Google’s latest edition to the new AdWords experience is integration with Optimize, the company’s visual editor for landing pages.
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Stop churning out content for the sake of it. Here's how to create content that can increase your website traffic.
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The definitive guide to augmented reality marketing, including AR campaign case studies from companies who did it right.
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Data shows the Internet is less mobile friendly in 2018 than in 2017. This could be good news for you.
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Many people ask me how to write for the children and young adult market, and here to provide the answers is Mike Thomas.
Mike is the author of The Secret of The Hidden Scrolls, a popular Christian children’s book series that he started because his son had to write a book report for school.
Mike and his son looked for a fascinating faith-based book appropriate for a grade school kids, and they couldn’t find one. So, Mike decided he would write a book for this niche instead. Even though he’d never been a writer before, Mike was determined and came up with the idea that would become The Secret of The Hidden Scrolls series.
When the first book was finished about 6 weeks later, Mike’s son asked if he would read it to his class. Despite feeling a bit nervous about sharing his art in public, Mike agreed.
Based on the feedback from his son’s class, Mike made some slight changes and then read it to more elementary school classrooms. The book was a hit, and kids repeatedly asked Mike when he was going to write another one!
It was then that Mike wondered what to do next. He trusted that God had given him this message to encourage others, and he felt obligated to share it.
Using CreateSpace, Mike asked a friend to design the cover, and created some illustrations for the book. He self-published the book and asked his church if they would put it in their library. A week later every copy was sold out, and Mike felt more confident about taking the books to a broader circle.
On this episode of The Portfolio Life, Mike explains how he went about finding an agent, what his writing ritual looks like from start to finish, and how many books are planned for The Secret of the Hidden Scrolls series.
To listen to the show, click the player below (If you’re reading this via email, please click here).
In this episode, Mike and I talk about:
Do you have an idea for a children or young adult book? Let us know in the comments.
Google My Business appears to have stopped counting anonymous reviews toward a business’s overall rating.
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These metrics will tell you if your digital marketing efforts are successful and where to make adjustments.
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Good, reliable web hosting matters. Here are the five key features that define an SEO-friendly hosting company.
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Six takeaways about PDF files in a mobile first Internet. Considered obsolete by some Internet marketers, others offer reasons why it's still useful.
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Here are 12 things you should take into consideration when choosing your domain name.
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Very important post for SEO beginner so many unique ideas for seo
Here's why you should care about branding, support branding efforts, and understand their objectives.
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Read an easy to understand summary of four important research papers about CTR and rankings.
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Since releasing Real Artists Don’t Starve, I’ve heard from a number of people who don’t believe it’s possible to make a living off your creativity — whether in writing, fine art, or another medium. But is that really true?
For most of my life, I was told a story about what it means to be an artist, a title reserved for that elite group of people who were talented but unlikely to succeed. The advice was always the same:
When I was growing up, I was told that creativity, though a nice outlet, was never something you should go “all in” on. Because, odds are, you’ll starve. You may have been told the same.
It turns out, though, that’s just not true.
For years, the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP) has been surveying graduates of arts programs to see how successful they are in the real world.
Approximately 120,000 degrees in the arts are awarded every year, and the question is, what happens to these people? Not what you think.
You might imagine, as I did, the stereotypical starving artist: the stubborn loner struggling to make ends meet and forsaking every adult concern for their work.
This is what we have been taught to expect when imagining people in full-time, creative careers. We imagine poverty-stricken souls spending their days slaving away at the work, toiling in agony to create their next masterpiece.
We picture Michelangelo on his back, nose to ceiling, paint dripping in his eyes, earning little for his genius.
The SNAAP study, however, revealed something quite different. The majority of trained artists are actually thriving. Here were some fascinating statistics:
They report income levels that support families, sustain careers, and enable charitable giving. In other words, they are not starving.
Contrast that with a 2014 US Census Bureau where nearly 75 percent of science, tech, engineering, and mathematics graduates are not employed in their field of study, and we are forced to consider a new reality for modern creatives.
