What To Do When You're Waiting

So, what do you do when you've called your clients, sent out your drafts for review, bid on all the jobs, and emailed your prospects? You wait.

What do I do when I am waiting for people to get back to me?

Well, if this was last year, I'd be scrolling through my Facebook feed, or tweeting or doing some other time-wasting web surfing. True, I still do that, but I limit it now. I've set a time limit for goofing off. 

What I do with my waiting around time now is work on Passive Income Projects. I've spent some of the past few months thinking about how to generate passive income.

Passive income is income you get from something you did in the past. Royalties from book or music sales is a prime example. It's something you create once and sell many times. Patterns, coloring books, books, recorded music, fabric designs - all these things (and more) can be passive revenue streams. 

They do take some time and effort to create. And they do take some time and effort to market. There are ways to have other people help you market the things you create, but you have to create them first.

My list of passive income projects are these:

1. Illustrate the two children's books that I've written.
2. Write up the quilt patterns I've had on the back burner for the past 5 years.
3. Promote my music that I've finally made available for purchase online

So, what are your ideas for creating passive revenue streams for yourself?

It's a New Year

I am a sporadic follower of designer David Seah. He doesn't do New Year's Resolutions; he does Ground Hog's Day Resolutions. I really like the concept (almost as much as I like using semicolons and parenthetical phrases). First, it lets me delay thinking about the new year until after the stress and general craziness of the holidays are over. Second, by this time of the year, we are in "full winter mode" (which typically includes being snowbound or dealing with snow in one way or another) and there is plenty of time to think about things. Third, I've been thinking about what comes next for a month or three. And finally, it's also Imbolc, my favorite holiday of the Wheel of the Year. I'm noticing that the sun is rising when I do and the days are noticeably longer than they were at the winter solstice.

So, it's 2015 now. I have gone back to working for myself, and have resurrected Moon & Star as a design firm. I've decided I want to focus my business on graphic design, interaction design, web design and illustration (both technical illustration and "artistic" illustration). I plan to refine my focus and find my niche over the course of this year. I'm not quite there yet. I also am nowhere near being fully booked with work.

So I am in the process of building my client roster, which means I'm learning how to look for clients, jobs, gigs, what-have-you. I'll be writing about how I'm doing with that as I go along.