This Brave New World, pt. 4

Read Part One here
Read Part Three here

Hello Steemit,
I hope everyone reading this enjoyed their New Years. I have high hopes for 2018 for us all to get it right. It is my mission here on Steemit to share what wisdom I've gleaned from the world and grow together in the shine of our collective enlightenment. This past week, I wrote in detail about myself and my ongoing campaign to creating passive income from posting original content online. I would like to continue to disseminate these details and insight into an ever evolving framework to building personal wealth from one's talents, specifically my fellow visual artists, a way to gain meaningful income with free or near-zero startup investment onto living a lifestyle YOU want to live. Here, I will further explain the finer points of my strategy ongoing for us to cultivate ourselves in the New Age.

Invest in your online presence. Start with a private email address for your business affairs.

Images, video, audio is streamed right into our hands nowadays. The internet, to date, reaches over 3 billion people all over the globe, connecting lives across oceans, borders, and time zones...and more join EVERYDAY. As new economies are formed around the world, different cultures are now able to communicate and relate beyond borders. Wouldn't you like to tap into even a fraction of that kind of traffic? It is the ENTIRE WORLD in an instant and ready to commerce on information!

(source)

Typically, the idea of owning a website is reserved for businesses and full-time hardcore professionals. However, if you're aiming to succeed and fully reaching your potential, spending any time creating something should lend itself to progressing self-improvement. If it's something you yourself sell, it is a in fact a business, thus doing so enough for a steady income defines traits that of a business OWNER. Any time spent advancing your skills or a talent follows the long, winding path of mastery, after some 10,000 hours of dedication.

Your aim is to go pro

(source: Youtube)

Pro·fes·sion·al
prəˈfeSH(ə)n(ə)l/
adjective

relating to or connected with a profession.
"young professional people"
synonyms: white-collar, nonmanual
"people in professional occupations"
2.
(of a person) engaged in a specified activity as one's main paid occupation rather than as a pastime.
"a professional boxer"
synonyms: paid, salaried
"a professional rugby player"

Why not aim to not only achieve but transcend your own expectation at the highest level possible? Why waste your time and energy to do otherwise?

There was a time not too long ago, less than a decade, the Internet felt rather a vast and distant place. Before Wikipedia and Siri, the unfamiliarity of searching volumes of text through a small windowed screen kept many away from the glow of technology. Before Maps and Uber, one had to know their way around, even when told, people asked directions. These seemingly miniscule, yet quite eventful experiences have now exported themselves as services built into our devices and function like on-demand toggle switches. Social media has made it easy to find individuals, as did the global search engine simplify locating information online, however neither has replaced the core function. By design, the rise of these kind of websites have further streamlined formerly casual, personal interactions into a automatic pastime. The Internet, similarly life, is far far more grander.

Use said email address to setup your business operations through a website hosting service, like Wix.com or Wordpress.org

(A closer look at managing your custom website on Wordpress.org source)

(Wix features a dashboard site manager that allows you to create and edit websites, connect domains, even for web design experts to build and sell their layouts by transfering a website to a paying client.)

As aforementioned in my previous posts, Part Two outlined how easy it is for anyone creating artwork to start a business and increase their profits building a business online around a website in Part Three. There many website hosting services I could go on in detail, however the most popular sites offer dozens of backend services like Squarespace's CMS interface (Customer Management Service) that allows you the artist to focus more time creating and less time coding your website. Personally, I suggest Wix.com for ease of use to design your own website powered by a lightweight HTML5 browser, means it's a very intuitive "what-you-see-what-you-get" editor to manage your content layout. Many of its basic operation, designing the website, SEO marketing, and email management are free-of-charge services. Anyone can start up a website for free with only a email address, even connect a custom domain name without spending copious amounts of money to optimize for all browsers and mobile devices.

(Using Wix.com's HTML5 editor, its a "what-you-see-what-you-get" interface that makes it incredibly easy to create a website EXACTLY the way you want with any coding experience necessary.)

I admit there is ramping complexity, with the more content you connect to your website (i.e video players, flash games, streaming channels, etc.), but it's rather important that to even the amateur to go the route of the professionals, it is vital to long term success by positioning themselves up in the same fashion to be seen and heard as early on as possible. I wouldn't discourage anyone from making a website in this regard. If you're creating anything and selling it, that's a business. Possessing a website is inherently similar to private property, your very own space to share yourself and all the media that you create to the entire world. If you're creating and selling objects from that creative process, that's otherwise considered a business. What other businesses that you know are open 24 hours, seven days a week, everyday of the year? A website does the same and is available to any connected device around the world.

(Sites like GoDaddy specialize in providing backend support for your website, as well as simple ways to upgrade your website's status with a custom descriptive domain title.)

There are quite literally dozens of companies that offer website hosting, design, and management for a wide range of price points. Many, in particular, feature a free option to use the service at the expense of real estate on your website for ad space. However, be undeterred, it is your public-private space available to any connected device, always "on" promoting your artwork and sharing your vision. As you begin to generate revenue from your website, specifically but not exclusively from site traffic, invest into your website to grow along with your business. Then purchase a unique domain name, for instance, from a reputable source like GoDaddy, incorporating your name or alias into the title as if your brand. Doing this makes it EASY to remember at a glance both your art and YOU, the artist. No need for anything fancy to start with, just a simple page with photos, text, and links that tell your story. Later, you always have options to upgrade your plan with the same site host you're creating the website on or seek out other sites that offer more flexibility, accessibility, and interconnectivity featuring your domain.

