enable you to focus on generating solutions to the challenge at hand:

Imagine yourself playing a game of chess while blindfolded. It’s possible to hold the positions of all the pieces in your mind’s eye for a time – and most chess masters can do it for an entire game – but it’s much easier to have the pieces displayed on the board in front of you. The shape and color of each piece and its position relative to the board and to the other pieces contains a rich set of information that can help you make better decisions about the game.

In much the same way, you can use visual thinking to treat your thoughts as ‘artifacts’ – tangible, portable thought objects that may include sticky notes, index cards, elements of a diagram or topics within a mind map. Rearranging them enables you to play “What if?” with information and ideas, in much the same way that a chess player ponders his potential next moves by analyzing the chess board in front of him.

Best of all, visual thinking uses both sides of your brain – both the logical left hemisphere and the more creative right hemisphere – giving you greater mental horsepower to generate productive solutions for yourself and the people you serve.

This powerful mindset is one that anyone can develop, and it’s an awesome differentiator for you and your unique creative style.

Visual thinking can help you to:

• See patterns and connections that others aren’t even aware of
• Envision new possibilities and ideas
• Display the quality of your thinking
• Dissect complex problems, view their components and discern their underlying causes
• Reach clarity more quickly on complex challenges
• Make better informed decisions
• Communicate your ideas in a high-impact, memorable manner to the key people you are trying to influence
• Build consensus with others

All of these are critical needs today. Why not become the ‘go-to’ expert on visual thinking in your world?

Good books on visual thinking

Visual thinking has become so popular that it has spawned many excellent books. These books are invaluable guides to this fascinating world of non-linear, bigger-picture thinking.

Specifically, I recommend these ten books:

1. The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures – Dan Roam
2. Unfolding the Napkin: The Hands-On Method for Solving Complex Problems with Simple Pictures – Dan Roam
3. Blah Blah Blah: What To Do When Words Don’t Work – Dan Roam
4. Visual Meetings: How Graphics, Sticky Notes and Idea Mapping Can Transform Group Productivity – David Sibbett
5. Mind Maps for Business: Revolutionize Your Business Thinking and Practice – Tony Buzan
6. Idea Mapping: How to Access Your Hidden Brain Power, Learn Faster, Remember More and Achieve Success in Business – Jamie Nast
7. Thinking Visually: Business Applications of 14 Core Diagrams – Malcolm Craig
8. Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers – Dave Gray, Sunni Brown and James Macanufo
9. Resonate: Present Visual Stories that Transform Audiences – Nancy Duarte
10. Visual Teams: Graphic Tools for Commitment, Innovation, and High Performance – David Sibbett

In closing, visual thinking is one of the most powerful tools you can add to your skill set. It can help you to increase your influence and impact in your work and, more importantly, differentiate you in the eyes of the people whom you serve.

What (and how) do you think?

What complex challenges do you face that may lend themselves to visual thinking?

Which visual thinking techniques have you tried to date? What were the results?

In what areas do you need help learning about visual thinking?

About the Author: Chuck Frey is the founder and publisher of The Mind Mapping Software Blog. This article is based upon an excerpt from Chuck Frey’s new book, Up Your Impact: 52 Innovative Strategies to Add Value to Your Work.

Image by Dennis Jarvis

Three years ago… I was trapped in a job I no longer loved, struggling to get by on a wage that could no longer support my family. With hindsight, I think I was on the verge of becoming clinically depressed.

Two years ago… everything had changed. I was running my own company and financially stable.  But now I was stressed out of my mind, working every hour of the day on projects that that still weren’t where my true passion lies – and with no idea where the next job was coming from.

Just one year ago… even that work had dried up – I’d done almost nothing chargeable for months, and was starting to wonder if it was all a horrible mistake.

But I had a plan.

And plenty of hope.

Today it looks as if my hopes were justified, and the plan is working. I’m generating a healthy income from the Production Advice website I started over four years ago, I’m being well-paid for doing the work I really love, and I’m getting more and more enquiries every day.

And I owe it all to my iPod Touch.

No, really! Here’s why. And some suggestions for using pocket-sized technology, such as an iPod or smartphone, to reinvent your life or business…

Who am I?

I’m a Mastering Engineer. Which means, I take people’s music and prepare the final masters before release, and make the music sound the best it can be as part of the process.

But three years ago, I’d almost completely lost sight of that side of my career.

Somewhere along the way, the interesting side-project of setting up new CD-ROM and DVD authoring services for my employers had become all I ever did. And by the winter of 2009, it was a dead weight around my neck.

I didn’t know it at the time, but the company I’d worked for for over 15 years was sinking fast, and as the work dried up things became more and more polarised – I was stuck with the cookie-cutter corporate DVD work, while my colleagues scrabbled for the remaining music and audio crumbs.

Personal conflicts with the management finally brought things to a head, and I decided I had to leave. But how ?

Strangely enough, my iPod Touch provided the answer.

I’d already started my first blog a couple of years earlier, inspired by a post on Mark’s Wishful Thinking site, in fact. I soon got interested in the art of writing headlines that would draw readers to my posts, and somewhere along the way I signed up to Twitter - also at Mark’s suggestion. But it wasn’t till the iPod arrived that everything started to click.

Here are four crucial ways I’ve used it to build my new business and change my life for the better – and how you could use the same principles in your life and business.

1. Make valuable connections

I got the iPod Touch for the sexy new interface, for the web browser and of course for listening to music – but to my surprise, the thing I really ended up using most for was Twitter.

I’d never expected an iPod to be a communications device, but that’s exactly what it was. The ability to read and post anywhere – in an armchair, while eating breakfast, waiting for masters to run at work – without being stuck in front of a desk – transformed the way I used the new service, and that eventually transformed my life.

