I have been pestering my latest victim interviewee for the Design and Marketing Podcast (subscribe or leave a review, folks) for weeks and weeks before she gave in!
Louise Myers is a fantastic example of a designer who has never stopped learning.
You have to listen to this interview because there is so much to take from Louise’s inspiring story.
The main points I got from her story were:
- Everything changes
- Have a cushion
- Be flexible
- Specialise
- And keep trying!
Everything changes
Louise’s background is in catalog design and at one point in the 90s she probably thought she could go on doing that forever. However, that work dried up for several reasons – not the economy, for once. But, it shows you that you can’t really rely on anything – and especially not in this business.
Have a cushion
If you have a good year and make lots of money – put half of it in the bank! This is the way Louise was brought up (and me as well!) and this is invaluable advice for freelancers.
Be flexible
Although Louise had set up her work from home business around catalog design she had to adapt to survive and she branched out into all sorts of other areas of graphic design. She has diversified in order to grow her design business.
Specialise
However, you don’t want to be a jack of all trades and a generalist because then clients won’t be able to pigeon-hole you and never know when to call you! All successful graphic designers have some sort of specialty that people can associate them with.
And keep trying!
Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm, as Winston Churchill would say. Louise can bear testimony to this. She may say that her success was in part due to luck but I’m not so sure.
So how did she do it?
The thing with the traffic? Simple, she kept on trying. This time last year, Facebook was moving all its (fan)pages to the timeline layout. Louise wrote a post about it. Bang! The rest is history.
If you blog and blog and blog, sooner or later, you’ll hit on a subject that has huge demand. Because the Facebook timeline page design was so new, there wasn’t so much written about it on the web. Louise had chanced upon a goldmine of visitors – that later became a goldmine of subscribers, and then and a goldmine of customers. Learn more by listening to the interview.
You can do it
As Louise has shown us, if you score a blogging “home run”, you’ve got to pick up the ball and run with it. That terrible mixture of sporting metaphors means: if you’re getting great traffic blogging about a particular subject, blog more about that subject. And then, productize!
Pay particular attention to social media. And by that I don’t mean tweet, share and like, I mean react quickly to any social media changes to layout and visuals. I have found out myself these are a particularly rich vein of traffic. Just last week, I posted about the new YouTube channel art and already I’ve had over 1,000 visitors to that page here and over 500 video views of the movie at YouTube.
Social media is going more and more visual and graphic designers can capitalize on this!
Don’t be ashamed of your naked Facebook page! Go to LouiseM.com and sign up to her mailing list to find a host of cool social media design tips. And I would also advise you to get her great e-book: “Create your Facebook Timeline Fan Page to Look Great and Engage Fans” on PDF or Kindle.
I love the laid-back style of this interview Rob.
Specialising in a niche is probably the most important part of earning a higher income. Whether it’s in graphic design or in blogging.
Specialise in something, work hard on it, make a name for yourself in that niche and enjoy the fruits of your labour.
Glad you liked the interview, Rahat! You’re so right about specialising. Thanks for coming and leaving a comment. 🙂
Another great interview Rob, I have never heard of that HootSuite before today will have a look in to it. It seems like with Louise the teaching of the work has over took the work itself which is great because I guess the work itself becomes a great cushion.
Best of luck to her 🙂
Hootsuite is really good if you get the extension for Chrome (and Firefox, probably) you can just click on it and schedule a Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook update of the page you are currently on. Glad you liked the interview. 🙂
Thanks for an inspiring story Rob. Working freelance can be hard if the work is not arriving in sufficient volume, opportunism and sheer tenacity can make all the difference and is great to see a real life example.
I think we need more feelgood success stories as an antidote to the general doom and gloom of the news media.
I definitely agree with you about the feelgood stories because there are a lot of amazing people out there whose story needs to be heard! I hope you have subscribed to the podcast, Dave, because more of these are coming!
Rob,
As always you have another great interview. I would only suggest that you adjust the two different volume levels. You are barely audible compared to louise’s volume.
Hi Alan, you’re totally right about the levels thing. I levelled them out in the audio on the podcast and it would be quite easy to do that to the video as well so I’ll try to do it next time. 🙂
Fabulous Rob! I’ve been ‘following’ [not stalking] Louise for awhile now – she is a big inspiration for me – so thank you for the interview. Your perseverance paid off.
I too have decided to turn my business into another direction and leave the VA service out and focus on the blogging and selling e-products. So you can see that Louise is an inspiration to me and probably for many. Great interview and insights.
Glad to hear it, Kellie, and I’m delighted that you’re focussing on passive income. Let me know how you get on and if you need any help. 🙂
Thanks so much Rob for featuring me! I’m pleased to be introduced to your awesome readers. And happy to see some folks I “know” here *waves Hi to Kellie* I’m glad we finally made time for the interview. Thanks for keeping on it!
My pleasure, Louise, nice to see it’s inspired a few people! 🙂
Love, love, love Louise! She’s a bright beacon and positive force on Twitter so it’s so nice to see her here on your site, too, Rob!
Me too, Laura, thanks for your comment. 🙂