Should I keep working for free? (Creative business advice)

September 11, 2019

Sometimes I am reminded why husbands can be a good idea to have around. I was telling him about how I’d got caught in the sales funnel of yet another Women In Business stream of emails. I’d clicked on one with a video called 5 ways to reclaim your time and how I had to watch it twice incase I blinked and missed the advice. It was just a video of pointless waffle of no practical help, but if I wanted more, I could naturally buy her course…

Chris is very good at seeing past all the crap; and he’s also very good at listening to all my trivial worries and woes about my blog and my business. So after moaning to him about that useless video, I told him about another one that was playing on my mind. It was all about how if she asked us to work for her; writing her blog posts, answering her e-mails etc for free; of course we wouldn’t; so why would we put up with it for working for ourselves?

This really nagged at me for a couple of days until I spoke to Chris about it. I realised I’ve been working for myself for free for years and years. Every day I work on editing my youtube videos; writing here; writing copy for my Threads of a Fairytale Etsy shop; writing captions and editing photos for Instagram – all for free. Even when I’m sewing, I don’t know when I’m going to get paid for the work. And all this thinking, quite frankly made me feel like shit. What a stupid fool I am for doing all that work for nothing.

(Not so stupid however that I would buy her (likely pointless) course.)

Before I’d even finished my sentence, Chris said, ‘Well that’s rubbish isn’t it. Everybody has to work before they get paid. All the things you’ve been doing will eventually lead to someone buying a dress and you getting paid.’ Or something like that. And then he’d finished making his tea and was off again.

And then I realised I’d been suckered into that Woman In Business’s salesy marketing. It was probably designed to make me feel like shit so I would give her some money to make me feel better. Because let’s face it, unless you have a sizeable investment for advertising or to pay a PR company to do the work for you, EVERYBODY working on a self-employed creative business will be doing hours of work for what feels like free. Because if we don’t have the money to throw at our venture, all we have left to find is time. And it takes time to build up a business.

So yeah, my advice is, whenever you’re given advice, be cynical about it. Are they actually trying to help? Or are they actually trying to sell you a course or a place on a workshop? Some people are genuinely trying to do both, which is fine, but we have to be a bit savvy here. Obviously my interest in creative business, entrepreneurial endeavours and freelance life has leaked onto the internet cookies or something, and all I seem to get on Facebook and Instagram at the moment is leads into a sales funnel. It begins with some free waffle…I mean advice, to make you realise you know nothing and you’d better sign up to her free webinar, which tells you what you need to know. And by then she has your e-mail address and you aren’t safe from her little videos and e-mails that daily pop up in your inbox until you’ve bought her course which will have you earning a six figure sum in no time by doing hardly any work! Be wary!