The other day I got an email from an artist who had recently lost her day job and was now asking me for advice on how she could turn her art, that she had always just done on the side, into a career to support herself financially. So I wrote back and offered her some coaching via email. And because I knew she wouldn’t have much money to spend, I asked her to just pay me whatever she could afford and thought my coaching was worth to her.

Her answer was that she couldn’t take my offer because she had to be careful with spending. That was the first time I thought that maybe this person might not  really want to become a creative entrepreneur. Why did I think that? Because if she was really serious about starting an online biz to sell her work, she would have jumped at the occasion. I know I did when Naomi Dunford had a ‘pay what you want’  sale over at IttyBiz. I got ‘Marketing 101′ (worth 197$) and ‘SEO School’ (worth 29$) together for 25 Dollars. I din’t have any more money at the time, so that’s what I paid!

My advice: If you can get something that will help you achieve your goals for free or really cheap, grab that chance. There is just no excuse whatsoever to not go for it!

Anyway, although I was baffled, I still wanted to help and so I sent her a list of blog posts I had written that I thought would give her valuable information on how to proceed.  But in her next email I was told she would follow up on my suggestions in the near future, but she was not just short on money but also on time.

Now I was truly speechless. I had tried to help an artist, who had asked me for advice, just to find out I was wasting my time. I’m actually still wondering why she came to me in the first place. To me it did definitely not seem like she had the right mindset to launch a career as a creative entrepreneur. Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying she will never make it, but there is one quality we all need if we want to make a living by selling our creations or creative services online:

We need to be passionate about what we do! It needs to burn like fire inside of us and we need to really want it, give everything we have to make it work and grab every opportunity to move forward in our endeavors.  If this is not true for you, you can stop right now and go do something else. If you don’t feel this passion, please don’t bother visiting this blog again because you will be wasting your time!

But if you are passionate about your creations or creative services and you will take any chance you can get to get ahead with your creative web biz, I am more than happy to help you achieve your goals in any way I can: Read the blog, sign up for the newsletter (upper right side bar),  grab the chance to get the Creative Web Biz Kit for free until Oct 31 and you can even email me and ask for personal coaching. Just don’t waste your own and my time!

Creative Web Biz - the art of creating an online business

Creative Entrepreneur

When in my final high school years people started asking me what I was gonna do for a living, I never knew what to answer. None of the available options (that I knew of) sounded attractive to me. So I opted for going to college because it was the choice with the most freedom involved…or so I thought.  My college years ended with me dropping out and my parents having nightmares about my now surely somber future. I can’t blame them, I actually had the same nightmares but started concentrating on my art because that was what I really wanted to do.

In 2007 I set up Kabai33 (now Creative Web Biz) using WordPress. I wanted to sell my art online.  A year later I attended  a WordPress meet-up here in Berlin, Germany.  Matt Mullenweg, the founder and developer of WordPress was there as well as Janetti Chon of Web 2.0 Expo and Jody Church, the then community manager of Lifestream.fm as well as lots of other people.  For me it was the first time meeting people who made a living through and with  the internet, blogging and social media.  At the end of the night we set with maybe 7 people on a tiny balcony in Friedrichshain and discovered that almost all of us were college drop-outs. I looked around at all those bright, inspiring people and I knew I was in good company and I never thought leaving college was a bad idea anymore.

Helping Others

Back then I decided to do more than just sell my art online. I wanted to  teach other artists how to use wordpress, how to blog and how to eventually make money with it. So I started writing some blog posts for fellow artists and other creative souls:  blogs to follow if you want to sell art online, how to create a Facebook fan page and some other stuff I had learned while building my own blog. These posts got a lot of attention because there seems to be a real need for this kind of information.

Creative Web Biz Kit

So I decided to take it a step further and actually help creative people set up a blog and start their own online biz and set up  the Creative Web Biz Kit for Artists and other Creative Entrepreneurs. It includes instructions on how to get a web host + the actual site set-up (by me) + 10 preinstalled themes (all designed with artists in mind)  + 10 preinstalled plugins which extend the functionality of your blog so you can sell your creations directly from your site and do other cool stuff. And because I really want you to succeed you will also get a 3 week email course that will teach you how to start and grow your own creative web biz! Sounds good right? Head on over and check it out!

Creative Web Biz - the art of creating an online business