HELLO, I'M SETH WERKHEISER

YOU CAN WORK WITHOUT SHOUTING

A book about MySpace today is laughable. But will a book about Facebook or Twitter (available now at your local book shop) ten years from now be any different?

The tools change, but the concepts are timeless; make something remarkable, and people will talk. If no one is talking about your thing, are you sure it’s work remarking about?

In this super connected world, everyone has the same soapbox (like Twitter), the same video broadcast platform (like YouTube), the same everything. Getting noticed is hard work because everyone is working so hard on getting noticed.

Then I see this advice: Be loud! Get out there! Shout! Tweet every hour! Talk at every event! Brand you! NETWORK.

Trust me — you don’t have to do this. There are shy, reserved, quiet folks doing great work without all the fanfare. They’re not speaking at conferences, or doing fancy videos, or spending all day on social media, but they’re making a living.

Your art is worth more than a play count on YouTube, much the same that your fans are worth more than their credit card number.

This post originally posted on Medium on Jul 25, 2015, and then posted on my Patreon on March 17, 2016. That means this piece is 10 years old, holy crap.

HOW TO DO COOL STUFF (AND EVENTUALLY GET PAID FOR IT)

I had a phone call recently with someone about dipping their toes into the freelance waters, and that led me to writing this. As someone who’s been without a full-time job since 2006, this is something I’ve dealt with over the years.

This is not a step by step guide. If it were like that, then there’s a map (nod to Seth Godin for that), and if there’s a map, it can be done by monkeys, and you’re smarter than that.

DUMB IT DOWN
Say you make websites. Cool. Now, figure out a way to explain that to people who don’t need websites, because there are a lot of people who don’t need websites. Why? Well, those people probably know someone who needs a website, and after meeting you and having a lovely conversation they’re more likely to recommend you over someone who just throws jargon and fancy job titles around.

Remember – this is for starting your freelance journey! You’re a small fish in the big pond, so you need to start off working with other small fish.

REFERRALS
Stay awesome friends with awesome people that you used to work with. No, not in a sneaky way so you can ask them for work, but because you like working with rad people, and they probably know rad people. Rad people do rad things, so you’ll want to always be around them. And that leads to rad things.

On the other side of the coin, don’t be friends with jerks. They probably know other jerks, and you don’t want to work with jerks.

SHARING IS CARING
Share what you know; the principles behind it, how you made it work for you. Show your work. Freely give this knowledge that took you thousands of hours to gain, because someday someone will see it, and say, “hey, I want that.” And then you can bill them for those skills.

Remember, not everyone who needs a website knows they need a “front end developer.” Convey what you do in language that is kind and relatable, as you’re new at this and chances are the people you’ll be working with are new at all this, too!

START TODAY
The sooner you start helping people, and establishing yourself as someone knows a thing or two, the better. Don’t wait to take a class, don’t wait to finish your degree, don’t want to get some brand new piece of equipment – start helping someone today. Go through your social media feeds and find a friend who has a problem and help them fix it. No, don’t work for free, but do something to help. Illustrate your knowledge in helpful, no-pressure ways and you’ll be amazed where it’ll get you.

This post originally posted on Patreon on March 14, 2016.

YOU NEVER KNOW WHO’S WATCHING

I love Billy Eichner. HE’S FANTASTIC.

On a visit to Seth Meyer’s show a year ago (the video clip is no longer available for some reason), Meyer’s explains that he and his fellow SNL friends watched Billy’s videos back in the day. Billy had no idea, but found out many years later.

Creating and publishing something for years without knowing if anyone is really paying attention is difficult. It’s easy to look at the standard metrics like pageviews, plays, or RTs, and base your success on that. For validation. But please, you are so much more than that!

Never lose sight of the real people behind those metrics, and then never refer to them as metrics, or eyeballs, or traffic. Ever. They are lovely people, and some of them have just never emailed you yet telling you how amazing you are.

Hard work isn’t a guaranteed ticket to stardom and appearing on late night TV shows, but you spend the time and do it the right way. Treat every video, every song, every appearance as if Amy Pohler might watching.

This post appeared on my Patreon on March 12, 2016, but I’m posting it here because I’m deleting those old posts. It also had this note saying “This post originally posted on Jul 21, 2015, but had been modified for Patreon.”

PROVE IT

While working at a cramped Starbucks near a busy university, I couldn’t help overhear a conversation between two people catching up. From what I heard, the one person was a personal nutritionist on the side.

She spoke of a hobby she picked up; Olympic power lifting. She got really good at it. Good enough to place well at some regional competition, apparently.

I’m paraphrasing here, but her reason was thus:

“I wanted to do something that could demonstrate my nutritionist work.”

Anyone can pick up a book and recite its contents with enough study. But it’s another thing entirely to take what you know, add your magic, and hard work, and produce a tangible result.

After leaving AOL Music in 2011 I knew I had the skill-set to help people share stories online. That’s how Skull Toaster was born! I have my resume’ sure, and that says plenty, but Skull Toaster is me showing, “I built a brand from scratch, with an engaged social media following, and a nightly email list with a 40+% open rate since 2012.” Ahem, hiring managers.

The folks at Coudal have been doing this for years. They’ve created plenty of campaigns for clients over the years, but then started making their own products. Why not? They already know how to make websites and ads and Twitter accounts. One of their projects was the Field Notes brand of notebooks, which they did with Aaron Draplin.

“There wasn’t any big corporate plan, or venture capital or a full page ad in the New York Times or anything; we printed up a batch, bought a domain name and let it grow from there.”

Just start. Find people to work with (not ask, “what do you think of this idea?”), and get it going.

STOP LINKING TO YOUTUBE

On YouTube you’re the pink space above. That’s it.

With a pre-roll ad you disappear.

See those videos on the side? Distractions. Noise. All aiming to be more compelling than your video, chosen my algorithms to drive more clicks (and money) for YouTube. Cha-ching (for them, not you).

That’s the fight you enter into each time you Tweet a link to your brand new video on YouTube.

You’re bringing a knife to a gun fight.

Do this instead. That pink space? That’s yours.

Fill your space with upcoming shows, links to your merch, and / or pretty pictures of your cute face. Don’t give up that space to other bands, makers, speakers, or bullshit BuzzFeed videos (because they’re engineered to win).

It’s 2015 – start driving traffic to your stuff instead of landing pages for fancy-pant sites engineered to distract your fans.

NOTHING IS NEWS

I remember December 29th, 2009. I was checking email around 12:30am while laying down to sleep when I got the news that Avenged Sevenfold Drummer James’The Rev’ Sullivan passed away. A few emails later we had a post up at 1:15am.

This year, on Christmas Eve, I saw some Tweets that Netflix was down. That meant some editors and bloggers had to mobilize. A post had to be written! Hurry!

Dec 24, 11:06pm – Netflix Hit by Outage, Blames Amazon
Dec 24, 9:46pm – Amazon AWS Takes Down Netflix On Christmas Eve

The same happens with my celeb / pop writer friends during the holidays, hoping that no movie stars get caught kissing someone that ain’t their significant other.

In 2009 this worked. It works today, late in 2012. But it can’t continue. There’s too much. When everything is a story, nothing is a story.