Are you waiting on success to arrive as wishing on a shooting star, or willing to rise amongst the stars in the sky?

Utilize the power of social media through networks like Facebook and Instagram to create profiles for your work.

Social media networks are more than the websites individually, but an entire ecosystem of media channels, powered by the individual and the content people share with each other. For the social network, it's a mutual exchange for sales and targeted marketing. In short, what users do on social media networks are in essence, directed advertising. Each user draw from real-life experiences that involve places and products, with other users that each us that participate in this very public activity something once we had to privately undertake. "If the service is free, most likely it is YOU that is the product" The public has the all the power here. The power of a social network is in proportion to how many users share information, raw data as capital. These kind of websites most of us have already elected to participate. Social media networks act as only technological amplifiers to our own organic sources. As such, individually we create something; together, we can create something much more.

(Steemit is a social network and content rewards platform that makes the crowd the beneficiaries of the attention economy.)

This is why Steemit.com and other similar sites are creating a new frontier, one that social networks act more like social societies, where a network's user base is invested into the infrastructure as primary investors and not simply source consumer marketers. We, the people, should reap the wealth of the land, but neither as master nor slave of the environment, but avid curators of this realm as devout stewardesses to a collective memory regarded as history. There are literally hundreds of social media networks, of every language, that have made millions of dollars pawning exclusive access to our media information inputs to companies, large and small, locally and globally alike, that already exist to serve goods and market their product to people everywhere. Only but a few of these social media networks have established themselves upon the wealth of aggregate data produced by consumers and creatives all around the world, enough so, the value invested in their networks have real-world implications. In this regard, these social media companies are truly empires of the New World.

Do you want to be part of history or make it? How do you want to be remembered by your grandchildren born in the age of Information?

Connect your social media accounts together, (i.e Facebook + Instagram + Twitter + Snapchat, etc.) thus bridging the gap between desktop and mobile experiences.

There are millions of people online, doing dozens of different things; writing emails, communicating with pictures and video on social media, sending winky faces through SMS, and of course, shopping for the next thing to see, use, or do. Apps were developed to bridge the gap between the digital playgrounds of the internet, where people commune over ideas and share thoughts, to the real world of physical connections and trade commerce through co-creation. Our entire global economy is based primarily on the exchange of goods and services for, well, other goods and services. Data, information, knowledge, and wisdom are new forms of capital in this brave new world we are virtually immersed in. Media flows through our lives like a current under the tide of the sea.

(How to link your Facebook page to your Instagram account is easy to do from your desktop or mobile app.)

Facebook owns Instagram, the most popular photo sharing app on mobile devices, and allows users to automatically send post content to forward to their accounts or pages. This can be done easily in the app or through Facebook, and once the two streams are connected, now you can post content from your phone and update your Facebook page simultaneously, significantly amplifying your broadcast to a user base of over 1 billion worldwide. Instagram allows users to write in hashtag metadata along with a short caption, easily share any content with searchable terms anyone can plug in and find using the Search feature. Facebook itself provides a space to share your content for free, through creating a Facebook page to promote your shared content, separate of your personal account that your friends and family can interact with your private content. Each social media network features its own format for your content and accordingly highlight that content or truncate information to source links in crosslinked content from your other networks.

(Connect your Instagram to your existing Facebook page is very simple to do from your mobile app, enabling you to push content seamlessly between networks.)

Once you do have a website, you can post your original content directly to your site or channel your content from wherever your markets reside into one, unified stream.

Gallery slideshows, photo albums, even video libraries share your story with the world. Use html widgets, social plugins that you can add to the structure of your site, that serve as portals to your feed on a Facebook page, Instagram image stream, a Twitter ticker feed, right into your landing page. This makes your page into an omnichannel that combines your content into a easy to digest single page format and makes it super easy to update the content of your page, simply posting from your favorite social media app already on your mobile devices.

Read Part One here
Read Part Three here

Craig A. Hamilton
Artist - Imagemaker
www.artistcraigahamilton.com

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Agency - FLOATINGMARS
Creative Consultant - Intellectual Property Holdings and Asset Management
[email protected]

Art wizard Craig A. Hamilton, Imagemaker - Artist, founder of Floatingmars, FUTURE REPUBLIK! AUDIO WEAPONARY GROUP, and The Imagemakers' Guild. Based in Miami, FL, I am a maker of original graphic illustrations, sold as print, product, or for publication. Currently, I'm managing my entire art business through daily curation of my website, www.artistcraigahamilton.com, using a handful of websites and their respective networks to harness my own market niche.

Thank you Society6, Patreon, and Steemit for empowering this self-employed artist-illustrator to profit from my own labor and turn this talent into a real world business.

I belong to a select group of content creators here on Steemit. My Artist's Circle here on Steemit I proudly support (and recommend you to check out!):
@earthnation
@qurator
@qustodian
@originalworks
@originalworks2