About this blog

What is Creatively Rising?

It’s a blog about becoming visible. Visible to oneself as much as visible in the professional sense.

It has come out of a personal exploration in my own life to understand how to navigate from an internal idea of me to a more public version. But I have found too it’s a challenge not so far away from what many of us confront online where the emphasis on folksiness, transparency, being in conversations across networks and expressing a personal “branded” idea of oneself becomes increasingly identified as the way to build our relationships.

While we may continue to hope that direct, face-to-face connecting is what truly matters in getting our products and services known to others, without a social presence online, we’re going to reach real limits, and disturbingly fast. The truth is creative individuals, artists and small business people alike already recognize both the opportunity (to develop and promote their own line of creative products and services to niche groups who’d love to hear about them), and the frustrations inherent in present day reality (getting and being online isn’t quite the natural reflex we’d like it to be).

Socializing in an Online World

Where creative self-promotion is concerned, it turns out I’m not a technology advocate so much as a realist. The goal of this site is to provide non-trivial encouragement and specific strategies that don’t overwhelm the creative within us but instead help us enter the social and media landscape and remain anchored to our own individual or group purpose. The hope is we’ll engage social networking only where it is truly satisfying and/or producing results, which may mean figuring out what, where and with whom to engage.  It will also mean deciding where engagements can fit in with the ways we can live and give most passionately.

As a social media professional who is working on similar challenges, creatively RISING explores:

• new ways to achieve visibility
• stories of promotion that create groundswell/ongoing interest
• roads to take given creative goals and preferences
• investments that make sense
• strategies for balancing time spent online and off
• productivity topics, and
• resources that can give us a charge, a laugh or a boost when we think we are talking to the wind!

Jump Start Activities to Correspond with the Time You Have Available

Everything takes time.  You don’t have a lot of it either.  So, to take most advantage of this blog, access the drop down category called ‘Jump Start Activities…’ Choose the length of time you have to put into your creative promotion, and then choose from the items returned.

It’s another way to think about taking small steps toward marketing and self-promotion — taking on only what you have time or the inclination to do.

What I Care About

The best audience for creatively RISING are creative professionals who are either ready to promote something individually in their creative lives or curious about engaging communities creatively.

So, if this is your bent, you have some cool ideas of your own that fit our times, are intent on giving your efforts traction and memorability, or  intent on moving from participant to player, it’s going to be great to talk with you! See you soon on the posts.