Adventures in Brand Building, Part 1: The First Step

Posted July 2, 2009 in Branding with No Comments

This is part 1 in a series of posts that will record my experiences in building a brand for myself. Hopefully this will help someone out there looking to do the same.

Currently, I’m employed as a full-time designer. I work at a pretty cool place with great benefits, a great atmosphere and great people. Recently, my job has taken a turn for the worse and I am now experiencing every designer’s worst nightmare: working in PowerPoint. My job started out great, being the sole designer doing print and web design projects, until the recession came and with it, some our marketing initiatives were re-focused to social media. As a result, some print marketing stopped as well as some of my designing, replaced by editing and designing PowerPoint slides. Ugh.

Naturally, since I’m a creative, I need to create or else I’ll go crazy. This situation sparked the desire to build my own brand and business to work for myself. When I say brand, I don’t mean a logo, a portfolio, a business card and doing work on the side—I mean clients, major income, work in pajamas and slippers, passive income, and quit my day job. However, I have no idea how to get started, I only know what I want. Since I don’t know what the first step is, I decided to think about the last step and work backwards. This is the list I have created:

1. Get my name out there – Upon reading and researching through countless blogs, I am attempting to create a blog. One that generates traffic and readership as well as trust to potential clients.
2. Passive income – My next step would be to create a source of passive income, to supplement my design career and primary income. Something to fall back on should times get tough, yet something I don’t need to worry about all that much. Set it and forget it. What I came up with was: blog revenue, affiliate websites/reseller, design website templates and hosting.
3. Brand establishment – I already have a brand and logo, I just now need to bring collateral together, build a system of operation and get business cards.
4. Build up recurring clientele for constant income – Next up, I’ll need to build up my clientele by promoting and marketing myself.
5. Safety net in the bank – If I didn’t have to worry about finances, a mortgage and bills, I’d start right now. But I can’t, so I need to create a safety net of 6 months. I think I’d feel stressed with that much so I’ll aim for 100k. (Hey, shoot for the stars. Worst-case scenario, you hit the moon).
6. Register for LLC, and search for insurance – Legal stuff… ugh. ‘Nuff said.
7. Completely freelance – Leave my job on good terms with a freelance contract.

At the time of this writing, I only have a website, jasonlarosedesign.com and this blog, which still needs to be designed (and named!). I haven’t written a blog intro yet, and the whole idea feels weird. I’m also reading tons of articles and totally pwning Read it Later.

In my quest for wanting to know what to do and how to go freelance, I came across an article by Joe Falconer, “Jump on Your Domain Name while You Still Can,” which couldn’t have come at a better time, because I had just discovered jasonlarose.com was available. Twenty minutes later, I owned it.

As I build my brand, I know I want to create something that will generate passive income. I had been thinking about it for days but couldn’t figure it out. More ThemeForest templates? Another t-shirt design at Threadless? Nothing really caught my attention until I bought the server space and I realized I can host my clients. Not to mention provide myself with a playground in which to try out and host some pet projects. There were more benefits to this idea than just passive income, which attempt expand my mind to try to comprehend server technologies and grant me the ability to offer my clients an all-in-one package with print design, web design and hosting.

So now that I have hosting space, I need to port my website over to the new server and design and build this blog. Hopefully part 2 will be written after the blog is done, with a pretty sweet design and catchy name.