My Mom Thought the Logo for This Blog Look Like a Girl Wearing a Hat
Work For Free Strategy Progress Update #1
My original intent was to write a simple monthly report.
I felt like I didn't do much in my first month of testing out the "work for free" strategy.
I spent almost one week researching the type of companies and people I would like to work for, and I spent another two weeks redesigning and building my portfolio website.
Adding them up, just those two things took up 75% of my time.
I changed my mind after writing the first draft of this article because it came out to be over 1,200 words.
It felt way too long for a simple progress update, so I decided to break the monthly report down into two parts.
Let's go over the first 2 highlights from this month (Feb 22, 2021 ~ Mar 21, 2021).
1) Shooting Photos for a Local Pizza Restaurant
Finding a meaningful job using the "work for free" strategy can be a long journey, and it means I probably have to take on some freelance gigs to fund this crazy journey.
The cool part about the "work for free" strategy is that it can potentially be self-funding. You can take the same strategy to help you land freelance gigs.
Because of Covid-19, the restaurant industry was heavily affected, and many of them started to care more about online marketing. My assumption was that a lot of these restaurants need more quality photos for their social media accounts.
The plan was to reach out to local restaurants that were active on Instagram but had crappy photos and offer to help them take some free photos. After providing some value upfront, I would talk with the owner or manager to see if they are interested in paying me to rebuild their website or help them do paid advertising.
I direct messaged 25 local restaurants on Instagram, and 1 said yes!
The restaurant name is called Pizza Mamo and they only opened up a few months ago.
I took a bunch of photos for the restaurant and edited seven of them for their Instagram.
In the end, Pizza Mamo didn't need a new website or help with online marketing, but they did give me a free pizza after the photoshoot.
Will I continue with this strategy? Probably not.
There are actually not that many restaurants in Hawaii that are both active on Instagram and have crappy photos.
2) Designed a Logo for This Blog
When I was working at a digital solutions agency, my main focus was to build websites for our clients. We had an amazing team of designers that took care of the design aspect, so I only had to focus on the building part.
Now that I am on my own, I have to make sure the websites I'll be making at least look half decent, which means I have to up my design skills.
I already have some experience designing comic arts with Adobe Illustrator from a few years ago, but after I updated my computer to Windows 10, all my Adobe software stopped working.
Adobe software use to be great. You pay for their software once, and you can use it for many years before it becomes too outdated, and then you can get an upgrade.
Adobe's latest products are crazy expensive, they charge you around $20.99 a month for just using one of their software. If you are on a small budget, Adobe is not your friend.
After watching a YouTube video talking about alternatives for Adobe software, I decided to try Affinity Designer. It has 90% of Adobe Illustrator's capabilities but only a one-time payment fee of $49.99. The best part is that when they add updates to the software, it's free!
I was able to learn the basics of Affinity Designer by designing an octopus logo for the Salty Tako blog.
My mom thought the logo looked like a young girl wearing a hat, so I was glad when other people were able to recognize the octopus in the logo.
For those of you that didn't know, the word "tako" means octopus in Japanese.
Check out the second part of my one-month progress update.
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Thanks for reading!
-George 🐙