Many artists are, in fact, not suffering for their craft. They’re proudly producing work that matters and pays the bills.
So we are brought to a sobering conclusion about creative work:
You can make art and make a living.
Over the past couple years, while writing Real Artists Don’t Starve, I interviewed hundreds of working creatives and came across a surprising fact. When we look at the lives of successful artists, writers, and entrepreneurs, we see a unique mindset:
They don’t believe they have to suffer to succeed.
These people, those I call Thriving Artists, think about themselves and their work differently than those who don’t succeed. Discarding the ways of the Starving Artist, they follow a new set of rules, what I call The Rules of the New Renaissance.
Here they are, all 12 of them:
These are the things nobody told me — as a kid drawing cartoons, a teenager playing the guitar, and a twenty-something dreaming of writing books.
In my new book, I share story after story of thriving artists who didn’t suffer for their work but instead found a way to live off it. And if we follow in their footsteps, adopting the rules by which they live their lives, we can do the same.
To learn more about how you can stop starving and join the New Renaissance, check out Real Artists Don’t Starve. Order the book and get over $100 in bonus resources.
You can also check out Real Artists Don’t Starve here.
Are you working in your field of study? How can you leverage creativity for your advantage at work? Share in the comments.
Google AdWords introduced parallel tracking earlier this year, and all accounts will be required to use it starting October 30th.
The post Google AdWords Requires All Accounts to Use Parallel Tracking, As of October 2018 by @MattGSouthern appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
I find that frustrating because I don’t want to waste my time with crappy marketing courses that may teach me outdated tactics, useless theoretical information and/or strategies I already know. Because I figure I’m not the only one facing this…
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You need to get these 11 important parts of SEO right to win clients, conversions, and sales.
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Here are the most common types of terrible content that manage to rank well on Page 1 of the SERPs.
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Discover an effective SEO framework that you can employ to generate high-quality B2B leads.
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Here are 10 common misunderstandings about Google and SEO and why they’re wrong.
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Here are the things you need to consider when choosing a TLD for international SEO.
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Have you ever wondered what it takes to turn craftmanship into a successful business? Travis Weige does.
Today, Travis joins us to share his fascinating story of leaving his six-figure career in software sales to build custom, handmade knives.
Before making custom knives, Travis spent 18 years in software sales, much of it flying to LA or NY from his home in Austin, Texas. One day he saw a video of a guy making knives, and was hooked by the idea.
Travis had always been good at making things by hand, and with the large garage that came with the house his family had just bought, adequate space was not an issue. The pieces all came together in his mind, so Travis tried out crafting knives.
Initially, his knives were just for friends and family, but one day a friend asked for a knife for his wife. She was a professional chef with a wealthy client list. During their consult, his friend opted to have his wife pick what she wanted her knife to look like, everything from the colors of the handle to the pins.
His friend’s wife came over and loved the concept. In fact, she loved it so much she told people about him. A month later a reporter from The Austin Chronicle stopped by to do an article on him.
Having worked as a journalist, Travis knew he would be better off having his friend take the photos for the article. The Chronicle agreed.
With the help of his photographer friend, they took photos of the various aspects and stages of the knife-making process. The Chronicle liked the photos so much they told Travis they were going to put him on the cover.
Within 48 hours of that issue going out to hundreds of thousands of subscribers, Travis had 400 emails and close to $50,000 in sales! Travis was ecstatic, but also nervous, so he called his friend to ask for help. After some cajoling, Travis’ friend joined him, and they’ve been working together ever since.
On this episode of The Portfolio Life, Travis also tells us how he manages a work/life balance, the different revenue streams for his business, and what practical advice he would offer an aspiring entrepreneur or craftsman.
To listen to the show, click the player below (If you’re reading this via email, please click here).
In this episode, Travis and I explore:
What first step will you take to turn your art into a business? Let us know in the comments.
Adobe Systems Inc has agreed to acquire e-commerce services provider Magento Commerce for $1.68 billion in cash.
The post Adobe Acquires Magento Commerce for $1.68 Billion in Cash by @MattGSouthern appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Here are 10 awesome WordPress SEO plugins that will help you quickly optimize your site.
