image by Mike Licht

If you have a blog (or website) where you sell your creations or creative services, there are 6 basic element you will need to implement if you want to succeed with your online business.

Add an About Page

Have a page where you tell people about yourself, your art, writing, designs or other creative skills or services. Definitely insert one or more pictures, preferably at least one of yourself. People like to know who they are dealing with. If you don’t know what to write, check out the about pages of your favorite artist bloggers and/or other creative biz people (new to the game and don’t know how to create a page? check out this video to learn how)

Provide RSS Feeds and/or Updates via Email

Let people subscribe to the content of your blog by providing them with an RSS feed or the possibility to receive updates via email. This way they will not always have to come back to your site to see what’s new, but will get new posts automatically delivered to their inbox. Google has a service that does exactly that. It’s called Feedburner and you can sign up for free. If  you need some help, check out this video that will explain exactly how to integrate Feedburner with your WordPress blog.

Show Links to Your Social Homes

Do you have a Twitter account, a Facebook fan page, an Etsy store? Link to them from your blog, so people can find and follow you on their favorite social networks. There are many great WordPress plugins to help you do it. My favorite one is called Social Homes and shows a subtle list of clickable icons in your sidebar.

Add Like and Retweet Buttons

The more people tweet about, like and share your blog posts, the more people will come and check out your creations and creative services. To make it easy for them add either the ShareThis or the SexyBookmarks plugin.

Get a Creative Commons License

Provide Your Contact Info

This might seem a no brainer but unfortunately a lot of blogs don’t have this. No contact, no business, that’s how it is!

Gravatar

Your Gravatar is an image that follows you from site to site appearing beside your name when you do things like comment or post on a blog. Avatars help identify your posts on blogs and web forums, so why not on any site? Setting up Gravatars on your site is easy; you don’t even need an account! The beauty of it is that people can recognize your comments across the net and it therefore automatically promotes your personal brand aka your creative web.

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What other basic elements do you think should every blog or site have? Let us know in the comments, so we can all learn and grow our creative online biz.

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.  @photomatt" href="http://twitter.com/photomatt" target="_blank">Matt Mullenweg, the founder and developer of WordPress was there as well as @Janerri" href="http://twitter.com/Janerri" target="_blank">Janetti Chon of Web 2.0 Expo and @tinythoughts" href="http://twitter.com/tinythoughts" target="_blank">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

Yep,  it’s finally 2010!

Now, if you @Yemoonyah om Twitter" href="http://twitter.com/yemoonyah" target="_blank">follow me on Twitter or are a fan of  Creative Web Biz on Facebook, then you already know that I am convinced that 2010 is going to be my year!

Yes, you heard it right, I am absolutely sure that this year is going to change my life. How do I know? Well, because I will take all my manifestation skills and create the life I want for myself. No excuses!

2009 has been hard on many of us and I too had to go through some very challenging times. But now, that we got rid of any unwanted energies, we are going to fly! We? Yes, we, because part of my plan is to help you do it too!

Last year I wrote some posts to help artists, designers, crafters, clowns, cooks and other creative entrepreneurs to start and grow their own creative web biz. The feedback was amazing and Google Analytics tells me that lots and lots of people have read them and still do.  I guess I’m not the only one trying to create a sustainable and independent lifestyle using my talents and gifts :)

If you haven’t read them yet, here is your chance to do so:

- How to Set Up Your Own Creative Web Biz in 5 Steps

- 21 Blogs to Follow if You Want to Sell Art or Crafts Online

- 10 Facebook FanPage Tips for Creative Entrepreneurs

- 10 WordPress Themes for Creative Entrepreneurs

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Win a Blog, Free Ecourse and other plans for this coming year:

While building my own online biz I have learned sooooo much and it would be a waste not to share this knowledge with all of you. And you know what? I am convinced that the more people can sustain and live their desired lifestyle, the better for Mother Earth cause happy people don’t go to war!

That is why from now on I will be writing  weekly biz articles! But that’s not all. I will also create a free ecourse for artists, crafters, musicians, designers and other creative entrepreneurs. If you want to get notified of upcoming posts, the free ecourse and other goodies , just sign up to my  bimonthly newletter below. Issue#1 will go out on Jan14th and one of the readers will win a free professional blog set-up! I will help the winner to sign up for a web host and then install the wordpress blogging software complete with ten themes and ten plugins that are handpicked and especially suited for blogs with highly visual content. I will even enable you to sell your creations directly from your very own blog. So sign up and start thinking about what your free domain name is going to be!

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And don’t forget to @Yemoonyah on Twitter" href="http://twitter.com/yemoonyah" target="_blank">follow me on Twitter for your daily dose of  tips, tools and resources for Creative Entrepreneurs.
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Let’s rock!

p.s. the beautiful pic above was shot by 1suisse

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Creative Web Biz - the art of creating an online business

Some days ago I found a post in my Google Reader by Duct Tape Marketing‘s John Jantsch in which he explains his social media system.The next day he started asking other social media experts to share their routines and although I’m certainly not an internet guru I still wanted to add my two cents.

Most of you do not only have a website or a blog to maintain but are also members of several social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Stumble Upon, Delicious and others. We use these sites either in a personal way or also more and more to promote and market our business. But keeping up with all the adding, following, messaging and posting takes up a lot of time and you can easily get lost and spend days in front of your screen without doing anything else (believe me I ‘ve been there).

So developing a system might be a very good idea and here is mine:

Usally the first thing I do after getting up is sitting down in front of my PC (still saving for a MacBookPro) and check email, rss feeds, blog comments and messages from my social networks. To make this easier I use Digsby which keeps me up to date on IM, email and social networks messages in my browser status bar. Then I write my blog post (which will  happen more frequently in 2009) and when I am done with all of this I open up Tweetdeck. If I did that before doing any of the other stuff  I’d be lost because Twitter is a true time killer. Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE Twitter and I have learned more from people on Twitter than I have learned during my entire school years (or at least more useful stuff) but following all the links people post can easily take up hours on end and I have always been the kind of person to do chores first and have fun afterwards (I’m not sure my mom would agree with this though).

There is also something else you should consider to help you with getting the word out about your blog, your art, music or whatever it is you want people to see. After posting a blog post, you want it to go out to your social networks, but doing this manually will consume a lot of time. That is where Friendfeed comes in. If you let Friendfeed import your blog, Twitter, Linkedin etc. you can then let it tweet your updates and also bring it into Facebook with the Friendfeed app available there. If you don’t have a Friendfeed account you can also just use the import service Facebook offers for your Youtube, Picasa, Flickr and some other services.  Then you can sign up for Twitterfeed and let them tweet any rss feed you specify, i.e your Delicious links feed, your MySpace blog posts and of course your blog feed.

To finish this up I have one more tip for you. Try Flock. Never heard about it? Well, it’s a browser, based on Mozilla (just like Firefox), but especially built with social networks in mind. It has a people bar in which you can follow your friends from across several networks, you can upload images to Flickr, Facebook and Myspace by drag and drop and it has a built in option to subscribe to people’s media streams from Flickr, Youtube and other sites and view them in a media stream. You can do all of this from inside the browser without having to find and add different add-ons like in Firefox (although most Firefox plugins also work well in Flock). These are just some of the features, so it might be something you want to check out.

If you have any more tips on how to manage your online social life please share with us in the comments.

Creative Web Biz - the art of creating an online business