Things that don’t work
I’m taking a good long look at my strategy for getting work. Since I’m playing a bit of a waiting game right now and I’ve scaled things down (partially on purpose – partially not) ready for the arrival of our next baby (any time in the next couple of weeks).

Anyhow, that leaves me with a bit of time to think about how I should be expanding (now that there seems to be more work about). I did a bit of that at the beginning of the year, and discovered a couple of things that don’t work.

SEO – search engine optimisation is one of them. I re-worked my website, and replaced it with a slightly easier to update, but less good looking site mainly because I thought it would appeal to search engines.

I also wrote a lot of how-to articles that I thought might appeal to my clients and got a company to post links to them on lots of interested websites so I got lots of backlinks (something search engines love) to my site.

It worked from the point of view that my site now appears much more frequently in web searches and comes up strongly when my favourite keywords are typed into google.

A success.

Or so you’d think. However, what I find is that it doesn’t make any difference. I haven’t got a single piece of work or even a contact (that I know of) from a normal search engine search.

On the other hand, I’ve got loads from the searches I pay for on google – the sponsored links.

In other words, if someone searches for an animator and I come up in the normal search they don’t bother clicking on it – or if they do, they don’t then contact me. If it comes up as a sponsored link, they do.

Which is a bit puzzling because I do the opposite – I assume that the sponsored links aren’t what I’m really looking for, and the really good stuff is the stuff that’s come up without being paid for….

Oh, well.


Another thing I did that doesn’t work is mailing lists - Getting a firm to find email addresses for lots of companies and sending out a mail to all of them. I’ve got a pretty good response in terms of people saying thanks for emailing, and I’ll keep your details, etc. but nothing to speak of in terms of actual work.

I have a feeling this is partially because I don’t really like doing this kind of mailing, and I’m a bit nervous about it, and it doesn’t sit well with me.



I think I’m finding myself forced by degrees towards a more serious and more personal approach to marketing. I have to do, what I guess I knew all along I’d have to do – just go out (or at least get somebody to go out) and personally meet and talk to the people I want to use my work.

It’s a tough job, but somebody’s got to do it. now, it’s just a matter of finding out who that somebody should be…

Because I’ve not got very much work on (although I know it’s all about to kick off again just in time for the new baby), I’ve taken the opportunity to try to make my life a bit easier.

Right now, when ever I have to produce a pitch or give someone an idea of what I’m planning to do, I end up spending most of my time making things look good and not much time actually laying out my ideas.

That’s because animation and graphics is difficult stuff, and just creating a lighting setup, background and materials that work is pretty time consuming before you even start on the concepts you’re trying to create.

So what I’ve been doing is building effectively a set of ready made studios. These are sets I can just load up and start to customise knowing that whatever I create in them, when I hit render the results will be pretty. All the laborious playing around with hundreds of settings to get the best result will already have been done.

I’ve also created a storyboarding “kit” – with simple primitive shapes and characters I can hopefully drag around to very quickly create visual representations of what I’m aiming at, so clients, others I hire to work on the project and me myself can get a feel for what’s needed.

I’m hoping the ability to do all this will become more important because I really do want to start pitching for more and higher level work. My magazine article on the pitching process is helpful – allowing me to pester people on the subject, and get lots of good advice on what to do and how.

I’ll put all that advice here once I’ve collated it, but the thing that’s coming across most strongly right now is that I really need to take networking seriously – I (or more likely a salesman who I hire) needs to be out there calling and meeting with production companies and commissioners to ensure that I’m on the list when animation work is put out to tender instead of just waiting for that work to come in from my advertising…