When Collecting Is Good For Business
Written by: Monika Mundell
Posted on April 7, 2008
Filed Under Starting your Online Business
Being a woman isn’t always easy. My dreams of living in total Zen-harmony are constantly shattered by a hoarding husband who just loves holding on to old stuff because we (might need it again at some stage). If you are a little like me you’ll understand what I mean by this. Don’t worry, hubby has given me full approval to post this, since he actually agrees (go figure).
While living in a cluttered environment can seriously diminish our productivity, holding on to “stuff” is actually good for business.
But not just any stuff, I’m not talking about old receipts (unless you can claim them with the Tax man) or your notes from 1999. What I’m referring to is your samples of work.
If you are in the business of servicing clients digitally, you will no doubt have samples of your past work.
Take a web designer for example: his purpose is to create and construct kick butt websites for his clients, which reflect his ability to convert traffic to customers. It isn’t really his responsibility as this will always lay with the actual client and their marketing efforts, but any self respecting professional in that field will work closely with his clients to provide optimum deliverables.
Keeping track of your work in one place will help you to pre-sell your services to potential clients. Whether you provide your samples on a custom built blog/site, or make them part of your about page on your self branded blog doesn’t matter.
What matters however, is that you collect your work like mad for your own impressive display of art. Art is the ability to enthrall people with your design, creations or your writing. Art is also to evoke emotions in your readers or visitors.
Much like when we visit the museum and look at art, we feel powerful emotions of sadness, joy, anger, passion, relaxation and more when we look at creative design or writing. As an “online artist” you too can collect your samples and collaborate them for a powerful display to your prospective clients.
Failing to do this could mean the difference between a new project and your bills paid for the week, or frantic last minute efforts to score another job.
Collecting as a digital business owner: if you are involved in any way with online media (blogging, pod casting, videos, news, articles, etc.) then you are encouraged to keep track of your exposure while stepping outside your front door. To make this easy you could keep a simple text file on your hard drive in which you update info every time you finish a job.
Web designers for example are expected to have a client portfolio and clients are only too happy in most cases to provide a testimonial in return for a link back to their site.
For writers sampling can pose certain challenges: If you write for niche marketers for example, you cannot post your past work samples on your site. In this case it would be advisable to create purpose built documents that talk to a specific market. I have actually resorted to writing my own sample articles for exactly this purpose because many of my article clients are actually niche marketers.
I strongly believe that this helps me to show my professionalism.
For guest blogger and pro-blogger this is somewhat easier, since the posts are already public. All you have to do is provide a link back to the published posts from your samples page.
Sampling and collecting your work really is good for business, regardless whether it takes a bit of work. The possible monetary gains far outweigh the hassles of keeping track.
It will be the single most important factor between you and your competition who has the same or similar abilities.
How do you feel about this? Are you keen on providing your own samples on your site, or do you think this is way over rated? I’d love to hear your input because I believe this is important for our business.
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Tags:Branding, business branding, business samples, past work samples, samples for business, sampling
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When Collecting Is Good For Business…
Ill tell you what I love about having Landon and Monika on board as writers and contributers to Making Sales Making Money. Fresh perspectives. Today Moinka writes about “collecting” samples of your work. Are you trying to sell a product or a service?…
thanks Monika, this gives me a lot to think on. I had a porfolio in Real Estate that I could sit down and go over with clients but we were sitting one on one over coffee at a table.
I am not sure exactly what this might look like on line, but it at least gets the creative juices flowing.
Monika, that whole idea is great! I hadn’t really thought about it from that stand point.
It is true, regardless of what field your in, having a sample of what your capable of is a very intelligent fore sight if you have any intention of progressing in your field or moving into other industries.
Having a personal blog makes this easy, I just didn’t realize it before.
Well done!
@ Wendi: I guess for someone doing as lot of face to face work with potential clients it might be beneficial to create a A4 ringbook folder and use this as some type of validation of experience.
What do you think? I’ve done that myself when I was in MLM. While there weren’t any work samples i was able to show them testimonial pics of using the products as well as the various event photos of our get together’s.
If done professionally enough, it would look quite impressive to have this handy.
@ Landon: Glad you like the idea. It’s a bit like when we prep our food. Sometimes we give samples to upsell too, the same applies to pretty much any business, especially online because there is no actual grasp of things.
@Monika, hey, who told you I speak in analogies?!? Don!
JK, yes, agreed. I will be in your neck of the woods late January of 2009, with my other half, we should meet up and make dinner together???
Sounds like a fantastic meal!
L
[...] categories you will find on eBay tend to lean towards some sort of collecting and not the kind of collecting Monika wrote about. I have experienced this first hand back in the baseball card boom. I owned a retail store that sold [...]