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Here are seven of the biggest stressors digital marketers face and ways to deal with them.
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Are there any implications to SEO for webpages that skip H2s and go directly from an H1 to an H3?
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Here’s a Google search operator you may be familiar with. It’s easy to remember most search operators. They’re short commands that stick in the mind. But knowing how to use them effectively is an altogether different story. Most SEOs know the…
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Use this guide to set up your Facebook page correctly and optimize every possible area of the platform.
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Take some inspiration from these five mobile landing page examples and you’ll be converting users in no time.
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Here are the top digital assistants today that every marketer needs to know about and what they mean for voice search.
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I’ve written before about the myth of the starving artist and why creative workers need to get paid their due. But often the next question they ask is, but how? How do you actually make money as an artist? Hint: it may not be the way you think.
The way you make money as an artist is not necessarily going to be from your most important work. Important work and popular work are not always the same. Often, a person’s most significant creative expression was not what made them famous or even paid the bills. Nonetheless, it was work that needed to be made.
There are two ways to look at this. First, we could look at the cynical way: the world doesn’t care about important, only popular work. And certainly, you could make a case for this perspective.
However, the second way to look at this—the way that I look at this—is that some work is naturally going to be more commercial than others. That doesn’t make it bad or superficial. It just is.
The challenge, though, is to not camp out here and keep producing popular work. Sometimes you need to make something important, something daring, something people just might not understand at first. And yet, it still needs to be made. That’s the important work.
So, my philosophy is this: do both. Create popular work, and use that commercially successful work to pay the bills. But don’t stop there. Keep creating and go deep in your craft so that you can also produce the important work that world needs but may not want.
In other words, be the Batman of your industry: the artist we need but don’t deserve.
Let the popular work fund the important work. And the way that you do that is through multiple income streams.
Not only do I want to share my thoughts with you in this post, but I also recorded a special episode of The Portfolio Life to expand on these valuable lessons. You can listen below or read the article.
Before we talk about income streams, let’s explore another concept briefly: why are you creating this work in the first place?
My friend Mark Almand (who has given me many great ideas including “experiment-chase-program”) has a great framework for deciding what the priority is in any given project. He calls it Reach-Revenue-Legacy. Here’s how it works:
That’s the framework: reach, revenue, legacy. Most projects you do will fit into one—but probably not all three—of those buckets. Before you set out to do something—launch a book, build a website, host a conference—you need to know why you’re doing it and which bucket your project fits in.
If reach is the goal, the questions become:
If revenue is the goal, the questions become:
The answers can be as simple as, “I want to make $10,000 so I can pay that down payment on my house.” Or it can be more involved, like, “I want to make $1 million so that we can give $250,000 to that school project in Africa.” Or so you can reinvest in your business, hire more people, etc. Whatever. You just need to have a number in your mind and a reason for that number.
If legacy is the goal, the questions become:
Whether your goal is reach, revenue, or legacy, starting a blog can help you reach an audience with your work. Join me for a free webinar and learn how to launch a successful blog and build an audience for your art.
Okay, so now that we’ve covered the reach-revenue-legacy framework, that should help you decide when a project needs to make money and when it doesn’t. Because of course, not all your work will pay the same.
Some of your most important work may not end up being your most successful. That’s okay. You still need to create it.
At the same time, you can’t go broke. Not if you want to keep creating for the rest of your life. And you don’t have to sell out to make an income off your art. You do, however, have to diversify.
In Real Artists Don’t Starve, one of the “rules” of the Thriving Artist was “Diversify your portfolio.” You need to create more than one thing. A body of work. A portfolio life. That’s how you’ll be able to do this kind of work for a lifetime.
Here are three income streams you’ll want to include in that portfolio. Of course, there are more ways to monetize your art, but these three categories are a pretty good start. Almost every Thriving Artist I see uses them at one point or another.
1. Teach your art
The old saying “if you can’t do, then teach” is not true. Some of history’s best practitioners of their art were teachers. And what better way to make some money off your art than to teach what you know?
