Re: Been a while / Advice on a new direction
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Mostly word of mouth, is how my customers find me. I do good work for one guy, and he spreads the word.
Totally agree. Word of mouth is very important. And of course, word of mouth only comes from satisfied customers. ;)
First thing I would suggest is to take as much time as you need and build a really good website. Make it creative and informative as a sample of the kind of work you do.
The website will give you a sample that anybody can see and will be a good sales tool.
Then see if there are some businesses in Moab, there must be some, that need design help and pitch them. You need a few success stories under your belt and some of these might be the start of your word of mouth campaign.
And we're always here to critique and to help.
Gameprinter - I think your fantasy maps topic is one of the most viewed topic, if not the most viewed, on TalkGraphics. I was a cartographer in the Army back in the 60s. And I recently did a topographic map stereogram http://www.artflakes.com/en/products/3d-topographic-map
Re: Been a while / Advice on a new direction
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Originally Posted by
gwpriester
Cool stuff, GWP! I've always wanted to play with the stereogram feature of Xara - just that I want my maps to be easily read. No need to give a headache trying to view a stereogram as a map (I do think they are cool, though.) Edit: I just realized that stereograms aren't a feature Xara, my old 3D program Raydream Studio has stereogram feature built into it, though I've never used it. Seeing your stereogram made me think of it - applied to the wrong software... oops.
And I never wanted to dominate this site with my portfolio of work, so I keep it to one thread only. I know that what I do is 'niche, niche, niche', so really not applicable to the greater design community here at Talkgraphics, but I think many of the techniques I use in my map designs can appropriately carry over to other kinds of design challenges. So my thread might be helpful, as well as showcasing Xara capabilities beyond the norm.
Back to the topic at hand. I am a brick and mortar business, so I spend money on expensive yellow page ads, maintain a website, get local news ads once every couple of months - which is all rather expensive. Still, word of mouth is by far where 90% of my customers come from, which costs nothing, except doing good work on time to the satisfaction of your customer - and that isn't so easy, but absolutely necessary if you are going to succeed on your own. I rely on word of mouth, but can do nothing to promote it, except to continually do good work, which can only be accomplished over time.