Through Twitter I discovered new sites like Copyblogger and Lateral Action. It would be so cool, I daydreamed, if I could make money from my website in the way they did – but, I thought, I was in completely the wrong field… (I was wrong !).

It was more than just casual contacts I made, though – the great thing about social networking is that anyone can talk to anyone, if they like.

I set up Dynamic Range Day in 2010, after reading blog posts by Derek Sivers and Seth Godin - both of whom I discovered through Twitter (of course). But when I announced the second event the following year, it was the managing director of Solid State Logic who contacted me via Twitter to offer support. In fact, they donated a mixing desk worth thousands of pounds as the first prize in a competition to help publicise it and we’ve never looked back.

I’ve been invited to write for magazines and do interviews via Twitter, and I meet new clients. Bizarrely, I even ended up in an Imogen Heap music video. 

And most recently I’ve started running a regular live “Q&A” session answering people’s questions about mastering, using the #masteringQT hashtag. Every time I do it, a flurry of new enquiries always follows. The beauty of this strategy is that it’s simple and free – you could try it in your area of expertise.

Takeaway: Connecting and sharing via social media is far more than a simple distraction – never underestimate the opportunity it offers you, especially in a hand-held device that lets you reach the world wherever you are.

2. Listen and learn

If you’ve tried setting up on your own, or making your own art you’ll already how much there is to learn and how little time there is to learn it. Especially by reading. The iPod can help you overcome this challenge.

I’ve always been good at mentally processing audio, including speech as well as music. So while I don’t have time to sit down and read much these days, I listen to books constantly – while I Photoshop, while I cook, while I drive, walk the dog…

Not just books, either. The Third Tribe website has been an important part of building my online business, and all their teaching materials are all available in downloadable audio form.

Plus podcasts ! Seth Godin’s Startup School, Jonathan Fields’ Good Life Project, Internet Marketing for Smart People and more…

And of course there are great apps on the iPod for reading and research too – the Kindle and iBook apps but more importantly the wonderful Instapaper, creating an instant archive of useful and interesting articles, saved for offline reading with a single finger-tap.

Takeaway: Figure out how you learn best – text, audio or video – and take advantage of 21st Century tech to use that method – when it fits best into your schedule.

3. Spark your imagination

They say all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, and it’s true. Mark is right - a key element to creating great work is being open to a wide range of inspiring influences. Luckily the iPod can provide that, too.

In fact I almost get more entertainment and inspiration than I can handle, from a combination of social media, blog posts and radio shows like Front Row or the Infinite Monkey Cage. Spotify feeds my desire for new music, or I can listen to iPlayer Radio. There’s even an app for Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies!

Best of all is a superb free application called Flipboard. It pulls all kinds of information together in an easy-to-use, great-looking interface – magazines, newspapers, Google Reader and Twitter, all jumbled up into a fascinating, personalised flow of information.

Takeaway: Be open to serendipity and new ideas. Allow a little time every day for simply playing with your expensive, geeky toys – look for connections and take note of the good stuff you find.

4. Make things on the move

You might think an iPod is too small to use for actually doing work on – but you’d be wrong.

The key weapon in my own arsenal is a mind-mapping app called iThoughts HD - I use it to brainstorm, plan blog posts, structure courses and plan new products. The touch-screen interface is perfect for mind-mapping, I actually prefer to use it this way than on a desktop with a mouse !

Another workhorse is Evernote - a kind of auto-syncing notepad on steroids, which stops you ever forgoting a great idea, and even allows you to do some quick writing work, at a pinch.

Crucially, both these apps automatically sync via the cloud, meaning everything is always up-to-date, even when moving from one device to another.

Takeaway: Even a device you can keep in your pocket can be used for serious on-the-go productivity.

Last night an iPod changed my life

So why did I write this post ?

There’s a quote doing the rounds on Twitter in the last week that goes something like this:

Imagine talking to someone form the 1950s. How would they react if you told them you had a device in your pocket that could instantly connect you with almost anyone, and access the sum total of all human knowledge ? But that you use it to look at pictures of cats, and argue with people you don’t know ?

I bought my first iPod Touch using money my grandfather left me when he died – and I don’t think my parents really approved of that choice. But the truth is that without it, I might not be where I am today. This tiny little device has been both a tool and a catalyst for the move into a whole new life for me and my family – and that they really do approve of, I’m sure. And I know my grandfather would have, too.

The same could be true for you.

If you’re stuck in a dead-end job, or struggling with a new venture you’re trying to get off the ground, or just need some fun, new connections and inspiration – maybe all you need to do is get an iPod!

I’m joking. Of course it doesn’t really have to be an Apple device – any modern smart-phone can do everything I’ve mentioned in this post, these days.

When I first got into blogging and Twitter I was convinced I was too late, that I’d missed the boat, that it was all over… but it’s still only just beginning. We’re right at the start of  a modern equivalent of the industrial revolution, or the invention of the printing press – and devices like the iPod are just the tip of the iceberg.

An iceberg we can hold in the palm of our hand.

Use it – start connecting, now.

Over to you

How are you using an iPod or smartphone as a creative or business tool?

Do you find it a benefit, or yet another distraction?

Have you made any powerful or inspiring connections via social media?

About the author: Ian Shepherd is a mastering engineer, Blu-ray/DVD author and musician. He runs Mastering Media, dedicated to making things look and sound great, and the Production Advice website where he helps people unlock the potential of their music. He is passionately opposed to the so-called CD ‘Loudness Wars’, and in 2010 founded Dynamic Range Day to help raise awareness of the issue.