Many, many artists have done this at one point or another to support themselves, including David Foster Wallace. Of course, you don’t have to do this.
The pro to this approach is it gives you more time with your craft, because even when you’re teaching it, you’re learning about it. The con is that you may feel like a fake, teaching something, if you’re not actually doing it yourself.
2. Sell your art
There are two ways to do this.
First, you can sell your art—your books, your paintings, your music—directly to the market. Or you can sell your art to a handful of patrons.
The Beatles are a prime example of the first category. So is Taylor Swift or any very successful commercial artist. The challenge to this approach is you have to sell a lot of widgets to a lot of people for a long period of time to make a career out of this.
An example of the latter category would be any successful Renaissance artist, like Michelangelo, who used the resources of a handful of wealthy patrons throughout his career to fund his work and make ten times the average rate of his peers.
There is, however, a third way to do this today that doesn’t require you to sell millions of records or books, nor does it require you to know a bunch of wealthy people. You can build a tribe—a small but significant audience of anywhere from 100-10,000 people who are all in on your art. They want what you have, and you can spend a lifetime creating just for them.
3. License your art
The third way to profit from your art is to let others use it while you retain the intellectual property, publishing rights, and copyrights associated with your work.
In other words, you maintain ownership of the work but license your art—your words, your images, your music—to others who pay a fee to use it every year. The advantage to this is you typically don’t need a huge audience to make a living doing this, so long as you license your work to the right individuals or organizations.
For example, cartoonist and author Hugh McLeod has had a very successful career as an artist licensing his artwork to major companies who use it in employee training materials. The music of Ryan O’Neal (AKA Sleeping at Last) is another example of employing the licensing model to make a great living as a an artist.
All that to say, the point of this is to not just make a buck. It’s to make something important, something that lasts. And in order to do that, we have to reach the right people, make enough money, and leave a legacy.
As I am fond of saying, we don’t make art to make money. We make money to make more art. Good luck.
You can learn more about developing multiple income streams for your work when you pre-order the paperback version of Real Artists Don’t Starve. In addition, you can pick up some extra bonusesavailable for a limited time:
Get your copy of the book and claim you free bonuses here.
Do you have multiple income streams for your art? Let me know how in the comments.
Wow!!! I’m blown. This is a beautiful piece. Where have you been? Great one Alex. I read every word from beginning to comments. Please Alex, I need a favour. I’ll be launching my blog in 7days. I’ll contact you.
Thanks in anticipation.
Google's "Don't be Evil" is NOT gone. It's simply demoted from prefacing Google's Code of Conduct. Respect is now more prominent.
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Chrome issued a final warning to remaining websites that have not switched over to HTTPS. October 2018 is the date of major changes.
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Most of us have been through a career transition – we know something is missing or there is more we are meant to do.
Our guest today, Shawn Askinosie, went through a challenging career transition that led him on a journey to meaningful work. It was so significant that he wrote a book about the journey called Meaningful Work: A Quest To Do Great Business, Find Your Calling, And Feed Your Soul.
Before reading his book or being introduced by our mutual friend Seth Godin, I tried Shawn’s chocolate at Jenny’s Ice Cream years ago. They offered an Askinosie chocolate flavor, created from ingredients provided by Shawn’s family-run company. And it was delicious!
Eleven years ago, Shawn started Askinosie Chocolate after a twenty-year career as a defense lawyer. Using a bean to bar model, he sources the beans himself from around the world.
Askinosie Chocolate’s work toward community development locally and globally has been well-recognized. Oprah Magazine called him “one of 15 guys saving the world” and Forbes recently named the company one of the 25 best small companies in America.
On this episode of The Portfolio Life, Shawn shares the story of his journey from lawyer to chocolatier to an author. His experiences allowed him to learn how to navigate life, measure company growth beyond profit, and what practical things we can start today to find meaningful work.
To listen to the show, click the player below (If you’re reading this via email, please click here).
In this episode, Shawn and I explore:
What is one thing you’re going to do to bring meaning to your work after listening to Shawn? Let us know in the comments.
